Most gardeners know that lettuce is one of the cool season crops. This means that lettuce plants perform best in the cooler spring and fall temperatures. When I lived in Northern California and coastal North Carolina, where winter brings frequent frosts but only occasional hard freezes, I was able to grow lettuce and other salad [...]
I haven’t been growing corn these past few years, deciding that it took up too much garden real estate. You must plant corn in such a way as to get adequate pollination. Corn is dioecious – it has separate male and female flowers. Pollen from the male flowers in the tassels, at the top of [...]
Since I started to grow unusual edible plants, the hardy purple passion flower or Maypop (Passiflora incarnata) has become one of my favorite vines. Its exotic, stunningly beautiful flowers are set off by the attractive dark green foliage. The small, yellow, edible fruit produced in the fall are another reason to love this vine. The name [...]
There are lots of things blooming in the garden today. Here is a small sampling, starting with plants from my sunny patio border, above. With the bright sunshine, it’s hard to see the plants in this distant shot, so let’s take a closer look . . . The wild looking, hot-pink poufs are from a [...]
It felt like 100 degrees in the shade on Sunday afternoon when a group of gardeners came to tour my kitchen garden. Not ideal weather for this enjoyable pursuit! Still, the intrepid garden gazers assembled at my house and ventured out into the broiling sun to take a look at edible plants in the landscape, [...]
I was at my mother-in-law’s house last weekend, and there were a couple of garden tours going on in the surrounding community. Like many gardeners, my heart quickens when I hear or read about a garden tour! Botanical gardens are wonderful if you want to glean information on different plants, to see collections of the [...]