I was making Italian wedding soup in the crock pot for dinner tonight when I decided to pick some kale from the garden to use (in place of spinach or escarole) in my recipe. Still picking greens from your garden, you ask? Credit the warm winter we’ve been having! And kale is the hardiest 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 [...]
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 [...]
Strawberries from Florida and California have been appearing at the supermarket in past few weeks, for what seems to me to be pretty reasonable prices. Which makes me long for some fresh picked strawberries from the garden! Strawberries are a favorite at our house, and we do buy them at the store, but I prefer to eat [...]
This warm spell we’ve been having is the perfect time to get out and give your fruit trees, berry bushes and roses a dormant spray against overwintering insects and disease organisms. I planned on doing just that today, but decided that it was too windy. With this gusty wind, who knows where all of the [...]
Last year I purchased a small fig tree in a 2-gallon container near the end of the growing season. Since fig trees are not hardy in my zone 5 garden, I kept the fig over the winter in my unheated garage. In early spring, I repotted the fig into a larger and more decorative container [...]
Strawberry foliage with leafspot disease . . . In mid-summer, the strawberry patch can look pretty bad. Leaf spot diseases take hold, especially in a year with alternating flooded and dry periods – like this year. In the past, when my strawberry plant foliage looked really bad, I just lopped it off and new leaves [...]
Strawberry shortcake – the dessert I dream about nine months of the year, and consume as often as possible the other three! This is a photo of the shortcake I enjoyed last night, using berries from our new strawberry patch. We started the rather large strawberry garden last summer. It is an oval shape, about [...]
I’m delighted that we’ve had a long, soaking rain the past few days – we really needed it! Photo of Bristol Black Raspberries from Stark Bros. Nursery As luck would have it, some bare-root ‘Bristol’ black raspberry bushes that I ordered (from Stark Bro’s Nursery, www.starkbros.com) arrived and needed to be planted right away. I [...]