I’ve been eating a lot of my favorite early spring vegetable the past few weeks. Asparagus (Asparagus officinalis) is the earliest vegetable harvested from the garden each spring – a sure sign that the gardening season has begun! One of nature’s perfect foods, asparagus is elegant yet easy to prepare. It is equally good [...]
The brassicas are plants from the family Brassicaceae, also known as the mustard family, or sometimes called the cabbage family. This group includes many delicious vegetables like broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower, kale and kohlrabi – in addition to mustard, of course. The kale plant, above, overwintered in my garden this year. Turnips and Chinese [...]
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 [...]
It’s always exciting to look through the seed catalogs and dream of what you want to plant in the garden this year. But with so many choices, how can you decide what to order? It can all seem overwhelming! Here are a few tips on how to approach your seed ordering in an orderly fashion. [...]
I’ve been spending some time cleaning up the garden – removing spent plants and those ravaged by the heat and dry weather; cucumber plants that suffered an attack of mites brought on by the hot, dry weather; broccoli and lettuce plants that have gone to seed because of the heat, and stuff that I didn’t [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Spring is fickle. One day it is approaching 80 degrees, and a few days later – today - it barely gets up to 50. That’s o.k. We also had a rain deluge and four separate tornado warnings during the night which, thankfully, did not amount to much except soggy ground and cold. It’s spring! I spent several chilly hours [...]