Does the fruit of squash and pumpkins need light to complete its ripening process? Should you remove leaves so that sun can get to the fruit to speed up ripening? If pumpkins are picked green, should they be left in sunshine or not?
Peppers come in many colors; green, yellow, orange, red and even purple, but when is the best time to pick them? Will they ripen after you harvest them? If they ripen indoors are they as good as vine ripened ones? Let’s have a close look.
Discussions about fertilizing tomatoes is mostly about selecting the right NPK and rarely discusses the amount to use. When quantity does come up, most comments suggest following the instructions on the box. But are the instructions on the box correct? Are the instructions complete enough so that you can apply the correct amount?
This post will compare some commercial products to see what they suggest and then I’ll compare that to reliable agricultural recommendations to see how much fertilizer gardeners should be using to grow great tomatoes.
You built some great raised garden beds and now you need to fill them but soil is heavy to move and expensive. You look around for a better alternative and find a hundred suggestions online. Which is the best option?
I started using raised beds back in 1974 and have tried a lot of variations over the years. In this post I’ll combine the science with my experience and tell you what works and what doesn’t, and give you the best option for filling raised beds.
Did you know that hybrid vegetables can be toxic? If you are a strong proponent of heirlooms you are probably jumping up and down with joy and if you grow a lot of hybrids you are probably wondering if I have lost my marbles! Let me be clear, most hybrids are perfectly safe to eat, but there are a few special cases where they are not safe.
Understanding these cases of toxic hybrid vegetables provides insights into the risk of saving seeds and using natural means to develop new cultivars.
When should you plant garlic? The common advice is to plant after the first hard frost. That advice may work but it is not right. The best planting time has nothing to do with frost!
It’s hard to find an ornamental garden without at least a couple of Hosta, but did you know hostas can be grown as perennial vegetables? Hostas, also called plantain lilies, have found their way into almost every garden in Zones 3 through 8, and for good reason – they’re resilient, beautiful, drought tolerant, shade tolerant, and low-maintenance yet not aggressive. For the same reasons, hostas make a wonderful addition to a perennial vegetable garden.
How to Grow, Harvest and Eat Hosta, harvesting shoots, source: Practical Self Reliance
I have never soaked garlic before planting but it might be a good idea. There is certainly a trend towards soaking with water, fertilizer, fish emulsion or disinfectants. This post will examine these techniques to see if they affect plant growth and the size of harvested garlic.
American groundnut (Apios americana) is the North American equivalent to the South American potato. Unlike common potatoes, American groundnut is a perennial flowering vine which produces numerous tubers along its root system. The entire plant is edible though the tubers are highly valued by foragers and wild food enthusiasts for their nutty, slightly sweet flavor.
Asparagus is one of the best options for cold-climate gardeners interested in growing perennial vegetables. Most people – and mainstream plant retailers – have never heard of the perennial vegetables that grow in cold climates. You might be hard pressed to find American groundnut tubers or Good King Henry seeds but it’s easy to find asparagus cultivars and accompanying recipes and friends to use them up. Plus, asparagus prefers cooler climates and will continue to produce an abundance of delicious spears for up to 30 years.
Are you an onion addict who dreams of a steady supply of fresh Allium? Expanding your onion repertoire with perennial onions is your best bet. Egyptian walking onions (Allium x proliferum), also called tree onion or topset onion, is a three-in-one perennial onion that can be harvested from spring to fall in Zones 5 to 9.
My mother used to grow “low acid” tomatoes because high acid levels gave her mouth cankers, or so she thought. There is a concern that canning low acid tomatoes causes botulism because the acid level is too low.
Lots of seed companies and garden blogs talk about low acid tomatoes and usually identify yellow, orange and small fruited varieties as low acid. Some claim that modern breeding has increased the acidity of tomatoes and that heirlooms have less acid. Others claim that there is no such thing as low acid tomatoes.
It turns out that this story starts as a myth. People tried to correct the myth only to create a new myth in the process. I’ll have to debunk the debunkers.
