With tomatoes, there’s very dramatic difference between homegrown and store-bought. Vegetable warehouses can stock up on green tomatoes because tomatoes can turn red while still hard and filled with starch if they’re exposed to a gaseous plant hormone, and when it comes time to sell them, the warehouses simply turn their tomatoes red. Add to … More Homegrown Tomatoes
Growing herbs is a fun, easy way to get some planting in without a garden patch. Borage, a favorite of bees and butterflies, yields delicately-flavored leaves and flowers, both of which are best eaten fresh. As an annual plant, to keep borage in your garden, just leave a few plants alone so that their seeds … More Borage: A Fluffy, Flowering Herb
Three days after sowing seeds in my garden, the heart-shaped leaves of radish sprouts have appeared above ground. Fast-growing and hard to kill, radishes are a wonderful crop for those who lack patience and time to care for finicky vegetables. Radish seeds can be bought at most stores. Spring radishes, which are much smaller than … More Radishes: The Cutest Crop
When picking onions, you have a lot of options available. Growing onions from seed, while having very clear benefits, is generally a hassle, and so this article will focus growing onions from sets instead. Onion sets are in stores right now, with Rural King and Lowes in Hamilton definitely offering up varieties. Onion sets tend … More Spicy Gardens: Grow your own Onions
Spinach is one of the most basic, healthiest things to include in your diet. Fresh or cooked, the health benefits of spinach are wonderful. As with many leafy greens, freshness matters, and it’s impossible to get anything fresher than straight from your garden or container. To grow spinach, plant your seeds as soon as possible, … More Spinach: Speedy and Cold-Tolerant Greens
Cheerful, bright sunflower blooms are impossible to miss when looking at a summer garden. Sunflowers are grown commercially in fields all around the world, but these plants will look just as nice growing in a small group in your garden. Sunflowers thrive when taken care of well, so if you know you will be around … More The Sunflower: A Summer Beauty
A very familiar face in our lawns and gardens is the dandelion, whose puffy mature flowers and persistent tap roots spell out a seemingly-endless reign over any livable area. And while it is true that unwanted dandelions are the poster child for weeds, surprisingly, this hardy plant does have some good to it as well. … More Friendly Foe: The Dandelion
Loofahs are vegan alternatives to natural sponges. Looking at the long, quirky, mesh-y loofah, it may be hard to imagine that it came from anywhere but an animal or a factory. Loofahs are actually the internal structure of fibers that develop in a particular type of gourd, and as such, are the most natural, easily … More DIY Loofa: Green Your Shower
For those interested in alternative ways of gardening, the hay bale method may be very enticing. This way of growing your vegetables and berries lets you skip covering your soil in compost and worrying about soil composition, removes a lot of dirt from the equation, and lets you garden without a garden bed. The hay … More Skip the Beds: Hay Bale Gardening
The staghorn fern does not look like the standard fern: instead of many thin, leaflet-covered ribs, the staghorn fern has thick blades that split at their edges and resemble the horns of an elk. This deep green fern can grow to be quite large, a few feet in diameter, and its base eventually becomes covered … More The Large, Elegant Staghorn Fern
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