With a little bit of planning ahead now, you can work toward ensuring a larger harvest in your fruit or vegetable garden next year all by following one simple trick: letting fruits and vegetables grow larger and longer and then saving their seeds. “Bigger fruits often have better-developed seeds, leading to improved germination and healthier,…
It’s August and that means harvest time is upon us. With some vegetables and fruits, it’s easy to determine when they are ripe, while others require a little more knowledge and judgment. Here are some tips for telling when popular vegetables and fruits are at their peak of perfection. Corn: It takes 21 days for…
To be honest, growing one’s own vegetables is hard work. The rows of beautiful produce that one sees in the markets conceal the effort to bring fresh vegetables to the grocery. Most of us want to eat healthy foods, and sometimes we can buy seasonal vegetables at farmers’ markets for a good price, but growing…
During the height of the pandemic, when most of us were working from home, I was sent a link to a recorded Zoom video about horticultural therapy. I had never heard of horticultural therapy, but during the presentation, I learned that it is a professional practice used to improve lives by connecting people with plants….
From fresh salsa or rich pasta sauce to a classic garnish for burgers and sandwiches, tomatoes are a beloved and versatile plant. For many zones, tomatoes thrive for only a few months, but a gardening expert from Armstrong Garden Centers (@armstronggarden) shared a clever hack to extend the life of your tomato plants. The scoop…
This practice was started in 16th-century France, where French Intensive gardening, also known as biodynamic gardening, helped produce a lot of yield in less space. By using methods such as deep digging, raised beds, close spacing, sun exposure, and companion planting, farmers were able to produce a healthy and substantial crop. While an ancient science,…
Stone fruit are fruit with one large pit, or stone, at their center. Traditional stone fruit are apricots, cherries, nectarines, peaches and plums; novel hybrids aprium, pluot, and plumcot have been bred with apricot and plum as parents. Every one of these stone fruit are rewarding complements in edible gardens. Clockwise from center bottom: white…
