One of the bigest advantages to being a gardener, is that you get to try more food. When you shop for food, you are limited to what is available for you to buy. When you grow, what you eat is up to you. Aside from the endless types of seed and alternate sources of cooking greens, there are more simply, the parts of common vegetables that never make it to the grocery store. These are known as secondary edibles. When you shop for produce, you get accustomed to looking at vegeta

Whenever a first time gardener asks my advice on what they should plant, I always say kale. Everyone should have some kale. Nutrition-wise, kale is a powerhouse plant. It is easier to tell you what is not in it that to list all the benefits in this vegetable. Like its cousin broccoli, it contains calcium. It also has plenty of vitamin C, beta carotene, and other carotenoids. What really makes kale worth eating though, is its potential as an anti-cancer food. It has sulforapha

I interrupt the regularly scheduled gardening post to bring you pie. You can garden all year. The berries are ripe now. You will need: 2 Cups Blueberries 2 Cups Blackberries or Black Mullberries 2 1/2 Cups Red Rasberries or Strawberries 1 1/2 Cups Sugar 5 Tblsp. Cornstarch Dash salt Milk (optional) Granulated Sugar (optional) Crust for 2 double crust pies Heat oven to 375. First, and this is the important part, get the freshest, highest quality berries you can find. Alter the

We all have those people in our life. The ones who makes the day better when they are in it. When they are around the jokes are funnier, the work goes faster, and everything is a little bit brighter. Transversely, we all have that OTHER type of person to deal with as well. The one who makes every second drag out, who makes the small tasks seem difficult, and who leaves everyone around them feeling drained. Plants are no different. Toiling all day out there in the sun, they ea

As many of you are pulling your old summer plants out to make room for your new fall plants, now is a really good time to talk about plant roots and what you can learn from them. As you remove your old plants, especially the ones that did not produce well, take a good look at the root of the plant. Is it short and blocky? Does it have bumps or nodules on it? Does it have only a few long roots shooting off of the main base? If so, chances are very good that your bed is infeste

Laying out a garden bed is a lot like cooking a turkey dinner. If you start cooking everything at once, the mashed potatoes will be cold before the turkey even gets started. To be a successful cook you plan things out first. You read your recipes over. You take note of both your prep times and your cooking times. Then you think backwards and lay things out. You start with your most time intensive dish and work forward. That way everything comes together at once and you make i

As fall quickly approaches, many of us who garden in Florida are beginning to think about what to plant. Fall is the prime garden season here and the limitations as to what we can plant are, at least for this season, lifted. So faced with almost limitless choices, how do you decide what to plant? We are all limited by time and space. It doesn’t matter if you are planning a few containers of tomatoes and herbs or a half acre of vegetables, eventually you will run out of both,

When setting out to grow your own food, the ultimate goal is to, well, actually get some food.  Gardening is good and all, but if you end up with a lot of dying plants and no fruit season after season, chances are you will not keep it up for long. So, how to maximize your success and reap the fruits of your hard work? Here are two common problems that lead to failure. Then maybe some ideas on how to start out better: Problem 1: When I started out, I wanted everything, all at

Vegetable plants are a gateway drug. You start out with a Burpee Big Boy tomato plant from Home Depot. Like a first born child it consumes your time as you learn how to care for it. You water it, you feed it. At the end of the season, you get one small hard green tomato. In love and undaunted, you move on to multiple containers of tomatoes. Then heirloom tomatoes, green tomatoes, tomatoes in a husk. You are not satisfied. You want more. What if your tomato was purple? What if

Ok class, today’s lesson is about crop rotation. No, don’t fall asleep, you are not stuck in middle school history learning about 16th farming techniques. Crop rotation is not just for serfs anymore, it is for backyard gardeners everywhere, and most importantly, for organic backyard gardeners. Crop rotation was pioneered by the Romans, fine tuned in England in the 16th century, and reintroduced to our country by visionaries such as George Washington Carver. Simply, crop rotat