Our Favorite Weeding Tips by Sandy Swegel It’s Spring. Your plants are tiny and growing. Your weeds are huge and growing. If you want a nice garden, you really do have to outsmart your weeds and deal with the weeds that are gobbling up your soil nutrients and drinking your water. Weeding doesn’t have to […]
How to Quickly Handle Weeds 1. Off with their heads. Most of us spend our time nurturing seedlings….but weed seedlings are a very different species. With the first warm spells of spring, hundreds of thousands of weed seeds germinate. I sharpen my hand-held hoe (a scuffle hoe works too…any sharp edge) and one swift run along the […]
Heirloom Vegetable Seeds I’m fortunate to know lots of gardeners. They are a quiet bunch for the most part and sometimes rather eccentric. But they are on the forefront of an environmental movement that is making a big difference in our community: turning front yards into vegetable gardens! It begins as the gardener runs out […]
Heirloom Vegetable Seeds These three veggies you gotta grow at home because they aren’t easy to find in grocery stores. Even if you can buy them, they are so much better fresh out of the garden AND super easy to grow at home. Broccoli Raab Rapini This is a relative to big broccoli stalks. You get […]
Try These Seed Starting Tips I teach basic seed starting for beginners classes every year and while there are often some people who are true beginners and have never started seeds before, more people who seek out a class are gardeners who have tried starting seeds and had some failures. So I like to keep […]
Try This Secret of Success Every pursuit has tools that make it easier to be successful. Ask any gardener and they’ll pull out their own favorite tool with a wry grin and and a long story about why you have to have this tool Row Cover is one of my own top secrets of success. I […]
Try These First Timer Tips If you are a beginner, you’ll soon learn that Gardening is both an art and science….and a bit of luck. You start by reading books and the backs of seed packets. You ask other gardeners and talk to strangers at the garden center. But mostly you observe. You watch what […]
Why You Should Always Avoid Wet Soil A bounty of snowfall followed by a warm sunny day has this gardener itching at the bit to get outside and play in the dirt. A nice wet Spring usually makes for excellent gardening all year, but this is the one time you can ruin your garden, harming […]
Two Week Intervals Last week I talked about Succession Planting by using varieties that have different times to maturity. There are two more easy kinds of Succession Planting you can use to you have a steady source of the best-tasting food and to make the best use of your space. Plant the same crop at […]
Plant All Varieties One of the challenges in the home vegetable garden is the cycle most gardeners experience of feast or famine…Either nothing’s ready to harvest or you have so much of a single crop all at one time, that lots of good foods end up going to waste. Succession planting is the common way to manage […]
