Vegetables Ideas, Tips & Guides

6 Types of Peppers to Grow There's a colorful world of flavors, shapes and sizes to try for sweet and hot peppers! Here are some of my favorite pepper varieties to grow in the garden. Meet some of our favorite types of peppers!

How to Grow Spinach For gardeners eager to start in spring and reluctant to quit in fall, spinach is the ideal «shoulder season» crop. With a range of varieties, there's a spinach for every garden! Learn how to grow it here. Grow spinach in spring or fall!

4 Ways to Prep Your Spring Garden This Fall Do these 4 things this fall to get a head start on your garden next year! Take care of this fall garden prep for a better spring growing season

Cucumber Trellis Flop I had high hopes for my cucumbers this year, but my bad luck with growing vegetables continues... Trial and error with cucumbers

At War with Squash Bugs Commiserate with me about how squash bugs are wreaking havoc on my vegetable garden… again! Squash bug takeover

Tips for Growing Peppers Love sweet and hot peppers? Try these tips for growing peppers to get a bumper crop in your garden this year! How to grow peppers

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Handy Vegetable Harvesting Guide Not sure when is the best time to harvest different vegetables? Check out our handy guide to learn about the signs of ripeness (and overripeness!) to pick vegetables at their peak. Tips for harvesting vegetables

Maximize Your Vegetable Harvest with Succession Planting Learn the secrets to extending your vegetable harvest through succession planting from Minnesota gardener Meg Cowden. 4 ways to get the most out of your vegetable garden

Favorite Vegetables to Grow & Preserve Meg Cowden shares her favorite vegetables to grow, eat & preserve to extend her garden harvest each year. Grow vegetables you can also preserve

How to Grow Asparagus Curious about how to grow asparagus? We'll break it down for you here! Growing asparagus

Comparing Biodegradable Plant Pots Want to use less plastic when starting seeds? We tried out several different biodegradable pots. Check out our comparison to see which one works for you! The breakdown on biodegradable pots

2024's Best New Garden Plants: Fruits and Vegetables Expand your palate and try growing these new fruit and vegetable introductions in your garden this year. New fruit and vegetable introductions for 2024

My Favorite Handmade Garden Gift Ever Our family has a tradition of giving handmade gifts for the holidays, and this year my husband outdid himself! Homemade garden gift tradition

LET THE seed shopping season begin. The 2024 offerings are being loaded into seed-catalog websites, and the earliest print catalogs are already arriving in our mailboxes, as if to help soften the separation anxiety we may feel if we’ve already put our gardens to bed for the winter.

Meet Our 2023 Reader Garden Award Winners! These award-winning gardeners combine science with artistry to create an inspiring landscape. Take a tour with us! Introducing Our 2023 Garden Gate Reader Garden Award Winners!

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I'm A Garden Meemaw! There is a special moment in a gardener's life when your kids ask for garden advice for the first time. I’m a Garden Meemaw!

The Great Garden Experiment | Meet Our 2023 Reader Garden Award Winners! These award-winning gardeners combine science with artistry to create an inspiring landscape. Take a tour with us! Introducing Our 2023 Garden Gate Reader Garden Award Winners!

4 Easy Ways to Preserve Fresh Herbs from the Garden Learn how to harvest and preserve your fresh garden herbs to enjoy them all year! Enjoy fresh herbs from the garden longer by preserving them!

WHEN YOU SHOP for food—whether produce or meat or eggs—and see a label that says “organic,” what do you think that means? At its most fundamental level, I guess I always thought it meant vegetables grown on the fields of an organic farm—like, in the soil, or animals raised in its pastures.

THE WORDS joy and delight figure prominently in writer Ross Gay‘s work, and so do moments he spends in his garden and descriptions of his relationship to plants. Now is that a coincidence that the garden is a main character in his books, books with the titles “Inciting Joy” and “The Book of Delights” and the latest, “The Book of (More) Delights”?

Tomatoes on Steroids Does anyone else's tomato plants go wild in the garden when they are on summer vacation, or is it just me? Tomatoes gone wild

If you’re looking for a bit of light-hearted Halloween fun, these family-friendly pumpkin jokes and great pumpkin puns are wickedly funny!

Would you like to find out how to grow garlic?  It’s such an easy crop to grow!

The harvest video was on Hudson Valley Seed’s Instagram account, and one of that New York-based organic seed company’s co-founders, K Greene, talked with me about growing shallots and their more commonly grown cousin, garlic. He also shared some other ideas for succession sowing of edibles whose planting time still lies ahead—whether for fall harvest or to over-winter and enjoying in the year ahead. Read along as you listen to the Aug. 7, 2023 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on Apple Podcasts (iTunes) o

The Tale of Our Harvest Bowl Our harvest bowl started as the perfect popcorn bowl, but then something so heinous happened that changed the trajectory of this bowl’s main purpose forever. The evolution of a popcorn bowl

While your baskets are filling with long-awaited tomatoes, zucchini and peppers, you might not be thinking about the months to come. But the garden season doesn’t have to end when the weather cools off. Midsummer is the perfect time to start plants for a second harvest. Here are five crops you can grow right now and enjoy in a couple of months. Happy harvesting! You Might Also Like: Best Places to Buy Garden Seeds OnlineCalculate How Many Vegetables to Plant Cool-Season Vegetables to Plant in Fall

Are you keen on the idea of growing your own vegetables, but not really sure where to start? This list of ten easy to grow vegetables is a great first step on your grow your own journey.

SO MANY GREEN BEANS, so little time. That’s how I always feel around now: how to keep up with the glut of one of my favorite vegetables. I don’t like them canned (all olive green and overcooked!) and they can lose crunch or get ice-encrusted when blanched and frozen plain, so I put mine up in canning jars in the freezer, doused in homemade tomato sauce. Read how I freeze green beans and many more garden-fresh goodies.

Tomatoes will produce best if they are well-rooted, so bury them deep, right down to the topmost pair or two of leaves. They are able to root all along their stems if you plant them very deep or even sideways, in a trench. The latter goes like this: Dig a small trench about 6 to 8 inches deep and almost as long as the plant (including its rootball) is tall. Lay the plant horizontally in the trench, gently bending the top end upward, and bury all but that end with the upper pair or two of leaves. Because my soil is acidic, If I am feeling organized I give tomatoes a dose of lime in the planting hole, along with bone meal and an organic fertilizer labeled for vegetables. Some gardeners think tomatoes benefi

My hero James Crockett of the original vintage 1970s “Victory Garden” PBS fame said he just left the carefully dug tubers out on top of the former row for a few hours to dry a bit, then put them in burlap or mesh bags in a cool, dark place at once. Even with a few days of light exposure, the potatoes would turn green and inedible.He didn’t bother with curing the crop, exactly, which is the more conventional advice today:Dig when the soil is dry, not wet, after the foliage has died down. I normally leave them right in the ground until I am ready for them in late fall, long after the plants have faded, to reduce indoor storage time, hoping for a dry spell later in the year. First, to gauge readiness, carefully dig a hill or two of potatoes, starting about a foot outside the hill itself and working inward, since po

Unlike white potatoes, where you plant a “seed potato” whose eyes are starting to sprout, with sweet potatoes you start with bits of vine called slips. Glenn Drowns of Sand Hill Preservation Center in Iowa, who lists more than 100 sweet-potato varieties in his amazing catalog, explains the origin of the word slip:“A slip is a single plant (with small roots) that is sprouted on the sweet potato root and then slipped off so that you may plant it in the garden to grow a sweet potato plant.”Each slip doesn’t look like much when it arrives—a piece of vine with some roots and maybe a leaf or two, usually a little pale and worse for the wear after days in transit. But it will quickly rebound if planted promptly according to some basic guidelines (that’s the above-ground bit of one a day or two after planting,

Though I cannot see without a hand magnifying lens if they have the requisite tiny markings, I’m betting from its overall appearance and velvety surface that this is the larval stage of the cabbage white butterfly, Pieris rapae, because I have also seen its adult stage flying around, a smallish butterfly with a couple of smudgy spots on each white wing.This article from Missouri Botanical Garden is extremely detailed on my latest visitor, also known as the imported cabbage worm, and other pests of cabbage relatives, including cabbage looper and the caterpillar of the diamondback moth. The latter two caterpillars are smooth, not velvety, among other clues to differentiating among the three.As with all caterpillars, these can be controlle

I PUT MY BEANS UP ON A PEDESTAL because they are one of the crops that’s finally producing here in the Year of Big Rains. In fact, I just planted another whole row of bush beans, along with more collards and kale, among many things. Welcome to Week 3 of the cross-blog Summer Fest 2009: Beans and Greens Week, a perfect time (if you hurry) to fine-tune the vegetable garden and eke out some produce for late summer, fall—and beyond.

I’d first read of the tactic being used commercially, particularly in greenhouse growing, to improve yields from less-vigorous varieties like some heirlooms, and counter certain tough conditions or diseases. Now it’s available to the home gardener, too–and you don’t even need a razor blade or grafting clips of your own.The extensive article I wrote last January on tomato grafting explained all the steps, with help from a video from Ohio State.Our plants did fine; the grafts took easily, once the initial awkwardness of the slice-and-dice-and-reconnect motions were semi-mastered. Matching up rootstock (which you behead) with a scion (the top of another plant, the one you want the tomatoes from) was the