giveaway: in bryant terry’s ‘afro-vegan,’ a vivid collage of flavors

Homegrown cabbage is a garden treat and planting it in your vegetable beds means you can enjoy it at peak quality and flavor. The vigorous plants form tightly packed heads with layers of crisp, sweet leaves that are delicious raw, cooked, or fermented. While cabbage is fairly easy to grow it’s important to harvest the heads at the right time. If you wait too long they can split. Harvest too early and you’ll miss out on the main crop. Below I’ll highlight how you know when to harvest cabbage types including green, Napa, savoy, and even miniature varieties. Keep reading to learn more about timing the cabbage harvest.

A colourful carpet of ground cover plants may be a creative, low maintenance alternative to a lawn. Alternatively a pattern of coloured stone or chippings with feature plants in containers may be your preference.

We all love this nutrient-rich fruit that is packed with potassium and many other vitamins and minerals. But the saddest fact is they have a short shelf life. The day you buy them, they are fresh and firm, and pretty soon, they turn brown and floppy. How to avoid this? How to keep them fresh and flavorful? This article has the answers.

MAKE ROOM ON THE SHELF—a big, fat space in a prominent spot, since you’ll be reaching for it a lot—and also in your garden. With Mike Dirr’s massive new “Dirr’s Encyclopedia of Trees and Shrubs,” all 3,500 photographs and 3,700 species and cultivars of it, the man we’ve relied on for decades to tell us what’s what in woody plants outdoes even himself. By the time I’d gotten through the “A’s,” I had a list so long of new must-have’s (Abies and Acer, especially–oh, those firs and maples!) that I’d have to rate this book as not just “smart, opinionated, comprehensive, wonderful,” which is what it says in my blurb on the back cover, but “dangerous,” too. So like I said, make room–maybe for the copy that I bought to share with a lucky one of you? The new book came at just the right time for me on two fronts. I manhandled a 1983 edition of Dirr’s thorough-but-not-illustrated “Manual of Woody Landscape Plants” from then until it fell apart, when I replaced it with a 1998 edition, which now is looking far worse for wear, too. There is hardly a workday in all those years when I have not gone to see “what Dirr says” about a tree or shrub I’m growing, thinking of buying, or writing about: How big will it get? Where is it native to? What conditions must I offer it?  All of that is covered in “Dirr’s Encyclopedia of Trees and Shrubs,” but the chance to see shots of the plant–details and often full-grown versions as well–makes all the difference.

REGINA BRETT IS MANY THINGS: a breast-cancer survivor; a onetime single parent; one of 11 kids; a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist for her commentary in “The Plain Dealer,” Ohio’s largest newspaper. And an author, of the bestselling “God Never Blinks: 50 Lessons for Life’s Little Detours,” just out in paperback.

I first met Deb Perelman in my former life, when I worked for Martha Stewart. It was late 2007 or early 2008—a millennium ago in internet years—and we’d invited in a group of bloggers we admired to get better acquainted.  Deb sat to my left (and beyond her was Heidi Swanson of 101Cookbooks.com, with the founders of Apartment Therapy and theKitchn.com across the table, and more). I think that gathering is what crystallized my intention to start a website: such an inspiring group.But I digress. If you haven’t visited Smitten Kitchen, prepare to be entertained, educated, and called to action.DEB PERELMAN is a self-taught home cook, and is funny in that self-deprecating way I love (often using the cross-out strikethrough key on her editing dashboard to good effect). On the blog, and in the new cookbook, Deb invites you into her kitchen, and family, teaching you (her Tips section online alone is worth a visit, let alone all her recipes) while tempting you. You always come away hungry…until you get out the ingredients

I doubt that Broken Arrow, founded by Dick and Sally Jaynes in 1984 in Hamden, Connecticut, needs much introduction—especially lately, as they were just featured in a “New York Times” piece by my former colleague Anne Raver. As Anne mentioned in that article, Adam (now 33 years old) used to buy plants at Broken Arrow as a teen-ager; now he’s their Propagation and Plant Development Manager.In the latter role, he’s the kind of particular guy who goes looking for a winterberry holly that shows off even without its fruit on (gold-splashed foliage, anyone?); who has such a passion for witch hazels that the nursery now offers 45 cultivars; who tracked down a pink-flowered Stewartia and….but let him tell you:The Q&A With Adam WheelerQ. So what does it take to catch the eye of the guy whose job is to go around looking for new things to add into Broken Arrow’s already very sophisticated product mix? You must see a l

AS I PLANT MY PARSLEY, PICK ASPARAGUS and get ready for tomato transplant time, it gets me thinking about tomorrow (as in “the offseason”) when my Northern garden doesn’t offer up so much food as it will the next few months. No worry, because I am a hoarder—of fresh garden and farmer’s-market produce (though not on sagging shelves like that 1940 Farm Security Administration slide, above!).

To enter to win a copy, simply scroll down to the comments and tell us how you like your spears. Type a whole recipe right into the comment box, or just a link to a recipe on your blog or another’s, or perhaps a tip instead about what you like asparagus served with (Anna says dill and lemon come to mind, for starters).The backstory: I met Anna Thomas when “Love Soup” came out last fall, and promptly stocked my freezer with double batches of several of her recipes made from my winter squash and sweet potatoes and kale and the like, and stocked up on copies to give as holiday gifts. Now a whole new season of homegrown vegetables has begun, and I’m working my way through “Chapter 9: First Tastes of Spring,” and on to “Chapter 10: Green and Greener.” Heaven. Vats of Asparagus Bisque, here I come.Thismust-have cookbook features 160 vegetarian recipes for soups and all the extras, from b

From the first time I landed on her popular blog Posie Gets Cozy, I knew there would be a connection—again, though I was the hopeless (and embarrassed) girl who hemmed her junior high school dressmaking project right onto the lap of the skirt she was wearing, and when the bell rang for next period had to go there “wearing” both.Alicia (self-portrait, left) welcomed me into her sewing circle, anyhow, charming me in the funniest Alicia-style ways. I mean, what’s not to like about a woman you don’t even know who says, “I want to be a gardener. Like Margaret.”A woman who emails you—though you are still total strangers, really—and asks you about the potato she has planted in a smallish flower pot, and how to care for it? (Answer: Get it out of the confines of that pot, a.k.a., my curriculum of How Not to Grow a Potato 101.)A woman who sends you link

All you have to do to have a chance in the truly random drawing (I’ll use the tool at random [dot] org to pick a winner) is comment below, and be a subscriber to my email newsletter.It’s easy to sign up for the latter if you haven’t already, and free, and here’s what it’s like in case you are worried I’m a spammer.After I draw the winner, I’ll verify that he or she is, in fact, a subscriber…if not, I’ll draw again.I know, that Margaret, she always wants something, right? Well, not really—there are no ads here or anything; I do this a

Have you bought my new book yet? (Tee hee. )The actual question to enter the third-anniversary drawing:(Not sure? Try the “Browse by Topic” List in the far-left narrow column on every page, which you can also access here if you prefer to browse by images. Or start with the “Best Of” top-50 page, or my latest offering, just compiled this week: Margaret’s Madcap Favorites (the ones I had fun doing or find myself referring back to or that just stick in my mind for who knows what reason).So now tell us: What do you like best? The Andre doodles? Slideshows? Technique posts, like how to graft tomatoes? A recipe, a particular plant pr