Sweet Potatoes

With their slender stems and perfumed blooms, sweet peas are a firm favourite for cut flowers.

Sweet Potato Flowers are not only beautiful to look at, but also offer many uses! Let’s have a look at them in detail!

Photo by Agence Producteurs Locaux Damien Kühn on Unsplash

I have had a disaster this year with my sweet peas sown last Autumn. They didn’t fare too well in the cold greenhouse. I gave them a long root run but probably didn’t give them consistent watering and TLC. So by spring they were thin specimens with lacy leaves eventhough I had pinched them out. Because they didn’t look too good I didn’t feed them up and cosset them but just plonked them in the ground. Well it serves me right and I have a very poor showing at the moment.

Potato blight, also called late blight, is a destructive fungal disease that is caused by spores of Phytophthora infestans. Potato blight spores are spread on the wind and may also contaminate potato tubers in the soil. It can ruin a crop in 10-14 days and there is little that can be done to save an infected crop. It was the original cause of the Irish Potato Famine.

I picked a small bunch of sweet pea flowers from the garden today, snipping off their stiff, slim stems with a scissors and shaking the rain from their soft, ruffled petals before bringing them indoors to fill the house with their distinctive scent, a cloud of perfume that never fails to seduce.

Homegrown tomatoes taste heavenly when they are sweet with a hint of tart, acidic flavor. If you want to grow the same, there is a science behind it. Learn the Number One Technique to Produce Sweeter Tomatoes to enjoy a sweet summer harvest!

The sweet potato is a starchy, sweet-tasting root vegetable. They have a thin, brown skin on the outside with colored flesh inside, typically orange in color, but other varieties are white, purple or yellow. You can eat sweet potatoes whole or peeled; the leaves of the plant are also edible. While called ‘potatoes’, sweet and white potatoes are not actually related. Botanically, the sweet potato belongs to the bindweed or morning glory family, whereas the white potato is part of the nightshade family.

2 packages frozen phyllo dough tartlet shells 1 small package instant vanilla pudding 1 cup milk ½ cup canned pumpkin or sweet potatoes (pureed) 1 tsp pumpkin pie spice (½ tsp cinnamon, ¼ tsp nutmeg and ¼ tsp ginger) ¹⁄3 cup whipped topping (optional)

This year, the newest shrub addition to my garden is a Burgundy Spice sweetshrub (Calycanthus floridus var purpureus ‘Burgundy Spice’). When I spotted it across the nursery, it was as if a big neon arrow was pointing at it with a sign saying “Buy Me.”

Iced tea has been on the menu since the 1870s. What made the iced tea novel wasn’t the tea but the ice, which was quite a luxury back then. Tea is rich in polyphenols, which are a type of antioxidant. These wonderful nutrients hunt for cell-damaging free radicals in the body and detoxify them.

I must be selective in the kinds of shrubs and trees I add to my landscape. Very simply: I don’t have the room. Like the village matchmaker, Yente, in Fiddler on the Roof, I match the plant with my landscape, paying particular attention to sun exposure, drainage, and room to grow. I also consider its maintenance requirements, particularly water, fertilizer, pruning, and pests. As a tough-love gardener, I have no tolerance for needy, wimpy plants.