tips for growing better tomatoes from seed

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

Up here in the Hudson Valley/Berkshires area, where the apples come in fast in fall, I make applesauce as fast as I can to freeze. A batch of mincemeat sounds about right, too, especially from a recipe minus the traditional beef suet. This one’s vegetarian.The recipe is from “Stocking Up II,” a Rodale cookbook of 1980s vintage that has since been reissued in athird version. The most-disfigured spread in my copy: the one with ‘Currant and Green Tomato Chutney,’ which uses loads of apples as well. If a waste-not, want-not mood seizes you in the not-too-distant future, here’s the recipe. (I fig

First, of course, you want to make sure the crop you’re considering saving seed from is open-pollinated, not a hybrid. Hybrids won’t “come true” from saved seed one generation to the next.“Start with the super-easy things,” said Ken, “like anything with a perfect flower and a pod—beans, and peas, for instance.” Perfect flowers contain both male and female parts, or stamens and pistils, such as lettuce, tomatoes, brassicas, beans; in imperfect ones, such as on squash and cucumbers, there are separate male and female flowers.“Before you even transplant your first seedling, you can start thinking about seed saving,” Ken said, and also wrote in a new article on the Seed Library blog.For beginning seed-

Hudson Valley Seed Library’s motto is “Heirloom Seeds With Local Roots,” and they specialize in heirloom seed “rooted in the history and soils of the Northeast.” The co-founders’ goal for their first-year business is to grow all their seed locally by 2014, much of it on their land in Accord, NY. Ken Greene and Doug Muller want to rekindle the knowledge and spirit of seed-saving at a local level, “to close the loop from seed to seed that is necessary for a truly local sustainable local food system,” they say.I think it’s a great reminder for all of us, wherever we live, especially right now: We can save some of our seeds from year to year, and also share it. Fostering this kind of consciousness and engagement is what the Seed Library is excited about.Anyone anywhere can order from their web-based catalog, and there’s a way to get more involved: Join the Seed Library, for $20 a year, which includes 10 packs of seeds (plain wrappers, not the fancy ones a

I spoke about some notable natives with my friend Andy Brand of Broken Arrow Nursery, with whom I often hosting half-day workshops in my Hudson Valley, New York, garden, when we focus on upping the beneficial wildlife quotient in your own backyard with better plants and better practices. Andy has been one of the experts I’ve pestered for ideas as I’ve been doing that in my own garden in recent years to good effect.Andy is manager of Connecticut-based Broken Arrow, and he’s a serious amateur naturalist, and founder of the Connecticut state butterfly association. (That’s a photo by Andy of a red-banded hairstreak on a Clethra blossom, top of page.) Learn where many familia

So I can invite guest experts to join me as well as share the program with other public-radio stations, we’re pre-taping “A Way to Garden With Margaret Roach” to stand alone, instead of airing live as part of my local station’s morning show, which it has been since March 2010.You can listen in to the first such standalone show here, right now. This week’s topic: When to sow what seeds, with guest Dave Whitinger of All Things Plants in Texas. Next time (February 4), the topic is why I’m going to grow calendul

WEDNESDAY’S SNOW IS TURNING MY HILLY WORLD TO ICE; the day was so short as to be unforgivable; the forecast calls for 11 degrees F tonight, the second such low in a row. No matter, though, because in my imagination, at least, I’m having grilled tomatoes with a wildly handsome red fox, thanks to Hudson Valley Seed Library’s killer seed packets, like the one above. Got anybody who could use a smile in their holiday stocking? Take a peek at a few more:

This year, I’m late, late, late—and I’m conveniently blaming circumstances beyond my control. After frozen ground in April, no rain for three-plus weeks in May, and a June of incredible deluges, some of my best-laid plans aren’t looking so swell. Maybe you’re in the same situation. With all the upside-down spring weather that made headlines around the nation, I suspect it’s not just me who fell “behind.” There’s still time for a positive outcome.Ken (below, saving tomato seed), founder of Hudson Valley Seed Library catalog and an organic seed farmer, joined me on the public-radio show and podcast to talk about planting for late summer into late fall harvest (think: pea-shoot salad, a succulent fresh batch of basil and more), and about seed saving.Read along as you listen to the July 13, 201

First, let’s do a little learning on the topic of local as it applies to heirloom seeds.  I loved where the conversation led in my Q&A with Ken:Q. “Local heirlooms” is a primary message, and mission, of Hudson Valley Seed Library. Explain. A. Just as beauty is in the eye of the beholder and taste is on the tongue of the eater, defining the term “local heirloom” is in the hands of the gardener. Most seeds have traveled more miles than any of us will in our lifetimes. Very few of the varieties of vegetables, herbs, and flowers that we love originally came from the places where we live. Many favorites, like tomatoes, originated in warm, sunny places like Central and South America. As the seeds traveled to new places, met new people with their own ideas of flavor, beauty, and use, they changed.So local do

I mean, it doesn’t close up shop or shut it doors on me or to visual enjoyment. The garden centers may need to stand idle a portion of each year, but not the landscape itself. And so, stubbornly and defiantly over a period of 25 years, at first accidentally and lately more intentionally as my knowledge has grown, I suppose I have made a garden for 365 days. Good thing I did, since I now live in it year-round, having left my career and the city in late 2007 after more than 20 years as a weekender in the Hudson Valley-Berkshires area of New York and Massachusetts.TO MAKE A YEAR-ROUND GARDEN was not my plan, or at least not a conscious one I could have explained when I began digging holes on an overgrown, bramble-infested bit of Columbia County, New York, land with little more to recommend it horticulturally beyond a half-dozen very old apples and a pair of ancient lilacs. My 365-day garden style was actually a happy side effect—a total serendipity—precipitated by my love of birds.Because birds’ needs vary at different times

Technically speaking, a “good bug bloom” would be one whose individual flowers are small (even if they’re massed in a big flowerhead, as dill or fennel are), and whose pollen and nectar are exposed for easy access.  They’d attract beneficial insect pollinators and predators—lacewings, for instance, or ladybugs, or ground beetles or beneficial wasps—creatures who spread pollen and/or feed on insect pests.A succession of beneficial blooms—not just one species or variety—will yield season-long appeal to a range of desired insects in all their life phases. Co-founder Ken Greene of Hudson Valley Seed Library says their Good Bug Blooms mix was formulated with that (and also eye-appeal to humans) in mind.Their current mix includes sulphur Cosmos, annual Gaillardia, ‘Lilliput Mix’ zinnia,

A. Sometimes when I’ve brought our seeds to a farmer’s market or event I hear people muttering as they pass our table, “I can’t start from seed.” At first it broke my heart a little. But then I started getting brave and asking people what they meant.In my mind I couldn’t fathom how someone might think they can’t grow a plant from seed. To me it’s natural, that’s how plants grow! Once I began talking to people I realized it was a fear based on previous attempts to grow from seed that did not work out–particularly seeds that need to be started early indoors in short-season areas, like tomatoes and peppers.But there are so many more seeds that can be direct sown–put in the ground at the right time and left to their own magical will to grow.Good examples of direct-sown seeds are peas, beans, corn, lettuce, arugula, calendula, nasturtium, and Asian greens. The only plants we Northerners and those in similar zones r