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Fall can be the most invigorating time in the garden -- for many vegetables as well as gardeners! Cool-loving crops like lettuce, spinach, kale, broccoli, and chicory take on their best flavor as the nights get chilly. And who among us doesn’t enjoy a few hours outside in beautiful weather, tending plants?Fall gardening is not without challenges, though. Getting plants started at a time of year when the weather is still hot and insects are still… Read more

Winter squash and pumpklns require a large investment of garden space and time, but reward the gardener with sweet, delicious, vitamin-rich fruits that hold well into fall and winter. For a successful crop, you must harvest them when fully ripe. Harvest them too soon, and you will be disappointed.So how do you know when it’s time to harvest your winter squash and pumpkins? There are several clues to maturity: Most heirloom varieties take 100 to… Read more

Many culinary herbs love cool weather — and when summer hits, they bolt (go to seed) or get tough and lose their delicate flavor. That’s why early summer is the best time to start preserving herbs for later use.There are lots of ways to preserve herbs, including drying and freezing, but my favorite methods are to make compound butters and pestos. All are easy and take less than an hour, from cutting the herbs to cleaning up. But the rewards are b… Read more

A male squash flower produces ample pollen; it just needs a bee to carry it to a female flower for pollination to occur.Every summer, we hear from a few people who say their squash, cucumber, melon, or pumpkin plants are flowering but not setting fruit. Or that the fruits drop off, or never fill out properly. These situations are normal, and easily remedied. The most likely cause is pollination failure, although growing conditions may also play a… Read more

Getting early tomatoes is a kind of a game for most gardeners; we start our seeds inside in winter, surround young plants with plastic or water walls, warm the soil with black plastic mulch, even build hoophouses over the plants. And that first sun-ripened tomato, after months of pale imitations, makes all the trouble worthwhile.But there’s something to be said for planting tomatoes later, too. Tomatoes really are heat-loving plants that are happ… Read more