A look at any seed catalog will reveal at least three kinds of peas: shelling peas, snap peas, and snow peas. Shelling peas are the ones that show up in the canned and frozen vegetable sections at the supermarket. When you grow them at home, though, there’s quite a bit of work involved in getting all those little…
Tag: Gardening
Strawberry Tortellini Salad
I’ve been crazy busy this spring, what with buying a new house and getting married! But not so busy that I haven’t been able to pick fresh strawberries almost every day. Our ever-bearing variety, Tristar, started bearing May 12 and has been going strong ever since. Homegrown strawberries are so delicious that you don’t really…
Ordering Seed Potatoes
In early January, when I took inventory of my seed stocks and sent off my 2013 order to Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, I told myself that I had plenty of time to order my seed potatoes later. I didn’t have to order everything at the same time this year because I’m ordering the seed potatoes…
The Resilient Gardener
I’ve read a lot of gardening books in my thirty-one years, and I’ve learned something new from every one. But it isn’t often that a book comes along in which I not only learn something new in every paragraph but each bit of new information feels absolutely vital. Carol Deppe’s book The Resilient Gardener is…
Fresh Winter Food: Turnips
Most people don’t think of winter as a season in which you can garden, but here in Virginia, you certainly can–even without greenhouses or cold frames. One of the foods we planted last fall and haven’t had to protect all winter is turnips. Now, it’s true that the temperatures down in the twenties a couple…
Starting Onions
Here in Zone 7, January is the time for starting onion seeds indoors: two months before the last expected frost. I got mine planted a little over a week ago, and the shoots are already green and unbending towards the sun. (When an onion seed first germinates, its stem is folded over with both ends…
The Vegetable Oscars
It’s that season of the year when every vegetable gardener is up to their ears in seed catalogs. They’ve been arriving for weeks now, and, if you’re like me, you can’t throw away a single one–even the ones you’ve never ordered from–without peeking to see what stunning new varieties they may have on offer this…
Does Vegetable Gardening Actually Save Money?
While my primary reason for gardening is love–love of the outdoors, love of physical work, love of plants in their infinite variety–my pleasure in gardening is immeasurably enhanced if I know that my labor is actually productive, if I know that, down the road a few weeks or months, I’m going to be enjoying the…
Garlic Harvest, Part II
A couple of weeks ago, I pulled the garlic from the garden and spread it to dry, stems and all, on the concrete floor under our deck. A couple of days later, I peeled off the outer leaves, culled for the refrigerator a few of the bulbs that were showing some deterioration, and, for convenience’s…
Wild Fruit
It’s been a little while since I’ve posted anything about foraging. Once the garden started coming into its own this spring, I felt less of the urge to snoop through the tufts of wild greens encircling the yard in the hopes of finding something edible. Eating from the garden just seemed…well, easier. Until now. It…
gettin' fresh! 