Learn how to grow your own vegetables, herbs, and fruits in any space — from backyard beds to tiny urban gardens. Discover planting tips, harvest guides, and seasonal growing advice for beginners and experts.
Learn how to grow your own vegetables, herbs, and fruits in any space — from backyard beds to tiny urban gardens. Discover planting tips, harvest guides, and seasonal growing advice for beginners and experts.
After fifty years of getting my hands in the soil, I’ll tell you that some of the most rewarding gardening I’ve ever done happened when I stopped fighting the heat and started working with it. If you garden in Zones 10 or 11, you already know the frustration of watching traditional vegetables like lettuce and … Read more
After fifty years of tending herb gardens in the Mid-Atlantic, I’ve learned one thing the hard way: not every Mediterranean herb earns a permanent spot in the ground. I’ve buried more rosemary plants than I care to admit, mourned lavender that dissolved into mush after a February freeze, and watched beautiful sage simply vanish under … Read more
After fifty years of coaxing life from cold ground, I can tell you that gardening in Zone 3 teaches you patience, persistence, and a healthy respect for frost. My first garden was in northern Minnesota, and I remember standing over those stubborn beds in May, waiting for the soil to thaw while my southern friends … Read more
I spent the first few years of my gardening life in northern Minnesota envying gardeners further south who seemed to grow everything effortlessly from June through October. My window was tight — last frost around May 15th, first frost creeping back in by September 15th — and I made the mistake of planting what I … Read more
I still remember the look on my neighbor Earl’s face when he spotted my apple trees loaded with fruit one August afternoon back in the mid-1980s. He’d been gardening in northern Minnesota his whole life and had long since given up on fruit trees after losing two young trees to a February cold snap that … Read more
A few summers ago, my neighbor Dorothy called me over to look at her backyard. She’d planted a beautiful Superior plum tree five years earlier — healthy trunk, lovely branches, bloomed like a dream every May. But come August, not a single plum. Not one. She stood there with her hands on her hips, genuinely … Read more
I spent years feeling a little sorry for myself as a Zone 5 gardener. My neighbors in Georgia were picking peaches in July while I was still waiting for my last frost. My sister-in-law in California bragged about her citrus trees, and I’d nod politely and change the subject. Then, one autumn about thirty years … Read more
It was the last week of May, about twenty-two years ago now, and I had spent the whole morning admiring my young Toka plum — absolutely dripping with tiny green fruitlets, the most promising crop I’d seen in years. By that evening, the temperature had dropped to 26°F. By morning, every single one of those … Read more
I killed three blueberry bushes before I figured out what I was doing wrong. Back in the early 1980s, I planted what I thought were perfectly healthy highbush blueberries along the south-facing fence in my Zone 5 garden in central Ohio. I watered them faithfully, fed them every spring, and waited. Year after year, the … Read more
My neighbor Dorothy grew raspberries for forty years. Every summer she’d bring me a little basket — beautiful, sweet, and gone by mid-July. One afternoon I mentioned I’d just finished picking my honeyberries and she looked at me like I’d said something in a foreign language. “Honey-what?” she asked. I spent the next hour walking … Read more