Most home garden vegetable crops should be harvested and used as soon as they are just large enough. A common home garden mistake is waiting too long to pick and eat vegetables. Don’t wait until your vegetables look like the ones you would buy in the market. Market growers let crops reach a certain size
Plan your vegetable garden on sticky-backed plant photos or plant sketches on Post-It Notes set on grid paper. This easy method will allow you to plan both initial vegetable crop sowings and plantings and succession crops before the weather warms and you get busy preparing and planting garden beds. Here’s what to do: 1. Determine
Eggplant Growing: Grow eggplant when days are warm; plant in compost rich well-drained soil. Aubergine or eggplant? You’ll find this vegetable under either name in cookbooks. Eggplant is the name used by most American speakers. Aubergine is chiefly a British usage. Eggplant was the name originally given to the white-skinned, egg-shaped variety of the vegetable
The eggplant is a fruit not a vegetable. Botanically speaking a fruit is the ripened ovary–including the seeds–of a flowering plant. That means that many foods called vegetables when cooking are actually fruits. That list would include squash, pumpkin, cucumber, sweet pepper, tomato and eggplant. Does that make ratatouille technically a kind of fruit sald?
Epsom salt used as a foliar spray or soil additive will help tomato and pepper plants grow and produce larger, tastier yields. Late in the season use an Epsom salt spray to increase tomato and pepper yield and keep plants green and bushy; early in the season add Epsom salt to the soil to aid
The clementine is a small mandarin orange that packs a rich juicy sweet-tangy taste. The clementine has a thin, smooth, bright red-orange skin that is very easy to peel and delicate, red-orange flesh that is virtually seedless. Here’s something to keep in mind about the clementine: the smaller the fruit the more intense the flavor.
Here is a very tasty sunflower brittle recipe that Julia, a San Francisco garden designer, recently cooked up using a recipe adapted from The Joy of Cooking. This brittle is light and sunflower nutty and a perfect snack for an afternoon in the garden. Julia advises that you might want to have ready a pair
A cloche is a small, portable plant covering designed to be easily moved around the garden. A cloche traps the sun’s warmth raising the temperature of both the air and soil inside. A cloche can cover a single plant or a small group of plants. You can use a cloche to protect a plant from
Colorado potato beetle The Colorado potato beetle attacks potatoes, eggplants, peppers, and tomatoes skeletonizing leaves and defoliating plants. Horticultural cloth draped over plants will exclude beetles from reaching plants to lay eggs and feed, diatomaceous earth will destroy larvae, and the botanical poisons pyrethrum and rotenone can kill heavy infestations of adult beetles. However, where
Valencia oranges Common oranges are sweet oranges that are not navel oranges or blood oranges. Common oranges are juicier than navel oranges, but they also have more seeds and are more difficult to peel. Because the juice of common oranges is sweet and does not have a bitter aftertaste or turn bitter when stored—like some
