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Young strawberry touched by the last spring frost. Vegetable garden planting is simply based on the premise that cool weather crops need cool weather to mature and warm weather crops need warm weather. Most vegetable gardeners need a year or two of trial and error plantings and attentive record keeping to know when is the

February is a busy month for the vegetable gardener. In many regions, indoor and outdoor sowing and planting will begin. Gardeners in warm regions already have seed in the ground. In cold regions, where there is snow on the ground, February is still time for making plans and preparing for spring.  Here are some tips

Make pumpkin soup with sweet, sugar, pie, or cheese pumpkins (small baking pumpkins). Add onions and potatoes for a sweet-savory flavor or substitute tart apples for the potatoes for a sweet-tart soup. Small pumpkins are sweeter, meatier, and have less fibrous flesh than larger ones. (Varieties to grow next year include: Sugar Baby, Baby Pam

Here is a tasty pumpkin ice cream that is easy to make: it is simply sweetened pumpkin purée, milk, and whipping cream, frozen. Because this recipe use a purée of just harvested pumpkin, you will need about 90 minutes to prepare the ice cream mix and another 2½ hours to freeze. ‘Sugar Pie’ is the

Row covers protect newly seeded raised beds Floating row covers are made of lightweight spun poly fabric and are laid loosely over plants. A floating row cover will protect plants from frost damage to 28°F. Row covers transmit up to 85 percent of available sunlight and are permeable to air and water. Sunlight and weather

Bruschetta: toasted bread with tomato, garlic and basil Bruschetta is an antipasto—a “before the meal” bite or first course—except when it’s its own meal. There is much to be said for the simple, traditional bruschetta—grilled bread rubbed with garlic and topped with olive oil and salt and pepper. That’s an antipasto. But when the summer

Grilled and roasted corn is most flavorful when it is cooked fresh—very fresh. As soon as an ear of corn is picked, its sugars start converting to starch. As the sugars turn to starch, the sweetness of corn is lost—though it is true that some new breeds of corn will retain their sweetness for days.

Tomatoes ripen in their own time, but they will ripen off the vine. Pick ripe tomatoes as soon as they ripen so that the plant continues to produce new fruit. This is very important at the end of the season when you want the plant to concentrate on swelling and ripening the remaining fruits. Remove

Corn chowder is a hearty soup. It’s a perfect match for the late summer corn harvest—a whiff of autumn in the air and sometimes a hint of chill. Chowder is an American term with French origins—chaudière is a sort of iron cooking pot. As for corn, the shorter the time from garden to table, the