Gardening

It’s a common experience for folks trying to grow vegetables without pesticides. You plant squash in the first stretch of warm weather and watch it grow into a beautiful plant. But soon after harvesting the first delicious squash, you come out to your garden and find the plant that was beaming with...

Ramps, also known as wild leeks, are one of the most coveted edible native plants in the North American forest. They are particularly prized by people in our area of Appalachia, where they have been collected and eaten for generations. They have a delicious mild garlicky flavor, and where you find...

By now the benefits of incorporating native plants in your landscaping and vegetable garden are very well documented. Native plants require fewer inputs and less upkeep because they’re adapted to your local environment, they provide habitat for native insects and birds, and in some cases, they are a...

It’s easy to get caught up in thinking that you must have a lot of space to make gardening worthwhile. But even with a small amount of space, you can actually produce quite a bit of produce by using the square-foot garden method. If you aren’t familiar with the concept of a square-foot garden, it’s...

Once the days grow longer and we start seeing little buds on trees and daffodils popping up around the periphery of the yard, it’s easy to want to get some plants in the dirt. And though we can’t grow a lot of the vegetables that require the mid-summer heat to thrive, there is actually a lot that we...

Tomatoes were likely first bred from wild nightshade plants with tiny fruit about 7,000 years ago in Mesoamerica. The original wild fruits descended from a Peruvian and Ecuadorian plant that is similar to modern cherry tomatoes. Although tomatoes had been eaten by people in the Americas for...

Garlic is one of the slow movers of the garden world. It’s typically planted in the fall and quietly builds a solid root structure underneath the ground all winter. Little green garlic stems popping up over the top of the soil are typically one of the first signs that spring will be here soon, but...

Second only to sunlight and water, the composition of a garden’s soil can make or break a vegetable garden. The primary aspects of your soil to be on the lookout for are the available nutrient levels, the pH, and the ratio of sand, silt, and clay. If you’re gardening in a city or an area potentially...

For the past seven years, my wife Silvan and I have been working towards producing as much of our own food as possible. Each fall, we begin a “Living off the Land” challenge where we see how long we can comfortably and healthily go, eating only food that we grew in our gardens or foraged and hunted...

After a successful hunt in my household, we like to challenge ourselves to use as much of the animal as possible. Not only is this a great way to honor the animal that is providing us with sustenance, it’s also very satisfying to learn about all of the useful materials that can be derived from game...

Crop rotation is the process of shifting which crops are grown in which beds in your garden from year to year. This process has been used for thousands of years to promote soil health and improve crop yields. The ancient Romans and Mayans used crop rotations to support their civilizations without...

Many gardeners have a springtime tradition of taking a trip to the garden center and coming home with a car or truck full of little veggie seedlings. I also enjoy perusing the aisles at my local big box garden center, but there are some downsides to sourcing your plants this way. The corporate...