EVERYONE LOVES GARLIC BUT ME
Influence of Planting Date on Head Size
I no longer grow “stinking roses” but when I did, it was the one vegetable that I was most likely to forget to plant each year. After all, although garlic, “the stinking rose,” is planted at the end of the season along with lettuce, endive, and radish, it’s not harvested along with these other vegetables, which all ripen or are at their best in the cool moistness of autumn. No, garlic ripens almost a year after planting, in the heat of summer. Nonetheless, now is a good time to plant garlic — and here’s a reminder for you.
Separating garlic cloves in head
True, many gardeners plant garlic in early spring and reap decent crops. And those of you who are more savvy — or who have done some reading on the subject — plant in late fall, which is when gardening books and magazine articles direct you to plant.
But let’s examine the logic of planting garlic in spring versus late fall versus late summer. Read more
SMUT POPPING OUT OF YOUR EARS
Spongy Galls, Mmmm
Smut doesn’t sound like something that you would want in your corn patch — anywhere, in fact. The dictionary says that smut can be, among other things, obscene language or anything that blackens like soot. The smut I am referring to is a disease of grasses, and corn, being a botanical grass, can get smut.
You probably have at some time seen smut popping out of your ears. Spongy galls, looking like corn kernels that have been pumped up with steroids and painted silvery gray, ooze from between the husks. 
Within days, the galls darken, then burst open to release powdery, olive brown spores. Not a pretty sight to most corn growers. Read more
THOSE “OTHER” RASPBERRIES
Two Eye-Catching Raspberries
Some raspberries are for eating; others are mostly for looking at — the plants, that is. Although you might not want to pluck fruits from these lookers, you might want to plant them in your flower garden. Two different kinds of good looking raspberry plants were recently staring out at me from the woods along a roadside.
The first of these, flowering raspberry (Rubus odoratus), also known as thimbleberry, could be mistaken for a wild rose.
Flowering raspberry
Its large flowers, however, have broader petals than those of a wild rose, and while the rose’s petals are — well — rose colored, a purple tinge makes the petals of flowering raspberry downright lurid. Read more
