Vegetables – Lee Reich

EVERYONE LOVES GARLIC BUT ME

August 18, 2026/0 Comments/in Vegetables/by Lee Reich

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

August 12, 2026/3 Comments/in Gardening, Vegetables/by Lee Reich

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

Ornamental front path vegetables and flowers together

PRETTY EDIBLES

June 17, 2026/2 Comments/in Design, Flowers, Vegetables/by Lee Reich

Don’t Pigeonhole Them

Look around your vegetable garden: Aren’t some of these plants pretty enough to be grown as ornamentals, perhaps shoulder to shoulder with marigolds, delphinium, and others in a flower garden or at the feet of shrubbery?

Imagine, if you will, a twining vine with sprays of scarlet flowers poking out from lime green foliage. The plant, scarlet runner bean, is so attractive that you might consider the edible pods as merely incidental — until you taste their rich, meaty flavor. Some other pole beans are also ornamental. Purple Peacock and Purple Pod Pole are Read more

EASY EDAMAME

April 22, 2026/9 Comments/in Vegetables/by Lee Reich

Soy Simple

I’m not going to ramble on and on in praise of the many health benefits of soybeans, their high quality protein, their healthful oil, and so on. Nor will I go on and on about how this plant, cultivated for thousands of years in Asia, has found its way into the manufacture of plastics and other hardgoods. Henry Ford was an early devotee of this plant, so much so that in the 1930s each Ford automobile ate up a bushel of soybeans in one form or another. I’ll also keep quiet about the gustatory alchemy that has been wrought on this bean to transform it into tofu and tempeh as well as ersatz meats, milk, and ice cream.

What I won’t do, though, is restrain my praise of the simplest form of soybean (edamame), the fresh green bean Read more

WITH GOOD REASON, FAMILIES MIGRATE AROUND MY GARDEN

March 3, 2026/4 Comments/in Flowers, Vegetables/by Lee Reich

(Excerpt from The Ever Curious Gardener: Using a Little Natural Science for a Much Better Garden, available directly from this website, signed, or from the usual sources.)

Who is Coming?

How many families am I having over to the vegetable garden this summer? I have to plan their seating arrangements.

I’m talking about plant families. An example of a plant family is the Mustard Family, known botanically as the Cruciferae, and including among its members cabbage, broccoli, collards, and Brussels sprouts. Their similarly pungent flavors and waxy, bluish leaves might also have earmarked them as being in the same family. Then again, the different parts eaten—the swollen stalks of kohlrabi, the leaves of cabbage, and the flower buds of broccoli— might indicate otherwise.

Most important in uniting this family, and the primary characteristic that botanically unites members of any plant family, is Read more

STUFFED

November 24, 2025/2 Comments/in Fruit, Gardening, Vegetables/by Lee Reich

Grow Your Own Stuffing

Thanksgiving is a time of year when one’s thoughts naturally turn to . . . stuffing. No, not stuffing yourself, but stuffing a turkey. Even many people who choose not to eat turkey on Thanksgiving nonetheless do enjoy stuffing themselves with stuffing.

So why not think about what ingredients for stuffing can be reaped from the garden? Even better, how about setting aside a little portion of the garden next year as a stuffing garden?

The bread and butter of any stuffing is some starchy food, often bread and butter itself, the bread usually as crumbs. There’s no breadcrumb plant, so forget about growing breadcrumbs. Not that you couldn’t buy some wheat “berries” at a health food store, plant them next spring, harvest the grain when the plants dry down, thresh and winnow out the berries, grind them into flour, make the flour into bread, then let the bread go stale and pound it into bread crumbs.

Growing breadcrumbs– I did it once!

TIGER NUTS

October 15, 2025/5 Comments/in Vegetables/by Lee Reich

Back to Our Roots

Every few years I grow a plant both for its flavor and because it takes me back to my — to our — roots. Digging any edible root or tubers is always something of a primal experience. This plant I occasionally grow elicits an especially strong bond to distant ancestors. The plant is chufa (Cyperus esculentus). You see, chufa tubers are not fat and succulent, the result of centuries of human selection and breeding. What I grub out of the ground are hard, egg-shaped bits of nourishment, each bit little larger than pea gravel.

As befits any primitive crop, chufa is extremely easy to grow. Just drop tubers into the Read more

TWO GOOD FLAVORS IN ONE

August 26, 2025/3 Comments/in Flowers, Vegetables/by Lee Reich

Friend or Foe?

Is it a weed or is it a garden plant? Garlic chives (Allium tuberosum) is among those plants — paulownia tree, Jerusalem artichoke, mint, and anise hyssop are others — that has paraded under either guise.

Garlic chives comes from a good enough family, the onion family. There is one definitely weedy member to this family, wild garlic, but so many of its other kin are valuable garden plants. Star-of-Persia, Read more

HOMEGROWN IS NOT ALWAYS THE BEST

August 20, 2025/8 Comments/in Vegetables/by Lee Reich

What is Ripe?

Some people, many of them gardeners, believe that the secret to eating a delectable tomato is to grow it yourself. Second best, they say, is farm-fresh. At the risk of committing horticultural sacrilege, I say “not so” in both cases.

Ripeness is, of course, important to great flavor. An unripe tomato tastes no better than cotton soaked in diluted lemon juice, to me at least. But this time of year, ripe tomatoes are to be had everywhere: from backyards, from roadsides, from farm stands, even from supermarkets! And if truth be told, tomatoes picked slightly underripe can still ripen to perfection off the plant, as do bananas, winter apples, avocados, and pears. Read more

WHAT’S UP WITH TOMATOES?

August 6, 2025/8 Comments/in Pests, Vegetables/by Lee Reich

Hurry Up

I’ve been enjoying tasty nuggets of Sungold tomatoes for a few weeks, and hope very soon to finally settle back to enjoy an abundance of large, juicy, red or orange tomatoes, the varieties at their best sliced and sandwiched,along with congenial companions, between two slices of bread. Those large tomato fruits are late in ripening this year.

The problem, like lots of garden issues, can be blamed on the weather. Ideal temperatures for ripening tomatoes lie between 70 and 75 degrees F. Read more