It’s not the time of year to inspire most of us gardeners to sow a seed, but sow I will, a figurative seed in your imagination. Who knows what reality it may grow into?
As the weather turns increasingly cool, then cold, and the landscape becomes washed over in gray and brown, imagine a retreat, an oasis of lush greenery and bright colored flowers suffused in warm, moist air. A greenhouse.
Greenhouse at the Nearing’s Forest Farm
I am happy and proud to admit that I have firmly established a weed in my garden. That weed is corn salad (Valerianella olitoria). Not that it took a lot of effort on my part; this plant is after all a weed, one that got its name for the way it invades European corn fields — “corn,” in the Queen’s English, being any grain except for corn, which is “maize.” I can still call it a weed because a definition of a “weed” is any plant that shows up where it’s not desired; much of corn salad here comes up where I don’t want it to.
Corn salad, the weed
The second part of this weed’s name, “salad,” explains why I nonetheless want it in my garden. Read more
How green is your vegetable garden? Mine is very. Summer long gone and frost in the air doesn’t have to bring on a scene of browned and ragged leaves clinging to withered stems.
My garden is green, having arrived at its present state of enthusiasm by, first, my keeping one step ahead of weeds. Especially after midsummer, some gardeners relax their grips on weed control, letting heat loving annuals like lamb’s-quarters, purslane, and pigweed take hold. And then cooler weather brings quackgrass and creeping charlie stealthily trying to . . . well, creep . . . in at the garden’s edges.
Regular weeding forays through summer and early fall took but a few minutes of my time — much less than the heroic effort firmly established weeds would have required. Read more
If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times, “Home grown tomatoes are NOT the best tasting ones.” Not necessarily, at least.
No, I’m not advocating tossing in your trowel and doing your tomato harvesting into a shopping cart. What I am saying is that choosing the best variety is all important to being able to bite into into the best tasting tomato. Grow an Early Girl tomato to perfection, harvest it at its peak of flavor, then take a bite out of it, and you’ll taste a good tomato. But not — in my opinion — a great tomato.
Heirloom tomatoes on plate
A tomato that has been handled carefully keeps pretty well for a couple of days, so you could actually purchase a great tasting tomato from a store or farm stand. But only if — I’ll say it again — that tomato is a great tasting variety. Read more
If a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose, then a tomato is a tomato is a tomato. Or surely a paste tomato is. After all, paste tomatoes are rarely eaten fresh; they are mostly just cooked.
Each summer in my garden, we grow and put up enough canned tomatoes to keep us in soup, stew, and sauce for at least a year. 
A couple of summers ago, I sorted through some of the paste tomato varieties available, planting, growing, and evaluating flavors of the reputed best. These were varieties highly touted by seed purveyors, some gardeners, and on the web.
I admit to entering this foray with prejudices. Read more
Truman Capote said something to the effect that the difference between the super-rich and the rest of us is that the super-rich eat tiny vegetables. So there’s another plus for gardening: It’s easy to be super-rich, or at least eat the way the super-rich do.
Not that smaller is always better in the world of vegetables. A cucumber picked undersized does not taste better and is surely not as juicy than one allowed to swell up before harvest — as long as that full-sized one is picked before its skin yellows and seeds start to harden.
Similarly, the taste of baby carrots can’t compare with fully grown ones, unless the “baby” size is how big the carrots are supposed to be when fully mature. Read more
Popeye ain’t the only bloke who’s gotta have spinach on tap whenever the urge strikes him. Some gardeners have similar needs — not me, though, who, come summer, gravitates to peppers, corn, tomatoes, and cucumbers. And being gardeners, you spinach lovers want freshly picked spinach, not that wan stuff that Popeye squeezes out of a can.
No matter how good a gardener you are, though, you can’t grow spinach this time of year (a statement that will no doubt be challenged by some reader who IS growing spinach now). Spinach is sensitive to cycles of night and day, and our summer’s short nights induce the plants to send up seedstalks, then die, instead of growing the succulent, broad leaves they do in spring and fall. Read more
I plan on eating sweet corn almost daily from about the middle of July until early autumn. I know the arguments against growing sweet corn in a backyard garden: It’s cheap at the farmstand and space-hungry in the garden. What’s more, the most modern, “supersweet” varieties hold their sweetness for days.
The supersweet varieties are truly supersweet. But “supersweet” is too much of a catchall term. Old-fashioned corn, the Papoon corn developed around 1750 by the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and still available today, is noted for its creamy texture and 9 percent sugar due to its SU gene. Unfortunately, those sugars start changing into starch as soon as an ear is harvested.
Golden Bantam sweet corn
In the latter half of the 20th century, “Sugary enhanced” sweet corn came on the scene. The SE gene incorporated into sweet corn varieties jacked sugar levels up to 17 percent. More Sugar meant more time for sweetness to hold following harvest. SE kernels are very tender.
Soon after, another gene, SH2 or “shrunken-2,” was found, which pushed that sweetness even higher, up to 35 percent! Read more
I’d like to make a case for growing asparagus, even if you’re not a vegetable gardener. In fact, vegetable gardeners need not relegate asparagus to the vegetable patch. The plants hold little interest to deer, rabbits and other furry invaders that must be fenced out of vegetable gardens.
The ferny stems can provide a wispy lime-green backdrop to mounded flowers like lavatera and gaillardia, or an airy foreground to the broad, glossy leaves of holly bushes. My present asparagus provides a backdrop for three clematis plants trained skyward on wire trellises.
Asparagus is especially easy to grow, in part because it is a perennial. My patch is about 25 years old. Read more
Especially in years past, I would get a little tense this time of year, because sometime soon I would have to sit down and map out the year’s vegetable garden. As usual, ideas have been bouncing around inside my head for the past few weeks, but the day must come — before April 1st, my date for planting peas — when procrastination must bow to action.
When that time comes, I gather together on the kitchen table printouts of the empty beds in my two vegetable gardens, a sharpened pencil, and notes and plans of gardens past. After taking a deep breath, my first order of business, planning for crop rotation, begins. The theory: Plant no vegetable in the same spot sooner than every third year. The rationale: A garden pest might survive the winter to bother the same plant the following year . . . unless the plant happens to be growing elsewhere, in which case the pest starves and dies.
Pests usually are equally fond of all plants in a plant family, so I won’t grow tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, or potatoes (nightshade family) at the same location without waiting three years. Read more
