Did you know sweet potatoes aren’t grown from seeds? Instead, they are started from root sprouts that slowly emerge from the “eyes” of mature sweet potatoes until they are ready to take over your garden bed with their vines and tuberous roots! This might sound like the plot to a new sci-fi show, but it […]

If you want to plant some food-producing woody plants including trees, shrubs, vines, or brambles, this is the post for you and now is the time to order! Ordering fruit and nut-producing plants can be very overwhelming especially when you have a small space you are working with.  Usually, you can only plant a few […]

This is the time of year that if you have been gardening for long you get a deluge of seed and plant catalogs in the mail.  Although it can be really fun to look through them and read all the glowing descriptions it can also be overwhelming to figure out what to order.  So today […]

Prepping the Garden & Orchard for Winter By this time of year, most of us are ready for a break.  It becomes easy to just leave the garden as it is and worry about it in the spring. Although leaving it for spring is tempting after a long year of tending the garden and orchard, […]

Guest Post by Nicole Miller-Struttann, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Biology, Webster University Many crop plants rely on local insects for pollination. While honeybees can be important pollinators in agricultural settings, wild bees are often better pollinators. That is good news in some ways, because it means you don’t need a honeybee hive to increase pollination. […]

Guest Post by Nicole Miller-Struttann, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Biology, Webster University Orchards are popping up in a lot of community gardens around the country, and it’s easy to understand why. They help to provide local sources of high-quality fruits, create shaded nooks for people and animals alike, and reduce the environmental impacts of long-distance […]

What if I told you there was a way to increase vegetable production without increasing garden size and that it would also reduce disease without using any fertilizers or pesticides.  Sounds like a marketing scam but it’s not, it’s vertical gardening.  Training and supporting plants that would normally sprawl over a large area of the […]

If you’re noticing some holes in your cabbages, collards, broccoli, kale or others in the brassicas family it most likely is caused by caterpillars. It always seems right when the plants start looking great that the caterpillars come out in mass. Luckily caterpillars are one of the easy pests to control in the garden. The […]