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 […]

Should I Plant my Tomatoes Yet? By: Dean Gunderson One of the most frequent questions we get this time of year is some variation of, “can I plant my tomatoes yet?”  The answer is no!  As a warm season crop tomatoes cannot tolerate any frost.  Technically you can plant them as soon as the last […]

March is the month of spring gardening!  This is the month to plant all of your cool season vegetables.  Starting in mid-March you are safe to plant root crops, greens, and brassicas. This is the time to plant carrots, beets, turnips, radishes, spinach, lettuce, collards, kale, chard, mustard greens, arugula, cauliflower, broccoli, cabbage, kohlrabi, bok […]