For the love of tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, squashes, potatoes, onions, radishes, peas, beans, broccoli, cauliflower, etc… how to grow them in containers, community gardens, and other small spaces.
Do you love tomatoes, want to grow tomatoes, or want some advice on new varieties to try? My guest this week is tomato crazy gardener, Kelly Gilliam. Kelly was a regular of the now defunct You Grow Girl forums way back in the day. Back then she was gardening in zone 8b out on the …
Like everything this year, the garden has been a little slow in producing spring salads fixings. Salad greens and sundry, i.e spinach, mustard greens, cress, lettuce, and radishes, to name just a few — are some of the first crops that I sow directly outdoors each spring. As soon as the soil is workable (meaning …
I have two criteria when choosing beans (Phaseolus vulgaris) to grow: they must be delicious at the tender, green bean (aka snap bean) stage and they must have something about them that is aesthetically pleasing. Over the years I have experimented with a lot of bean varieties and by these criteria ‘Trionfo Violetto’ and ‘Royal …
Chiltepin (Capsicum annuum var. glabriusculum) aka (Capsicum annum var. aviculare) or bird pepper is a small, pea-sized chile that grows wild on 3-4 ft-tall shrubs in parts of Texas and Northern Mexico. Coming in at 50,000-100,000 Scoville Heat Units (SHU), this pepper is ferociously hot and pungently flavoured. The heat comes on violently, yet diminishes …
You Grow Girl is celebrating 14 years online this month! As you can imagine an awful lot of articles have been posted in that time and with so much to choose from it can sometimes be tricky to find what you’re looking for. To make things easier, I have been slowly building an archive of …
Continuing in a running theme of hot peppers that aren’t hot, I present to you another exceptional variety, ‘Pimenta Biquinho’ aka Little Beak Peppers. Hailing from Brazil, these funny little peppers are round with a distinctive, tapered point or tail that resembles a birds beak (hence the name). Like ‘Trinidad Perfume’, another not hot, hot …
I grew my first multiflora tomato variety back when I had the rooftop garden. Multifloras (aka compound inflorescence) are tomato varieties that produce legions of fruit, usually cherry-sized, per cluster. In a hot year, some multifloras have been known to produce as many as 50-100 fruits on a single cluster! I can’t recall which variety …
Since moving to a house with a basement three years ago, I have been experimenting with hanging whole tomato vines before the frost to ripen indoors. I’ve tried this technique in varying conditions: in a cold, dark basement; in the darker corners of an unheated porch; right up in the windows of the same south-facing …
Yesterday afternoon 20 gorgeous, and very large pumpkins/winter squash arrived on my doorstep courtesy of my friend Uli. She had gone out of her way to purchase many of them from a local farmer to use as Halloween decor, and a few others were given to her for free. Knowing that they would only rot …
I have a “stick them wherever they’ll fit” attitude towards onions, shallots, garlic, and leeks. While most edible alliums grow to be their biggest and best when the soil is rich and the sun is bright, I often start the season with more allium seedlings and sets than ideal space in which to plant them. …
Back in late July I told you about a two-for-one squash from Argentina called ‘Pilar’ aka ‘Zapallito Redondo de Tronco’ that can be harvested young as a zucchini, or left to ripen and enjoyed later in the year as a winter squash. Well, three months have passed and I have begun harvesting and eating the …
I love the idea of hot peppers much more than my body likes it when I eat them. For that reason I am always on the look out for what West Indians call “seasoning peppers.” That is, varieties that impart the flavour of hot peppers without the heat.* One of the best seasoning peppers that …