When I started gardening, I ransacked the seed displays and catalogs in search of new tomato varieties to try. Over the years, though, I’ve settled in to a few reliable favorites, and with life catching up to me and a book to write, I have less time to be experimental with the veggie patch. Sure, maybe one day I’ll give those white cherry tomatoes a shot, but for now, I have my snacking tomato, my dehydrating tomato, my salad tomato, my paste tomato, my yellow tomato and my all-purpose slicer and vegetable soup tomato. No need to mess with what works.

Now that I know what tomatoes grow well in my garden and that my family will eat, I save the seeds from one year to plant the next, sparing me the temptation of the seed catalogs and garden center displays. Seed saving is as old as agriculture. While most seed saving is as easy as letting a plant produce mature seeds and collecting them, tomatoes are a bit trickier. Although I’ve grown tomato plants from seeds that I saved by simply spreading the seed glop out to dry, rinsing and fermenting the seeds using the process detailed below produces a much higher germination rate with just a little bit of work. (continue reading…)

I like to garden. Every year, keep vigilant watch for the first sign of winter’s end so I can plant spinach, lettuce and snap peas, then watch for the last frosts so I can plant the tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, squash and delicate herbs. And that doesn’t even get into the orchard or the berry garden, where I grow apples, pears, peaches, plums, cherries, grapes, strawberries, blackberries, raspberries, elderberries and currants.

My veggie patch may be bigger than my first dorm room, but it doesn’t look like those pretty magazine spreads featuring gardens full of lush plants. Not even close. Back in the cool-weather veggie season, it looked like this: (continue reading…)

ⓒ Janet Harriett

Planting a fruit tree or two is a great way to increase your family’s fruit consumption. A mature standard apple tree produces around 10 bushels of apples. To put that in perspective, a large laundry hamper holds about 2 bushels. Those five hamper loads of apples are ready for picking over the course of a couple of weeks.

If you don’t want to learn to can - though it’s not that hard - dwarf fruit trees produce smaller crops of the same delicious fruit varieties and take up less yard space, making them great for smaller lots. No matter what size fruit tree, growing tree fruits requires some homework.

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©iStockphoto.com - kati1313

Grapes were one of the last types of fruit I started growing. The instructions for training and pruning grapes can be intimidating for a beginning fruit gardener, especially since growing grapes requires building a support structure. While I am handy at many things around the house, engineering and installing a support structure capable of holding up for 30 or 40 years is not one of them. Grape vines should be trained to a trellis or arbor, though if you plant them in a garden arbor where you expect to spend a lot of time, be aware that ripening grapes tend to attract yellowjackets.

Red-skinned grapes contain more antioxidants than the green varieties. Select varieties based on what you want to do with them. If you’re looking to grow snacking grapes, you’ll want a seedless table grape variety like Canadice, Flame, Reliance or Himrod. For juice or homemade winemaking, a wine grape like Concord, Delaware or Catawba fits the bill. Wine grapes often have a slip skin, where the skins slip readily off. Wine grapes are perfectly edible out of hand, but if you or your kids are used to the grapes from the supermarket, the sensation of the squishy grape innards shooting out of the skins inside your mouth takes a bit of getting used to. (continue reading…)

Photo Credit: Steve Hillebrand/ US Fish and Wildlife Service

Moving up from strawberries and bramble berries, fruiting shrubs are a bit more of a commitment and require some planning, since they take 3-5 years before the labor invested in them pays off with fruit. Fruiting shrubs can last up to 20 years and after the first few years, get to be too bit to move easily if you decide you want them somewhere else so planning is essential.

Birds like these berries, so, space permitting, plant more than you think you’ll need. Products like bird netting keep the birds out of the fruits, but I cannot recommend them, having had to cut a dead bird out of an entanglement with a pest deterrent. Since I don’t have space limitations, I just consider feeding the birds and other assorted wildlife part of fruit gardening.

These bush fruits are well worth growing for their nutritional value, though. Blueberries consistently get high marks on analyses of superfoods for their high levels of anthocyanins. Elderberries make a delicious jam and are a traditional herbal medicinal for relief of the common cold. All currants are high in vitamin C, and black currants contain proanthocyanidin, a powerful antioxidant. (continue reading…)

ⓒ iStockPhoto - ObjectifMC

Bramble fruits - blackberries, raspberries and their related varieties like boysenberries and dewberries - are also fairly easy to grow. In many areas, bramble plants have escaped cultivation and become weeds, easily found on roadsides or in woodlands. I have run that in reverse in my own fruit garden and domesticated some wild black raspberries that were growing as a weed in a wild spot on my property, after first carefully determining that they were, in fact, edible.

Many blackberries and raspberries pretty much grow themselves, needing a gardener’s intervention mainly to keep the patch clear of weeds and older, non-producing vines.  Bramble berries pack a nutritional punch and don’t travel well, so they’re often prohibitively expensive in supermarkets. The ease of growing and expense of buying makes blackberries and raspberries a prime candidate for home growing. (continue reading…)

If you live in North America, (excluding Hawaii) your area has hummingbirds. These tiny nectarivores can hover, beat their wings between 20-90 times per second, and are the only type of bird able to fly backwards!

Hummingbirds are territorial and have an average lifespan of four years, so once you attract the birds to your yard they are very likely to return. There are two ways to attract and feed hummingbirds: feeders and gardens. (continue reading…)