This blog post is brought to you by the Home Garden Seed Association at EZfromSeed.org. If you don't know when to harvest your summer crops, here's a helpful guide: You put your time and energy into growing tomatoes, greens, zucchini, and other vegetables from seed. So of course you want to harvest them at their absolute best. But it’s not always easy to know when that is. Picking at peak flavor is essential. Read below to find HGSA's top tips…
It's beautiful up here at the Heirloom Expo 2016. There is so much to see, so I'll just leave it to the photos to explain. And we have to finish with the squash tower, a mainstay of the Heirloom Expo:
I fell in love with Silver Edge pumpkin seeds the moment I laid eyes on them. This Mexico native squash wins every beauty contest when it comes to seeds. They're enormous, they're exotic and they have a shiny SILVER EDGE! What could be better? Well...this: they taste delicious. Silver Edge pumpkins are not grown for the flesh, which is allegedly unpalatable, they are grown for the seeds. Traditionally used in pipian sauce, a green mole-type sauce without the chocolate, Silver…
The moment of truth has arrived. We just harvested the Glass Gem Popping Corn we grew this summer. Between the rats and corn worms, we lost at least half the harvest, but what was left was substantial enough to be proud of. Glass Gem is an open pollinated seed "bred from a number of Native varieties by Carl 'White Eagle' Barnes, the famous Cherokee corn collector to whom we owe our gratitude for his life's work of collecting, preserving and…
It's here, in Mar Vista, in our backyard. The Asian citrus psyllid (ACP) has been in found in Los Angeles, but just last week we discovered it on a weak lime tree in the back corner of Gardenerd HQ. Here's what it looks like in real life. At first we didn't see the pest, just evidence that it arrived. Squiggly, white threads were sprinkled over the leaf surfaces and dangled off flower buds. It's like a horror film where the…
I had the good fortune of being a speaker at the first ever Natural Beekeeping Conference that took place this weekend in Pasadena, CA. Honeylove.org organized the event. They gathered top experts in treatment-free beekeeping from around the continent, and welcomed guests from all over the world. Yours truly taught Gardening for Beekeepers. Most of my beekeeping colleagues have attended regular beekeeping conferences, only to find themselves flabbergasted by the amount of attention given to chemicals: miticides, fungicides, artificial food…