Down-to-earth storage

It’s easy to keep root crops from the fall garden for months in your root cellar. Keep these points in mind:

Your late crop should be as late as possible. The later you can harvest and store them, the longer they’ll keep.

Pull or dig your storage crop after 2 or 3 days of dry weather. Leave the crop out in the sun for an hour. The vegetables will dry quickly and the soil on them will fall off easily.

Don’t wash or brush the vegetables. As soon as you dig them, “top” them right in the garden, but don’t cut the tail roots of your carrots or beets. Leave about an inch of stem on beets so they don’t bleed. Cut the tops close on other root crops. Wash the roots when you’re going to use them, not before. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s a guaranteed way to get hard-to- germinate parsnips and carrots to come up in a few days!

Parsnips, carrots, and other slow-germinating seeds take so long to come up—often 2 weeks or more—that weeds often overtake the row.

If you’d like to get these slowpoke crops to come up in just a few days (or if you want to speed up other crops such as onions, lettuce, beets, etc.), my wide-row seed tape planting idea is for you.

1. Roll out one layer of reinforced paper towel. Get the toughest towels you can. The cheap brands fall apart during the sprouting stage.
2. Moisten the paper towel, using a spray bottle. Read the rest of this entry »

My grandson Brian is a real carrot fan. When he sees the feathery carrot tops in the garden he can hardly wait to start pulling up his orange snacks. Kids like discovering buried treasure and I’ve taught Brian how to find the biggest carrots in the row—by looking for the darkest green tops. (Works almost every time.) To get the most of your carrots‘ vitamin A and other minerals, don’t peel them. A good scrubbing with a vegetable brush is all they need.

I try a lot of carrot varieties each year, all lengths and shapes. My friend Ed told me about the Danversvariety which I grow every year. He said it was developed a long time ago in the area around Danvers, Massachusetts. When he was a kid he weeded carrot fields there by hand for a summer job and received $4 a week! Read the rest of this entry »

Everybody loves giant sunflowers! Grown just to look at, or for seeds for you or the neighborhood birds, sunflowers are easy to grow, even for the beginning gardener.

I plant sunflowers directly in the garden a couple of weeks before the last frost. Because young sunflower seedlings transplant so well, they can also be started indoors very early in the spring and set out in the garden around the time of your last frost. Read the rest of this entry »