Every year, I have to make sure that I make lots of room for growing tomatoes in raised beds. I love to plant a variety, from the little cherry tomatoes that you can pop in your mouth like candy, to those big juicy ones that you can slice for summer burgers.
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3 ways to grow more food this year
Let me get right to the point; you don’t need a big garden to grow more food. Even small space gardeners can boost their yield by practicing a few sneaky techniques like vertical gardening, intensive planting, and companion planting.
6 vegetable gardening tips every new food gardener needs to know
In recent weeks, the rapidly increasing cost of vegetables, like cauliflower ($8.99 at my local grocery store!), has made headlines across North America. With food prices expected to continue to rise in the near future, more homeowners are turning to veggie gardens to offset the price of groceries. For those who are new to gardening – or at least new to food gardening – here are six vegetable gardening tips to get you started.
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3 annuals with beautiful blooms
I love to add to a variety of annuals with beautiful blooms to my containers, borders, and raised beds for visual interest—and for the pollinators that frequent my edible gardens (we like to call this idea of planting ornamentals in our edible gardens, and vice versa, Garden BFFs). There are three annual flowers that I tend to plant every year in my gardens, raised beds, and containers: zinnias, nasturtiums, and calibrachoas. I have a few favourite varieties, but each gardening season seems to bring a new one to market.
Corn mache: Perfect for the winter vegetable garden
I paid a visit to my winter vegetable garden over the weekend and discovered that one of my favorite cold-weather crops, corn mache, was still cranking out the green. While most of my winter vegetable garden was decimated by the deer, these delicious, succulent greens were safely tucked under the protection of milk jug cloches. I couldn’t have been happier to see those little green sprouts surrounded by the snow. Needless to say, I snipped off a few leaves and enjoyed them in my dinner salad.
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Four flowers for the vegetable garden
In the gardens of my childhood, there were always pots of geraniums, petunias, and sweet alyssum, as well as beds of cosmos, sunflowers, and nasturtiums, but there was no room for flowers in our vegetable garden. That traditional plot was a rectangular-shaped space and reserved for long, tidy rows of beans, peas, potatoes, and beets. Happily, (and in large part thanks to my fellow Savvy expert, Jessica!) flowers now play an important role in my food garden. They entice pollinators and beneficial insects, as well as provide an endless parade of blooms for the vase. Here are four flowers for the vegetable garden:
