Garden Wisdom Blog — garden-wisdom

One day this past summer several of us got together to photograph some of the flowers and produce from the trial fields in a more studio setting. Jill, who normally works in customer service, has some professional experience as a florist, and her arrangements were amazing. Several of our team would cut the flowers and herbs (and vegetables!) and bring them into the farm house where Jill would set them up, and I would light and photograph them. We have tagged the most traditional of our cut flowers on this website so they can be filtered as a group. These...

Garlic has been used as both food and medicine since at least the 25th century BC, around the time that the pyramids were being constructed at Giza, Egypt. In his Ecologues, Virgil writes all about garlic being consumed by ancient Greek and Roman soldiers, and it is was grown in England by the mid-16th century. This is curious given the modern English attitude toward garlic. As late as 1997, Dr. D.G. Hessayon warned in his bestselling book, The Vegetable & Herb Expert: If you are a beginner with garlic, you must use it very sparingly or you will be put...

The plant above is spinach, and it’s getting ready to bolt. As we approach the summer solstice, the spring garden is transformed into something quite different. Various plants begin to behave in new ways. Growth really kicks in for vine-forming plants, while other leafy greens suddenly go to seed. The term “bolting” is not immediately intuitive, especially to new gardeners. But it’s a term that must be understood to maximize success in the garden. All plants have the genetic prerogative to make seeds, but they employ different strategies, and react differently to changes in the seasons. A large number of...

Gardening instructions can be full of peculiar phrases from British gardening traditions. “Potting on,” “pricking out,” and “hardening off” are all things we do with seedlings to help them prepare for eventual transplanting out into the garden. Hardening off seedlings is probably the most important concept that new gardeners can grasp to improve successful transplants. It is the process of gradually introducing seedlings started indoors to the much harsher conditions of the garden outside. As bright as any indoor grow lights might be, none compare to direct sunlight. Plants that have not been introduced gently to direct sunshine may show...

The bean is an annual plant of the family Fabaceae. This is a huge plant family, with over 19,000 species, so there are many interesting facts about beans. Only orchids and asters outnumber the members of this botanical group. Among the bean plant’s many close relatives are peas, runner beans, broad beans, soya beans, peanuts, alfalfa, clover, lupins, and sweet peas. All these plants are grouped botanically based on the common structure of their flowers and other characteristics. All of them can be considered “Legumes,” although most of them are inedible and many are even poisonous. The particular species we...