That was the subject line of an email that screamed out at me a few weeks ago…

This alert indicating it was time to “start your seeds” arrived during the middle of January and was delivered to the cold and snow covered climate of Central Pennsylvania!

Panic Attack at VeggieGardeningTips.com

My initial reaction upon reading that headline was to enter into a momentary panic as I tried to determine whether I had slipped into the Twilight Zone and totally forgot about the indoor seed starting season. “What date is it?” “How could I have let the winter fly by without getting my spring seedlings off to a good start?” “Is it too late to get caught up?”

Well, a quick glance at the calendar, followed by look outside calmed my nerves enough to reassure me that all wasn’t lost and that I hadn’t fallen behind in my winter seed starting duties. My next thought was to find out who the culprit was behind the cruel hoax to work me into a seed starting frenzy.

Continue Reading About “It’s Time to Start Your Seeds!” »

A couple of terrific agriculture/gardening events are scheduled for this week in the Central Pennsylvania Region.

Both gatherings will offer plenty of information and dialogue that will be of interest to all backyard vegetable, fruit, and herb growers.

2008 Farming for the Future Conference

First up the 2008 Farming for the Future Conference kicks off with the pre-conference tracks starting today and the main workshops and lectures scheduled for Friday, February 8^th and Saturday, February 9^th.

The conference is organized by the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture and is a great resource for everyone from the home gardener, to the commercial farmer, and anyone interested in the quality of food that is grown and processed in their community.

For more information on this Sustainable Agriculture Conference visit the PASA website where you can obtain complete information on all the activities, view speaker biographies, check the topics and schedules for the gardening and farming workshops, download a conference brochure, and get directions to the Penn Stater Conference Center in State College, PA.

Continue Reading About “PASA Farming Conference & BYFG Gardening Workshop” »

The annual winter meeting of the PA Backyard Fruit Growers was well attended and focused on the topic of growing organic apples in the home garden or orchard.

The main speaker was Michael Phillips author of “The Apple Grower,” an incredible book loaded with information related to ecological apple growing. Also on hand to present a lecture on cultivating organic apples was Greg Krawczyk of the Penn State University Organic Research Program.

I met Michael at last winter’s PASA conference where I listened to him lecture and picked up a copy of his book. Michael tends an apple orchard called “Lost Nation Orchard” in New Hampshire and shared a wealth of knowledge about organic apple growing.

Brief highlights from Michael’s lectures included the following apple growing tips and information:

Continue Reading About “Backyard Fruit Growers Winter Meeting” »

It used to be that the new vegetable seed catalogs would start to show up in my mailbox sometime after New Years. Well times have changed and guess what arrived in my mailbox right around Thanksgiving? Yep, the first new vegetable seed catalog of the year.

Not that I’m complaining… I’ll confess to actually reading through a vegetable seed catalog as if it was a favorite magazine subscription. What else is a frustrated gardener to do during the cold sometimes snowy days of a long northern winter?

What Gardener Doesn’t Treasure a Good Seed Catalog?

And don’t act like I’m the only one around that collects seed catalogs or gets excited by the sight of a new one in the mail. I only wish I had held on to some of the classic old seed catalogs that were produced by pioneering companies like Seeds Blum that helped to spark my interest in growing heirlooms in the vegetable garden.

More than just sales brochures, some of the old garden seed catalogs were informative, entertaining, and hand crafted by people such as Jan Blum that had a passion for growing rare and unusual edible plants. And while the catalogs may have been printed in black and white, with simple illustrations instead of high resolution photos, they still qualified as artwork in my book.

Continue Reading About “Bringing in the 2008 Veggie Seed Catalogs” »

Would you like to grow an edible crop in the garden that was prolific as grass in that you could cut it down once, and cut it again, but it would just bounce back and continue to grow and yield additional harvests of delicious produce?

Well that’s kind of the idea behind the veggies that are classified as cut and come again crops. Usually found in the form of leafy green vegetables, these baby veggies and micro-greens will provide you with the convenience of multiple harvests from a single planting.

Enjoying Multiple Harvests with Little Effort

Like the lush blades of grass growing in your lawn, these leafy greens can be sheared down almost to ground level and they will turn right around and re-grow additional leaves for your next harvest.

Unfortunately the cutting can’t be maintained as indefinately as a lawn, but you will be able to enjoy at least three or four harvests from each planting. And you can go from sowing the seed to your first harvest in just a few short weeks.

Another advantage is that vegetables raised as cut-and-come-again crops can be planted much closer together than you normally would since the veggies are not going to be maturing into full sized plants before harvest time.

It’s better to stagger your plantings into small blocks so that you can maintain a continuous supply of harvestable leafy greens, rather than wind up with more than you can use all at one time. These cut-and-come-again crops are also great for extending the garden into the fall or for raising extra early spring produce. Continue Reading About “Cut-and-Come-Again Leafy Greens” »

The November issue of the Gardening Secrets Newsletter has been published and distributed to all the gardeners on the subscription e-mail list.

The feature article for this month’s newsletter is a review of a selection of great gift ideas for the home gardener. Regardless of the budget or style of gardening engaged in, there are suggestions for choosing an interesting gift that will please anyone who loves to grow plants in the home or the garden.

Request Your Free Gardening Newsletter Subscription

If you didn’t receive a copy or haven’t subscribed yet you can do so by visiting this page: http://www.mygardeningsecrets.com/optin.html.

Tips covered this month include steps that you should be taking now to protect and maintain some of the borderline hardy edible plants and herbs to ensure that they make it through the winter months. There are also a few recommendations to help improve your successes with those plants that need to be brought indoors for their winter vacation.

If you had been patiently awaiting the arrival of a new issue of the newsletter, you weren’t alone. One subscriber’s inquiry regarding her missing gardening newsletters received a frank confession on my part, along with a couple of tips to help  make sure that you never miss an issue.

Additional Info in the Gardening Secrets Newsletter

Other topics discussed in this month’s newsletter include a charitable organization that provides assistance to the less fortunate by supplying them with knowledge, training, and the equipment necessary to use agriculture and gardening as a path towards self sufficiency.

A visitor to the Veggie Gardening Tips blog also shares an interesting account of how a six inch bay laurel plant matured into a full-sized tree that has withstood the outdoor conditions year-round in her northwest garden.

Subscribe today to secure your access to all of the information provided this month, as well as in future issues of the Gardening Secrets Newsletter. It’s quick, easy, and it won’t cost you a dime, so take a second to sign up, then sit back and enjoy your first issue of the current newsletter.

A recent article shared a lineup of unusual and uncommon fruits for the home gardener; today we’ll add a collection of rare heirloom apple varieties.

All of these interesting antique apples were on display and available for sampling at the Pennsylvania Backyard Fruit Growers annual fruit tasting that was held a couple weeks ago just outside of Lancaster, PA.

If you’re not familiar with heirloom apples you’ll be surprised to discover just how many different varieties of apples exist and can still be found growing in local orchards and backyard fruit gardens. Following is a partial listing of the heirloom apples being cultivated in Central Pennsylvania landscapes.

Super-Sized Heirloom Apples – For those that like jumbo sized apples, there was a score of gigantic fruits, some that appeared capable of producing an entire pie from a single apple. Continue Reading About “Annual Fruit Tasting; Heirloom Apple Roundup” »

A recent article here about rare backyard fruits described my first experiences with the uncommon jujube fruit, which is also known as the Chinese Date.

No, I wasn’t impressed with this odd tree fruit when I tasted it for the very first time. But despite the so-so encounter with that initial jujube fruit, I was determined to keep an open mind about the worthiness of planting a jujube tree in the backyard orchard or landscape.

Growing Support for Jujube Fruits

My optimism increased when I received a favorable jujube comment from Ben, a member of the California Rare Fruit Growers who painted a rosier picture of the jujube and suggested that the fruits which I had sampled may have been well past their prime. So I figured that I would give them a second chance but hardly expected that the opportunity would arrive as soon as it did. Continue Reading About “Unusual Jujube Fruits Earn a Second Opinion” »