My wife is a Mulch-aholic. I have gone to their meetings, and there is no cure. It’s an illness caused when your mother didn’t let you play in the dirt as a 4-year-old. Each spring, Lowe’s brings in 2 tractor trailer loads of brown mulch – one for Nancy and one for all the other gardeners in Charlottesville and Albemarle County. Mulch-aholics ofte try to hide their sickness. Rather … [Read more...]

I am chomping at the bit to start digging in my garden. I have planted a few peas, beets, onion sets and lettuce, but I must bide my time before the summer garden goes in. Still, that doesn’t stop me from buying garden toys, and I have a new one – a cucumber trellis. I have found that most cucumber vines like to climb if there is something nearby to cling to. They’re up and at ‘em like Jack … [Read more...]

  The seasons have changed. The Christmas displays are down at Wal-Mart and in their place are 50-foot racks of seeds. It won’t be long. This is the time of year when my thoughts turn to the garden, hoping the tomatoes will behave and the cucumbers will be plentiful, and praying that the squash borers will take a year off and that rain will come, but not all at once.  About the only … [Read more...]

I plant spring onions from sets every year. They are usually the first things to pop out of the ground. Then, after about a month, they are mature enough to pluck from the soil and eat as delicious, tender spring onions. But I never pull them all up. A few get a little too plump for raw, spring onions, so I leave them alone. By July, the green tops have disappeared, and it looks like the onions … [Read more...]

  Finally, a good frost. It was halfway through November, but at last there was frost on the pumpkins, and on the collard patches as well. As every Southerner knows, you never eat collards until after the first frost. It’s something about that frost that brings out the sweetness in what are easily the best tasting greens on the planet. I once went through the line at Food Lion with a … [Read more...]

I grew vines in my garden this summer. Not tomatoes, just vines. They bloomed on time, then nothing. Finally, a few baby tomatoes popped up but then went away. In early September, honest-to-God tomatoes finally begin to form on my four vines, but they mostly stayed green. The handful of tomatoes that did turn red were pecked by some critter, likely a chipmunk. Last week when we had a frost … [Read more...]

Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good – especially in a vegetable garden. My little garden has really not performed as I would like, in spite a lot of rain and a lot of sun.  My cukes were so-so, my squash crop was pitiful and other plantings were hit and miss. But along about June when I pulled up my early sweet peas, I decided to put a few short rows of green beans in their place. I had … [Read more...]