Every season, I let a few of my radish plants flower and seed. Some I leave to collect seed for next season, and some I leave to harvest the pods. Amid this tangled mess of vines is a handful of daikon radish plants — plants that had grown over 4 feet tall, full of little [...]
seeds
I know it’s not spring yet, but in my neck of the woods (which I affectionately call “the land of 72 and sunny”) it already feels like spring, and it even looks like spring too. I guess that prognosticatin’ groundhog was right after all — spring is near, and this is what I’m seeing around [...]
So tomorrow is Groundhog Day, and for the last 126 years, it’s been up to Punxsutawney Phil — wide-eyed and bushy-tailed from his slumber — to predict the fate of our gardening season. Will he see his shadow and cast another six weeks of winter upon us? Or will we be blessed with an early [...]
Here in Los Angeles, nasturtiums are wildly weedy, growing all over hillsides and gardens and reseeding with wanton abandon. This weediness makes them very underappreciated as a bona fide vegetable, and even moreso as a pickled delicacy. While much of the country doesn’t see the seed pods until late summer (when intense heat causes nasturtiums [...]
How many times have you sowed a handful of teeny tiny seeds — onions and carrots, for instance, or even worse, those little specks called basil! — and wished you had a magnifying glass? Or sowed a row of teeny tiny seeds, only to end up thinning out over half the seedlings? But it’s not just [...]
Anyone who knows me knows that I’m a sucker for seeds. Lots and lots o’ seeds. And one of my favorite suppliers of seeds is a small heirloom house called Baker Creek, headed by Jere Gettle and his wife, Emilee. This homegrown operation has a feel-good family vibe to it, and since we’re all family [...]
Ahhh… The days are getting longer, the air is getting warmer, and many of us are starting to think about sowing seeds for spring. After our non-winter this winter (we had only two days of rain and cold before the weather jumped back up to a summery 80°F this week), I’m eager to leave behind [...]
