Last year in the garden, a new variety climbed up to take the gold medal place for summer squash in my heart: ‘Friulana Rugosa.’ This summer squash is an Italian heirloom – the fruits are yellow or light green, long, and bumpy. Ok, actually they’re warty. And I’d forgive you for thinking it’s just another…
Category: Farm and Gardens
In Praise of Bolted Carrots
There’s nothing delightful about carrot roots that have bolted. Yet, I’m here to sing their praises. Carrots are biennials, and are supposed to wait until year two to produce flowers. When they bolt in year one, instead of sending their energy into root production, that energy gets moved into reproduction, aka flowering, leaving the root…
We Grew it From Seed – Will Rogers Zinnias
One of the delights of my gardening life is trying new seed varieties – a pleasure that my husband Chad and I share. Lately though, I’ve been dealing with gut dysbiosis related food chemical intolerance, so choosing seed varieties of tomatoes or winter squash is no longer the easy breezy, fun process it used to…
Introducing Little Pirate, Our Babydoll Sheep
After our Mama Sheep, Izzy, passed away recently, we were left with just one sheep, Buttercup. As herd animals, sheep feel stressed out living alone, and while other types of animals can make decent companions for a lone sheep, another sheep (or more) is the best type of buddy. On her first night alone in…
A Dying Sheep – Saying Goodbye to Izzy
We keep sheep for their wool and for manure for our garden – and because we love animals. This week we had to say goodbye to our sheep Isadora (also known as Izzy or Mama Sheep), who was about 14 or 15, pretty old for a ewe. As she grew elderly, I looked for resources…
Cosmos Flowers in the Garden
It’s summer, and summer is a good time for a break, a good time to send post cards. Here’s my summer garden post card to you. While the “official” purpose of our garden is to grow food that we can eat, my not so hidden agenda is growing flowers. Yes, they help attract pollinators which…
How to Pot a Chayote Seed
Chayotes, also known as “chokos” or “mirlitons,” are used in Latin American cuisine, but not so much in standard American fare. Unless of course, you develop salicylate sensitivities like I have, and then you end up with this cucurbit as one of your staple foodstuffs! With a quickly dwindling menu, mirlitons have been a godsend…
How to Get the Seed Out of a Chayote for Propagation
I’m growing chayotes in my garden for the first time this year after developing salicylate sensitivity and I’ve found that there’s just not a lot of guidance out there on growing this crop in the home garden. Call them what you want, chayote, choko, or mirliton, so far some of the tips I have read…
Bonus Round – The Fall Garden
In early October we brought in what we thought would be our last harvest before wintery weather put an end to our summer garden. Now, a day away from November 1st, after several rainstorms and a few weeks of mild days, there are some unexpected surprises in the garden. We don’t usually get to grow…
Showy Milkweed – Weed or Wildflower?
When it comes to differentiating between a weed and a wildflower, the answer lies in one’s perspective. Many farmers find that milkweed gets in the way. I wouldn’t exactly say that my husband and I qualify as farmers. Though we do live on a small farm and keep farm animals, we earn our living from…
We Grew It From Seed – Costata Romanesco Zucchini
In addition to ‘Cube of Butter,’ another of our favorite zucchini varieties in the Hearthwilde garden is this Italian heirloom, ‘Costata Romanesca.’ What initially appealed to me about this summer squash, after its long history, was its ridges. Texture is a big thing for me, just as important as how things look. The ridges on…
Winter Squash and Pumpkin Varieties – 2021
This year, 2021, we grew at least 11 different cultivars of winter squash and pumpkins. ( I say “at least” because we can’t peg an ID on some of them.) While our 2020 winter squash haul gave us some behemoths, this year all of our winter squash and pumpkins were medium sized or smaller. But…
Watching Our Pollinator Neighbors
Once the days are warm and the flowers in bloom, one of my greatest and most simple pleasures is watching insects – and our garden affords many opportunities to do just that. Actually, harvesting food from our garden makes me quite happy, but honestly, not as happy as watching these little “neighbors” of ours buzzing…
We Grew It From Seed – Plains Coreopsis
Coreopsis is a plant I’ve been fond of back since my high school days when I had an afternoon job working at a family owned garden center. There’s something reassuring and cheery about this plant’s bright, bobbing flowers. So when I noticed some seeds for plains coreopsis (Coreopsis tinctoria), a native of the Great Plains,…
We Grew It From Seed – California Poppies
While we still grow some exotic garden flowers in our polyculture garden, such as cosmos and zinnias, this year I decided to add more native annuals to the mix. One of the native wildflowers I planted was California poppies. Our sunken garden rows are on a slight slope, so when I planted the seeds, they…
We Grew It from Seed – Lauren’s Grape Poppy
I’m not sure why, exactly, but I decided to grow several different types of poppies from seed this year. Lauren’s Grape poppy was one of my favorite varieties. With deep purple flowers, this poppy variety was pleasing to the eye – but also to our local pollinators, affording me many pleasurable moments snapping up photos…
A Low Oxalate Garden
Since I began gardening seriously in 2013, I have always been focused on expansion. How can I grow the most diversity of foods? How can I incorporate perennials, fruit trees, shrubs, and unusual edibles into my landscape? It seemed silly to me that there were so many edible plants out there that were being overlooked…
Why We Grow Our Own Food
Sometimes in the middle of summer when it seems like all our spare time goes to the garden, both Chad and I can start to question our commitment to gardening. It doesn’t take long though for us to remember why it is we spend time and effort planning, seeding, tending, watering, and harvesting our much-loved…
We Grew it from Seed – Cube of Butter Yellow Zucchini
Chad and I usually prefer open-pollinated varieties as opposed to hybrids, so that we have the option of saving seeds if we want to. However, early this year when we were choosing our seeds, I was tempted by ‘Cube of Butter,’ a yellow zucchini hybrid that promised to be very productive, have a great texture,…
Gardening: How to Grow a Survival Garden for Beginners
Growing your own food must be sounding pretty good right about now, eh? And you’re not alone, based on the current run on seeds. The seed companies can’t keep up with the demand and are having to close for days at a time just to catch up on backed up orders. I have received emails…
Garden News: Overwintered Carrots
This week, Chad and I received a gift from ourselves from the past – almost 20 lbs of carrots! We had a large carrot crop last summer and decided to keep many of them in the ground for winter – a way to take advantage of the outdoors as an additional source of refrigeration. I…
Wildlife: Painted Lady Butterflies
Last summer we had some borage come up as volunteers in our garden. Did I say “some”? I meant thousands of plants. We didn’t have borage plants, we had borage patches. This was our first year with a borage explosion, so we thought we’d let some of it live, not realizing just how hardy it…
Garden News – Winter Seed Catalogs and Garden Planning
My spirits tend to get low during the winter – the post-holiday blues, gloomy weather, and reduced outdoors time always get to me. Winter here in NE Utah is long, but I have something to cheer me up and carry me through: seed catalogs and garden planning. By mid-January, there’s a stack of seed catalogs…
Garden News – Harvesting Apricots – 2019
Harvesting Apricots in July in Utah We have one mature apricot tree on our property. Mostly every year it blooms a bit early, then a frost comes along and kills all the blossoms off, knocking them to the ground, meaning that there will be no apricots for us. When we noticed the tree covered in…
Tips – How to Keep Track of Your Polyculture Garden Plantings
A few years ago I excitedly planted several varieties of snap beans and dry beans in the same section of the garden. At the time of planting, I marked the different varieties with wooden markers, so I didn’t think I’d have any problem knowing which was which later. By the end of the summer, however,…
Foraging – Why Eat Wild Food?
Getting to Know Plants My first gardening experience came when I was a teenager. Back then “gardening” for me was an after school job at a small, family-owned garden center, lugging around a heavy, interminable garden hose to water, section by section, the herbs, the perennials, the shrubs, and the flats of annuals. Out alone…
Gardening – Composting in the Desert
Anyone who gardens or simply cooks a lot of vegetables quickly finds out – you must have a compost pile! Vegetable waste translates into useful fertilizer and soil very quickly if you compost, so it is a huge waste NOT to create some composting system – not to mention the cost of buying bags of…
Gardening – Desert Garden Design
Over the past ten years or so my husband has been planting a fairly traditional garden. Each year he tills the ground with a tractor then digs out rows to plant his seeds and transplants. With my visions of permaculture I of course wasn’t satisfied with this approach. Tilling with a tractor compresses the soil and also…
Gardening – Gardening in the Desert
Contrary to what you might think, people can and do garden in the desert. However there are certain obstacles to overcome that those of you in more clement areas won’t have to worry much about. For one thing, we only get about 7 inches of rain a year here. Yes, a YEAR. Back in NC…
Garden News: New Life in Macro – Spring 2017
If you’re a gardener but have never planted from seed before, you really must try it. Every year when I plant seeds there’s always some doubt: they might not come up. And yes, sometimes for various reasons some seeds don’t come up. But most of them do. Suddenly, on their own schedule, they come up, sprouting…
Garden News – New Cold Frame
Me and my sweetie went a little crazy ordering seeds a couple of weeks ago. When we combined households last year our seed collections expanded dramatically! I added a lot of perennials, herbs and flowers to the mix, he brought a ton of tomatoes, peppers and squash. But somehow, it seemed we still needed more seeds. And…
Starting Seeds
Over the past week or so I’ve been starting seeds in some DIY cold frames which consist of plastic storage bins with a few holes drilled into the bottom. I would prefer to make a glass cold frame at some point, but this will do in a pinch! It’s very exciting to see the first…
Hearthwilde 