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Pictured above are 'Swenson Swedish' snow peas up and going in the cold, water-logged soil of early spring at Giving Ground Farm.  These peas germinated quickly and at the same time, something difficult to achieve in late winter soils without the help of a few pea germinating tips, my favorite of which are found below.  Impress your neighbors with the earliest peas, and get a warm and fuzzy feeling by sharing your secret/this blog post with them! Pushing the Pea-season Boundaries Yeah, yeah, we know, peas love it cool, moist, and as the back of every vague seed packet says should...

Our ‘Struttgarter’ onions have an incredible shelf life! Not only are they deeply golden, with a tremendous flavor and oniony bite- they’re one of the longest keepers we’ve tried. Treat them right and you’ll have onions from harvest until April!Many onion varieties store quite well given the right conditions. Optimal onion storage can be achieved with just a few simple considerations.1. Preharvest dry down- Planning for onion storage begins at the end of the previous summer. Cut-off watering as soon as the outer four leaves begin to dry down after the onion has completed bulbing. Drying down starts at the...

Paper seed catalogs and seed packets are necessarily brief in their descriptions of crop varieties. I appreciate these descriptions when I need something quick and dirty, and there is a poetry to succinctly conveying the most important things about a variety in a short space. I'm surprised, though, that even with the advent of web-based seed catalogs and theoretically unlimited space, seed growers still don't provide more than a few sentences of description on the growing and eating particularities of varieties they sell. There could be a lot of reasons for this, a main one being that they simply don't...

It's planting time!  We want you to be successful when starting your seeds.  Here are a few tips to remember when you get to growing your seeds: The basics of seed germination: Healthy seeds are little protected packets of everything a plant needs to get off to a great start.  As a survival mechanism, seeds are dormant and protected by a hard seed coat until the right conditions arrive for them to grow.  They've evolved this as a protection, otherwise they would germinate in unfavorable conditions. When we germinate the seeds for our garden, we strive to create just the...

Storing squash all winter long Early spring is famine time in many home gardens. Winter food storage is running out and spring crops are not yet. Not in our house! Ever since I started growing large amounts of winter squashes, its become a huge part of our lives, especially in early spring. Largely because we keep our winter squash in our living room its also become an unintended but welcome part of my identity. Visitors have come to expect dining in the midst of onlooking squashes of all shapes and sizes.   Storing winter squash is easier than fresh storage...