Book - The Heirloom Life Gardener

The founder of the Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Company offers a comprehensive guide to cultivating heirloom vegetables and a wealth of tips and techniques for planting, growing, harvesting and saving seeds, as well as instructions for canning and preserving.

Shop for book: The Heirloom Life Gardener

Link to book excerpt and NPR interview with author: NPR Interview - Gardener Gives Heirloom Life

Video: August Gardener's Calendar

Growing Wisdom: August Gardener's Calendar

Surprisingly adaptable frondly ferns

Publication: The East Hampton Press & The Southampton Press
By Andrew Messinger

I enjoy teaching, and most of all I enjoy teaching new gardeners all about horticulture.

Recently, I asked a beginning class of home gardeners to tell me two things that came to mind when they thought about ferns. In almost every case, their first associations were with forests and shade.

Theirs was probably a similar reaction to what most of us have when we consider these unique plants, but there are also ferns that grow in full sun, in sandy soil, from between crevices in rocks, climbing up tree trunks for 10 feet (unless you have the hardy Asian variety that grows up to 40 feet) and floating on the top of ponds. In some parts of the world, there are even tree ferns that can be 30 feet tall. Read more>

The Hungry Gardener: To prune or not to prune - JSOnline

Q&A article on Gardening. Read more:
The Hungry Gardener: To prune or not to prune - JSOnline Source: jsonline.com

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Food: Preventing blight in your garden tomatoes

By ROBERT KESSLER / Special to The Herald-Mail
July 7, 2009

This year's wet weather is causing many disease problems for gardeners. Since tomatoes are the most popular vegetable grown in gardens, we will mention what you should be doing to help prevent potential problems.

Tomatoes will get three major diseases in weather like this. Septoria leaf spot is a fungal disease that usually appears on the lower leaves of the plant and works its way up the plant. The affected leaves turn yellow and drop, reducing the plant's ability to produce food, which will reduce the production of tomatoes on the plant.

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Food: Preventing blight in your garden tomatoes

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UNCP first Farm Bureau scholar

The first Farm Bureau Scholar at The University of North Carolina at Pembroke is a devoted vegetable, flower and fruit gardener.

Working this summer at UNCP’s Biotechnology Business and Training Laboratory, Brittany Locklear showed off samples of roses, ferns and lilies that she is micro-propagating under grow lights.

“This augur solution contains everything the plants need to grow, just like soil,” Locklear said. “I’ve been making more solution today.”

Locklear is interning in a National Institute of Health-funded program between UNCP and Robeson Community College (RCC). Besides plant propagation, she is working on bacterial transference using streptococcus epidermidis.

“I’m learning a lot about lab work,” she said. “But I enjoy gardening, and I really like being outdoors.”

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