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Yes, happy holidays! Going out to wassail the orchard tonight. Apparently the secret to really great peaches is $40/bottle calvados in the wassail...

They can be more susceptible to disease than the regular kind. There was a blight going around in 2009, so it may be worth it to try again. I always plant the heirlooms, because I reckon I can get the regular kind from the store, and I never had a problem getting plenty of tomatoes until this...

It doesn't even have to stay that dark, really--mine stays more or less dormant as soon as it gets less than 11 hours of light per day, and doesn't come back until a couple weeks before the spring equinox. And that's in the house with all my other plants.

Wicked good onion soup w/ bread: For the bread: This is the 6-3-3-13 Five Minutes Per Day bread, with the following substitutions: 1/3 regular flour substituted with stone-ground whole wheat 1 cup regular flour substituted with rolled oats Add 3 tbsp. fresh chopped rosemary For the soup: 2...

1. Plant hedges. I need hazelnuts, because we are too far north for decent peanuts. So, plant hazelnuts and a few other bushes I've been plotting. I have all these straggly-looking wire fences the previous owner installed that are falling down and look like heck. Rip em out and put in nice...

Some things taste much better homemade. Any tomato product, much better homemade. Unless you're canning heritage breeds of dry beans (as in baked beans, for example), there's not a real significant difference in taste, it's more of a convenience. I don't can green beans except as dilly beans...

Nope, they will lose most of their leaves in response to sunlight rather than temperature. They are a tropical plant from a region where "cold night" = ~60 degrees F, so they respond much more to sunlight than to temperature.

Even while dormant, it should still be kept moist, so I usually hide mine amongst the other houseplants.

Lemon verbena, Aloysia triphylla. No question. They are deciduous even in warm climates, and mine lose all their leaves after I bring em indoors. I have to water sticks for five months out of the year. No matter. They are totally worth it. If not made into tea, then simmered in milk that is then...

I just realized it this weekend. Yeah, I am slow, that's why it took me this long to figure it out. :rolleyes: The garden is pretty well done. It is now under snow, and nothing but freezing weather is coming for the foreseeable future. The freezer is full of veggies, so many that I described my...

Glad to hear you say that Reinbeau, I need to try new onion types. Johnny's, you say? Today I am making something with kale. Picked the majority of my kale crop yesterday before the snow hit, so now I have a whole bushel of kale. Kale soup, probably, and freeze the rest, or perhaps a veggie...

In Indiana, you want long-day onions. I think you are planting the sets more or less correctly, I push em down maybe an inch with my thumb, but with just the tips poking out is OK. It's normal for them to "pop up" as it were, that always happens. You don't need to hill up around them, that's...

Well, the thing is, I did that. I sowed pretty heavily, thinking I might get a 50% or so germination rate, and it ALL came up. I had a gorgeous sea of green grassy stuff speckled with bright blue flowers that waved in every breeze. I thought, wow, if I were farming for actual money in New...

Hattie, that's perfect! Thank you! I especially love the pics at the bottom of the espaliered trees, they are wonderful. I have one apple in particular I want to try notching. Stupid thing survived the Great Venison Invasion of 2007 with hardly any damage, has what should be very good, twiggy...

OK, I posted some time ago about maybe getting bees. I had a concern that if I got bees, my neighbor's bees might be duking it out for territory. Apparently this concern was completely unfounded. :rant I just harvested my flax. I was growing the flax mainly for edible seeds, and it dutifully...

1. Onion type may be an issue. In your area, you might just not get enough sunlight to get certain types of onions. There are long day vs. short day onions. Long day onions will begin to make bulbs and die back when sunlight is 14-16 hours per day, as it typically is in northerly summers. Short...

I have never, ever pruned that particular type of dogwood, and the extra-nice thing about that kind is that you will never need to. :D They are wonderful like that!

Yeah... *sigh* I even ordered grafting rootstock to arrive this past spring, but because the company I ordered it from did not bother to staff their customer service department with anyone who had a clue about trees, they didn't bother to ship my rootstocks until May, after a series of...

Nope. As journey11 said, they are not good keepers at all and must be eaten within days of ripening. They grow in those shady-ish areas where blackberries tend to pop up, so if you have a brambley area like that, it might be a good spot.

We heat our house mainly with a woodstove. This makes the air exceptionally dry, so we keep a cast-iron steamer on top of the stove filled with water to help humidify the place. In lieu of potpourri, we throw aromatic plant stuff in the steamer to make everything smell nice. Exceptionally...