Growing & Gardening Tips

You simmer a big pot of garden tomatoes all afternoon, and what's left is thin, watery, and half what you hoped for. Usually the recipe isn't the problem. The tomato is. Big slicers carry a lot of juice and seed...

You walk out to the garden on a hot afternoon and your zucchini looks like someone let the air out of it. Leaves flat on the soil, stem limp, and yesterday it was fine. Before you reach for the hose,...

How to set up the clip-on LED grow light: clip it on, choose one of three light modes, set brightness and distance, and use the 3, 9 or 12 hour timer for seedlings, houseplants and fruiting plants.

You set out tender seedlings on a Saturday, and by Sunday morning the tops are gone, torn off at a ragged angle rather than clipped clean. That ragged tear is the tell: deer have no top front teeth, so they...

If your tomato plants have become a shoulder-high wall of leaves while the fruit stays small and slow to color up, the plant is pouring its sugars into foliage instead of tomatoes. Pruning fixes that. Ten minutes of pinching a...

Soil temperature beats the calendar Here is the part most planting charts skip: corn does not read the calendar, it reads the thermometer in the ground. Drop seed into cold, wet soil and it takes up water but cannot fire...

Carrots reward patience more than perfect weather. Get the timing right and the seed does most of the work for you. Rush it, and you spend three weeks staring at a bare row wondering what went wrong. The good news...

By August the garden can look a little worn out. The spring lettuce has bolted, the early beans are winding down, and weeks of heat have taken the shine off everything. Here is the part most gardeners miss. August is...

Every spring plays out the same way. A warm week shows up in March, the garden centers wheel out their tomato racks, and every instinct says plant now. Then a late frost slips through and turns those young plants to...