Lettuce is another wonderful springtime crop. It grows well in the cool weather of the spring and it matures relatively quickly. If you really can't wait, you can harvest lettuce before it fully matures for baby salad greens. 

Lettuce Varieties

So many types of lettuce are available! You can find lettuce in different colors: almost every shade of green, red, and mixtures of red and green. There are varieties that grow in...

Carrots are another pantry staple and a much-celebrated garden vegetable. 

Early spring is the preferred time to grow carrots in most of the United States. They tolerate the cold weather of the spring well. In fact, if the weather is too warm, carrots can take on a bitter taste.  In the southern regions of the United States, carrots can be grown in the fall and over the winter. 

The vegetable we know as the carrot...

I've not been super-successful growing onions in the past, but then, I never really dug in and learned how to grow them well. 

In this article, I'll share what I've learned about growing onions, and we'll both have a great crop this year! 

This turned into a long article - if you want the summary, scroll to the bottom.

Types of Onions

Onions are an old, old crop. Humans have been cultivating onions for at least...

Peas are a wonderful cool season crop! They're one of the earliest crops you can plant in the spring in most of the country because the seeds will germinate a lower temperatures. Warmer parts of the country plant peas over their mild winter season. 

Types of Peas

There are basically 3 types of garden peas: shelling, snap, and snow. 

Shelling Peas (also called garden peas, English peas, or sweet peas) have an inedible pod. You have to...

Hooray, it is finally spring! It's getting around the time for most gardeners in the United States to start growing food crops!

In April, I'm going to profile 4 different spring crops:

• Peas 
• Onions
• Carrots
• Lettuce

These are spring crops, also known as "cool season crops." There are many more cool season crops than these, and I've written about some of them previously:

• How to Grow Beets
• How to Grow Spinach
• How to Grow Green Onions

What...

Oh, how I love, love, love Swiss Chard...

It's not the most popular vegetable here in the United States, and I didn't grow up eating it. Until about 15 years ago, it never even crossed my mind to grow it. 

The suggestion to grow Swiss Chard came from Mel Bartholomew's Square Foot Gardening books. The author suggests many vegetables to grow in a square foot garden, including Swiss Chard, and he raves about how wonderful it is. I gave...

Ah, spinach. One of the best vegetables to grow in the garden. Every year I allocate some space to spinach for salads.  If you haven't tried it yet, let me encourage you to do so.

Spinach-Growing Season

Spinach is a cool season crop and grows best in spring and fall. In warmer parts of the country, spinach can be grown in the winter. Using a cover over the growing spinach plants can protect them when the weather gets unexpectedly cold,...

Beets are an easy crop to grow and in the last decade or so, they've become more popular on the plates in American homes and restaurants.

Beets are a root vegetable. Their binomial name is "beta vulgaris," which basically means "common beet." Curiously, Swiss chard also has the binomial name "beta vulgaris," because they are closely related. They originated from the same plant subspecies centuries ago. 

Beets are easy...

Here in the Kansas City region, we've awakened to a mid-April snowfall today (April 20, 2021) and a temperature of 32 degrees Fahrenheit. It's unusual, but it does happen some years. Technically, we're past our average last freeze date (April 17), yet this morning it was 32 degrees, which technically is a freeze!

If there's one thing I've learned living in the midwest for the past 17 years, the weather here is unpredictable. It can change...

Choosing what to grow is a personal process, but it doesn't have to be stressful. No one should tell you what you are supposed to grow – assuming you are growing for yourself.

The real question is: 

• What do you like to eat?
• What flowers do you like? 

 Make a list. Don’t forget fresh herbs. 

Once you have your list, you will need to do a little research about the plants. You will need to answer several...