Category Archives: Garden Advice

7 Reasons You Should Grow Flowers in Your Vegetable Garden

January 2, 2024 Jordan Charbonneau Leave a comment

For foodies, homesteaders, and dedicated vegetable gardeners, it is easy to squeeze as many different vegetables into our gardens as possible and let other plants go by the wayside. This is a mistake! Some of the most beautiful and productive gardens are a mix of food crops and flowers. Whether you want to be as self-sufficient as possible or have a passion for heirloom tomatoes, adding flowers to your vegetable patch has many benefits.

Flowers attract pollinators.

Many of our favorite vegetable crops, like squash, watermelons, tomatoes, eggplants, and peppers, rely on insect pollination to produce. These pollinators do an incredible job, too!

A look at greenhouse tomatoes found that those compared with pollination by a vibrating hand wand (a tool workers use to ensure pollination manually), tomatoes pollinated by buzz-pollinating bees had improved seed set and higher fruit weight.

Adding flowers to your garden and aiming to have something blooming throughout the season can help support these creatures and ensure they spend more time in your garden. You won’t get a good harvest without them.

Flowers may help reduce pest and disease issues.

Companion planting isn’t just an old wive’s tale! There’s much evidence that avoiding monocultures and mixing plants together can help reduce pest and disease issues. Creating mixed plantings can help significantly reduce how diseases and pests can spread through a crop.

Try specific pairings if you have a recurring issue. For example, research has shown that French marigolds help protect tomatoes from whiteflies.

You can also take a more broad approach. A study on large monoculture plantings found that adding wildflower strips was highly effective at reducing pests and plant damage.

There are many edible flowers available.

Growing flowers doesn’t mean that you have to give up productive food-growing space. There are plenty of edible flowers that you can use to make soothing herbal teas, toss in fresh salads, or decorate cakes. A few of our favorite edible flowers include nasturtiums, chamomile, breadseed poppies, echinacea, and hollyhocks.

You can use them to create shade.

Generally, we don’t want our flowers shading our vegetable crops, but occasionally we might. When we’re trying to stretch the season for cool-weather-loving crops like lettuce and kale, having a few taller flowers around can be helpful to create a bit of shade.

They’re beautiful.

Growing as much of your food as possible is a wonderful goal. Hopefully, our above points illustrate that saving room for flowers can help with this goal. If you’re still not convinced that flowers deserve a bit of your garden, think about what you want your garden to feel like. Ultimately, gardens should bring joy. While vegetables are beautiful in their own right, tucking a few flowers in amongst the vegetables can make your garden a happier place to be.

Flowers can help provide habitat and food for wildlife.

While you probably know that pollinators are using your flowers for food, you may not be aware that they may use them for shelter, too. Some pollinators and beneficial insects use flower stalks or debris as shelter to overwinter or lay eggs.

Birds will enjoy the flowers in your vegetable patch, too. Songbirds enjoy perching on tall flower stalks and searching the seedheads of species like sunflowers and echinacea during the fall. They will also help pick a few pests off while they’re there. Of course, the charming Ruby-throated Hummingbirds of our area will also take advantage of blooms during the season.

Flowers can be low maintenance and affordable.

Growing flowers doesn’t have to be difficult or stressful. Some of the easiest flowers to start with are annuals like cosmos, marigolds, sunflowers, and zinnias. All four of these plants are easy to start indoors or direct sow. They grow fairly quickly and make a big impact in the garden.

These four are also easy to save seeds from, meaning you won’t need to purchase packets of seed each year, helping you cut costs. Given the opportunity, they also have a tendency to self-seed, and you’ll probably get a few volunteers, too!

If you don’t want to work on planting flowers every year, you can establish a few hardy perennials like coneflowers (echinacea), bee balm, salvia, or rudbeckia. Many of these options, such as the echinacea and rudbeckia, are also incredibly drought tolerant once established.

When you’re shopping for seeds this year, don’t forget to add a few flowers to your list! Flowers are easy to grow and can help you to have a healthier, more productive garden in 2024.

Garden Advice, Seed Saving

Growing Guide: Ground Cherries

December 18, 2023 Jordan Charbonneau Leave a comment

You’ve probably grown tomatoes and maybe even tomatillos, but their lesser-known relative, the ground cherry, deserves a spot in your Solanaceae (nightshade family) lineup. Ground cherries have a more sweet, fruity flavor, hence the name ground cherry. They’re well suited to sweeter, dessert-type recipes than their relatives and are tasty fresh, too!

Ground Cherry History

Ground cherries are native to South and Central America and may have originated in Brazil before spreading to Peru and Chile. They were one of the many crops cultivated by indigenous peoples in the Americas before European contact, and Europeans brought them to England in 1774.

English colonists brought them to the Cape of Good Hope, earning them one of their other common names, the Cape Gooseberry. As colonists traveled with them, the plants made their way back to North America.

While ground cherries were popular with small farmers, they were never commercialized, probably due to their ripening and harvest, which we’ll get into in a bit. Today, they remain popular among specific communities like the Pennsylvania Dutch, who grow them for jams and preserves.

Starting Ground Cherry Seeds

Growing ground cherries is a lot like growing tomatoes! Start your seeds indoors about 6 to 8 weeks before your last frost. Plant the seeds about 1/4 inch deep, and for good germination, maintain a soil temperature between 75 and 85 degrees F.

Ground cherries typically take 7 to 10 days to germinate.

Transplanting Ground Cherries

Ground Cherries should be transplanted out after all danger of frost has passed. Harden off your transplants for a couple of weeks before planting.

Transplant them into a bed that has rich, well-drained, light soil. You may need to amend the bed with compost, as ground cherries are heavy feeders. You should also select a bed that receives full sun.

Rotate Your Ground Cherries

Rotating your crops is essential, and ground cherries are no exception. We like to rotate crops by family. Ground cherries are a member of the Solanaceae family, like tomatoes, peppers, tomatillos, eggplants, and potatoes, so we avoid planting them in beds where any of these crops have grown in the last couple of years.

One of our customer favorites, Cossack Pineapple Ground Cherries

Ground Cherry Spacing

Unlike tomatoes and tomatillos, ground cherries don’t require trellising or cages. However, they still need proper spacing. Ground cherries have a sprawling, spreading growth form, so you should place them 2 to 4 feet apart. In some varieties, like Mary’s Niagara Ground Cherry, plants can surpass 6 feet wide in good growing conditions.

Ground Cherry Care

Keep your ground cherries weeded and water consistently. Keep the soil moist but not soggy. After the soil temperature has risen in June, mulching around plants is a good idea. It will help with weeding and prevent the fruits from getting dirty or rotting as quickly around harvest time.

Harvesting Ground Cherries

Ground cherries are edible and tasty when fully ripe and yellow, and their husk is brown and dry. Usually, this also means the cherries have fallen off the plant and are lying on the ground. Collect your fallen cherries and remove the husks before eating.

This habit of dropping ripe fruit is one of the reasons ground cherries have never seen widespread commercial interest.

Using Ground Cherries

Ground cherries can be eaten fresh, cooked, or preserved for later. Ground cherries also have a good shelf life and can be kept fresh for weeks before processing. Here are a few of our favorite recipes we’ve found for ground cherries:

Preserve your ground cherries for later with Grandma Ott’s Ground Cherry Jam from Seed Savers.

Make breakfast special with this 10-Minute Ground Cherry Coffee Cake from The Kitchn.

Try this Ground Cherry Tart from The Forager Chef for a simple dessert that really lets the ground cherry flavor shine through.

Try a more savory approach with this recipe from Ground Cherry Salsa from Health Starts in the Kitchen.

Turn your ground cherries into moist and delicious cake with this Coley Cooks recipe for Ground Cherry Torte.

Saving Ground Cherry Seed

You may not have to save seeds, as ground cherries have a strong tendency to self-sow. However, if you’d like to steward a variety, we recommend separating varieties by 300 feet for pure seed. You only need one plant to save viable seeds, but if you want to maintain a variety over many generations, save seeds from between 5 and 20 plants.

Processing and saving the seeds is exactly like processing tomato seeds. Squeeze the seeds and pulp into a jar, add about as much water, and let the mixture ferment for 2 to 3 days, stirring once a day. A little mold growth on top is fine.

After fermenting, add more water so that the pulp and non-viable seeds float to the surface and pour them off. You may need to repeat this a couple of times. Then, rinse your good seeds in a mesh strainer or cheesecloth with clean water.

Let your seeds dry out of direct sunlight for three weeks. Then, store them in an airtight container out of the sun.

Garden Advice

Tips for a Drought & Heat-Tolerant Garden

December 7, 2023 Jordan Charbonneau Leave a comment

Many of you probably saw that the USDA released a new hardiness zone map just a couple of weeks ago. Some of you may have gotten a further surprise, glancing at the map to see that your hardiness zone had changed! This little jolt may have helped confirm signs of climate change you’ve already noticed in your garden, like milder winters, hotter summers, erratic weather patterns, or earlier budbreak. While we can’t totally predict the effects of a changing climate, we do expect to see generally hotter, drier summers, and many of our customers do too. Here are a few ways to prepare for a heat-tolerant garden this season.

Grow Drought Tolerant Varieties

Many of our old heirlooms come from a time when irrigation on a small family farm was non-existent. When you look at many old Southern heirlooms like ‘Iron and Clay’ Southern Peas, Texas Gourdseed Corn, and Genuine Cornfield Pole Beans, you’ll find varieties that have tolerated heat and drought for years without much assistance.

Grow Short-Season Crops

One way to beat the heat is to avoid it. Crops that are fast-maturing stand a better chance of producing before they even have to face extreme temperatures or drought. Short-season bush beans are a great crop for this strategy. Varieties like ‘Provider’ can mature in as little as 48 days. In hot areas, crops like these should make up a good portion of your spring garden and will allow you to get another round in autumn.

You can also opt for smaller versions of some of your typical slow-maturing favorites. ‘Golden Midget’ has become one of our favorite small watermelons for its ability to produce in just 72 days. ‘Table Queen’ winter squash, which produces in just 80 days, is another great option, especially when compared to varieties like ‘Big Max,’ which takes 115 days to mature.

Plant Perennials

Many perennials are quite drought-hardy once established. Their long lives allow them to develop deep tap roots and extensive root systems. This includes many fruit and nut trees and perennial herbs and vegetables like figs, almonds, horseradish, and asparagus. They may require watering initially, but once established, they should do pretty well on their own, especially if you keep them mulched.

Many of our native wildflowers, like Rudbeckia, echinacea, and Early Horse Gentian, have more extensive, deep root systems than many ornamental flowers. Opting for more species like these can reduce watering and maintenance in flower beds.

Use Companion Planting and Intercropping

The classic example of companion planting is the Three Sisters Garden, where corn, beans, and squash are interplanted. In this example, the squash vines help shade the soil for the corn and beans, keeping it cool and moist.

While this example has become famous, Native Americans often interplanted other crops like sunflowers and amaranth, too, and you can use the same principles with other crops. Cucumbers can be grown beneath sorghum, roselle, or other tall crops to shade the soil. Bean tunnels or trellises can create shade to stretch the season for cool-weather crops like lettuce and broccoli.

Diversifying in this way has other benefits, too. If one crop fails, you’ll still have used your space well. Multi-crop beds also tend to be more disease and pest-resistant than monoculture plantings.

Use Cover Crops and Mulch

Bare soil is dead soil, especially when the temperatures climb. Keep your soil cool, moist, and healthy by keeping it covered. Cover crops are ideal for edges, pathways, and resting beds as they add nitrogen and organic matter to the soil. Some, like buckwheat, are very quick-growing and can be cut, dropped, and used as mulch for transplants.

Use mulch around plants and in heavy-use pathways. Mulch doesn’t have to be beautiful and perfectly matching. Try woodchips, straw, hay, grass clippings, or old leaves.

Use Your Shade

Shade isn’t usually a vegetable gardener’s friend. However, in the middle of a hot summer, plenty of cool-season crops will benefit from a bit of shade. Use the spaces around fruit trees or sides of buildings to experiment with getting better summer production from tender crops like green mixes.

Save Seeds

Each year, you have an opportunity to adapt your favorite varieties to your climate. Take it.

You may not have the time or energy to save all the seeds for your garden, but you can probably pick a few favorites. Maybe there’s a tomato you couldn’t live without or a pole bean your family has enjoyed for years. If you save seeds from the plants that performed best each year, you will shape that crop’s future to be specifically adapted to your growing conditions.

Gardening has never been easy, and it isn’t getting any easier! Climate change brings warmer temperatures, drought, new pests, and more. Hopefully, these tips will help you adapt your garden strategy to climate change and have a productive year.

Southern Exposure Seed Exchange