Q: I know I can grow radishes in spring. Can I plant any other root crops then?

A: Beets, radishes, parsnips, rutabagas, and turnips share a love for cool weather, and growing them when temperatures are cool is the secret to sweet, crisp roots. Start sowing spring radish seeds as soon as the soil can be worked, and plants will be ready for harvest in as little as 3 weeks. Fast, even growth is the secret to a good crop. Sow new crops every week or 10 days until daytime temperatures remain above about 65°F/18.3°C. After that, the roots will be bitter and tough, not spicy and crisp.

Beets and turnips also can be grown in spring, but they take slightly longer than radishes—from seed, beets take 1 to 2 months, turnips 1 to 2 months. Beets germinate in 45°F/7.2°C soil, but you’ll probably get better results if you wait a bit and sow both beets and turnips once the soil is at least 50°F/10°C. If you harvest turnips when they’re still small, you can sow successive crops every 10 days until warm temperatures (daytime highs in the low 70s/21-23°C) arrive to spread out the harvest.

Some long-season or winter radishes also can be sown at the same time as beets and turnips in spring. Look for bolt-resistant cultivars that mature in 40 or 50 days, and sow as soon as the soil can be worked. Parsnips are the slowpokes of this group. Sow them in early to mid-spring for fall harvest.

Reprinted from The Veggie Gardener's Answer Book
Copyright 2008 by Barbara W. Ellis, with permission from Storey Publishing.
Creative Commons photo credit: Chantal Foster

Ron is frantic. His urban cat has a perfectly good litter box but prefers to use the pots and planters on the sunny windowsill where Ron is trying to grow herbs. It's natural that his pet prefers natural earth to the bagged imitation. Cats' instinct is to bury their droppings in soil by digging and scratching, and the job is much easier in soil that is loose and fluffy. The kind gardeners create.

Solving Ron's problem is easy. Covering the soil surface of indoor pots with attractive stones, or a lid of chicken wire cut to accommodate the plant's stem, will send Kitty back to her box. Even cats that nibble on or play with foliage can be foiled by a hanging planter (unless they're trying out for a feline Cirque du Soleil). But for outdoor gardeners, the problem is a more serious one. Cat and dog excrement contains pathogens that are transmissible to humans, and it's especially important to keep them out of food gardens.

Soil barriers work outdoors as well as in, especially in a small garden. Strips of wire mesh that are placed between plant rows and are removable for cultivating and weeding are effective, as are flagstones, bird netting, pieces of carpet, black plastic, or any agricultural fabric such as Reemay or shade cloth. When mature, crops such as kale and squash will block access with their large leaves. Cats avoid a garden strewn with rose or raspberry briers, though you might, too, unless you wear leather gloves. Some people swear by repellents applied to the soil. I'd avoid any commercial product with a warning label on it, but a five-alarm dressing of hot pepper, curry powder, mustard, garlic, chopped citrus peels or eucalyptus oil might help. You'll need to whip up a fresh batch whenever it rains. Plants touted as cat repellers, such as rue, are unlikely to have much effect.

With any repellent, you might have to provide another place for the cat to go. After all, even a restroom that reeks of cheap potpourri (or worse) will be used if there is no nicer one nearby. Some people set aside a cat area with loose soil or peat moss and maintain it as a litter box. As a lure, they plant a cat grass to nibble, such as oats, or a stand of catnip (a cat narcotic). But I'm dubious. Most creatures prefer not to do their business where they eat or do drugs.

Your best trump card is the fact that cats hate water. A squirt gun is a handy item for the tool basket, a hose even better. (For times you're not there, you can use a motion-sensing pest and animal squirter.) According to Shannon Hayes, author of "The Grassfed Gourmet Cookbook," who is wise in the ways of the four-footed, the hose trick is foolproof.

Article copyright of Barbara Damrosch. Reprinted with permission.
Creative Commons photo credit: A. Shoots

As we all know from past embarrassing moments, there's no red deeper than beet red. And there's no red soup redder than borscht. While borscht is traditionally a cool weather soup, served when the beets and cabbages are at their plumpest, it can also be enjoyed during the warm months or in warm climates served either at room temperature or chilled.

Ingredients:
1 medium onion, finely diced
2 small leeks, thinly sliced
1 rib celery, finely diced
1 medium carrot, finely diced
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 1/2 pounds fresh beets, peeled and diced
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
4 cups vegetable broth (you may also use chicken or beef, if preferred)
4 tablespoons apple cider vinegar
3 tablespoons finely chopped fresh dill more to add at the end
4 tablespoons sour cream
salt and pepper to taste

Procedure:
1. Prep all the vegetables. To prepare the leeks, rinse them well under cold running water, making sure to pull apart each layer with your fingers to remove any sand or soil lodged in between. Cut off and toss the root end, and thinly slice the white part.
2. Heat the butter over medium heat in a large heavy stock pot until it melts and foams. Add the onions, leeks, celery, carrot, garlic, beets, and the salt & pepper and stir. Cook, stirring often, until the vegetables soften, 15-20 minutes.
3. Add the vegetable broth and bring the soup to a simmer. Simmer gently, stirring occasionally, for 10-15 minutes.
4. Stir in the vinegar, dill and more salt & pepper to taste. Puree using an immersion stick blender (optional).
5. Ladle the soup into individual bowls and top with sour cream and a sprinkling of dill or shaved carrot for added color.

Serves 4-6

Creative Commons photo credit: Vidiot

Q: I don’t want to bother with seeds this year, so how do I make sure I buy healthy transplants?

A: First, you’re better off buying transplants from a garden center than from a grocery store or big-box store, where they may or may not get adequate watering or other care. Look for bushy, compact plants that have healthy green leaves. Check the roots, too, by gently dumping a plant out of its pot while holding the top of the rootball between your fingers.

If you decide to buy larger plants, pick off any fruits that have already started forming. This redirects the plants’ energy into producing roots, which it will need for the long haul. If the nursery or garden center you usually shop at only offers seedlings in market packs, and you don’t want to grow six plants of a single cultivar, try one of these options:

-Shop at a local farmers’ market in spring. Local growers often offer vegetable seedlings for sale.
-Shop for seedlings online. There are Internet companies that sell single transplants.
-Buy market packs of all the cultivars you want to grow, and share excess seedlings with friends and neighbors. Or see if a local community gardening group, garden club, or food pantry would be able to use the extras.
-Ask if the nursery will let you “switch out” cultivars in a market pack.
-Buy all the cultivars you want to grow, and toss the extra plants on the compost pile.

Reprinted from The Veggie Gardener's Answer Book
Copyright 2008 by Barbara W. Ellis, with permission from Storey Publishing.
Creative Commons photo credit: Lord Bute

This little furry fella has got it all figured out. Pass it on.

Wonderful as it is to eat only what's in season, there are some vegetables that a cook always likes to have on hand, and the scallion is one of them. Whenever a dish looks or tastes a little bland, all you need to do is grab a scallion and a pair of scissors and snip away, letting the pieces cascade over the surface. Your creation will instantly look fresh and appetizing, whether it's a salad, a stir-fry, a bowl of chili or borscht.

To grow scallions properly, though, it's best to sow them in cool weather, when the soil is about 50 degrees. They don't relish heat, so if you haven't started any for your summer garden, you'll have to wait until the season starts to moderate a bit, then plant them as a fall or winter crop. In the meantime, this means no scallions to put in summer salsas or to scatter over that boring, oh-so-white potato salad.

I find that by broadening the definition of the scallion, I can extend its season. Strictly speaking, a scallion, often called a bunching onion, is an onion that never forms a bulb at the end but remains straight and slender from top to bottom -- like a leek, only tiny. (Botanically it's a distinct species, Allium fistulosum.) But you can get those slender, long green-oniony leaves from any plant that is, at the moment, exhibiting scalliony behavior.

Viewed this way, scallion season might start with the onion bin at winter's end, when your storage onions have reached the end of their shelf life. The bulbs have softened and are sending out long shoots from the tops. These are a bit firmer than classic scallion foliage but just as good to eat. If they're pale from having begun life in darkness, just set them on a sunny windowsill and they'll green right up in a day or so. In the old days, these sprouts were often the only green thing to eat before spring crops started to bear.

Regular bulbing onions, on their way to maturity, can always have their tops robbed prematurely at those times when scallions are a necessity. Sometimes bulbing onions don't ever get around to bulbing at all. Don't call them a crop failure. Call them scallions.

Perhaps you intended to plant bulb onions and never got around to it. Visit the garden center and see if there are any leftover onion sets, those tiny dry bulbs that turn into big bulbs at summer's end. Plant them now. They'll be more heat-tolerant than the seed-sown types, and if you keep them watered they should at least yield some green tops. Steal a few tops from your garlic and shallots while you're at it. And when the chives get fat and mature in summer, they'll be almost scallionlike, too, or at least a good enough imitation to tide you over until cool, scallion-planting weather returns.

Article copyright of Barbara Damrosch. Reprinted with permission.
Image credit: Aaron Freimark

With food and oil prices zooming into the stratosphere, we're likely to see a lot more small, neighborhood-scale farms like the ones featured in this Wall Street Journal report. Who said that the suburbs were just for growing lawns?

Unlike the French and Australian gatherings which will coincide with Kitchen Garden Day (4th Sunday of August) in their respective years, the Maine event in 2011 is scheduled for September 17th and 18th in order to give participants an opportunity to attend the Common Ground Fair, the US largest organic agricultural fair which takes place each year in Unity, Maine in late September.

So here are the dates and destinations you can pencil into your long-range diaries:

22-23 August 2009: South West France
21-22 August 2010: In and around Adelaide Australia
17-18 September 2011: Maine, USA

To be perfectly clear, we're not talking about organizing huge international "kitchen garden Olympics" with large carbon footprints to bring the world's gardeners together in one spot. Rather, we're letting you know in the event that you are considering travel to these locations already or have dreamed about it and would like to plan your travel in order to meet up with like-minded people from other parts of the world.

We will be providing more details about these events as we have them. In the meanwhile, you can be in touch with the local organizers directly via the KGI community site: .

France 2009: Ian
Australia 2010: Kate
Maine 2011: Roger and Maya

Well, not that kind of toast. We're referring to the bumper crop of blog posts that have been written about KGI over the course of the past several weeks. These include diverse sites such as Take a Bite out of Climate Change, Slow Food USA's blog, Climate Today, and Dwell Magazine. The prize for comprehensive and blogging creativity goes to Kerry Trueman who blogs for EatingLiberally.org and the Huffington Post. She included us recently in a post about groups and individuals who are working to carry out a "Terroirist Plot on American Soil" (yes, that spelling - terroir-ist - is right). And we thought we were clever back in 2006 when we referred to our "Subversive Plot" to encourage more people to grow some of their own food.

To all the food and garden bloggers out there - whether you're a terroirist, subversive or "dirt-y minded" - thanks for covering our work and that of the many other groups and individuals working to shorten the distance from plot to plate.

Photo credit: D'Arcy Norman

Dear Kitchen Gardener,

From times immemorial, gardeners throughout the world have endured hardships of all kinds: floods, droughts, blights, swarming locusts, and, in the case of Dutch growers, centuries of uncomfortable footwear.

As a New England gardener, I have my own share of climate-related challenges, for example trying to keep track of seasons that can change from one hour to the next. For those of you who haven’t been to Maine before, we just recently welcomed the arrival of our fifth season – mud season – which is sandwiched between winter and spring and which helps explain why babies here are born wearing miniature LL Bean boots instead of pink and blue booties. Spring here only starts around May 1st and usually wraps up around May 10th or 15th. For those of you who are curious, Maine’s summer officially starts with the arrival of the first mosquito or Massachusetts tourist, whichever comes first, and ends when all of them, tourists and stinging insects, have left.

In celebration of mud season, I am proposing that home growers finally catch a break. Not from bugs, weather, or clunky garden shoes, but from taxes. It’s not as silly an idea as it may sound. We provide fiscal incentives to people to encourage them to put hybrid cars in their garages and solar panels on their roofs, so why not offer incentives for solar-powered, healthy food production in their backyard? With wars still waging, food and oil costs rising, and paychecks stretching to the breaking point, now is the time for a home-grown revival. What better way to usher in this revolution than by marrying two great American traditions: vegetable gardening and tax cuts?

It wouldn’t be the first time that our country encouraged its citizens to grow some of their own food. The government’s wartime “Victory Garden” campaign was a success by every measure. By 1943, 20 million gardens were growing 8 million tons of food (an amount comparable to that of the nation’s farms) and Americans were eating more healthy fruits and vegetables than ever before.

More home gardens would offer us victory not only over rising food and healthcare costs, but also foreign oil dependency and climate change. Researcher estimate that locally-grown foods use up to 17 times less climate-warming, fossil fuels than foods from away. And when it comes to local foods, it doesn’t get any “localer” than one’s own yard.

There are different breaks that local, state and federal governments could offer home gardeners. Sales taxes on seeds, seedlings, fruit bushes and trees could be removed. Better still, an income tax break could be administered as is done with home offices where people measure and deduct the square footage of their houses used for business purposes. The bigger your garden, the better the tax break. Those with no yard could deduct the rental fee for a community garden plot.

Tax break or not, I’ll soon be outside fighting climate change, rising food prices, and mosquitoes in my own modest backyard. Last year, my family and I converted our $85 seed order into six months worth of delicious, fresh vegetables. This year, if we’re lucky, that should take us right into winter which in Maine starts in mid November, except for those years when it comes early.

Wishing you bountiful harvests and comfortable footwear this season,

The three basic types you can grow are shell peas, snow peas, and sugarsnaps. Shell peas are opened (shelled) so you can get the peas out of the pods. These are the traditional pea varieties grown in New England. Snow pea pods are harvested before the seeds get large. They are often used in Asian cooking (stir-fries) or salads. Sugarsnap varieties are eaten whole -- both the pod and the peas are edible -- and they tend to be sweet.

Planting peas is easy. You simply make a shallow trench (about an inch deep and 3 inches wide) in your garden and scatter the seeds in the trench. If you want to get fancy, you can coat your peas with an inoculant (a beneficial bacteria) before planting to help the plants to fix nitrogen. An ounce of seed will plant about five feet of row. Cover the seeds firmly with soil and wait for the seeds to germinate. This usually takes about five to seven days. The peas don't need to be thinned, but you will want to keep the rows weeded.

When you plant your peas, the spacing between rows depends on the varieties that you are growing. Dwarf varieties don't need to be trellised, and the rows can be planted about 18 inches apart. Full size varieties need to be trellised, and they should be spaced about 4 feet apart. If the seed packet doesn't tell you that the peas are a dwarf variety, you should plan to erect a trellis.

A trellis can be as simple or fancy as you want to make it. The easiest version is to put two posts in the ground, about ten feet apart within the row, and fasten a net trellis to the posts. (Reusable trellises that last many years are available at most garden supply stores.) If you want a more traditional trellis, gardeners for hundreds of years have grown their peas on branches stuck into the ground and woven together to form a row. If you decide to grow your peas on a brush trellis, you may want to allow a little more space between rows to make it easier to weed or harvest.

Because peas like cool soils, after the plants germinate you can keep the soil mulched with grass clippings or other materials to help keep weeds down.

Dwarf varieties are ready to eat in as little as seven weeks. Some of the taller varieties take up to ten weeks to reach maturity. Harvest shell peas just as the peas fill out the pods.

Text credit: Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association
Photo credits: Cpt. Obvious, Mira D'Oubiette

Allen, who lives and writes in East Thetford, Vermont, recently shared his personal story with freelance writer Brianne Goodspeed in this interview.

How did the War on Bugs come about? Was it a book you’d been thinking about writing for a long time?

I began writing the War on Bugs after we [The Sustainable Cotton Project] developed a poster display of old chemical ads and editorials that glorified the chemicals as heroic tools in farmers’ struggles against pests and low fertility. We gave tours to more than one thousand cotton industry, academic, and government officials. The most common question asked on these tours was “How did people get comfortable with spraying poison on their farms, in their house, on their kids, in the river and the lakes?” I decided to find out. This book is the result of that search for how the American public reached this comfort level with toxic chemicals.

In your research, do you notice any trends in how chemicals are being marketed to farmers today, as opposed to some of the older ads you review in War on Bugs?

Today’s ads are slicker and there is much more discussion about the safety of the products. But, most of the emphasis is still focused on the effectiveness of the product. There still are no warnings about the real dangers in products, either in the ads or on the labels.

Some people ask us about the global nature of our network of kitchen gardeners. We recently dug deep into our database to see what countries are represented. Here we are:

Afghanistan, Algeria, Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Argentina, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Bahamas, Bangladesh, Barbados, Belgium, Belize, Brazil, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Canada, China, Cote D'Ivoire Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Dominica, Ecuador, Eritrea, Estonia, Ethiopia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Grenada, Guyana, Hong Kong, Hungary, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Iran, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Kenya, Kuwait, Lebanon, Liberia, Luxembourg, Malawi, Malaysia, Mauritius, Mexico, Myanmar, Nepal, Netherlands, Netherlands, Antilles, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Norway, Pakistan, Paraguay, Philippines, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Singapore, Slovenia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sri Lanka, Swaziland, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, Trinidad and Tobago, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Uganda, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United States, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, Vanuatu, Venezuela, Virgin Islands, Zambia, Zimbabwe.

Most baby vegetables are small because we make them that way. A cute three-inch-long zucchini is the result of an intervention. If not harvested at that size, it would grow as big as your thigh. A mini pumpkin stays mini, but only because it has been programmed to do so by a modern breeder.

Currant tomatoes, on the other hand, are tiny because they are ancient and relatively un-tampered with. They look the way the first tomatoes probably looked -- clusters of delicious little fruits no larger than large blueberries (or currants, hence the name). Cherry tomatoes look jumbo by comparison. Considered by some to be a distinct species, Lycopersicon pimpinellifolium, the currant type is extremely prolific. The plants, laden with hundreds of berries, are very vigorous and disease-resistant. They can even withstand a few light frosts.

The stems are thin and lax. All vining tomatoes are floppy, but these are almost impossible to stake. An excellent way to manage them is to let them festoon a fence or ramble over a low stone wall. They're best grown off by themselves anyway, as they tend to crowd other garden plants and self-sow with abandon. Since they cross-pollinate readily with other tomatoes, it's best to keep them at a distance of at least 50 feet if you plan to save seeds.

Picking currant tomatoes can be tedious, but well worth it for their rich, concentrated flavor. They look gorgeous sprinkled over salad or as a garnish for any summer dish. Try them atop peach ice cream. They can also be dried to make sweet tomato raisins.

To some extent, currant tomatoes have been selected or bred for various traits, particularly color. The standard red type can be found at a number of seed companies, including John Scheepers. There are also yellow varieties such as Gold Currant from Tomato Fest. White varieties such as Little White Rabbit from Amishland Heirloom Seeds are actually somewhere between yellow and cream. A mix of colors in a bowl would be the hit of a summer party. Some currant tomatoes are more prone to dropping their fruits. Tomato Fest's Hawaiian Currant holds onto its fruit until the whole cluster is ripe.

There is still time to buy seeds to start indoors, or order plants in three-inch pots from White Flower Farm. They are shipped in mid- to late April, but the gardener can hold them in a protected spot if warm tomato-planting weather gets held up in traffic.

Article copyright of Barbara Damrosch. Reprinted with permission.
Baby corn image credit: Krissy Downing

A recent article in the British newspaper The Guardian highlighted efforts underway in the city of Middlesbrough to source more food from within the city limits. It's amazing the results they've already had and the ambitious goals they have for the future:

The idea of the urban farming project was to make people more aware of food miles, improve health and aid regeneration of the borough, which contains the ninth most deprived area in the UK. Groundwork South Tees advised schools, mental health hospitals, residential care homes and retailers on planting and growing many varieties of herbs, vegetables and fruit. Containers of different sizes were used so people could cultivate whatever space they had.

This year, Middlesbrough plans to supply seeds and containers to anyone interested, and already has 2,000 individuals and groups lined up, including 31 out of 51 schools, with 280 growing sites. "This has caught people's imagination. But we've gone beyond novelty now and people want to make it a mainstream activity," says Ian Collingwood, a regeneration consultant at the council.

With the world's urban population on the rise and oil reserves in decline, these types of efforts will be critical and central to cities' sustainability plans.

Those of you living in or near New York City will soon have an opportunity to connect with people and organizations that share your interest in urban gardening at the third annual NYC GROWS Garden Festival, hosted by the National Gardening Association and the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation. The action will take place on Sunday, April 27, from 10 to 5, in Union Square Park South Plaza at 14th Street. There will be hands-on activities for the whole family, food and beverage sampling, chef and gardening demonstrations, a prize drawing, and much more.

Visit www.garden.org/nycgrows for more information.

Photo credit: urban garden in Cheong-ju, South Korea by Dax Melmer