produce

11 Harvesting Tricks to Avoid Bruising Produce

October 11, 2025 by Brandon Marcus Leave a Comment

There’s nothing worse than spending weeks nurturing your garden—watering, weeding, and whispering words of encouragement—only to watch your perfect tomatoes turn into mush after one bad harvest day. Bruising doesn’t just ruin your hard work; it speeds up decay, drains flavor, and makes your produce look sad and unloved. Whether you’re picking for a backyard…

11 Mistakes Gardeners Make When Storing Produce

October 9, 2025 by Brandon Marcus Leave a Comment

You’ve spent all season nurturing your garden—watering, weeding, and proudly watching those tomatoes, cucumbers, and carrots grow into perfection. Harvest day feels like victory… until a week later, your beautiful bounty turns mushy, moldy, or strangely flavorless. What happened? The truth is, storing produce is its own art form, and even the greenest of thumbs…

How To Get Free Seeds From The Government by Amanda Blankenship Seeds might seem like a small expense, but any seasoned…
Should I Use Enviro Ice On My Plants? by Kathryn Vercillo Every week, I receive food from Hungryroot. It's a great…
From Trash to Treasure: Transform Shredded Paper Into Garden Gold by Amanda Blankenship Should you use shredded paper as garden mulch? It might…
What Happens to Plants If You Use Enviro Ice on Them? by Amanda Blankenship About a year ago, I wrote our first article about…

5 Plants That Can Fill Gaps Left by Tired Annuals

By late summer, some annuals look less like garden stars and more like they need a vacation. Petunias stretch, marigolds lose their swagger, and once-lush containers can develop suspicious-looking bare spots that seem to appear overnight. Instead of automatically buying another flat of annuals, gardeners can tuck in plants that offer lasting foliage, flowers, texture,…

Why Are Gardeners Pairing Roses With Drought-Tolerant Grasses?

Roses bring the drama, and drought-tolerant grasses bring the cool confidence. Put them together, and a garden bed suddenly looks less like a collection of individual plants and more like a thoughtfully designed landscape, with lush flowers rising above ribbons of foliage that move when the breeze wanders through. There is a practical reason for…

Should You Allow Volunteer Tomatoes to Keep Growing This Late?

Volunteer tomatoes have a funny habit of showing up without an invitation, planting themselves in the garden and then acting as though they own the place. By late summer, that once-cute surprise can turn into a serious question: should the plant keep growing, or should it get pulled before it becomes a tangled mess? The…

6 Ways to Reuse Bamboo Stakes Before Putting Them Away

Bamboo stakes rarely deserve a one-season retirement. Before tossing a bundle into the shed until next spring, gardeners can put those slender poles to work supporting plants, protecting seedlings, organizing garden spaces, and even helping with small outdoor projects. That matters because a bamboo stake can do far more than prop up a tomato. Its…