News — Gardening

Drying herbs from your garden is a great way to take advantage of your harvest and so you can then use those herbs later in your kitchen. Fresh herbs can die quickly, but drying them allows you to preserve them longer for later use, retaining flavor and preventing waste. Great goals for any gardening or homesteader.    Drying herbs when they’re fresh allows you to retain the flavor for later use. And bonus, when your herb garden is out of season, you’ll still have plenty of flavorful herbs to use in your kitchen. It’s best to dry herbs immediately after...

During both World War I and World War II, people with land (even small parcels) planted victory gardens — also known as war gardens or food gardens for defense. It was a means to feed the family, to supplement the restrictions enforced with rationing, and to ease the food chain. Victory gardens provided people with hope for a better future. There’s something about gardening that promotes and encourages inner healing. Local Food Initiative / Flickr (Creative Commons) With the world pandemic of COVID-19 closing international borders, the food supply chain is severely hampered. People are hoarding products to make sure...

For some reason, the sunflowers grew like gangbusters this year, even while everything else struggled. (Funny story: all of my sunflowers were volunteers this year, and when they first popped up, I thought they were bean plants… so I transplanted them into a nice little square in one of my beds, and then was promptly embarrassed when I realized I’d planted 9 sunflowers extremely close together in the midst of my bean patch.) So, while no one will be calling me a gardening expert this year (or probably any year), a few weeks ago the kids loaded up wheelbarrows full...