Gardening

When I was a kid, any time my sisters and I came down with a stomach bug, my mother ran to the store for a bottle of ginger ale. Though it looked like any other soft drink in a green plastic container, we were taking part in a tradition of plant medicine that dates back over 5,000 years. Gingerols...

As the name implies, brussels sprouts were first cultivated in what is now Brussels, Belgium, around the beginning of the 16th century. The fact that individual sprouts resemble tiny cabbages is no coincidence; they were originally bred from the exact same species as cabbage (Brassica oleracea). The...

It’s everybody’s favorite starchy staple crop. It can be found anywhere from a salad in a Syrian village to fast-food French fries in an American city, but this plant comes from humble beginnings as a slightly toxic wild mountain tuber. Potatoes were first transformed into their edible and delicious...

Archeological evidence suggests that garlic is one of the oldest crops in the world. It’s cultivation likely began around 5,000 years ago. References to garlic are found in ancient texts from India, Egypt, and China, and garlic bulbs have even been found in Egyptian tombs. Back then, garlic was...

Most gardening experts are familiar with the concept of feeding plants by giving them nutrients in the form of compost, manure, or synthetic fertilizer. But the importance of feeding soil is less obvious to many people. In order for plants to thrive with as few outside inputs as possible, they need...

If you’ve ever come across a wild lion’s mane mushroom (Hericium erinaceus), it might strike you as something that came from the deep ocean. The beautiful, cascading spines appear more fit for life on a coral reef than the terrestrial home by which they abide. Fittingly, the texture and flavor of...

There is no better complement to a meal of wild game than fresh herbs and veggies from your own garden. Our hillside home in East Tennessee isn’t very conducive to traditional gardening, so I build raised beds as a practical, productive solution. I use plastic barrels to make beds that require...

When I first became interested in composting, I was uninterested in learning how to do things correctly and more interested in just doing them. I grabbed an old 5-gallon bucket with a lid, dumped all of my kitchen scraps and garden waste in it, and put the lid on top. A month later, I opened the lid...

“Let your food be your medicine,” I proudly remarked as I poured black bean seeds into a weekly pill organizer. My wife rolled her eyes and then popped the container into our refrigerator’s crisper drawer. We’ve been storing seeds like this for years, and in some cases, we’re even starting to...

Radishes might be my favorite vegetable because they’re so versatile in the kitchen. The first year I grew radishes I easily planted about fifty, and to my delight (and, let’s be honest, surprise), all of them germinated and grew to full size. But when I bit into one, it was disheartening to...

Imagine tomorrow you wake up having traveled 100 million years back in time to the late Cretaceous period. Depending on where you live in North America, you could be on the Island of Appalachia (present-day East Coast), the Island of Laramidia (present-day West Coast), or underwater in the Western...