Should I Try Tomato Grafting?

...graft tomatoes onto potato plants (two crops in one!) as well as graft tomatoes onto eggplants for plants that are more hardy in soggy soils. In the bad idea department, you can graft tomatoes onto tobacco (for nicotine laden fruit) and jimsonweed (for poisonous fruit–note this strange incindent). The Illinois Extension service has detailed tomato grafting instructions and notes on root stock selection here. So what do you think? Intrigued? Comme...

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Admitting Gardening Mistakes

...hange and a unwillingness to admit mistakes. Take, for instance, the stone fruit trees in our front yard. The “new normal” that climate change has brought to our region–fewer chill hours and drought–has greatly diminished the health and productivity of most of our stone fruit. It’s time for those trees to go and for the execution of a more coherent and attractive landscape plan. As Hermann von Pückler-Muskau advises in his 1834 book Hints on Lands...

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Our Grape Arbor is a Stacking Function Fail

...ermentation going. It’s like something out of my inner Martha Stewart’s worst nightmare. A poster by Benjamin Dewey. Available in his Etsy store. I wish I had a conclusion to this post with a miraculous solution, like say specially trained roof Chihuahuas. I don’t. I do wish that the non-fruit producing Vitis californica vine that grows along our northern fence could be swapped with the prodigious one on the arbor. If fruit grew on the fence vine...

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De-Cluttering the Garden

...o room for plants that are sickly or just don’t look attractive. Ditto for fruit trees that have never produced. I’m with Piet Ouldolf on this: if possible, plants in our tended spaces need to look good year round (even when dormant) and they need to provide wildlife habitat. Rethinking the garden. Even the best gardener has to rethink and renew a garden periodically. Many perennials become gangly, trees shade out other plants and things just gene...

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Behind the Scenes at Root Simple is a World of Big Pumpkins, Pomegranate Catapults and Man Crates

...Wilson Band, plus everything pomegranate. “We’ll have vendors selling the fruit itself, plus pomegranate trees, pomegranate-scented candles, jellies and anything else you could think of involving pomegranate, and probably some things you didn’t know could incorporate the fruit,” Bray mentions. Will they aim the pomegranate trébuchet at the skydivers? Or does the Geneva Convention prohibit that? Hello Kelly and Erik! My name is Alexandra, and I’m...

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