growing fancy: purple pole beans

Decorate your garden, tout your heirloom pride, and nurture your inner gourmet: grow purple beans.
When purple beans blossom, their flowers are a lovely shade of lilac. The stems are purple; the green leaves are edged in purple, too.
And boy, do these babies grow. They handily out-grew our Blue Lake Beans (a classic, [...]

growing fancy: beautiful baby lettuce

It’s not one hundred percent pest proof, but it’s pretty darn good. While our brassica mix attracts flea and cucumber beetles like none other — which I found interesting, since it’s considerably more spicy and slightly tougher than this mix — our awesome Johnny’s Seeds lettuce mix is surprisingly resilient and mostly beetle-free. [...]

growing fancy: french breakfast radishes

They’re radishes, only slightly less boring.  Oblong, with a pink base fading to a white tip, occasionally they have a pretty blush of pink inside when sliced in half lengthwise.
Are they truly idiot-proof to grow?  Pretty much.  A few growing notes:  flea beetles will punch holes in the tops, but who cares?  They’re a bit [...]

growing fancy: armenian cucumber

I think it’s safe to put the Armenian cucumber in the ’successful’ category now, although I might be jinxing myself here.
The winter squash may be dying, but the Armenian cucumber is as healthy as can be. (Knock on wood.) Heck, we keep stepping on the tendrils that spill over into the path–they keep [...]

growing fancy: quinoa

It’s not something I ever would have thought of growing myself. But when Emmett and I were wwoofing on a small family farm in New Zealand, our hosts had a few quinoa plants going. They were healthy, bushy, beautiful things, and their grains were just starting to dry.
So, when we were on our [...]