May Day Garden Flowers

Here’s a simple Grow Curious project for you to do in celebration of May Day and the growing season ahead. Collect flowers* from your garden. Choose one of each kind if you can. Assemble them in an arrangement, either laid down flat (aka a flat lay), together in a single vase, or as I have

Let’s Talk About Mealybug

A small infestation of mealybug was recently found on this variegated pothos (Epipremnum). I check my houseplants regularly, but they were camouflaged well against the white variegation. Of the many pests that can plague houseplants, mealybug are the one I’ve come up against most. This may be because I keep a lot of succulent plants,

Borage Soup

Recipe: Borage Leaf Soup

Last week I wrote about growing borage as well as my recent forays into using the leaves more readily as an edible staple. While I have found several ways to use the prickly greens, making variations on this soup recipe has proven to be most successful and best-suited to my current diet. As I have

Golden Nugget Hot Pepper

Food Worth Growing: ‘Golden Nugget’ Hot Pepper

‘Golden Nugget’ is a favourite “hot” pepper variety going way back to when I was a rooftop gardener. It’s a fruity flavoured little pepper with a bit of heat that can be used fresh or dried. I’ve found it to be very good infused in vinegar or tossed into a mixed vegetable pickle for a

What to do About Seedlings that Won’t Shed Their Coat

This is a problem that occurs with a few seedlings every year even when the soil or the air inside the humidity dome is moist. It seems to occur most frequently with hot peppers and occasionally with older tomato seed, which leads me to believe that it is related to a loss of vigor. [See

Recycling and Reusing Seed Starting Pots

You’d be surprised by what can qualify as a decent, if not great, seed starting pot and perhaps surprised even more to discover that many can be found in the recycling bin. Toilet rolls are free and accessible, but have their downside. I can get a second use from the paper cups and cartons that

roof wall june 2010

Container Gardening Guide

The back wall on my roof garden, June 2010. I cut my teeth as a young gardener growing edibles in containers on a very hot roof in urban Toronto. For 15 years I grew everything and anything you can think of there (all without an outdoor water source), and while some crops produced much better

Seed Starting Chart

Seed Sowing and Planting Chart

How and when to get seeds started differs with each crop. Some plants do best when sown outdoors directly into the ground or container where they will live out their lives. This is called direct sowing. Crops like basil, tomatoes, and peppers have a very long growing season that can’t be met in colder climates

Beginner Garden

Beginner Garden Help Here

My garden here in Toronto is currently chilling on ice and will be for some time yet; however, in other parts of the world a brand new growing season has already begun. Questions about how to start a garden from scratch have already been pouring in and I’ve realized it is high time that I

Peterborough Community Garden

The Peterborough Community Garden Network’s Urban Grain Seed Project

Way back in the depths of deepest winter I accepted a position with Fiskars Project Orange Thumb® as a member of the editorial board. Project Orange Thumb gives a financial lending hand to community gardens in the US and Canada and this year 30 gardens were slotted to each receive $3,500 in cash and tools.

Pepper Growing Help

You Grow Girl is celebrating 14 years online this month! As you can imagine an awful lot of articles have been posted in that time and with so much to choose from it can sometimes be tricky to find what you’re looking for. To make things easier, I have been slowly building an archive of

Food Worth Growing: Chiltepin Pepper

Chiltepin (Capsicum annuum var. glabriusculum) aka (Capsicum annum var. aviculare) or bird pepper is a small, pea-sized chile that grows wild on 3-4 ft-tall shrubs in parts of Texas and Northern Mexico. Coming in at 50,000-100,000 Scoville Heat Units (SHU), this pepper is ferociously hot and pungently flavoured. The heat comes on violently, yet diminishes