Peppers are perennials, which means you don’t have to buy new transplants every spring. Here’s how to dig, prune, and overwinter your best pepper plants indoors so they come roaring back next season with a serious head start.
Lettuce bolting in July is inevitable if you don’t plan for it. Afternoon shade, frequent harvesting, heat-tolerant varieties, and smart timing can all delay it. And if some bolt anyway, let them go for free seed next year.
August in the PNW is all two things at once: peak summer harvest and the fall planting window closing fast. Here’s what to pick, what to plant, and what to get planned before the rains make the decisions for you.
Fall fava beans are one of the best deals in the garden: plant them in late October, ignore them all winter, and you get an early spring harvest plus free nitrogen for your soil. Here’s how to do it right, which varieties to pick, and why fall beats spring sowing in the Pacific Northwest.
Yellowing tomato leaves aren’t all the same problem. Here’s how to tell nitrogen deficiency from disease from watering stress, and how to fix each one without spending much money.
Your bolted lettuce and cilantro aren’t garden failures. They’re next year’s free seed. Here’s exactly how to collect and store it before it’s gone.
Mâche and claytonia are two cold-hardy winter salad greens almost nobody grows, and they’ll survive real freezing weather in an unheated frame. Sow them now and you’ll be cutting fresh leaves in the darkest months of the year.
Aphid control for kale and brassicas doesn’t require anything fancy. A strong blast from the hose, a soap spray you mix yourself, and a few habits around checking leaf undersides will handle most infestations without spending much at all.
A few 90-degree days in the PNW can wipe out a whole bed of lettuce, peas, and cilantro before you know what happened. Here’s how to build cheap shade for under $20 using old bedsheets, window screens, burlap, and actual shade cloth from the hardware store.
Raspberry pruning is one of those late-winter jobs that pays off big in July. Get the timing wrong and you’ll either lose this year’s fruit or spend summer fighting a thorny mess. Here’s how to do it without overthinking it.
July is the time to start overwintering brassicas like purple sprouting broccoli. Start seeds now, transplant in late August, and let the plants build over winter so they explode with early spring shoots when everything else is still mud. Patience pays off big.
Tomato cracking usually comes down to one thing: inconsistent watering. Here’s why it happens in July, how to prevent it with mulch and deep watering, which varieties hold up best, and what to do with the split fruit before it’s gone.