Garden Betty
For people who want to grow more food with less work. 🌱 This is my weekly newsletter loved by 38,000+ subscribers—here's what one of them had to say: "These are not the regular run-of-the-mill garden-based emails. You actually touch on more unusual tidbits that encourage me to keep growing and learning."
the best time to pick tomatoes is NOT what you think
If you were asked when the best time to pick a tomato is, you'd probably say: when it's ripe. And you wouldn't be wrong. After all, the idea of a warm, sun-ripened fruit on the vine is what all our tomato dreams are made of. But even though the ultimate goal is ripe tomatoes, picking them when they're fully ripe isn't always the best call if you also want high-quality fruit before they fall on the ground, before the squirrels and birds get to them, or before the skin splits and cracks. Also:...
the fix for yellow tomato leaves
It might start as a few splotchy leaves here and there, but before you know it, entire tomato stems turn yellow and brown. What does it mean? What can you do? And will it spread to your other tomato plants? Of all the issues I see in the garden, yellowing leaves are one of the most common and also the most confusing, because they represent any number of things that could be going wrong depending on where—on the leaf and on the plant—they're turning color. It's kind of like asking, "Why isn't...
heat problems
Hot weather isn't just hard on humans... many plants (even warm-weather crops) suffer when temperatures rise too. My climate doesn't get as scorching as other areas. We usually top out around 95°F in peak summer, but evenings cool down significantly into the 40s. That doesn't make summer any less hard on my plants though. Tomatoes, peppers, squash, beans, and cucumbers are all, surprisingly, sensitive to different things once the weather turns hot. Maybe you're seeing something like this...
how to cure and store onions for *months*
Yesterday I wrote about the 3 signs your onions may be ready to harvest. If all of those point to yes for you—hooray! Let's get to work. You can absolutely keep onions in your pantry or on the counter to eat within the next couple weeks, but homegrown onions can store for much, much longer than that... think months! Some varieties can even go a whole year without spoiling, but they need a simple extra step right after they come out of the ground: curing. Curing is just one part of the...
3 signs your onions are ready
Onions take SO long to grow, especially if you start them from seed. It takes around 100 to 120 days for onions to mature from seed, 80 to 100 days to mature from sets, and somewhere in between if you transplanted a plug of seedlings. Which means... the day you've been waiting for is near! But just because you can see the tops of your onions start to push out of the ground, it doesn't mean they're actually mature. While you can pick onions at any stage of growth (even super young, if you want...
using up a csa box
Do you get a CSA box? That is, a farm share from a Community Supported Agriculture program. (If you've been with me for a while, you might remember that I wrote a book about this back in 2015!) CSA boxes have undoubtedly gotten a lot more popular and mainstream since my first book was published, and I even know people who have their own gardens but still get a CSA box to fill in what they can't or don't want to grow. So it's no surprise that I get this question a lot throughout summer: "What...
I'm shipping organic walking onion seeds!
If you've been with me for a while, you might remember that last fall, I offered organic walking onion seeds from my own garden. (And they sold out!) This year, I harvested my seeds earlier so I can bring them to you in time for your fall garden! Organic seeds from my own garden in Bend, Oregon Egyptian walking onions are a type of perennial onion that can be harvested for its green stems (like chives or scallions) as well as its bulbs (which kind of resemble shallots). Walking onions are...
my new book is HERE! 🇺🇸
Just released!!! 🎉 About two years ago, my longtime book editor asked if I would write a book about Route 66, America's most recognizable roadway, to honor the Route 66 Centennial in 2026. 🇺🇸 It would be very different from all my other cookbooks and on the surface, it didn't seem doable: I knew little about Route 66, none of the recipes would be my own, and was it all going to be diners, drive-ins, and dives? You could only have so many recipes for burgers and pies, after all. But the more I...
For people who want to grow more food with less work. 🌱 This is my weekly newsletter loved by 38,000+ subscribers—here's what one of them had to say: "These are not the regular run-of-the-mill garden-based emails. You actually touch on more unusual tidbits that encourage me to keep growing and learning."