Harvest to Table

Use mint fresh or dried to flavor vegetables—cabbage, carrots, cucumbers, eggplants, peas, potatoes, tomatoes, and zucchini. You can add fresh mint to cold and hot soups and beverages. There are all types of mint to choose from: spearmint, peppermint, pineapple mint, orange bergamot, and apple mint to name a few. Mint has a striking aroma, [...]

Baby beets are beets harvested just as they have started to round out. Leave these beets until they mature and you can call them table beets. Baby beets—just about the size of a ping-pong ball—have the most delicate taste and texture. Table beets—as big as your fist—still taste good, but don’t let them grow much [...]

Russian Red kale is thick, juicy and chewy. Match this kale with grilled sausages, pork or turkey. You can also match Russian Red with grains, roots, dried fruits and nuts. Russian Red has silvery-green to blue-gray leaves that look like a cross between a turnip green and a highly lobed oak leaf. This kale doesn’t [...]

Kale is usually cooked and rarely eaten raw because of its strong pungent flavor. Small amounts of raw, young kale can be added to salads to bring a spicy note. Steam kale and serve with butter, lemon juice, and chopped bacon. Kale has large cabbage-like curled leaves, usually soft green but also shades of blue-green [...]

Arugula is pungently peppery and well matched to milder salad greens and endive. Certainly, you can serve juvenile arugula on its own. Arugula flowers bring the same peppery dash to a salad and some wonderful color as well. Arugula flowers are white pinwheels with burgundy center stripes and veins. You can use arugula flowers as [...]

The apple is the most widely grown fruit. Apple trees grow everywhere except in the very hottest and very coldest regions of the world. Apples vary from crisp to soft, from juicy to dry, from acid or insipid to bitter, bland, or aromatic. Apples can range in color from green to gold to yellow to [...]

The soil in your garden was created over thousands of years through the disintegration and decomposition of rock and organic matter. Temperature and rainfall, the life and death of plants, animals and bacteria and fungi, and the rocks that were there to begin with: all contributed to the soil you find in your garden today. [...]

If the idea of serving your own fresh-picked strawberries next summer sounds good, spring is the time to get your strawberries growing. Strawberries are a perennial plant which means once you’ve got them in the ground you will have them for a two or three years to come. There are two types of strawberries: June-bearing [...]

You don’t have to get fancy to enjoy Brussels sprouts. Simply steam or sauté the sprouts and serve them with butter or lemon or sprinkled with Parmesan cheese, like you see here. To steam Brussels sprouts, arrange the sprouts or pieces on a steamer rack. Bring 1 to 2 inches of water to a rapid [...]

Brussels sprouts are a biennial grown as a cool-season annual. They survive winter snows to push their final harvest of miniature cabbage-like sprouts in spring. Brussels sprouts have a nutty, cabbage-like flavor that makes a delicious hot side dish dressed with butter or meat-roasting juices. Lightly steamed Brussels sprouts are perfect with a lemon-butter sauce, [...]