All posts tagged: vegetable

Carrots Love Tomatoes

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Every vegetarian gal or guy that has any space at all should try to grow some of her/his own vegetables either in containers on a porch or in the yard.  How have I gone so long without such a must-have, classic book?  This rare treasure among a sea of gardening guides?  Written originally in 1975 and updated in 1998, Carrots Love Tomatoes: Secrets of Companion Planting for Successful Gardening , published by the well-respected Storey Publishing, should be the bible which we all refer to when deciding where to thoughtfully place each plant in our garden.  Who knew that beans and onions would hinder the growth of one another?  And how did Louise Riotte know that planting celery near cauliflower would deter the white cabbage butterfly?  There are no flashy photographs in this book nor dreamy prose.  Yet there is such a wealth of information here dispersed among simple and informative drawings.  If only I had known last year that dill may affect carrot growth in a negative way, I may have ended up with carrots that weren’t the size …

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 I grew up in Upstate New York on 14 acres in the middle of nowhere.  Nature was a huge part of my life.  Other kids had real neighbors and we had deer, turkeys, rabbits, birds, squirrels, and all sorts of wildlife as fellow members of our neighborhood.  My parents were gardening junkies and every year our garden grew dramatically, incorporating crazy kinds of squash, potatoes, string beans, lettuce (not just one kind, but every kind known to man), herbs, tomatoes, cucumbers, and everything you could think of that grows in Zone 5.  My father can attribute his love of gardening to my grandfather. I attribute my love of gardening to my parents. I, too, have the gardening junkie gene.    It was evident that I’d always have a soft spot for animals as a child when I became obsessed with a book called The Big Snow by Berta and Elmer Hader (first published in 1949), which tells the story of animals surviving winter.  I worried and cried about how deer would find food and wondered where …