Vegetables

As we celebrate Thanksgiving this week, take note of the foods on your table. Many of our classic Thanksgiving dishes rely heavily on New World crops native to central, south and north America. Read on for a little Thanksgiving culinary history.

All-America Selections (AAS) announces its 2024 national award winners - six flower and two vegetable selections. National awards are given to plants with consistently great performance across the United States.

Browsing garden catalogs and planning the coming year's garden is a pleasant way to spend a winter day, despite the danger of setting off a massive case of spring fever! But choosing from the abundance of vegetable varieties in even a few catalogs can quickly become a challenge.

Beginning gardeners, especially, may have difficulty picking varieties to plant because they don't have the benefit of gardening experience and a list of favorites.

The bulk of the summer harvest is still in the future, but this month the gardener begins to get a taste of what's to come. The important thing to remember about vegetables is that their taste will be better if you harvest them at the peak of quality.

Leeks, sometimes called "the gourmet's onion" are related to onions and garlic, but have flat leaves instead of tubular and relatively little bulb development. They're easy to grow and delicious, with a taste all their own, very much like a mild onion. The thick leaf bases and slightly developed bulb look like a giant green onion, and are eaten as a cooked vegetable.

Back before supermarkets, when gardens supplied the vegetables put on the table, the last of the potatoes in the storage bin were used for seed potatoes. Experienced gardeners set aside their blemish-free, healthiest potatoes for seed. Today you can go to the garden center and select from several varieties.

We know fall has arrived when pumpkins begin decorating porches and our favorite pumpkin spice foods appear in stores, including - new this year - Pillsbury pumpkin spice rolls and Philadelphia pumpkin spice cream cheese. Pumpkin pie, and other pumpkin desserts, are favorites at many holiday celebrations.

Planning the garden and thinking about growing potatoes? Selecting an appropriate variety is critical to success with potatoes in the home garden. But even a great variety won't perform at its best without the right soil and moisture conditions.

We've had our first touch of cold weather, with night temps falling to the upper 30s on October 6^thand 7^th, but no hard freezes yet. Of course, we're at the end of the gardening season. But if you have tender plants, and you want to keep them growing a while longer, it's important to pay attention to weather forecasts and provide protection if freezing temperatures threaten.

Many gardeners think vegetables can only be planted in spring, but they can also be planted in fall with either of two goals in mind: