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May 14, 2024 | 
themeateater.com | Tony Peterson |Jordan Tony |Adam Moore
Sure, it’s May, and some states still have open turkey seasons. The thought of deer or elk season is just a faint glimmer on the horizon. While it might seem like you have an endless amount of time until the next big game seasons roll around, you’ll wake up one day in September only to realize that you haven’t tuned your bow, practiced those steep-angled shots, or scouted that new area on your list.
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Jun 7, 2023 | 
themeateater.com | Misty Newcomb |Jordan Tony
It’s a common experience for folks trying to grow vegetables without pesticides. You plant squash in the first stretch of warm weather and watch it grow into a beautiful plant. But soon after harvesting the first delicious squash, you come out to your garden and find the plant that was beaming with health a day earlier now limp and dying.
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Jun 5, 2023 | 
themeateater.com | Jordan Tony |Jenna Rozelle
Ramps, also known as wild leeks, are one of the most coveted edible native plants in the North American forest. They are particularly prized by people in our area of Appalachia, where they have been collected and eaten for generations. They have a delicious mild garlicky flavor, and where you find one you often find about a million others.
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May 23, 2023 | 
themeateater.com | Jordan Tony |Anna Borgman
By now the benefits of incorporating native plants in your landscaping and vegetable garden are very well documented. Native plants require fewer inputs and less upkeep because they’re adapted to your local environment, they provide habitat for native insects and birds, and in some cases, they are a refuge for plants that are threatened or endangered in the wild.
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May 15, 2023 | 
themeateater.com | Misty Newcomb |Mike Fitzgerald |Jordan Tony
It’s easy to get caught up in thinking that you must have a lot of space to make gardening worthwhile. But even with a small amount of space, you can actually produce quite a bit of produce by using the square-foot garden method. If you aren’t familiar with the concept of a square-foot garden, it’s a method of gardening popularized by author Mel Bartholomew that typically occurs in a small space.
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May 10, 2023 | 
themeateater.com | Misty Newcomb |Jordan Tony |Mike Fitzgerald |Jenna Rozelle
Once the days grow longer and we start seeing little buds on trees and daffodils popping up around the periphery of the yard, it’s easy to want to get some plants in the dirt. And though we can’t grow a lot of the vegetables that require the mid-summer heat to thrive, there is actually a lot that we can still plant–even if it is before our last frost. There’s a whole group of frost-tolerant plants that will not only survive a frost, they will also thrive in cooler temperatures.
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May 8, 2023 | 
themeateater.com | Jordan Tony |Misty Newcomb
Tomatoes were likely first bred from wild nightshade plants with tiny fruit about 7,000 years ago in Mesoamerica. The original wild fruits descended from a Peruvian and Ecuadorian plant that is similar to modern cherry tomatoes. Although tomatoes had been eaten by people in the Americas for thousands of years when they were first introduced to the rest of the world, many cultures were wary of the new fruits, and some people considered them toxic.
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Apr 26, 2023 | 
themeateater.com | Misty Newcomb |Jordan Tony
Garlic is one of the slow movers of the garden world. It’s typically planted in the fall and quietly builds a solid root structure underneath the ground all winter. Little green garlic stems popping up over the top of the soil are typically one of the first signs that spring will be here soon, but most people have to wait until June to start harvesting their garlic.
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Apr 24, 2023 | 
themeateater.com | Jordan Tony
Second only to sunlight and water, the composition of a garden’s soil can make or break a vegetable garden. The primary aspects of your soil to be on the lookout for are the available nutrient levels, the pH, and the ratio of sand, silt, and clay. If you’re gardening in a city or an area potentially contaminated by heavy metals, it’s also crucial to test the soil for these contaminants before feeding food grown in them to children or pregnant women.
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Mar 27, 2023 | 
themeateater.com | Jordan Tony |Misty Newcomb
For the past seven years, my wife Silvan and I have been working towards producing as much of our own food as possible. Each fall, we begin a “Living off the Land” challenge where we see how long we can comfortably and healthily go, eating only food that we grew in our gardens or foraged and hunted in the woods.
