Know Your Roots: Pinetree Garden Blog

Harvesting peas yet? Check out our quick Summer salad recipe and tips for freezing your peas without letting them get mushy!

There is something so fancy and so fun about eating flowers! Like intricate cake icing or ice cream sprinkles, we all get a rush of delight when we discover that something decorative is also delicious. Whether strewn across salads, tossed in stir fries, preserved in oils or cordials, or candied for dessert decorations, edible flowers elevate any meal and deserve a place in your backyard garden.

These gorgeous blooms are so pretty and profuse that they have earned an unfair reputation as high-maintenance and hard-to-grow. Nothing could be further from the truth! Whether you grow them from seeds or tubers, dahlias are so simple to...

Indoor gardening can be the perfect pick-me-up at any time of year but they are particularly comforting when it is cold outside and your backyard garden has gone dormant. Without much effort, windowsill plantings can provide bursts of freshness to your cooking, bright pops of color on cold days, and a cheerful reminder that you will be back out playing in the soil sooner than you think!

Composting can take your backyard garden to the next level, turning organic waste material into a rich and renewable soil amendment—for free! There are as many types of composting as there are home gardeners. Check out our guide below to see which method matches your own gardening style and get started making your own “black gold”—homemade, harvest-enhancing compost.

Bursting with backyard garden ideas but need to stay on a budget? We hear you! With so many great gardening tools and accessories out there, it can be easy to forget that it doesn’t take all that much to get a garden growing. In fact, to be a backyard gardener, you don’t even need a backyard.

Red leaf, radicchio, romaine, and more. With such an abundance of delicious and nutritious lettuce varieties available, it can be challenging to choose just one to grow in your garden. The good news is that cultivating lettuce is almost as simple as sprinkling seeds (one of the reasons they are simply the perfect succession plant) so you can try and taste a new type of lettuce almost any time you like! 

We asked the thousands of home gardeners in our Facebook group what they wish they had known before they dug into a lifetime of gardening. The result? A bumper crop of tips for beginning gardening from a diverse, experienced, and generous group of folks that want first-time growers to fall in love with growing your own vegetables the way they did

One of the problems you may run into with growing your own food is simply having too much of it! You can only eat and give away so much, so an alternative is canning or preserving it! By canning your own fruits and veggies, you can save money and learn how to be almost completely self-reliant concerning food. When you really break it down, canning is just food science. When you preserve food, you are basically freezing time.

Dig down in your backyard a few inches and take a good look at your garden soil. Is it dark brown and crumbly or heavy reddish clay? Rocky or slightly sandy? There are so many different types of soil across regions, climates, and even different parts of your property. And there are many more distinctions within soil we can’t see: PH levels, vitamins and nutrients, beneficial microbes, and possibly pests, blights, and even dangerous contaminants. Before you plant, start your soil preparation—and Pinetree Garden Seeds can show you how.

So, the hard part is over, right? Getting seeds to germinate and keeping them alive long enough to admire them is a rush… but now what to do? They’re going to keep getting bigger, and we know that the small peat pots they’re in aren’t going to do the trick forever. Well, this is where transplanting comes in.

If you have ever visited the agricultural exhibits at your county or state fair and wondered how to grow giant pumpkins, our guide below can take you from planting pumpkin seeds to a first-place finish this fall. The secret? Choosing the right variety of pumpkin seeds—and committing to hands-on gardening techniques to pile on the pounds.