What is chervil? My favorite herb writer, Bertha Rappaport, likens chervil to parsley, but this French herb differs from parsley. I grew chervil ...

If you’ve always wanted to grow your own food but you kill plastic plants, this is the gardening website for you.
Welcome to Home Garden Joy! I’ll teach you how to grow delicious fruit and vegetables, and how to grow and use common herbs for health and wellness. New to gardening? I’ve got you covered with over 1,000 articles on everything from apples to zinnias. So come on in – soon you’ll have a garden to be proud of!
When the opossums eat it, of course. One of the first questions I had this summer about my new patch of cantaloupe growing in the raised bed garden was, “How to tell when cantaloupe is ripe? How do you know it’s time to pick it??” Of course, I searched online for the answer. “It will…
Learning how to grow butternut squash organically ensures you know how to grow this tasty, nutritious vegetable in your home garden. I’ll share with you some basic information on growing butternut squash, followed by some organic gardening tips that have been helpful for me here at Seven Oaks Farm in dealing with the various pests…
Make the perfect cup of herbal tea, right from your own garden! In May, I gave two free talks on how to grow, harvest, dry, and create your very own herbal teas. This lecture proved so popular that I recorded the narration and uploaded it to YouTube. You can view it below: Supplies to Make…
I spent last Saturday morning getting rid of Eastern tent caterpillars from the apple and pear trees in the orchard here on the farm. Malacosoma americanum, the Eastern tent caterpillar, is a regular visitor each spring. We first spot the shimmery webs on a clear spring day. The small ‘tents’ built by the caterpillars quickly…
Raised bed vegetable garden soil soil needs to be replenished periodically. If you’ve done your job right and selected great soil, and amended it with nice compost, you’re going to have super garden soil for the first few years. Because you don’t walk on a raised bed garden the way that you do with typical…