A plant profile for basil: all about growing basil, basil uses, and basil recipes. Plant Profile: Basil (Ocimum basilicum) Botanical Name: ...

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!
Trimming apple trees, otherwise called pruning, means shaping trees by cutting off twigs, stems and branches. It’s important to prune apple trees to ensure good fruit production and healthy trees. Although it’s true that in the wild apple trees are “pruned” only by the wind and weather, in the backyard garden, pruning helps shape apple…
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…