Tomatoes are the most popular home garden vegetable in America, and also among the most commonly sabotaged by their own neighbors. Every April, gardeners make the same well-intentioned mistakes: tucking a familiar herb here, a cheerful flower there, a cousin vegetable a row over. By midsummer, the harvest is thin, and the mystery feels unsolvable. …

The annual gardening cycle is expensive, time-consuming, and — when you step back and look at it — a little absurd. You buy seeds or starts, raise them through a season, and then watch them die. Next spring, you do it all over again. Perennial food plants break that cycle entirely. As Eric Toensmeier writes …

Most people think fruit trees are for serious gardeners; the type who have spray schedules pinned to their garage wall and know what “chill hours” means. They’re not. Several fruit trees are genuinely simple to grow, produce abundantly with minimal fuss, and taste so much better than anything at the grocery store that the first …

The gardeners whose yards erupt into color every February didn’t do anything magical in spring. They did one quiet, unhurried thing the previous year: they planted. If your garden always feels one season behind, this is the reason — and right now, in April, you still have a narrow window to change that. Most of …

Here’s a hard truth. That tray of cucumbers starts isn’t a shortcut — it’s a $6 mistake. For a surprisingly long list of common vegetables and flowers, buying nursery seedlings is slower, more expensive, and less successful than dropping a seed directly into warm soil. This April, when nursery tables are overflowing with tempting green …

That brown, leafless plant you’ve been staring at all winter may not be gone; it may just be dormant. Before you pull it out and reach for a replacement, it’s worth taking two minutes to find out. The most common gardening mistake in late winter isn’t overwatering or underwatering. It’s discarding a perfectly healthy dormant …

Your front porch is the most-seen room in your home. It greets every visitor, catches the eye of every passerby, and sets the tone for everything inside. And yet, most of us treat it like an afterthought. This April, that changes. Spring porch garden decor doesn’t require a designer budget or a sprawling wraparound porch. …

Most people think a pollinator garden requires tearing up their entire lawn, hiring a landscaper, or knowing the Latin names of plants. None of that is true. You can start with a five-by-five-foot patch of dirt, a bag of native seeds, and an afternoon, and by midsummer, you’ll have bees and butterflies visiting like clockwork. …

If you’ve ever stood over a weedy, overgrown row garden in August and thought, there has to be a better way — there is, and it’s been around since the Carter administration. Most gardeners are still doing things the hard way, and a single number explains why: traditional row gardening requires approximately 98% more labor …

Most gardeners spend April wandering the nursery aisles, picking up potted plants that are already in bloom, and paying five to ten times what it would cost to grow the same flowers from seed. Here is the thing: the flowers that will make your summer garden genuinely spectacular are the ones you start yourself, right …