The Garden · Glassboro, NJ · Zone 7a
Growing guides written while the job is actually happening, not remembered a season later. Every step gets a photo of the real thing, including the ugly parts.
Guides
Jobs happening in the garden right now. Every guide tells you the exact signal to look for, then what to do with your hands.
The only guide here you can do from the kitchen, with a pepper you bought this afternoon. A green pepper is an unfinished pepper and the seed in it is unfinished too, so the whole job is two weeks of leaving it alone on the counter before you ever pick up a knife.
Seed saving · AugustWait for the back of the head, not the petals. How to hold a head on the plant for the extra weeks without feeding every bird and squirrel in the yard. Then what changes for a Mammoth and what changes for a dwarf branching plant, because those two ripen nothing alike.
Seed saving · AugustThe seed sits loose in little dry tubes and pours out the second you tip the head, so this one is a race rather than a wait. How to test with your open palm, how to cut without spilling it in the lawn, and why your named variety is not coming back.
Seed saving · AugustThe seed is a small arrowhead hiding at the base of every petal. Pull one petal and you will know in two seconds whether the whole head is ready.
More guides get added here as the season turns them up.
About
Most growing advice tells you what to do and skips the part where you decide whether it is time. That is the only hard part. A head that looks finished from the front can be three weeks out.
So every guide here leads with the signal. What you are looking at, what it looks like when it is ready, and what it looks like when it is not. Then the steps.
Photos are of my own plants, taken while doing the job. Where a guide gives a number, it comes from a university extension service or a seed-saving organization, and the source is linked at the bottom of the page.
Glassboro, New Jersey. USDA zone 7a. Heavy clay that I have been arguing with for years.