Senior Gardening Features

I've moved things around a bit, grouping our tutorials on our How-to index. The items remaining on this page are more feature stories.

Lazy Summer Days (Daze) - A cool drink helps ward off sunstroke as I renovate a garden bed. (August 5, 2008)

A Cucumber of Distinction - I almost lost my saved seed from the Japanese Long Pickling variety. (August 7, 2008)

Gloxinias - This is a continuing column on how to grow this gorgeous plant. I've started the plants from seed and will update the page periodically.

• Saving Gloxinia Seed - This feature is really a sort of "part 2" of the gloxinia feature. I document the pollination and seed saving process for gloxinias. (October 10, 2009)
• Gloxinia Photos - I pulled together some nice gloxinia shots taken over the last few years. (October 12, 2012)

Portuguese Kale Soup - I've crosslisted this recipe here, as it's really more a how-to story than a recipe. If you like hearty soups, try this incredible soup from this once all but forgotten vegetable.

Growing Geraniums from Seed - I finally refined our previous blogs on growing geraniums from seed into more of a how-to on the subject. (March, 2015) Note that the older blogs remain, goofs and all.

• Growing Geraniums from Seed - 2010 - If you have the right conditions, growing seed geraniums (geraniums from seed) is relatively easy. (January 22, 2010 - a discontinued, continuing horror story)
• Growing Geraniums from Seed - 2009 - What should have been an easy "how-to" turned out to be an instructive lesson on nearly everything one can do wrong in starting geraniums from seed! (December 1, 2008 - another discontinued, continuing horror story)

Suppliers - First published November 15, 2011 - a continuing listing of trusted vendors we use (updated several times throughout the year)

Working to Save a Pea Variety - I grew out and saved a nice seed crop of a pea in danger of going extinct. But it turned out to be a patented (PVP) seed variety, so I can only use the seed for our own gardening purposes. (October 9, 2013)

Earlirouge Tomatoes - I hunted high and low for this tomato variety that is related to our favorite tomato, Moira. It turned out that I already had seed for it in frozen storage...and the twenty-five year old seed still germinated! (October 11, 2013)

A Year in Our Garden - These pages are our annual reviews of our gardening year, successes and failures included.

• 2011 - (December 28, 2011)
• 2012 - (December, 24, 2012)
• 2013 - (December, 30, 2013)
• 2014 - (December 15, 2014)
• 2015 - (December 23, 2015)
• 2016 - (December 10, 2016)
• 2017 - (December 23, 2017)
• 2018 - (December 19, 2018)
• 2019 - (December 24, 2019)

Our Best Garden Photos - Now an annual feature here on Senior Gardening. There's only a few words in the pages, as I hope the photos speak for themselves.

• 2012 - (February 6, 2019)
• 2013 - (January 5, 2014)
• 2014 - (November 6, 2014)
• 2015 - (November 4, 2015)
• 2016 - (November 7, 2016)
• 2017 - (November 14, 2017)
• 2018 - (November 3, 2018)
• 2019 - (November 4, 2019)
• 2020 - (December 8, 2020)
• 2021 - (November 20, 2021)
• 2022 - (November 2, 2022)
• 2023 - (November 26, 2023)
• 2024 - (December 5, 2024)

Flowers in the Senior Garden - A quick look at some of the spectacular flowers that grow around our veggies in the Senior Garden. (December 30, 2011)

2014 Onion Trials - Sensing that some of the hybrid onions we've grown for years may be discontinued soon, we tried nine new-to-us onion varieties this year, many of them heirloom varieties. (July 28, 2014)

Buying Guides

• The Old Guy's Shopping Guide for Gifts for Gardeners - A page of useful items that make great gifts for gardeners. (updated November, 2023)
• Shopping Guide for Gardeners - The tools we use in our garden (updated November, 2023)

Mulching with Grass Clippings - We really wouldn't have much of a garden without using grass clippings to mulch our many vegetable plots. (May 16, 2015)

End-of-Season Gardening Chores - Doing a few tasks each fall makes ones spring gardening a lot easier. (November 1, 2016)

Earliest Red Sweet Peppers - A little bit about our favorite and an endangered pepper variety (March 10, 2017)

Whither Seed Savers Exchange - Not all of the Seed Savers Exchange’s work occurs at the Heritage Farm. It’s happening every day on the farms and in the gardens of SSE’s members. It seems that the leadership of the exchange has forgotten its core. (October 9, 2017)

Time to Let Go - After my concerns about the direction of the Seed Savers Exchange were totally ignored, I decided to give up and just let my membership in the organization go for a few years. (June 4, 2018)

Contact Steve Wood, the at Senior Gardening