Currants are an ideal edible: perennial, ornamental, and deer-resistant!

Add currant bushes to your garden for an easy, deer-resistant edible that also grows in part-shade.

If you live in USDA zones 3-8 currants are a must for your garden. In our new video, Tricia plants currants and gives tips on getting the best harvests.

CURRANTS BRING NEW FLAVORS FROM YOUR GARDEN TO YOUR TABLE

These attractive 3’-‘5’ bushes will be covered in summer with glistening red berries, heralded for their simultaneously sweet and tart flavors. Enjoy them fresh or preserve them in jellies, jams, and cordials.

SHADE GARDENERS CAN GROW CURRANTS

If you’re in a climate with hot summer sun, currants will grow best in part-shade or afternoon shade.

LIVE WITH DEER? YOU CAN STILL GROW EDIBLES

Good news! Although deer will browse their way through most plants we want to eat, they show little interest in currants. So if you have filled your garden with deer-resistant plants, now you can add some edibles to that group.

Rhubarb is another deer-resistant edible that grows well in sun or part-shade.

Artichokes are deer-resistant but need to be in the full sun section of your garden, where they will put on a dramatic show.

TRAIN CURRANTS AS AN ESPALIER OF BRANCHES AGAINST A FENCE

Vern Nelson in The Oregonian has directions to espalier currants to act as a screen or a decorative accent.

Lee Reich, author of Landscaping with Fruit, espaliers currants along the fences of his vegetable garden and writes appreciatively of their easy maintenance and “bright red fruit, which dangle from branches like translucent jewels.”

GROW CURRANTS IN CONTAINERS

The natural growth habit and height of currants makes them an excellent choice for container gardening.

To learn all about growing currants (and many other edible plants) in containers, we recommend The Bountiful Container.

ALL PEACEFUL VALLEY CURRANT BUSHES ARE DISEASE RESISTANT

We only sell disease resistant currants. They are resistant to the White Pine Blister Rust that made currants a less popular plant in U.S. gardens.

For more information about currants read our Growing Guide, and articles from Iowa State University Extension, and Cornell University.

Eat your currants in front of the deer!

Strawberries are a beautiful and delicious addition to your garden. Follow our easy steps to keep your beds in top form.

Once you have a strawberry bed going, you need to renovate and renew it every year, to maintain healthy yields.

Strawberries are vigorous plants. As they increase you want to keep the beds from becoming overcrowded (which would reduce yield and could encourage diseases).

It sounds rather sedate when you read that “strawberry plants spread by sending out runners”.

To get the real sense of those runners, think 50-yard dash if you have June-bearer strawberries. Enjoy these athletes of the vegetable kingdom, but do some post-season training to keep them in check.

Everbearer and Day Neutral strawberries produce runners too, in the Junior Varsity for speed, but they also need supervision.

Your coaching duties begin after the last strawberry harvest.

STRAWBERRY HARVEST DATES

June-bearers or Short Day will produce over a 3 - 4 week period. It won’t be in June if you live in Southern California or Florida; your strawberry season could be as early as March. For cool climates, harvest will be closer to June.

Everbearers and Day Neutral strawberries produce throughout the summer, either in distinct crops or continuously.

DO A SOIL TEST AFTER THE FINAL HARVEST

Strawberries grow best in slightly acid soil with a pH of 6.0 - 6.5. Test your soil at the end of the harvest. If you need to make your soil more acid, add a phosphorus rich fertilizer. Since strawberries are also fond of potassium, look for a fertilizer that is high in the last two numbers, like Dr. Earth Bud and Bloom Booster.

Many organic fertilizer options are waiting for you in the Find Fertilizer Solutions guide on our Fertilizer page; for instance, click on Potassium or Phosphorus for your range of choices.

CUT & THIN STRAWBERRY PLANTS RIGHT AFTER HARVEST

Blow the whistle after the last harvest.

All varieties of strawberry plants should be cut back to a height of 2 inches. How you cut depends on the planting method you’re using.

Pull any weeds before you start renovation.

Matted Row Method

June-bearers are often planted with this method, and the runners spread all over the bed. If planted on the ground, it’s easy to cut the plants back with a lawn mower set high enough to leave 2” of stems above the crowns.

Matted rows in a raised bed should be cut back by hand.

Popular row widths on the ground, for easy picking, are 18” - 24”, with 24” paths between the rows. By the time of harvest the rows will have runners making them wider than 24”. Narrow the row to a pickable size again by hoeing the runners from the edges, reducing the row to about 12” across. Or if the “mother” plants in the center of the row are declining in vigor, hoe out the center of the row and leave two rows of “daughter” plants on the edges, as the basis for two new rows.

After you hoe, pull out the least healthy plants, leaving 5 or 6 robust plants for each square foot.

Hill Method

Hilling is popular for Everbearer and Day Neutral strawberries. You will not have as many runners to deal with here. Use garden scissors or shears to cut the plants back to 2” above the crowns.

*Whichever cutting method you use, rake away the cut leaves and compost them, if your plants are disease-free.

FERTILIZE

Choose your fertilizer according to your soil test results, apply, brush off any on the leaves, and water in well.

CULTIVATE

If you’ve been using organic matter for mulch, turn it in to the soil (if you can do so without damaging shallow roots) or add it to your compost pile.

Add 1/2” of compost around the crowns to encourage new roots.

Keep the bed weeded and then mulch it before the first frost.

ROTATE

Follow good organic gardening practices and rotate your crops regularly. Strawberries are particularly susceptible to the soil disease verticillium wilt. To avoid this disease:

1) Rotate the strawberries to a new location every 3 years.
2) Do not plant strawberries in a bed where you recently grew solanaceous plants (tomatoes, eggplants, potatoes, peppers).

FOR MORE INFO on starting a new bed, watch our video of Tricia setting up irrigation and red plastic mulch, then planting out a strawberry bed.

We send a Strawberries Planting & Growing Guide with each purchase of our strawberry plants, with details on how to heel in, plant, and harvest the many kinds of strawberries we carry.

We read all the new books on organic and edible gardening, and for strawberry growers we especially recommend two books:

* Grow the Best Strawberries, an all-strawberries-all-the-time 32 page booklet in the reliable Storey Country Wisdom Bulletin series.

* The new guide to all things fruity, The Fruit Gardener’s Bible, is a big, colorful tome. If you already own The Vegetable Gardener’s Bible you’ll understand why we’re excited about this hot-off-the-presses book.

Valuable university articles are Growing Strawberries from Purdue, Growing Strawberries from the University of Illinois, and Strawberries in the Home Garden from North Carolina State.

Keep your team of strawberry plants thriving, year in and year out.

Walk through the rainbow Hall of Seeds in our double-length booth at the San Francisco Flower & Garden Show.

For the first time ever  we will be at the San Francisco Flower & Garden Show this spring!  We invite you to join us there Wednesday through Sunday, March 21-25.

We’re looking forward to seeing our Bay Area friends!

Parking’s a breeze since the show is actually in San Mateo now, at the San Mateo Event Center near Highways 92 and 101.

We’ll be packing up thousands of our beautiful seed packets to create a rainbow Hall of Seeds in our double-length booth in the Plant & Flower Market section at the show. Come riffle through the seed packets in person.

At the show we will have over 250 varieties of certified organic vegetable seeds (many are heirloom varieties) and over 80 open-pollinated flower seed varieties.

Stop by to:

*Enjoy discounted show pricing on seeds and organic fertilizers
*Take home ideas from our demonstration patio and wall gardens
*Watch highlights of our weekly organic gardening video series
*Meet our video star, Tricia
*Ask our knowledgeable staff about fertilizing organically, and natural pest control methods
*Sign the petition to require GMO food labeling in California

We’ll create a fun souvenir for you, on the spot.

The San Francisco Flower & Garden Show is one of the top three garden shows in the country and the 2012 theme is Gardens for a Green Earth.

Get your Early Bird discount tickets now, and come visit us!

Garlic Heads
Olive Oil

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Peel the outer layers off of the garlic heads. Leave the cloves connected and in their wrappers. Cut off the first quarter to half an inch of the cloves. Place the heads in a muffin tin and coat them with olive oil. Cover each of the heads with aluminium foil. Bake the heads for thirty to thirty-five minutes, or until the cloves are soft.

Let the roasted heads cool and then they are ready for eating straight or using in recipes. Try smearing the softened clove on bread. Mix it with cream cheese for a garlic spread. Add it to salad dressings. Mix it into an alfredo sauce for pasta or chicken. Experiment, the possibilities are endless!

The best way to an organic gardener’s heart is…

There are oh, so many words that could finish that sentence. Give us your  suggestions in the comments!

This Valentine’s Day we recommend two ways to an organic gardener’s heart: both are red, luscious, and romantic to share.

Did you guess?

Strawberries and raspberries.

Get your gardening Valentine some strawberry plants, just $3.99 for a bundle of 25. At those prices you can buy enough for a nice June crop (June bearing) and also pick up some everbearing for sweetness all summer long.

Red raspberry plants are only $9.99 for a bundle of 5, to give you berries for years to come. Raspberries are one of the easiest ways to grow fruit in your garden, as you’ll see in our new video.

Red raspberries need some serious garden space, but strawberries can grow happily in containers.

What do you think? More creative than roses and chocolates?

Got to have chocolate? How about this?

Of course, if you’re a real romantic you can wrap it all up in red mulching film.

While you’re wrapping, please share your  ways to an organic gardener’s heart…

And if this is not a Happy Valentine’s Day we have something for that too. Pick up a seed packet of ‘Love Lies Bleeding’ Amaranth.