One Seed Chicago wants to help us all garden together - but you have to help pick what we grow. more ›

Walking around Brew & Grow's sparks ideas. You'll find yourself motivated to take on a roster of new homegrown projects, from growing your own greens hydroponically to brewing your own beer. more ›

It's a fantasy dream for gardeners and localvores - if only our backyard looked like this. more ›

Getting Fresh is a seasonal exploration of fresh herbs. From cultivation to cooking, join us as we get our hands dirty and add a little extra spice to life. If you have any favorite uses for the herbs we cover or questions, please share them in the comments section. more ›

Vermicomposting: It means composting your food waste at home with the help of worms, and it's a clean, easy and effective way to produce nutrient rich soil that'll kick your backyard garden into overdrive without any help from fertilizers or other chemicals. Local vermicomposter Dana McKenzie Lee, who by day works in sales for a compostable-products manufacturer, recently walked us through the process of setting up and maintaining a compost bin powered by worms. more ›

Getting Fresh is a seasonal exploration of fresh herbs. From cultivation to cooking, join us as we get our hands dirty and add a little extra spice to life. more ›

The Peterson Garden Project (which is hosting the Chicagoist garden plot for the second year in a row) is having a gala fundraiser on Thursday, May 26th at Architectural Artifacts. Things kick off at 7 PM, and the event will have food provided by City Provisions, drinks poured by vinejoy and Koval Distillery, live music, a silent auction for restaurant gift certificates, and more. Best of all, we're giving away two tickets - a $150 value! more ›

It's been said that chefs are the new rock stars. The most media savvy chefs, from Food Network mainstays to the chefs who are only known by one name, are successful because they sell their fans on a lifestyle: if you cook and entertain according to their guidelines, your life will be enriched. When a chef reaches the level of celebrity of Rick Bayless, with the tv show and the accolades and the endorsements and the cookbooks and the pop culture afterglow of being the first "Top Chef Master," a fawning cult of personality is certain to follow. At that level, like in politics, control of the message and the brand is paramount. more ›

Can you believe it's only been 6 weeks since we planted the garden? Everything we planted has come up wonderfully, and we're finally starting to get a real harvest. Our first tomatoes turned red this week, baby jalapeno peppers are hanging on the plants, and all of the bush beans have flowers. We've already harvested lettuce and radishes twice and the new crops are sprouting! As we mentioned before, our only minor failure was our carrots, but even they have rallied and are now coming up strong. Take a look at our first all-garden salad! It was very tasty. more ›

Last time we checked in with our Victory garden, it was nothing but a bare patch of recently-planted soil. We were quite worried that, due to our spat of early-June monsoons, the garden would be washed out and our plants would drown. Despite our trepidation, almost everything turned out just perfectly. This weekend, we harvested our first crop of French breakfast radishes and transplanted some tomatoes and jalapeno peppers, per the suggestions of some readers. The only failure was our carrots, which didn't seem to sprout at all. more ›

With the long, sunny days and stormy weather, our tobacco plants are doing great. They're over three feet tall at this point, with large, leafy foliage and thick, firm stems. In fact they're doing so well that they've begun to flower. We've picked the buds off all but one of the plants (as we intend to harvest them as a crop, rather than grow them for ornamentation). Growing flowers will sap the plant's energy, and it will focus on flowering instead of producing leaves. Tobacco is an ornamental plant as well as a cash crop, so either option is fine, depending on your gardening goals. We also added a bit of fertilizer to the pots, as tobacco is a heavy-feeding species. more ›

We've been talking the locavore talk for years, advocating local produce, farmer's markets, freezing your own food and gardening. But here is our dirty little secret: we've never put a seed in the ground in our entire life. Never. We've read all the books about young hipsters becoming organic farmers, and acted like we knew what we were doing, but it was all a bluff. No more! more ›

Usually tenants are appreciative when their landlord wants to spruce up the place a bit, but the Chicago Bears declined the Chicago Park District's request to replace the natural sod at Soldier Field with an artificial surface. more ›

It's been a few weeks since we last checked in our tobacco crop, and they've grown quite a bit. With the days getting longer and the weather set to warm up soon, we'll be moving our plants outside into fresh air and better sunlight. In the meantime, though, they've gotten too big for the cells we planted them in. Over the weekend, we repotted the plants, using larger pots and fresh soil, so they can grow a more developed root system and get bigger before we move them outside. more ›

ChicagoNow's Megan Cottrell wrote an excellent piece about the Chicago Avenue garden at Cabrini Green's southern tip that's run by Fourth Presbyterian Church's "Chicago Lights" outreach program. Cottrell reports on some of the relationships developing in the garden between Old Town and Cabrini Green residents, as well as the struggles faced in getting Cabrini residents to take part in the project. (via Windy Citizen) more ›

Chilly weather be damned, we're focusing on spring. That means planting stuff, and for some that means planting stuff native to Illinois. Native trees and shrubs are more likely to thrive than non-native horticultural specimen, and they're better for native wildlife, too.
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