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

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 ›

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 ›

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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