Now that vegetable gardening season is upon us, you might be shopping for the right seeds for your garden. You’ll have the option of choosing “heirloom” or “hybrid”, “GMO” or “Non-GMO” seed varieties.

Read the seed packet or catalog and make sure what you buy is labeled open-pollinated or heirloom, not hybrid. My grandfather grew what we now call heirloom tomatoes: time-tested varieties that breed ...

I maintain that buying seeds is truly the best kind of shopping—seeds are relatively affordable and are literally bursting with potential. Quite frankly, I think seeds are a miracle; you get a small ...

As a teenager I enjoyed helping my parents in the vegetable garden, but I would always dread when the abundance of our harvest moved inside and my mother began the long and arduous task of processing ...

Coulter sets out to provide readers with "a sampler for heirloom seeds" to learn about and grow. Each of her four chapters focuses on a single season, with an informative essay on its tasks and ...

The word “heirloom” likely conjures an image of the past, and when it comes to growing food, the implication is mostly accurate. But while some try to define heirloom cultivars by age — at least 50 ...

We're not shy about our affinity for the Cherokee Purple, a purplish package of sweet, acid and savory tomato greatness. But every year, the Cherokee Purple's preeminence (in our mind, anyway) is ...

Mike Prochaska Jr. has grown purple tomatoes, and peppers shaped like spaceships. The colors and shapes are neat, but the best part is the taste. "No doubt, the flavor is what makes them marketable," ...

As a new season of the year approaches, novice gardeners who have leftover seeds might wonder if they should toss out their packets or hold onto them for next year. This could be especially of ...

Don't miss the big stories. Like us on Facebook. As a boy in the 1950s, I knew there were two kinds of tomatoes: deep red, plump and tasty ones my grandfather grew, and the kind that came four in a ...