Seed Starting Tips

If you’ve ever seen a volunteer tomato, dill or squash seedling pop up unexpectedly in your garden plot, you may think that starting seeds is as easy as dropping them in the soil and waiting. And it is – given the right temperature, moisture, soil, and passage of time. But getting...

It’s time to s...

Although it’s way too early to start tomato, and even broccoli seeds indoors in Chicago, it is the right time to start other edibles like celeriac and globe artichokes. Globe artichokes (not to be confused with Jerusalem artichokes) are a perennial plant in warmer climates (zones 7-10),...

The Three Sisters

Corn is possibly the most domesticated organism on the planet (aside from us!). Archeologists have identified domesticated corn as old as the oldest identified human settlement in the Americas, but only recently identified its wild parent, teosinte, through genetic testing. On first planting...

Digging in the Dirt

By Alexandra Nelson, U IL Extension Master Gardener You’re not supposed to call it dirt. As explained in Master Gardener training, “dirt” is what’s under your fingernails or on the knees of your jeans. That stuff in the garden is soil. Soil is just a mixture of organic remains, clay, rock...

Plants Have Stories ...

At Peterson Garden Project we love stories. We’ve told our own origin story so many times most of us can recite it in our sleep. It’s been told so often that we’ve even heard a fairly mythologized version of it that attributes our founding to people we’ve never even heard of. Stories are an...

2015 Plant Sale List...

We’re bringing back our best-selling heirloom favorites for the 2015 annual plant sale! We’ve added two hybrid tomatoes- selected for great taste and disease resistance- as well as an open-pollinated basil variety, ‘Eleonora’, which is more resistant to downy...