My mom taught me early on that if you want to make a delicious dinner, you'll have to chop onions and garlic. They're staples in most kitchens, and with good reason: They're easy to store, easy to grow and full of amazing flavor. Alliums also have their own unique growing conditions: A long season resulting in fat, heavy-skinned bulbs. If you planted yours in April, they may just be maturing now. Here's how to dig them up and store them without damage.

Whether you love summer or hate it, one thing's for sure: It will end, and that end is only a couple of months away. Smart gardeners are already preparing for the change in seasons, by planning and planting fall crops. Autumn is a perfect time for a second round on your cool-weather plants: Greens, peas, carrots, beets... With good planning, you can enjoy garden-fresh food until the snow falls.

“Lettuce is like conversation," wrote humorist Charles Dudley Warner. "It must be fresh and crisp, so sparkling that you scarcely notice the bitter in it." As the weather heats up, lettuce tends to become acrid, tough and sun-bleached, eventually bolting or going to seed. Luckily for fans of summer salads, there are a few tricks to keeping your greens tender and refreshing through all but the biggest heat waves.

With all the oohing and aahing over summer garden darlings—those delightful tomatoes, berries, peaches and melons, we often overlook another very versatile summer fruit: The pepper. Eat them raw, add them to just about any dish, and make the finest pepper relishes, sauces and jellies to last you until next year. However you like them, there's no shortage of uses.

Hot peppers—while wildly flavorful and feats-of-strength in-and-of themselves—actually serve a very important function. They grow in many hot equatorial climates and can kill certain bacteria, making them a practical tool in thwarting food borne illness. They also keep us from overeating—spicy food is only tolerable in smaller bites, and taking longer to eat allows the body time to know that it's full. Here's a look at some of our favorite peppers from the mild-at-heart to the seriously-too-hot-to-handle. 

Gardening doesn't usually make the news -- but when it does, it can be surprisingly scandalous. Take the two recent cases, one in Michigan and one in British Columbia, where residents were cited and threatened with jail time for growing vegetables in their front yards.

Let's get one thing straight: You're really not lazy. You're just busy, and the last thing you want to do is crouch in the hot sun for hours pulling weeds. Honey, I feel your pain. Here are a few tricks to get your garden in order fast, so you can move on with your life.

Those juicy, yummy, unbelievably perfect garden tomatoes are not going to be here much longer, so don't squander your bounty! Make some incredible dishes (and desserts!) with your heirlooms, plums, beefsteaks and those cute cherry tomatoes. Even as you enjoy them today, there are plenty of easy ways to savor the flavor when the season has long faded into Christmas shopping and the dreaded subzeros. Try these eleven ideas to make the most out of your garden of love tomatoes.

Can you really blame inquisitive and hungry neighborhood residents for sizing up your garden and perhaps sampling a few particularly enticing tomatoes or peppers? If given the chance to enjoy a fresh from the vine meal with little or no struggle, you’d probably leap at the chance to crunch and run, too. This presents quite a predicament for the well-intentioned gardener who prefers to work with Mother Nature’s creatures rather than against them. How can the fruits of one’s labor be protected without losing a significant portion to critters that go bump in the night – all without harming an ever-lovin’ hair or feather on their heads?