Bill Dugan, Executive Editor of Food Gardening Network

Welcome to the May edition of Food Gardening Magazine!

This month we’re exploring one of the most critical parts of gardening–water. Gardens need sunshine, good soil, and fresh water to thrive, and while they can be quite resilient, thankfully, too much or too little water can render even the perfect sun and soil pointless.

Add to that the fact that water is becoming a more valuable and precious resource with each passing year, and you can understand why the way we approach watering the garden is such an important topic.

Join us in exploring the A, B, Cs of watering, including conservation ideas that will ensure your garden gets the perfect amount of water every time. Plus, you don’t want to miss the delightful recipes!

Here’s a look at what we have planted in this edition of Food Gardening Magazine.

Food Gardening with Amanda articles—Food Gardening Network’s Senior Editor and Producer Amanda MacArthur is one fabulous food gardener! She takes gardening seriously, makes it fun, and delivers some great content—including companion videos to show you, not just tell you, exactly what to do. Check out these helpful articles from Amanda this month:

• 10 Herb & Vegetable Seeds to Plant in May: There’s so much you can plant in May, but these 10 herbs and vegetables prefer to go right into the ground, rather than started early and transplanted.
• Watering A to Z: Everything You Need to Know About Watering Your Garden: Get 26 facts, tips, and ideas around watering your garden, from how often to water to ways you can ensure your garden gets the perfect amount of water to several ways to conserve water.
• How to Create a Custom DIY Drip Irrigation System for Raised Beds for Under $100: For under $100, you can create a simple DIY drip irrigation system that will water your raised beds on a timer at regular intervals and while you’re away.
• Fire-Roasted Tomato Kale Soup: Easy to prepare and fun on your tastebuds, this Fire-Roasted Tomato Kale Soup uses home-“fired” tomatoes and leafy Tuscan kale, alongside fresh fennel and carrots, to soften and smooth out this hearty garden soup.
• Honoring Rain in the Garden: This article comes from our sister publication, GreenPrints Magazine. In it, writer Becky Rupp reminds us that the key to life on earth—water—comes from outer space icicles and Jurassic dinosaur pee. Truly an entertaining science lesson not to be missed!

And this issue of Food Gardening Magazine includes details on three featured foods this month—concurrently with publishing this issue of our magazine, we’re also publishing and updating three gardening guides on asparagus, carrots, and onions. As a premium member of Food Gardening Network, you get full access to the magazine and these gardening guides:

Asparagus: Asparagus is one of the first vegetables to appear in spring, and it’s easy to grow as long as you have some patience. You can’t harvest this perennial vegetable until the second year, but beyond that, you can enjoy fresh asparagus every spring forever! Find out more about growing this delightful garden veggie in Asparagus—King of the Garden!

Carrots: Carrots sometimes get a bad rap as being difficult to grow. They’re not hard to grow, but you do need the right soil preparation and a bit of patience: carrot seeds take a while to germinate, and their growing cycle is fairly long. But in the end, you’ll be so happy with the flavor of your own homegrown carrots—you’ll never go back to store-bought carrots again! Learn more in the Crunchy Carrots Guide!

Onions: Sweet. Savory. Pungent. Onions make us cry (but they don’t have to). They garnish our burgers, put zing in our salads, and spice up our soups. We grill them. Fry them. Bake them. Chop, caramelize, slice, and dice them. We can even make ice cream with them! Find out more in The Outstanding Onion Gardening Guide!

Here are some interesting tidbits about the foods you’ll find in these gardening guides to get you thinking about what you might want to plant in your garden.

• Did you know that Dutch and English settlers brought asparagus to North America as early as 1655? In 1685, one of William Penn’s advertisements for Pennsylvania included asparagus in a long list of crops that grew well in the American climate.
• Carrots come in five main types, from foot-longs to golf ball size. You can grow them pretty much anywhere they can get six to eight hours of sunlight—in open land, raised beds, or containers. The key to growing carrots well is to have loose, loamy, sandy soil that’s free of obstructions. You want to give those roots room to roam!
• Onions may be one of the earliest cultivated crops because of their convenience: they were less perishable than other foods available to early humans, they were easy to grow and easy to carry, and they thrived in a variety of climates. Onions prevented thirst and, while early humans didn’t know it, provided lots of essential nutrients.

In this edition of Food Gardening Magazine, you’ll find Gardening Guide Close-Ups that focus on asparagus, carrots, and onions to help get you started with these three foods and our gardening guides. These articles give you valuable tips and advice about these three foods, and you’ll have instant access to the premium gardening guides themselves, too. Be first to read these Gardening Guide Close-Ups and get a head start on how to grow and use these foods:

• In Growing and Enjoying Asparagus: 5 Do’s and Don’ts, learn how to get started with growing and enjoying asparagus. And you should, because once established, your asparagus garden can yield bountiful crops for up to 30 years!
• In Ways to Use Extra Carrots, discover six easy ways to ensure your carrots don’t get wasted, from better storage to tasty carrot soup!
• In Best Tips for Handling Onions, you’ll discover ways to handle, store, and prepare onions, like keeping them out of the refrigerator, for example!

And then there are the recipes you’ll find in the three gardening guides! Here are some of my favorites that are tasty, unique, and easy to make:

• Healthy Cream of Asparagus Soup: Instead of cream, this asparagus soup takes advantage of Yukon Gold potatoes and Greek yogurt to develop a rich, creamy texture sure to delight any taste buds.
• Classic Carrot Cake: This rich, flavorful recipe has the added benefit of being able to eat cake that verges on “healthy” with all those carrots. This luxurious recipe isn’t too sweet, making it perfect for a spring dessert.
• Caramelized Onions: This is more a cooking technique than a recipe, but I’ve been known to enjoy some caramelized onions on their own. They really are that good! This is a slow and low process, but the results are simply amazing.

I hope you enjoy the May 2023 issue of Food Gardening Magazine as much as we’ve enjoyed putting it together. We’re so happy to have you here! Now let’s head out to the garden!

Happy harvesting—and happy eating!

Bill Dugan
Editor & Publisher

P.S. Please enjoy this issue of Food Gardening Magazine, and let me know what you think about it by commenting below with your feedback! Your input is valuable to us and can help us make improvements.