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Charlotte Scott San Marzano Tomato: The Sauce Tomato Everyone Tries to Imitate San Marzano is the most famous sauce tomato in the world, an elongated, thin-skinned plum tomato prized for sweet, meaty flesh, low acidity, and few seeds. Chefs build pizza sauce around it, home cooks pay a premium for the canned version, and gardeners plant it … Read more
Sungold Tomato: The Orange Cherry Tomato Gardeners Plant First Sungold is a golden-orange cherry tomato that has become the benchmark for sweetness in the home garden. Its bite-size fruits ripen early, hang in long clusters, and taste so sweet and tropical that many gardeners eat them straight off the vine before they ever reach the … Read more
Cuphea: The Hummingbird Plant That Doubles as an Oil Crop Cuphea is a genus of tropical and warm-temperate plants best known to gardeners as cigar plants, firecracker plants, and Mexican heather, and to hummingbirds as an all-season nectar bar. Its small, tubular flowers bloom nonstop from late spring until frost, and the plants ask for … Read more
The Sedge Genus That Quietly Does Everything Carex is one of the largest plant genera on Earth, a group of grass-like perennials called sedges that grow in nearly every habitat from mountaintops to coastal sand dunes. Most gardeners walk past them without a second look, which is a shame, because few plants offer so much … Read more
Determinate tomatoes are the compact, bush-type plants that grow to a set size, set fruit on the ends of their shoots, and ripen most of the crop in a short stretch. They’re also called bush tomatoes, and they’re the reason a gardener with a patio, a small bed, or a canning project can grow tomatoes … Read more
Indeterminate tomato varieties are the vining tomatoes that keep growing, flowering, and ripening fruit all season until frost shuts them down. Where a determinate plant stops at a set size and delivers most of its crop in a few weeks, an indeterminate plant keeps adding new stem, new flower clusters, and new tomatoes for months. … Read more
Determinate vs indeterminate tomatoes is the single most useful distinction on a seed packet, because it tells you how big the plant will get, how much work it needs, and when the fruit will arrive. Every tomato variety falls into one of these 2 growth habits, or lands in a middle category called semi-determinate, and … Read more
The Fragrant Shrub With a Famous Reputation for Being Fussy Gardenia is one of the most beloved fragrant shrubs in the American South, prized for waxy white blooms whose sweet, spicy scent can drift across an entire yard on a warm evening. It’s also one of the most notoriously temperamental, a plant that rewards the … Read more
Bee balm is a North American native perennial in the mint family, grown for shaggy, tubular flower heads that draw hummingbirds, butterflies, and bumble bees from midsummer into fall. Found naturally in woodlands, meadows, and floodplains, it was named for Nicolás Monardes, a 16th-century Spanish physician, and its common name comes from an old use … Read more
Bottle tree describes a genuinely remarkable group of Australian trees built around one of the more elegant survival strategies found anywhere in the plant world: a swollen, bulbous trunk that stores water during the wet season and slowly draws on that reserve to survive months of drought. The most dramatic species in the genus look … Read more