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Well, it's too late this year for you to get some types of potatoes in the ground, but it's definitely not too late to start thinking about a great fall crop of tasty tubers. Lucky for you, in your region, you can plant some late-maturing potato varieties in early summer, for a fall harvest of potatoes. And next season, you'll want to plant early potato varieties and midseason potato varieties a few weeks before your last spring frost date. In your area, the average last spring frost is around the end of December, so you should be able to plant potatoes at the very end of November or beginning of December. Here are a few varieties to try:

Early Potatoes: Mature in less than 90 days. ‘Irish Cobbler,’ ‘Caribe,’ ‘Red Norland,’ ‘King Harry’

Midseason Potatoes: Mature in about 100 days. ‘Yukon Gold,’ ‘Red LaSoda,’ (great for warm climates)

Late Potatoes: Mature in 110 days or more. ‘Butte’ (best in the Midwest), ‘Katahdin,’ ‘Kennebec’ (both great in the Northeast), various fingerling potatoes 

To find seed potatoes from great mail-order companies, check out our Plant and Seed Finder. You can learn more about potato cultivation in the following articles from our Archive:

* All About Growing Potatoes 

* When and How to Plant Potatoes

* One Potato, Two Potato, Fingerlings Galore! 

* Sowing Spuds 

Fertilizer companies — even those that make organic products — like to make us think we need one fertilizer for tomatoes, another for flowers, another for “vegetables,” another for lawns. But unless you have had a soil test (most of us have not), then there is no way to know what the optimum fertilizer mix is for your soil. So your best best is to use any fertilizer labeled “all purpose” or “for vegetables,” if that is what you are growing. And by the way, you don’t need to buy fertilizer, reall…

Funny you should ask, Madeline, because I just posted an article about exactly that topic! I hope you find the information in How to Organize a Community Seed Swap helpful. And to learn much more about organic gardening, please check out our extensive gardening archive. It's absolutely chock-full of expert organic gardening advice. New gardeners might be especially interested in our "All About Growing" articles. More advanced gardeners should take a look at our "Garden Know-How" articles.

The mention of black walnut trees makes many gardeners groan, because all of the plants parts, from leaf to root tip, contain a substance called juglone that causes severe stunting of many plants, including tomato. In fall, black walnut hulls become a car-bashing, foot-bruising problem, too. After you harvest the nuts, you're left with that pile of tarry hulls. Is it really safe to compost them?

Thanks to on-farm research done by Chris Chmiel in Athens, Ohio, the answer is yes. Looking at all the…

Blister beetles (Epicauta vittata and other closely related species) appear in swarms in summer, just as tomatoes, beans and other crops start looking good. This native species does one service — the larvae eat grasshopper eggs — but then the adults strip leaves from a dozen different plants. Hand-picking them can be dangerous, because a toxin in the beetles’ bodies can irritate the skin. Blister beetles often drop to the ground and play dead when disturbed, so the best way to collect them is to…

The answer to both questions is yes, but the key factor is “local.” Fruit tree varieties vary tremendously in how many chill hours they require, which is the average number of hours when temperatures are below 45 degrees. If you plant a low-chill variety, it may start blooming so early in spring that the flowers and fruit are damaged from freezing. Varieties with high-chill requirements fruit poorly when grown in climates where winters are mild.

Local nurseries stay in business by selling climate…

The bean you are seeking is probably the white tepary bean (Phaseolus acutifolius), which has been grown by Native American tribes of southern Arizona and northern Mexico for thousands of years. The tribal name Papago (“bean people”) was used for many years, but in the 1980s, the tribe’s actual name, Tohono O’odham (“desert people”), became popular instead. The 24,000 people of the Tohono O’odham Nation grow several types of dry-climate beans, but if the bean you seek is small and flattened, it …

CCA-treated wood, often called pressure-treated wood, is very common, and you are right to be concerned about it affecting your garden. The three main chemicals that can leach into your soil — copper, chromium and arsenic — are probably concentrated within a few inches of the base of your fence. Studies that analyzed the chemical content of soil inside raised beds framed with CCA-treated wood found high concentrations of arsenic in soil within 2 inches of the wood and normal levels of arsenic 2 …

If slugs are a huge problem, you need to remove their habitat by raking up your mulch in spring and composting it. Then, start your garden in open soil, and wait until early summer to add a fresh blanket of mulch.

You still may have problems because your soil may be well stocked with slug eggs. A few years ago, a U.S. Department of Agriculture scientist found that crabgrass contains a substance toxic to slugs. Since then, many backyard slug slayers have experimented with crabgrass cookies, which …

Many people use shredded non-glossy paper in mulch or compost, where it typically degrades in a single season. Since paper is a wood product, you should regard it as a high-carbon soil additive, similar to sawdust. When using it to make compost, you will need to add plenty of nitrogen-rich green material. When using it as mulch, most gardeners cover it with a layer of organic mulch, such as leaves.

Laser printers use toner rather than ink, which usually contains plastics or waxes. The residual ef…