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My gardening ambitions increase each year. This year we planted more than a dozen herbs including lesser known items such as sorrel, borage, chamomile, pineapple sage and the usual suspects like basil, thyme, oregano et al. We planted many types of kohl: cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, broccoli and collards, which the slugs enjoy thoroughly. I planted pumpkins (grotesquely large and petit ones too), watermelon, cantaloupe and raspberries. Rhubarb came back to balance out the sweet stuff. Oh. right, there's asparagus, beans, peas and fennel too. And onions and garlic.

We planted, intentionally and through accidental compost volunteers, 16 types of tomatoes. This is where the favorite item comes into play: Tomatillos de Milpa. These purple tomatillos are as sweet as a grape with a firm flesh and circus-like skin, creating purple flags where the paper parts and exposes the flesh to the sun. It is a prolific bearer of fruit and seducer or pollinators.

I have a raised-bed herb garden that is a real pleasure for me. I love going out the kitchen door at dinner time and harvesting basil, cilantro, mint, oregano, etc....

The seven tomato pants in large pots on the patio are another story. I'm averaging about one tomato per pot per week. They appear to have wilt disease. WHAT am I doing wrong?

lori in Pittsburgh

Having a small herb garden in the window of my downtown apartment has quite honestly changed my cooking and refocused me on using farm-fresh and seasonal produce as the BASIS (and not just an occasional "frill") for my food. I'm now looking to buy a plot of land for no reason other than to plant a garden. Your book, as with much of your writing, helped inspire the dream.

Fruit trees and tomatoes. Something other than cacti.

I think tomatoes are the most rewarding - they taste so much better from your own garden & and you get a lot of them. I also find growing herbs and chives to be among the most useful - they can be used in so many recipes.

Herbs! So expensive in the grocery store, and such poor quality. And at the farmer's market they come in much larger batches than I want to use before they go bad.