Peaches usually come to harvest from mid- to late summer. Peach fruit requires 3 to 5 months to reach harvest from the time flowers are pollinated. Peach trees have fruit producing lives of about 12 years.

Peaches are divided into freestone and clingstone cultivars. The flesh of a freestone peach will separate easily from the seed. The flesh of a clingstone peach does not. Freestone peaches are best for eating fresh out of hand. Clingstone peaches are a good choice for cooking and preserving.

The flesh of the peach fruit is most often yellow, but some cultivars have white flesh. White flesh, like yellow flesh, is tender and tasty.

Half a peach poached in syrup served with a scoop of vanilla ice cream topped with raspberry purée: peach Melba.

Barely chilled peach slices served with sugar and cream: peach Mom.

Auguste Escoffier--the most famous chef of his time--created peach Melba in 1892 in honor of the Australian opera singer Nellie Melba.

Peach Mom has been served much longer. It remains a favorite.

The success of any peach dish is a tender and sweet peach. The key to finding a tender and sweet peach is a gentle squeeze. A soft-fleshed peach is ready for the table or eating out of hand. It will be sweet and juicy and melt in your mouth.

Yield. An apple tree can yield from 75 to more than 130 pounds of fruit each year.

Apple varieties. There are nearly 10,000 different kinds or varieties of apples. About 7,000 varieties or cultivars grow in North America. Only about 1,000 of these of these are grown commercially or in home gardens.

Some apple varieties are "sports" or accidental mutations of another variety and others are bred--created by apple breeders through cross selection. Not every sport is productive and worthy of growing.

Apple tree sizes. An apple tree can be a standard or full-sized tree which grows to 30 feet tall and can take 6 years to bear its first fruit or a dwarf or semi-dwarf trees which can grow from 6 to 20 feet tall. Most dwarf and semi-dwarf trees are grafted on a rootstock which keeps them small. Dwarf and semi-dwarf trees produce full-sized apples in about three years.

Sierra Beauty, Rhode Island Greening, Arkansas Black, Gala from New Zealand, Fuji from Japan: if you really want to appreciate fresh apples, get to know the apples that grow in your region.

Apples for eating out of hand, apples for baking and cooking, apples for sauce and juice, apples to serve with savory dishes and apples for dessert: there is an apple for every use. Apples that ripen early, apples that ripen mid-season, and apples that ripen late for eating right into winter: there is an apple for every season.

There are more than 7,000 varieties of apples. The most popular ones, you know: Red Delicious, Golden Delicious, Granny Smith, and McIntosh, are shipped around the country and around the world. But, there are many little known but delicious regional favorites available at farm stores or farmers' markets.

Apples range in color from yellow to bright yellow-green to green to almost every shade of red. Apple textures range from tender to crisp. Apples can be sweet or tart or range in flavor complexity from simple to complex. The flavors of an apple can vary from pineapple to bananas, apricots, strawberries, roses, cloves, spices, wine, nuts and berries.

There are apples that actually taste like where you live. The flesh of an apple can be cream-colored or white or yellow.

In the course of a year, there are actually three apple harvests: an early-season harvest, a mid-season harvest, and a late-season harvest. The harvest for early-season apple varieties begins in mid-summer and peaks in late summer. The harvest for mid-season apples begins in late summer and peaks in early autumn, and the harvest for late-season apples begins in early autumn and peaks in late autumn--and sometimes runs right into winter. Late-season apples can be stored at cool temperatures and stay fresh right into spring.

To avoid tomato cracking keep the soil evenly moist all growing season. Do not allow the soil to completely dry out. To check soil moisture, insert your finger into the soil 3 or 4 inches--your finger should come away just moist, not wet or dry. For mature tomato plants it is acceptable for the top inch of soil to dry--but the soil below should remain moist allowing plants to draw up soil moisture consistently.

One way to keep soil moisture even is to complete an even watering and then mulch around your tomatoes. Mulching will slow soil moisture evaporation. An alternative to mulching would be laying plastic sheeting over the planting beds and then watering at the base of the plant. Mulch and plastic can be applied after the soil warms in spring.

Blossom end rot is caused by calcium deficiency in the fruit. That deficiency can be caused by a lack of calcium in the soil or the plant's inability to draw up calcium from the soil--most often caused by a lack of water. Blossom end rot is aggravated by drought or uneven soil moisture. Soil moisture taken up by plant roots delivers calcium to plant cells or by the excessive application of fertilizer, usually nitrogen or potassium.

• Amaranth: green leaves used as vegetables; use thinnings raw in salad, steam like spinach.

• Moth bean: nutty flavor, popular in India.

• Garbanzo bean, also called chickpea: bean for making humus and use in salads.

• Tepary bean: grows in desert and near desert conditions, a common bean.

• Black-eyed pea, also called cowpeas: use bean to make vegetable soup.

• Yard-long asparagus bean: long, thin, crunchy pod often used in Chinese cooking.

• Snap beans and pole beans: require a short growing season and can draw on residual soil water.

• Chard

• Black Aztec corn: use black kernels for roasting.

• Eggplant

• Mustard greens: tangy, spicy salad green.

To grow and learn about other legumes: click here.

Description. Lentils are a hardy annual; they are a member of the pea family. Lentils grow on sparsely branched vines from 18 to 24 inches tall. The lentil has small whitish to light purple pea-like flowers. Pods are small, broad, flat and contain one or two flat, lens-shaped seed that are green or yellow to orange, red or brown.

Yield. Plant 4 to 8 lentils per household member.

Site. Plant lentils in full sun. Lentils prefer loose, well-drained soil rich in organic matter. They will grow in poor soil. Lentils grow best in a soil with a pH between 6.0 and 6.5. Add aged compost to planting beds before sowing.

Snap beans or green beans harvest: Green beans are ready for harvest when they are about the size of pencil. The seeds inside will be just visible--they'll look like small bumps. Depending on the variety you have planted, snap beans will be ready for picking 50 to 65 days after planting. For a big harvest, pick green beans every day or at least every couple of days. If you allow beans to mature, the plant will stop producing new beans. So pick regularly for an extended harvest. Pinch of cut off beans; be careful not to pull beans or you may uproot the whole plant. Aging pods will turn yellow and leathery; streaked pods are mealy inside.

Green beans storage: If you can't keep up with the snap bean harvest at the table, you can freeze or pickle green beans. To freeze green beans, wash the beans and snap off the ends. Cut the beans into 1 inch pieces or slice lengthwise. Blanch the beans for 2 to 3 minutes. Chill. Pack in freezer bags. (To blanch beans, add 1½ to 2 inches of water to the kettle and heat to boiling. Place the colander with beans into the kettle and heat through 2 to 3 minutes.)

Both the fruit and juice of the passion fruit combines well with other fruits and juices, especially tropical fruits. In addition to being eaten fresh, passion fruit can be used to make preserves, sauces and ice cream.

Passion fruit has a flavor reminiscent of guava. The fruit is about the size of a hen's egg with a thick hard shell and rich gelatinous yellow-orange pulp containing soft edible seeds.

Passion fruit can be added to fruit salads and used as a topping for pavlova (meringue cake) and cheesecake and made into a fruit mousse. Cooked with sugar it can be made into thick syrup and used as a topping for shave ice or mixed with water and ice to make an ade.

There are bananas for eating out of hand, and there are bananas for cooking, and then there bananas for eating out of hand and for cooking. If you think of a banana as simply a long, tapered, yellow fruit then you are missing out on some very colorful and very tasty bananas. Some bananas are eaten raw for a sweet snack or dessert, but others can be cooked and served just like a savory vegetable.

Bananas, in the market, are not as predictable as they once were. It is not unusual to have a choice. There more than 500 varieties of bananas. Here are more than a handful of banana varieties that are worth a try and not difficult to find:

Exactly what flavor you ascribe to the plantain will, no doubt, have something to do with how it's been prepared. The plantain is a fruit--a very close cousin of the banana--that is eaten as a vegetable, except when it's served as a dessert.

Plantains can be chunked and cooked in soups or stews. They can be sliced and fried or mashed like a potato. They can be boiled or sautéed and served as a side dish, and they can be baked in their skins and served as a dessert.The message is clear: the plantain is versatile and can land on either the sweet or savory side of the table.

To plan succession crops you must know two things:

• The number of weeks of growing season in your garden. The length of the growing season is the number weeks between the last frost in spring and the first frost in autumn. The local cooperative extension office can tell you the length of the growing season in your location or you can ask an experienced gardener at a nearby garden center.

• The number of weeks each crop you wish to grow requires to germinate, grow, and reach harvestable size. The chart below will help you make these calculations. Note the number of weeks a particular crop require in the garden can vary by variety--for example, some varieties of corn require more days to reach harvest than others.

So here is your succession cropping planning formula:

Number of days to harvest for Crop 1 + Number of days to harvest for Crop 2 = Total number of days in the garden. You can add Crop 3 as long as the total continues to be less than the number of days in the growing season.

For example:

• A row of carrots is planted in early spring: after the carrots are harvested in early summer, the vacated row is re-planted with snap beans for harvest in early fall. The two crops are grown on the same ground.

Or:

• A garden space is divided into three sections: a first sowing of radishes is planted in the first section; in 10 days, the second section is planted with radishes; in another 10 days the third section is planted with radishes. Successive sowings of the same crop are made in different locations at 10-day intervals.

Succession planting allows for a continuous, uninterrupted harvest. Succession planting is sometimes called relay cropping.

Succession planting is different than rotation cropping. Rotation cropping is the practice of not planting the same crop in the same place for at least three successive years. Crop rotation ensures that the same plants or plants from the same family will not deplete the same soil nutrients year after year.

For broccoli growing tips see How to Grow Broccoli or Broccoli Growing Success Tips at the bottom of this post.

Here are common broccoli growing problems with cures and controls:

Seedlings fail to emerge from soil; seedlings are eaten; roots are tunneled. Cabbage maggot is a small gray-white, legless worm to ⅓-inch long; adult is the cabbage root fly, looks like a housefly. Flies lay eggs in the soil near the seedling or plant. Maggots will tunnel into roots leaving brown scars; some plants may be honeycombed with slimy tunnels. Exclude flies with floating row covers. Remove and dispose of damaged plants. Apply lime or wood ashes around the base of plants; time planting to avoid insect growth cycle. Plant a bit later when the weather is drier.