My vegetable pick of the week: Red Mini Bell peppers.

One of my favorite vegetable plants in my container garden last summer was a crop of adorable mini bell peppers.

These miniature versions of red bell peppers made gardening (and eating) fun.

I selected mini bells to add to my other pepper selections because I haven’t had good luck growing full-size bell peppers. I blame that on having a short growing season combined with fickle spring weather.

But these minis meant sweet pepper success!

I started several miniature bell pepper plants from seed and waited until mid-June to transplant them into the garden. Night-time temperatures weren’t consistently warm enough for planting earlier.

Each plant grew to about 24 inches in containers in my small-space garden and took only 60 days to start producing peppers. Each pepper was only several inches tall and wide, but the flesh was tender, sweet, and quite flavorful.

I asked and gardeners answered. Here’s a list of their top tomato recommendations for planting this season.

Every year I plant a dozen or more new-to-me tomato varieties in my garden. But with hundreds of delicious tomato choices, I needed help narrowing my selections. So in November I asked gardeners on my VegetableGardener.com blog to help me decide by giving me a list of their favorite tomatoes to grow.

I asked for gardeners’ top tomato recommendations in three categories:

Best medium-to-large tomato
Best small or cherry tomato
Most flavorful tomato

Twenty-six gardeners answered the call and gave me plenty of tomatoes to think about. I thought you might like to see the list, in case you’re looking for some new tomato varieties to add to your gardening efforts this season.

The last Saturday in January is designated as National Seed Swap Day. You can celebrate with these ideas for making seed sowing simpler this season.

Many beginning gardeners fret about starting their garden from seed. I know, because I worried about every seed I planted when I first started gardening, too.

But the basics of planting seed are simple. Gardeners plant seeds in the ground, cover seeds with soil and keep soil moist until seeds germinate.

Seeds want to sprout and grow–and many do without our help.

But for as long as people have been planting seeds, they’ve been trying to make seed sowing easier.

Native Americans rolled their seeds in clay balls to protect them from sun, wind, birds, and other animals. The seed balls weren’t planted, but broadcast on top of the ground so when it rained, the clay would melt and start germination.

Dr. Bob Gough may have departed the gardening world last year, but he left gardeners with more than 17 books on horticulture including The Guide to Rocky Mountain Vegetable Growing.

I never had the opportunity to meet Dr. Bob Gough face-to-face, but I got to know him anyway. He was the author of the “Ask Dr. Bob” gardening column on the pages of Zone 4 magazine. One of his last books, written together with his wife Cheryl Moore-Gough, is one of my go-to resources for vegetable gardening in a tough climate.

Soon we’ll all be fretting over chilly days that delay planting, so now’s a good time to pick up a copy of this book and tap into some of Dr. Bob’s vegetable growing wisdom.

The book is a good guide for any gardener, but it was written especially for gardeners who grow in short-season climates like we have in Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Utah, and Wyoming,

This is the first of a two-part blog post on how to plant, grow and bottle your own Tabasco sauce.

Well-known food writer Eugenia Bone once wrote there isn’t a condiment sitting in the refrigerator that can’t be homemade.

That idea stuck with me last season as I was deciding what to plant in my garden. I thought about all the assorted bottles of sauces and small jars of accompaniments taking up space on the shelf in the fridge and landed on my favorite: Tabasco sauce.

Because that large bottle is my go-to favorite for spicing up soups, adding a zing to curry and sloshing on dirty rice, I decided to plant, grow, and bottle my own.

It was about this time last year when I set my sights on homegrown, homemade Tabasco sauce and I kept that in mind as I shopped for seeds in the piles of gardening catalogs that stack up so nicely right after the first of the year. I found authentic Tabasco seeds in the Baker Creek Heirloom Seed catalog.

I couldn’t put down my copy of The Heirloom Life Gardener, the fascinating story of how Jere Gettle started the Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Company. You can win a copy of the book that boldly states, “Anyone can start a garden.”

To enter the book giveaway, post a comment here on what gardening means to you before Friday, January 13, at 5:00 p.m. Mountain time. The winner will be selected at random from all comments and notified January 16. This giveaway is open to gardeners in the U.S. and Canada.

The new book called The Heirloom Life Gardener is all about gardening with heirloom vegetables. But there’s much more to it than that. I think this book is also a love story.

Jere Gettle started working in his family’s garden when he was only 3 years old and almost immediately he knew he wanted to become a seedsman one day. He started Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Company in 1998 in the bedroom of his family’s home when he was only 17. That first seed catalog has grown to one that includes 1400 varieties from 70 different countries.

Every year I hedge my tomato-growing bets by planting both large and small tomatoes; heirloom and hybrids.

This was a good year to plant different kinds of tomatoes in the garden because it’s been an odd gardening season.

Many gardeners I’ve heard from are wondering why their tomatoes aren’t producing like they should.

We owe most of our problems to the unusual weather conditions we’ve experienced from a colder-than-usual spring, followed by drenching May rains, and then hot July weather. Tomatoes hate these kind of weather fluctuations. They prefer to grow under more moderate conditions.

I’m keeping my fingers crossed for a nice warm September into October so my big tomatoes will have the extra few weeks they need to finish growing.

Until then, I thought you might like to see the results of my small tomato trial. This year I grew five different varieties of small tomatoes, all from seed sent to me from seed companies or organizations.

I planted this succulent strawberry pot on a chilly day in April and here’s what it looks like today. I’m delighted at the results, especially the little tendrils growing down the sides of the pot.

If you’d like to plant one for your patio, here’s a link to a video how-to posted on my Lowe’s Garden Grow Along blog.

It’s time to plant your sunflower seeds and join the Great Sunflower Project for 2011.

The Great Sunflower Project is underway! Plant Lemon Queen Sunflowers this weekend and then mark your calendar for July 16. That’s the day of the Great Bee Count of 2011.

The Great Sunflower Project is my favorite citizen science effort. Every summer gardeners across the country plant sunflowers in their gardens, count the bees that land on them, and report the results.

Even though it’s best to observe and report weekly, the Great Bee Count is the day set aside for a nation-wide count.

Bees are in trouble and they need our help. By growing sunflowers and counting bees, we can learn more about our important pollinators. More information leads to more action to help preserve and enhance pollinator habitat.

The idea for EZ-walls Plant Protectors came from a gardener who was tired of coping with windy weather. (Photo courtesy of Debbie Schauer)

One of the things I like best about being a garden writer (besides all the free seeds, plants, and new products to try) is getting to talk with gardening experts across the country.

Just recently I talked with Debbie Schauer, a former Colorado gardener who now lives in Arizona.

Debbie sent me one of her new EZ-walls Plant Protectors to try in my garden.

She dreamed up this new idea in plant protection because she struggled to keep similar products upright in high winds. Her husband helped her get EZ-walls off the ground. Or in this case, on the ground.

EZ-walls is the only plant protector on the market with a single fill tube and drawstring top.