Tag: Tomatoes
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Post-Storm Garden Recovery: How to Revitalize Your Garden After Severe Weather
For gardeners, heavy summer storms highlight the importance of being prepared both beforehand and ready for quick and decisive post-storm garden recovery. This article offers guidance on assessing damage, immediate care, and long-term recovery. It emphasizes the importance of quick action, evaluating plant damage, removing debris, caring for broken stems, waterlogged soil, and considering fertilization…
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Pruning for Perfect Tomatoes
Tomatoes are easy to grow and pruning is essential for optimal plant health and fruit production. Pruning encourages fruit growth and prevents diseases by limiting leaf contact with the ground. Determinant (bush) tomatoes require minimal pruning, while indeterminant (vine) tomatoes benefit greatly from it. Prune when plants are about a foot tall. Be mindful of…
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World Art Day 2024: A Garden of Expression
World Art Day, introduced by UNESCO, honors art’s role in advancing knowledge, creativity, and cultural diversity. Its theme changes yearly, with the 2024 focus on cultivating community through art. The date, April 15th, coincides with Leonardo da Vinci’s birthday. Anyone can participate in World Art Day, from simple sketching to botanical art. Realism, capturing the…
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Your Hardening Off Handbook: Tender to Tough Before Transplanting
To ensure your young plants thrive when transplanted outdoors, it’s crucial to harden them off. This process toughens them up to handle the unpredictable elements outside. By gradually exposing them to wind, rain, and direct sunlight, their stems and leaves become more resilient. Skipping this preparation can result in transplant shock, causing wilted stems and…
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Walking on Eggshells: Calcium for Your Garden
When you grow plants, they absorb nutrients and transform them into vegetables, fruit, and flowers. Harvesting removes these nutrients, so fertilizing your garden is crucial for its growth. Eggshells are an excellent source of calcium, vital for fruiting plants. Besides preventing issues like Blossom End Rot, eggshells benefit earthworms and help alkaline-loving plants. Sterilizing and…
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Green Tomatoes With Envy
Green tomatoes isn’t necessarily a tomato problem you need to overcome. But as the growing season grows to a close, the question arises: what to do with all those green tomatoes?
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Seed Saving Made Simple: A Beginner’s Guide to Saving Seeds
Whether you grow annuals or perennials, a garden continues year after year. If you’re looking to preserve the varieties and cultivars of plants that you most enjoy, you should save your seeds. Saving seeds from your own garden saves money too. If you’re going to go through the trouble of saving your own seeds, you…
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Blossom End Rot, What It Is, How To Fix It
Nothing is more upsetting to a gardener than dutifully caring for your plants only to find issues once the plant has begun to set fruit. Blossom End Rot is one of many common problems gardeners will encounter. It often occurs on common beginner gardener plants like tomatoes. Just because they’re easy to grow, however, doesn’t…
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Common Tomato Problems
Tomatoes are the most common plant for gardeners of all types and skillsets. It is an easy plant to grow and is extremely forgiving to most kinds of weather. Yet even as easy as tomatoes are to grow, they come with a whole host of problems. Fortunately, tomato problems are easy to diagnose. Today, I’m…
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Transplanting Seedlings Outdoors
Finally, spring planting time is here! It’s time to transplant our seedlings from their cozy seed starters and give them new homes in the great outdoors. In our case, because we don’t have much land to plant directly in-ground, we’re transplanting in raised beds and containers off of our back porch.