BY C STONE | STONE NEWS NETWORK
Gardening season is approaching, with most gardeners working throughout the upcoming May long weekend planting. A few recent threads on reddit has some interesting tidbits.
Whatever vegetable you're planting, find it some flower friends. Nasturtiums, marigolds, zinnias, calendulas, sunflowers, violas, get a bunch in there. Borage! Borage is great. You'll get better yields on anything that needs to be pollinated, if you're putting out a buffet for your pollinator bugs.
Propagation
I save tons of time and money cloning plants I already have. Sometimes it takes a while (hibiscus) and sometimes it takes just a few weeks (tomatoes) to go from stem to ground.
I love seeing a plant start to develop on its own once removed from its parent. Especially flowers.
I usually have so many I wind up selling some at a local market.
Tomatoes are especially easy. I just prune a good-sized sucker, plop it in an old beer bottle with some water. Within two weeks it has enough roots to put it in a cup with potting soil.
Companion planting. Companion planting. COMPANION PLANTING.
Want natural pest protection? Companion planting. Want to help lessen the chance of certain diseases? Companion planting. Want to benefit the soil? Companion planting. Want to improve pollination? Yep, you guessed it - companion planting.
Don't try to grow everything you find in the store. Localize it to a salsa garden, or a stir fry garden to begin with.
Grow upwards. Use fences, strings, and cages. Whatever it takes to get the plants off the ground.
Use large cages for tomatoes and use large stakes (studded T-posts) to keep the cage from falling over.
Use small cages for peppers and use small stakes (like for electric fences) to keep the cage from falling over.
Put in a really early spring garden with lettuce, radishes, set onions, spinach, etc. Plant these in an area that will be consumed by a larger plant like squash later in the season.
Space your plants appropriately, if not even more than suggested. It's better to get less of something that is larger, than more of something that can't develop.
Weed your garden regularly. Cultivated plants do not compete well with weeds.
Do not let your plants (weeds or cultivated) drop their seeds in the garden. These will be a problem for years to come.
Consider a fall crop of lettuce, spinach, beets, or whatever to consume the space in the garden from early ending plants.
Consider soil replacement right under your larger plants. I often dig a hole, put in some 10-10-10 than a couple shovels of compost, and then the tomato, pepper, cabbage plant.
My tomato secrets:
If you live where you only uses cages for supports and not keeping critters out, consider horizontal tomato cages. They allow easier picking and can be removed to work the soil in spring.
http://therisnospoon-excursions.blogspot.com/2009/05/horizontal-tomato-cages.html
Tomatoes planted densely will choke out most weeds (except vines) if you give them plenty of food, water, and full sun. I regularly plant 16+ tomato plants in a 4x12 bed.
When planting tomato plants, buy the tallest you can buy in your price range and strip off all but the top leaves. Bury them up to just below the top leaves and wrap a strip of newspaper around the stem at ground level to protect against pests. Everything below ground will become root. Don't mulch until the plants are well established, because mulch like straw can attract some pests that hurt small seedlings.
Add a soaker hose before the plants get too large. Water them during droughts to keep up production.
Good soil is important. Compost as a soil additive is important. Without these you can't get a good yield. However, miracle grow and other high nitrogen fertilizers can feed plant growth. These can be taken in by all parts of the plant. I spray miracle grow directly on to the plants. My tomatoes can reach six to eight feet in height and have huge yields from all parts of the plant.
Don't worry too much about suckers on tomatoes. On large plants they can produce fruit.
When you have green tomatoes that are big enough but haven't ripened yet, add a store bought overripe tomato to the garden near the plants to kick start the ripening process.
A general note for tomatoes, but also more important for peppers: If there is any sort of concrete, cement block, or rocks near your garden, you may need to add sulfur to balance the ph. Peppers generally respond very well to sulfur.
I would add:
Build your own tomato cages or buy the heaviest you can. I use woven wire fence that I got from the scrapyard. The 3 legged wire tomato cages will disappoint every time.
Compost everything, including weeds. But don't compost tomato vines.
All of the cole crops (cabbage, radishes, kohlrabi, etc) can stand light frost, plant them early spring and late summer.
Separate garden into zones. One for cole crops, one for the nightshades (tomato, pepper, potato, etc), one for everything else. These two groups of plants carry disease, so need to be rotated every year.
Start onion seeds indoors in January if you are in the midwest.
Overwinter hot peppers indoors, they'll live for years if you take care of them. That way you get a jump on the next season and have peppers before anyone else.
Don't use insecticide, it will kill your bees, your mantises, your ladybugs.
Pick and squash all cabbage loopers, you shouldn't be eating Sevin.
You need a lot of room for sweet potatoes, watermelon and zucchini. More than you think, these three especially will amaze you with how much area they cover.
When the stem borers wilt your zucchini, you can slice open the stem, kill the worm and bury the stem with moist soil. The plant may survive. If you do nothing, it will die.
Don't let your chickens any where near your garden.
After everything is dug up in the fall, broadcast turnip seed.
Ask questions! Gardeners love to talk about gardening. Learn from others because whatever happens to your garden, it has happened to someone else and there is a remedy.
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