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Growing Tomatoes

Written by k · 1 Comment

Trying to talk about tomatoes can start a fight. First, there’s the pronunciation argument, and then there’s the, “Is it a fruit? Is it a vegetable?” one.

growing great tomatoesGrowing tomatoes, on the other hand, is probably a lot easier than you think.

You need to decide if you’re growing them in the ground or in a container. If you think you’re too limited for space even for containers, you may be tempted to try one of the upside down tomato kits, but we don’t recommend those. They usually don’t live up to the advertising hype. Try to be creative and utilize space that might not have occurred to you before. I’ve seen plants thriving on fire escapes and in front yards, so you may have more room than you think.

There are advantages to both methods. A container garden is portable and you can put it anywhere that receives a minimum of seven hours of full sun per day. Regardless of what you do with your plants, that seven or more hours of sun is more crucial to growing tomatoes than anything else, except watering.

Watering Your Growing Tomatoes

In the ground, the tomatoes can spread out, and I’ve found we have larger plants and grow more tomatoes if we give them some room. I also have an easier time keeping them watered well, because while it’s easier to see when you’ve soaked a container (the water runs through the drainage holes underneath), I’ve found that containers also dry out quickly.

If you live in a hot place, or they’re in the sun most of the day, you will need to water more than the average grower. In order to ensure your tomatoes are watered correctly and the water is reaching the roots instead of being wasted on the leaves, there are a few methods of drip irrigation that aren’t even slightly complex, and don’t require you to have a hose all over the place.

In our garden, we use stakes that are attached to a 2 liter soda bottle with the bottom cut off. Push the stakes down as far as they’ll go, then fill up the soda bottle with water. These are pretty easy to find at a gardening center. If your eye is drawn by ones that are pretty glass globes, save those for your flowers. Tomatoes are too thirsty to care much for beauty!

If you’re handy with a drill, you can use a PVC pipe that is 1″ wide and about two feet tall. Drill holes 1/8″ along the length of the pipe and leave about two inches at the top undrilled. Nestle this in among your tomato’s roots and fill the pipe with water. This method is definitely cheaper than the soda bottle method, but they’re both practical ways of taking care of thirsty tomatoes, so just pick whichever you like best.

Next to watering, the most important things are space, support, and fertilizer. Always leave at least two feet of space between tomatoes. Plants can become very large and they need room to breathe and enough room to establish a good root system.

Everyone has seen a tomato cage before, even if you’ve never touched a garden. The most common ones are are made of wire and cone shaped. They usually have three or four wires wrapping around the cone. While your tomatoes are getting established, take care to do a little weaving so the plants stay in or near their own cage and don’t start visiting their friends.

Fertilizing Your Growing Tomatoes

Tomatoes generally prefer a balanced fertilizer, and ideally you should use one specifically for tomatoes with a NPK ratio such as 8-32-16 or 6-24-24. If you can’t find a tomato fertilizer, use a general gardening fertilizer and do not let lawn fertilizer anywhere near your garden. The fertilizer should have instructions on how much it should be used on the bag or container, and you should follow them.

If you compost or have access to compost, I highly recommend working it lightly into the soil around your growing tomatoes every three weeks or so as a top dressing. It’s better for the environment, because there is no fertilizer run off when it rains or you’re watering, it will improve the soil structure of your garden and it’s free if you are interested in doing your own composting, or fairly cheap if you buy it from someone else.

There are all sorts of other things to discuss about ideal growing conditions, but as long as you give your growing tomatoes sun, water, and some fertilizer, they’ll produce beautifully for you, and next year you can get more complicated!

Categories: Growing Vegetables - Tags: , , ,

Beginners Vegetable Garden Layout

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Why You Need To Plan Your Vegetable Garden Layout

When you are planting your very first vegetable garden, you are no doubt very excited and want to grow everything you possibly can! It’s good to have that feeling, and to be passionate about your gardening.

Your enthusiasm will have to be patient with you, because your first vegetable garden plans should be small, and should be sown with easy plants. You don’t want to get overwhelmed, and you may be underestimating how much time most gardeners spend making everything look beautiful.

After this first year, and getting your feet wet, you’ll be able to do more in the next year, and scale up your garden from there however you like. One year of patience is worth a season of disappointment.

How To Plan Your Vegetable Garden Layout

On a day when you won’t be busy, go out into the yard roughly every hour with a very rough sketch of your back yard (it doesn’t have to be anything more than vague shapes, for this purpose). Write on the sketch where the sun is each hour. You want to plan your vegetable garden layout somewhere where the plants will have 6-8 hours of full sun every day. With that in mind, your vegetables need to be planted away from trees or large bushes — they compete for energy too much and your vegetables, being small, will lose out.

If you can find someone with a tiller, that will be a great help with readying the patch and loosening the soil. You should still go in with a hoe or pitchfork and go through the soil, remove any rocks you find, and try to get the soil easy to work with.

Grounds-keeping companies sometimes offer services for gardeners, such as tilling, and also tilling the new soil, compost, or manure into the ground. It can save you a lot of labor, if it’s in your budget.

If not, you’ll need to work on it yourself, but remember that you can take breaks. You can start this as soon as the ground isn’t frozen, if you need to. Greens are very fond of cooler conditions. You could sow your favorite greens and have something to look forward to while it’s still cool outside.

In my garden, we usually plant things when we see the tulips or wisteria bloom. It’s easy to look up and find the last day frost is predicted for your area. After that day, you can plant nearly anything you want.

So, the danger of frost has past. You should have something like a 6′ x 3′ raised bed, or a 5′ x 5′ plot. You’ve enriched the soil. You made sure it’s loose. Now, what to put in it?

vegetable garden layout

A Small Raised Bed Vegetable Garden

* Tomatoes are excellent. They’re prolific producers if they’re in good soil and kept watered. One year, we were able to harvest such an unreasonable amount of tomatoes that we lived on tomatoes that summer!

* Carrots are very easy. Mark your calendar with the harvest date for the carrots. They will grow nearly indefinitely if you don’t pluck them in time! You may want to space rows of carrots in a small area, and plant sequentially. That way, you’ll have carrots for most of the season. Replant the first row right away, if you like.

* Radishes are another excellent choice for a new garden. If you like them in salad, they can combine with the carrots and tomatoes, and have a gorgeous salad.

* Peppers of any type are often highly recommended. I usually go for some red and green bells and some jalapeno.

* Cucumber needs a lot of room to spread out over, but you can use tomato cages or trellises to make them expand upward instead of outward. We’ve had good luck growing them. We’ve just needed to keep an eye on them. Ideally, keep the cucumbers off of the ground by using cages or a trellis, because the cucumbers will not be as healthy if one side of them rests on the ground.

* Asparagus is a little bit of a cheat. The trick with asparagus is that you cannot harvest it in the first year, only in the second and thereafter, so if you love asparagus, you should put that in, as well. Do not cut off any of the spears — let the plant grow into a tall, leafy monster. It is gathering nutrition from the soil and sun to start producing a good crop in the next year.

I hope this has given you some good ideas! Gardening has been shown to reduce stress, and eating the fruits of your own labor from your new vegetable garden layout is an amazing experience, after a lifetime of store-brought produce.

photo courtesy sscornelius

Categories: Garden Design - Tags: , , ,

Planting Climbing Roses

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Climbing Roses In Your Garden

Whether you are interested in a fast-growing ground-cover for beautiful soil retention or you enjoy weaving a plant through an intricate trellis for stunning visuals, climbing roses will rise to the occasion.

The long canes produced by climbing roses cannot support their own weight, giving clever gardeners the chance to use them to best and beautiful effect on trellises, arbors, fences, and anything else that will hold the canes. For those who prefer to trail, the same roses can be used on embankments, walls, and as vigorous ground-cover.

Rambling roses are fast-growers, adding as much as 20 feet of new growth each season. Typically they have smaller flowers than other varieties, but roses introduced in the past few years have been seeing a steady increase in flower size.

Taking Care of Your Climbing Rose

climbing rosesThe major drawback of ramblers is their proneness to mildew. During periods of hot days with cool, moist nights, mildew is at its worst. You can prevent trouble by keeping your ramblers in sunny locations and making sure you only water them at the root and keep the leaves as dry as possible. An automated sprinkler system is a nightmare for a rambler-lover: make sure sprinkler heads are turned away and water them well at the base by hand. Try to water in the morning, instead of at night, so the rose will have all day to dry, and keep up a good pruning habit to allow for air circulation between the canes.

Which Climbing Roses Should You Plant?

Rather than choosing the climbing companion of your hybrid teas, consider climbing floribunda or climbing polyantha instead. They are much hardier than hybrid teas against mildew and disease and reliably produce profusions of blossoms. Deadheading these beauties may seem like a gargantuan task when they’re well-established, but it’s more than worth the extra time.

If your garden space is small or restricted, ever-blooming climbers may be just the ticket. Sometimes known as pillar roses, they grow slowly and can flower in spring and autumn if the conditions are good through the summer. For flowers on both sides of summer, choose Blaze Improved to make it most likely. Ever-blooming climbers are one of the best winter-hardy types, and in the spring, you can expect heavy flowering.

In small gardens, it’s often important to plan carefully so that you have flowers through the seasons, and in a garden with an ever bloomer, you may want to choose a summer-blooming variety to make sure you maximize time with your climbing roses in flower.

photo courtesy of redagainPatti

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Wildflower Seeds and Mixes

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Cover the Problem Areas of Your Yard With the Best Wildflower Seeds

Wildflower seeds are an easy and economical way to fill out difficult yard and garden spaces. Wildflowers are a beautiful delight for the eyes, and capable of resowing themselves, making them considerably more easy to care for season after season. Your initial investment on wildflower seeds is likely the only cost you’ll encounter.

wildflower seedsYou may see wildflowers local to your area when visiting parks, or alongside the roads. Some states in America sow them intentionally, to beautify the roads and to help with soil run off and prevent erosion.

How To Plant Wildflower Seeds

As with any other flower, it’s best if you can ready the place they will inhabit by removing old roots, large rocks and grass. They are the least picky of any type of flower, but you will still have better luck if you can mix compost into the soil, or fertilizer if you don’t have access to compost, and mix the soil well. Loosened and worked soil makes it easier for the flowers to set up strong roots.

Which Type of Wildflower Seeds?

In many garden centers, there are canisters of wildflower seeds, that you’re meant to only sprinkle over the place you want them to grow and then add some dirt and water. In the past few years, wildflower mats have become popular. With those, the seeds are already embedded in them and they don’t require more work than rolling them out where you want your flowers to grow.

There are also wildflower seed mixes to attract particular creatures. Butterfly mixes are always popular; who doesn’t like watching butterflies flit across a garden? By planting a butterfly-friendly garden, you give them food, and a place for caterpillars, and finally, a fairly safe place for them to pupate.

There are also mixes for birds and bats. If your focus is on butterflies, birds that may be attracted to your flowers may make a meal out of caterpillars. Check with your local gardening center for more information on having a butterfly and bee garden.

If you’re nervous about bats, don’t be. They cannot hurt you and their use of echolocation makes it unlikely that they will run into you, even in the pitch of night. They can eat up to 1,200 mosquitoes every hour, making them the natural champions of mosquito control! If you are interested in adding bats to your garden, building a bat box is very easy and there are a lot of guides online. The box gives them a safe place to rest, and to have babies.

Once you’ve chosen a place, prepared it, and purchased your wildflower seeds, it’s time to plant them. If you picked specific varieties of wildflowers, you may want to mix the seeds together for a wilder garden. Fresh seeds should germinate quickly. If you are concerned about birds and animals getting to them before they’ve had time to grow, use a wire mesh that the garden center should have, to put over the bed. It doesn’t restrict the amount of sunlight or water the flowers receive, but it will keep critters out until the plants are established.

As always, water well after planting.

Since your wildflower seeds pack contains seeds from different species, they may germinate and bloom at different times. If you get a good mix, you’ll have blooms and a lovely visual texture to admire through the seasons, until winter. Don’t worry if your flowers don’t all start to sprout at the same time. Keep the soil evenly moist and your beauties will show up.

This season, invest in a mix of colors and variety of wildflower seeds and you’ll feel like you’re in a meadow, without leaving your own yard, and in this fast paced (and sometimes ugly) world, that is fantastic!

photo courtesy of ruthieonart

Categories: Garden Design - Tags: , ,

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