Welcome! This blog is dedicated to all things related to tomato and vegetable gardening. Please dig around. DIG DEEP, there are lots of things buried below. I plan to video catalog the entire 2013 season. Enjoy & GL!
The herb fennel will attract the entire life cycle of the black swallowtail butterfly. It will host eggs, caterpillars and the chrysalis. You can plant clumps of fennel in your flower garden and the plants will host the the life cycle of many kinds of butterflies.
If you remove a branch of the fennel with a mature caterpillar... you can put it in a jar and watch the chrysalis form and the swallowtail emerge. A great project for kids!
I started a new video series called: From Garden to Grill. I will be grilling vegetables as they mature in the garden this season. Each video will be about 5 minutes long and it will cover harvesting the vegetable, the basic recipe, cooking and finally plating. My first video in this series is - Grilling Garden Beets.
Garden vegetables, in this case beets, offer a taste and flavor you will never find with grocery store vegetables. No matter how fresh they are... they don't compare to your home grown vegetables. As soon as a vegetable is picked the sugars begin to convert to starches and they begin to lose moisture. Events that change their flavor. From Garden to Grill, takes a freshly pick vegetable to heat and plate all within the same day.
Grilled beets take 45-60 minutes based on your grill. You initially roast them in foil and let them releases their juices. They are finished over heat to caramelize the sugars and bring out a great earthy sweet flavor that only beets can give you.
Lettuce and greens are typically cool weather crops. They like 60 to 70 degree days and cooler nights. While the temperature is cool... your lettuces, endives and spinach happily produce leaves for your garden salads. Great tasting greens!
As the days regularly break the 80's and the 90's creep in lettuce begins the process of 'bolting'. Warm days with 70 plus degree nights starts the flower and seed production process for many garden greens. That is called 'bolting'.
Your lettuce stops producing leaves as starts producing a flower stalk. The chemistry of the plant changes and often a bitter taste comes to the green. The video shows you what 'bolting' looks like and it explains the changes in your now bitter lettuces.
There is nothing wrong with crushing up few eggshells in a planting hole or composting your banana peels. Eventually it all becomes the same stuff for your garden... nutrients. You can, however, speed up the process of taking eggshells and banana peels to workable nutrients for you tomato plants and other vegetables. Dry them and grind them. Create more surface area.
The video will show you the whole process. There is no exact recipe or ratio so don't worry about that. You simply dry out your shells and peels at about 170 degrees and grind them down in a coffee grinder. Add 2 or 3 tablespoons to your planting hole for tomatoes and peppers and you are good to go.
Eggshells bring a great source of calcium to your tomato plants which is a great way to prevent blossom end rot. The browning of the bottoms of tomatoes. Banana peels are a great source of phosphorous and that is one of the three main nutrients needed for thriving vegetable plants. Shells and peels are also a good source of micro-nutrients.
By pulverizing them you create more surface are and with more surface area you have greater microbe and 'break down' activity. The homemade fertilizer will starting breaking down and feeding your plants. Enjoy! You can always ask your neighbors to save you their eggshells.
Tomatoes are resilient. The container tomatoes I am growing on my deck were hit by a late frost that damaged many of their leaves and even growing stems. The frost broke a 100 year record. There was direct damage from the frost but the cold in itself stressed the plants. Following that frost we had temperatures that were up and down and varied by nearly 30 degrees. More stress was placed on the plants from fluctuating temperatures. Towards the end of May and beginning of June we even hit 90 degrees.
One of the responses to this general stress was significant purpling of the leaf stems and productions stems. Some tomatoes got it worse than others. Some tomatoes looked generally stunted compared to other tomato's growth. Purpling of tomato plants typically has to do with phosphorous. There could be a lack of phosphorous in the ground or in this case, I believe, stress made it more difficult for the tomato's systems to pull in nutrients. I knew may container soil was tended and managed as I had for 10 years of great tomato growth. The difference... this extraordinarily stressful month of May.
I had to make a decision to either pull the stunted weaker looking tomatoes or treat them. The video highlights the problems showing the frost damage, purple stems and the recovery of the tomatoes after about 1 week of treatment. I did not have to pull and replace any of the tomatoes.
The treatment was giving the tomatoes a foliar feeding every day for a week. The green color returned. The weather normalized and the combination of both factors relieved the stress. The tomatoes greened up and started growing nicely.
The key is to NOT over fertilizer your tomatoes when something is wrong and you know they are fed. I used 1/2 strength liquid fertilizer that had phosphorous. I poured about 1 cup over the leaves daily. Miracle Gro or organic fertilizer alternatives that focus on 'easy' foliar uptake is needed for this treatment. The theory is that the tomatoes had a hard time, due all the stress, using their roots to get what the needed. Providing nutrients over the leaves gave the tomatoes some help. A boost.
This type of feeding won't over fertilize or damage your plants. If you were to use full concentrations in the soil, on top of having container soil that was fully fertilized you could potentially harm the plant in various ways. If the tomatoes don't perk up in about 7-10 days, using this type of treatment, then you probably need to consider replacing them.
The frost hit May 3rd. I waited 3 weeks for them to recovery on their own. I started the daily foliar feedings toward the end of May with hope they would perk up.
