Welcome! This blog is dedicated to helping you grow food and have a better garden. Every year I do a real time garden video series that covers everything! Watch me as I grow in Maryland on my 2 acre garden homestead. Thanks for Visiting "A Garden Wants to Give. All You Have to Do is Help it Along!" Cheers!
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Seed Starting Basil Indoors: Starting Mixes, Light, Fertilizing and More
Ill be doing a series for new gardeners called Grow As I Grow for 2017. It will take you through the process of seed starting, planting, tending and harvesting many kinds of herbs and vegetables. Follow me and I will help you have a successful garden. My garden is in Zone 7. If you are close to that zone, you can do as I do in real time!
Please visit The Rusted Garden Seed and Garden Shop: www.therustedgarden.com
Good Luck with Your Garden,
Gary (The Rusted Garden)
5 Cucumber Garden Tips: Care, Feeding, Spraying, Transplants and Trellising
by Gary Pilarchik (The Rusted Gardener)
Cucumbers love the warmth of summer As the season goes on, your cucumbers can begin to look "beat up" and tired. It may be from the high summer temperatures, insects, diseases or all three. A lot of times, here in Maryland Zone 7, I get great production from my cucumbers from late June until the end of July. But as August approaches, the plants just get beat down. That leads me to my first and most under utilized cucumber tip.
One key point that I want to stress is that cucumbers needed to be watered consistently from planting. A well amended planting hole with compost and manures will set your cucumbers up for success. Consistent watering will be needed. At some point in the season, you will have to water daily. Any plant dealing with drought, won't be healthy.
Please visit The Rusted Garden Seed & Garden Shop: www.therustedgarden.com
Please visit The Rusted Garden Seed & Garden Shop: www.therustedgarden.com Tip One
Start some new cucumber transplants mid July. Select a fast maturing variety and start the seeds outdoors in 16 ounce cups. Replace your old beat up plants with 2 week old transplants, come the end of July. They should be up producing by the end of August. It is easier to replace an insect plagued or diseased plant then to try and save the larger plant. Remove it and replace it.
The smaller plant can be treated much more easily with sprays to manage pests and diseases. Less foliage, means it is easier for you to spray the entire plant, top and bottom. The plant is also disease and insect free which means they sprays will provide maximum protection as the disease or insects try and take hold. You are also removing the older plant that often carries various stages of insect and disease growth.
Tip Two
Your cucumbers might be a bit weathered and worn come mid season. You can use Epsom Salts as a way to green them up and give them a boost. One time, mid season for your heavy feeding plants, is all you need in the way of Epsom Salts. Despite what you might hear, Epsom Salts work. The key is to use it this way. It is not needed as a weekly ongoing feed.
This is also a great time to good give them a liquid feeding with a balanced liquid fertilizer that covers N-P-K and micro-nutrients. This is true for both container and ground planted cucumbers. If you are growing cucumbers in containers, you should be feeding them at least 2x's a month when they are producing. However, come mid season, your plants would appreciate a bit more
.
Tips Three
Sometimes you get a lot of flowers and little cucumbers that seem to turn brown (starting at the tip) and die after growing briefly. That is because the female flower with the tiny cucumber wasn't fertilized by a male flower. You can actually hand pollinate cucumbers to increase production.
Learn the difference between male and female cucumber flowers and try your hand at hand pollination. This will help you get more mature cucumbers. A female flower actually bears a tiny cucumber but the cucumber won't grow to maturity if the female flower isn't pollinated. Once you see the difference between the flowers, it easy to... well, see the difference.
Tip Four
Grow your cucumbers vertically. It makes care so much easier! Cucumbers can take up a lot of space in the garden. Trellising cucumbers is a great way to save space and better manage pests and disease. It is a lot easy to spray cucumbers that are growing vertically. You are able to get both sides of the leaves much more easily as well as find mature cucumbers. You will be able to plant many other vegetables in the space the ground sprawling cucumbers once covered.
Tip Five
Start spraying 2 weeks before problems arise in your garden. I use Neem Oil for insects and baking soda at times as an anti-fungal. Make notes when diseases and insects show up in your garden. Make a plan for the following year, to spray early.
Cucumbers are often attacked by cucumber beetles and other insects. I use Neem Oil and soap to make my spray. They also can get powdery mildew. For that, I use a baking soda spray. Spraying before problems arise is key. Know when problems show up in your garden. Write down the dates and start spraying 2 weeks before they arrive. I stressed this twice, because it is that important and makes a huge difference in managing pests and diseases.
AND.... ALWAYS test spray anytime you make a new spray, it is important to test a few leaves with the spray and wait 48 hours to see if any damage occurs. Don't spray in full sun or when temperatures cause leaves to droop or wilt. The leaf will be damaged.
Good Luck with Your Garden,
Gary (The Rusted Garden)
In Maryland Zone 7 we get the four full seasons of temperatures. We often get a period of great weather in February or March and think the frost is gone and spring is here, only to be hit be a deep freeze. You would think I would learn but I don't and I try to get plants out early.
Your cool weather crops like; lettuces, spinach, kale, broccoli, cauliflower and peas can actually take a frost and a freeze into the upper 20's and survive. Now the cold can still damage them, so simple easy frost protection is always valuable. In this video, I talk about 17 degree and 20 degree F nights that came back to back. That is just too cold for newly planted transplants.
The freezes killed off my unprotected peas and lettuces but the plants that were covered by the rigid plastic cups survived nicely! I also used a large trash bag as a second layer of protection for one of my container planting of peas. Here is the method and proof it works. This is a quick and inexpensive way to protect your plants.
Good Luck with Your Garden,
Gary (The Rusted Garden)
I cover just about everything from starting mix preparation to pinching off the peppers. I use 3 week old peppers, 5 week old peppers and 7 week old peppers for visuals. Great for beginners. My hope is you get peppers like in the picture this season!
It is a 19 minute long video that covers all 12 of these aspects of starting peppers indoors. I wanted to create a video that answered a lot of questions, where you could fast forward through the parts you didn't want to watch but didn't have to go searching all over the place for questions your had about starting peppers indoors. Enjoy!
Seed Starting Mix (Preparation, Fungus, Insects)
Planting Cell Preparation
Planting Seeds
Germination and Heat Mats
When to Start Peppers Indoors
When to Transplant Peppers Outdoors
Bottom Watering & When to Water
When & How to Fertilize
Acclimation to the Outdoors
When & How to Transplant Them Up
Basic Lighting Guidelines
Pinching off Pepper Tops
Good Luck with Your Garden,
Gary (The Rusted Garden)
A lot of gardeners don't know their indoor seed starts are soft and not ready for the great outdoors. They need to go through a slow acclimation process to get use to the sun's ultraviolet rays, the wind and temperature fluctuations. The process is generally called 'hardening-off' and it is how it sounds. Your seed starts need a week's time to toughen up to the world in which they will be growing. They will actually be burned by the UV rays of the sun. They will be stressed by the wind and temperature changes.
When your seeds germinate indoors and break the surface they are ready for the outdoor elements but they lose that ability as they spend weeks growing 'oh so comfortably' indoors. They have to be reintroduced to Nature. I can't give you an exact way to do this but to say... slowly over a one week period. Too many factors come into play such as; plant variety, temperature, time of day, amount of sun that day, the wind and day night temperature fluctuations.
This video discusses two ways to acclimate your plants. The way I recommend is to give your seed starts time outside 2,3,4 times a week, during nonfreezing temperatures, for 15 to 30 minutes as soon as they germinate. This exposure will make for an easy transition outdoors. The benefit is they will already be 'hardened-off' and the exposure to the sun will benefit their growth. The disadvantage to this is the possibility of insects hitching a ride back into your grow area. The second method is to transition them incrementally to the outdoors ,slowly over time, once the reach transplant size.
Good Luck with Your Garden,
Gary (The Rusted Garden)
