Candytuft brings drifts of lacy white blooms to the spring scene, often flowering from late winter for many months. Although grown as an annual, candytuft will last for several seasons, but does become leggy. This can be rectified with gentle pruning after flowering. Read the rest of this entry »

Capture the spirit of autumn with a clourful harvest of decorative fruit and vegetables. Choose inedible varieties you won’t be tempted to pick, and enjoy this display on chillu autumn days. Read the rest of this entry »

Create the impression of nature running wild to give your garden a relaxed, spontaneous look. Choose containers with worn finishes and plants with soft outlines for happy informality.

Whether you live in the town or country, you can create an exuberant and relaxed style of container gardening that gives an atmosphere of unrestrained nature. Read the rest of this entry »

Some people seem to grow their vegetables all mixed up together, while others keep them separate — sometimes even in special, built-up beds. What is the best method?

There are different ways of planting vegetables. You can dig over the entire site and then sow all the various vegetables in blocks of different sizes (depending on how many you need of each kind) with no clearly marked space between them. Read the rest of this entry »

I can’t make up my mind — will growing my own vegetables really be worthwhile?

This depends on which varieties you grow. Rand for rand, it is probably not always worth your while to grow your own potatoes or onions. But with other quick-growing crops, it is a different matter. For even though you may not always be able to produce crops for the same price as the ones in the supermarket, your home-grown vegetables will certainly be far superior in freshness and flavour. Read the rest of this entry »

I get conflicting advice about the best time of day to water the garden. What do you think is the best time?

When to water depends to a great extent on what part of the country you live in, the kind of plants you grow and the time of year. In summer, it is best to water plants early in the morning, as this will keep them damp during the hot part of the day. This applies especially to newly planted bedding plants and vegetables, which may need to be watered again in the afternoon if the weather is hot — and in very hot, dry weather may even need watering at midday as well to keep them from flagging. Read the rest of this entry »

Many home gardeners do not grow melons because the plants need a great deal of growing space, particularly watermelons, whose plants can grow as long as 3 m. Melons also take quite a long time to mature and this means that the plants occupy the ground for lengthy periods, making them unsuitable for a small vegetable garden where space is limited. Read the rest of this entry »

Growing tomatoes

When is the right time to grow tomatoes and how should I go about preparing the ground for them?

Tomatoes are a warm-season crop and the main sowing period is from mid-September to November. But seed can be sown up to a month earlier if you have a greenhouse or some other protected place. Read the rest of this entry »

It is hardly surprising that the herbicides you have used on your lawn have not affected the winter grass, Poa annua, for if they had they would have killed off your lawn as well. Selective herbicides for the control of weeds on lawns are designed to kill off broad-leaved annual and perennial weeds, not grasses. Read the rest of this entry »

I have several half-full packets of vegetable seeds left over from last year. Can the seeds be used this season?

Stored in a dry place, most vegetable seeds remain good for two or three years, even though the packet has been opened. It’s best to keep the seeds in a fridge or an airtight jar in a cool, dry place such as a shed or garage. Read the rest of this entry »

The wormery is a bin (usually plastic) with a lid, and layers or chambers through which the worms move as they eat up the waste.

There is a collector tray at the bottom which holds the liquid that is produced, with a tap to run it off. The lowest chamber has a layer of bedding where the worms live to start with. Read the rest of this entry »

Green manures (also called cover crops) will improve soil quality A green manure crop is plowed under right in place, adding organic matter high in nitrogen to the soil. In decomposing, it produces humic acid, which helps release locked-up minerals, so you need to add less fertilizer in other forms. Read the rest of this entry »

Lazy gardeners argue about compost. Some insist nothing can take the place of a shovelful of compost mixed in planting holes for tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, and members of the cabbage family. Melons, cucumbers, and squash need its richness to send out strong, healthy vines. Read the rest of this entry »

Do you plan to purchase a new shrub or tree? The summer or fall prior to planting, dig the hole. Dig it bigger than you think it needs to be. Layer it with composting materials and soil, building a small compost pit. Mulch lightly. In spring, the hard work of digging is behind you, for the friable soil that now fills the hole will come out ever so easily and be rich and ready to feed your new tree or shrub. Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes a plant’s poor performance results from the wrong pH. Test your soil to determine its degree of acidity or alkalinity. Your County Agent can tell you how to send soil to the state university for testing, or you can buy a home test kit. Do this in the fall. Read the rest of this entry »

The extreme case of the lazy gardener might be the college professor who planted his entire vegetable patch in spring and never looked at it again until it was time to harvest. He overplanted and just let the whole business go weedy. He got enough food for the family out of the enterprise, and that was all he was after in the first place.

Most of us aren’t that lazy. We take pride in order and control. The specter of carefully planned and planted crops being choked by weeds makes us shiver. We dream of lush crops and flamboyant flowers with few weeds, but we’d like to be able to reach that goal without accepting slavery. So we compromise and let a few weeds grow, or take a different tack and smother them with mulch. Read the rest of this entry »

The queen of mulch was Ruth Stout, author of How to Have a Green Thumb Without an Aching Back. She maintained a year- round hay mulch at least eight inches deep in her Connecticut vegetable garden. In her fifty-by-fifty-foot plot, she used twenty-five bales a year. She never turned the soil, sowed a cover crop, hoed, weeded, watered, or built a compost pile. She just mulched, making compost on the spot, for as the bottom layer of mulch decomposed, it added rich organic matter to the soil — a continuing process. Ruth didn’t bother with manures, but used cottonseed meal or soy bean meal for added nitrogen. She sprinkled it on top of the mulch in winter, at a rate of five pounds to one hundred square feet, so that snow and rain carried it down through the hay by planting time. To plant, she pulled aside the mulch and sowed the seed. Read the rest of this entry »

“Black plastic has freed me from hours of weeding. I never used to finish that chore,” explains a Massachusetts gardener. “I resisted black plastic because it looks so awful, but we put dirt along the edges and scatter some on top, and that helps. We use three‑ Foot-wide rolls in our entire vegetable garden. We plant a row, lay the plastic, anchor the edges with dirt, plant another row, and so on. The weeding always had hung over me. Now I just hand-weed in the row itself, and we have more time to canoe or play tennis.” Read the rest of this entry »

“Please, please tell me how to keep weeds out of the asparagus patch,” pleaded one frustrated gardener.

“My Dad had the ideal solution for weeds in his asparagus patch,” a grower explains. “He built a fence around the bed, and after the harvest, when the spears had grown up tall and lacy, let his chickens loose inside the fence. They ate all the weeds, kept the asparagus beetle under control, and fertilized the soil with their droppings.” Read the rest of this entry »

You ask for trouble if you use garden soil for indoor planting. It’s likely to be loaded with pathogens. Use sterile, commercial potting mix, or make your own:

• two parts soil
• one part compost or leaf mold
• one part sand, perlite, or vermiculite
• one tablespoon bone meal per quart

Sterilize it in a 150° oven for one-half hour (which may drive everyone out of the house holding his nose). To stay in your family’s good graces, use a microwave oven for speedy sterilization. Put the soil in a plastic bag in which you’ve punched a few holes. Bake it in the microwave for four or five minutes. Read the rest of this entry »