In this post I’ll look at some specific plants and discuss ways to overwinter them. Some plants can be brought indoors and grown in a green state just like your other house plants. Others can be easily stored in a semi-dry dormant state.
In my post, Overwintering Pond Plants – Part 1, I reviewed general ways to overwinter both hardy and non-hardy plants.
Straw bale gardening seems to be an “in-thing” to try and I have written about it in Pros and Cons of Straw Bale Gardening. I see people on line praising the technique, but I also see a lot of people reporting failure. What is rare is any side-by-side comparison of straw bale gardening to traditional in-ground gardening. Even proponents of straw bale gardening don’t provide evidence for their claims by making a comparison.
I wanted to see for myself how well it worked, so this year I decided to do a comparison between my traditional vegetable garden and straw bale gardening. Here is what I found.
Amsonia orientalis is a rare perennial that looks good most of the season and even has good yellow autumn color. It is supper easy to grow in just about any location from sun to part shade, dry to moist and any kind of soil. Its azure blue flowers are attractive without being gaudy.
Primula sieboldii, is a fun little primula with lots of variation in its flowers in both color and petal shape. It blooms after many other primulas and its flowers last for more than 4 weeks. It is a great addition to any shade garden.
A few weeks ago I published the post called Ripening Tomato Myths—Both on the Vine and in the Home, which explained why tomatoes ripen completely when picked at the breaker stage. Some people pointed out a discrepancy in that post. How could the fruit be sealed off from the plant at the breaker stage and still show fruit cracking due to excessive water in the plant? This was a valid point that needed some more investigation.
In this post I will clarify the situation and explain how this tomato myth got started. This will lead us to a better understanding of the tomato ripening process.
If you spend any time on social media or reading popular gardening blogs you already know that hydrogen peroxide does all kinds of useful things in the garden. You will see blog headings such as, “11 Mega Reasons why Hydrogen Peroxide for Plants is a Must” and “10 Amazing Uses of Hydrogen peroxide for Plants in the Garden.”
This stuff must be fantastic! Or not.
Not every claim is a complete myth, but many of these claims are just wishful thinking. Time to look at some science and get down to the reality of using hydrogen peroxide in the garden.
Foliar feeding is becoming more popular among gardeners, in part because it seems to be an easy way to fix plant nutrient issues. When your plant is showing low levels of iron, spray some chelated iron onto the leaves and you have solved the problem. The second reason foliar feeding is more popular is that there are more products on the market. These include specialty foliar feed products as well as regular fertilizer which is being recommended as a foliar spray.
There is also great interest in using home brews like compost tea and comfrey tea . Use of compost tea as a soil drench has not really shown any benefits, so maybe it works better as a foilar spray?
It’s time for me to have a close look at foliar feeding and determine if gardeners should be using these products.
My regular readers will understand that this is a science based gardening blog and that I rely heavily on the scientific method to debunk gardening myths, but what does “the scientific method” really mean and why is it so important? In today’s post I am going to focus on one aspect of this, the control.
Clematis heracleifolia is an unusual clematis. It doesn’t vine and it’s semi-woody even though it is treated as a perennial. It also flowers late summer or early fall when most clematis are done for the season. If you see it in the garden for the first time you won’t believe it’s a clematis.
You have worked hard all spring and summer to get some fresh red tomatoes from the garden. Now you have all kinds of green tomatoes on the vine and hope that they get red before the frost hits. What can you do to speed up the ripening process? Should you remove some leaves and let more sun reach the fruit? Can you harvest them green and complete the ripening process inside?
Some people suggest putting a banana or apple in a bag with green tomatoes to ripen them – does this work?
Does fertilize or water affect ripening? Would a change in culture speed up the tomato ripening process? Let’s have a close look at the facts and help you bite into a red tomato.
Caltha palustris may be a common plant but each spring it becomes a star in the garden for about 3 weeks. It has been in my garden for over 10 years, never gets any maintenance, never has pest or disease problems and it flowers like crazy. How many garden plants can match these qualities?
The common advice is to water in the morning and not at night because watering at night keeps leaves wet all night and allows fungal spores to infect leaves. This seems to make sense, but is this really true? Do leaves stay wet a long time if watered at night?
What do farmers do? If they have to irrigate 100 acres, do they stop watering in the afternoon to reduce fungal infection?
Another common piece of advice is to water the soil only. Don’t get the leaves wet and you will have less fungal problems. I have always felt that water evaporates fairly quickly so is this really a concern?
