One of the hottest new additives for plants is silicon, which is also incorrectly called silica. It is claimed to reduce pests, improve growth and fend off diseases such as powdery mildew. Although there is some truth to the claims, there is also a lot of misinformation in the gardening community.
I am sure you have heard of determinate tomatoes and beans. I have known about them for years and knew they formed bushes and produced all of their fruit at one time. After that, they stop growing.
Turns out that most of the things I thought I knew about determinate plants is wrong! Not only that, but 99.9% of the gardening information about determinate plants online, in books, in seed catalogs and even Master Gardening Groups is incorrect.
Why should you care? This myth can cause you to grow the wrong type of vegetable.
There seems to be a lot of confusion about F1 hybrid seeds. Here is the truth about some common myths.
Last week we reached the 20 million visitor mark on this blog and I want to thank all of you for supporting this site.
The very first post was called, What Does Organic Mean, and it was posted on September 6, 2012. I was getting fed up with all the myths I was seeing in gardening literature and online and thought that I might be able to change a few minds. At the time, I figured I had enough material for about 100 myths. I have now posted 688 articles containing some 2,000 myths and have another 326 drafts started. I won’t run out of material any time soon!
I’d like to thank you for reading my posts and I want to ask for your help. Go to your favorite social media outlet and post a link to this post. Let others know how much you like this site. Let’s get to 30 million soon.
To celebrate I thought I would go back in time and review some of the most important articles.
Some very desirable plants, like rhododendrons, azaleas, and blueberries, demand acidic soil, and many gardeners have alkaline soil, which is not suitable for growing these plants. The most common solution I’ve seen is to mix peat moss with the soil to produce an acidic environment.
Peat moss is acidic, so it makes sense that if you add some to your soil, the resulting soil will also be more acidic. But is this really true? How long does the acidity last? Can gardeners with alkaline soil use peat moss to grow rhododendrons, azaleas, and blueberries?
Biochar is a special kind of charcoal that seems to have many benefits as a soil amendment. It holds water, acts like a fertilizer and grows bigger plants. While doing all this it is also eco-friendly and sequesters carbon in the soil for many thousands of years. Sounds like a win-win-win.
What is biochar? Are the claimed benefits real? Should gardeners be using this product to amend their soil? Let’s check it out.
I watched an interesting video describing the fact that pests don’t feed on healthy plants. How do you measure plant health? Simple. Just take a Brix reading.
Around the same time I became aware of the fact that spraying molasses on plants not only increases Brix values but also creates healthier plants with fewer pests. This has become a very popular technique among dahlia growers and seems to have some support from gardeners.
Let’s dig into the connection between Brix, molasses and pests.
This post uses affiliate links
There are so many types of fertilizer that it’s hard to know which one to use. Which NPK ratio is best? Is one brand better than another? Organic vs synthetic. Soluble vs slow release. This all seems so complicated, but in this post, I will simplify the whole process of selecting the best fertilizer.
Most gardeners now understand that a healthy soil is critical to good plant growth and a successful garden. Many of you are also beginning to understand that it is the soil microbes that make healthy soil. Unfortunately, that has lead to a lot of myths about how microbes should be used. Companies are making this worse by supplying microbial products that have not been shown to work.
The latest science has made it clear that it is even easier to build good soil than we thought. Some of the old techniques still work, but there are new methods that are even more powerful.
Hydroponics can be a great way to grow plants but it is important to make sure the nutrient solution contains enough food for the whole growth cycle. If either pH or EC (electrical conductivity) is out of whack, plants grow poorly or stop growing all together. It is therefore important to measure and control the nutrient solution. This post will look at what the numbers mean and what you should do about them to keep plants growing well.
This post uses affiliate links
Does the fruit of squash and pumpkins need light to complete its ripening process? Should you remove leaves so that sun can get to the fruit to speed up ripening? If pumpkins are picked green, should they be left in sunshine or not?
Ladybugs, also called lady beetles, ladybirds and ladybird beetles, are one of the gardeners best friends because they eat aphids and other pests. What attracts these beneficial insects to your garden? Is it the plants or the aphids? Are there plants you can grow which will bring more into your garden?
