Lots of people are looking to buy organic seeds but as a chemist this has never made any sense to me. I started asking people on social media for their reasons for selecting organic seeds over conventional seeds or heirlooms seeds. The answers clearly indicate that people don’t understand why they want organic seeds, but one valid reason did emerge.
In this post I will look at the reasons people give for buying organic seed and discuss the validity of the reasons.
Garlic is one of the easiest vegetables to grow in the home garden and if you grow too much, it easily keeps all winter long. Plant some today.
Blossom End Rot (BER) is a disfiguration found in fruiting vegetables, like tomatoes, peppers, watermelons, egg plants and apples. This problem is usually blamed on a shortage of calcium, but this turns out to be a myth.
Companion planting is a standard recommendation for growing vegetables. One of the most commonly recommended plants for this is the marigold, which is supposed to be good for preventing various pests from eating the vegetables. I will limit the discussion in this post to using marigolds to reduce or eliminate nematodes in the garden.
The idea of square foot gardening has become popular over the last few years and some of the underlying concepts of the this gardening technique make sense.
I was at an industry gardening show recently and spotted a plastic box for square foot gardening. I just started to laugh. What a silly idea!!!
A local gardening group was touring a greenhouse operation that grew tomatoes. The tour guide told the visitors that they removed the lower leaves from the plants because “they robbed nutrients from the upper part of the plant that was producing fruit”. In short, removing lower leaves resulted in a better harvest. It is unclear if that means larger tomatoes or more tomatoes.
Some home gardeners remove lower leaves believing that they will get a better harvest. Others don’t bother and claim they get a good harvest without the extra effort. Who is right?
I have grown garlic for years and consider it the easiest vegetable crop to grow. I have always been taught that, given our northern zone 5 climate, we could only grow hardneck garlic. Turns out that this is a myth.
Both the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture and Filaree Farms (keepers of the largest privately held collection of garlic in North America) agree that both hardneck and softneck can be grown in colder climates.
