Carrying over my hydrangea kick from last summer, I don't know how I could have missed the open spots in the rather large planting bed I have containing shrubs, Japanese maples, perennials such as rudbeckia and echinacea, ornamental grasses and annuals.
The muscles are sore and the body a bit on the achy side at this point in the planting season, but how long can 12 hydrangeas really take to plant? It's a day's work for sure, but wow, will this bed glitter in the dog days of August.
GARDEN IN FULL GEAR
This last partial weekend of May is a significant time on a gardener's calendar. The weekend affords an opportunity to finish the bulk of the vegetable garden plantings if it hasn't been done yet.
If you're a tad behind schedule, don't push yourself and try to do it all this weekend. I often hold off on planting peppers, cucumbers, eggplant, okra, cantaloupe, watermelon and summer squash until the first full weekend of June.
These particular crops will gain very little by an early planting, and will actually catch up and surpass those plants that went into the ground earlier. They are all hotweather crops, and the soil needs to be very warm in order for them to get off to a fast start.
While many of these types of vegetables are fast germinators and can be direct seeded, I find that
The last week of May also offers the first crispy greens of the season ready for harvest.
Leaf lettuce, which is a muchanticipated green from the garden, as is the final harvest of arugula and broccoli raab are now ready for the table.
Radishes have been a steady crop for a few weeks and the spinach, which looks fabulous this year, should be ready for picking in another two weeks.
The cabbage, broccoli and cauliflower are getting larger every day, but could really use an extra boost of nitrogen fertilizer to push them along.
I'll remove the polyester row covers just long enough to work in some 10-10-10 granular fertilizer and lightly scratch it into the soil. This final feeding is all the nutrients these robust plants will need to help them mature by mid- June.
Now that the soil temperature has warmed to 65 degrees, the first bean crop of the year can be planted without the threat of the seeds rotting in the soil. When it comes to gardeners and beans there are two schools of thought: those that plant pole beans and those that plant bush beans. Both types have their own distinct advantages and disadvantages. Gardeners who grow pole beans swear that the taste of pole beans far exceeds those of bush beans. While pole beans bear later than bush beans, the yield is heavier and over a longer period of time.
With pole beans you obviously need some kind of support, and a strong support at that. Not only must the support be strong enough to hold the full weight of the growing bean plants, but it must also withstand toppling from gusty summer thunderstorms.
I've tried a dozen or so contraptions for support and have come to settle on metal bean towers. These strong, weatherproof towers can be deeply driven into the garden, providing a very strong and spacesaving means to grow pole beans.
Bush beans, on the other hand, are relatively compact plants that grow fast, provide a heavy first harvest and a lighter second picking before the plants are finished. Several crops may be planted during the season so that a continuous supply of beans is always close to maturing.
Since the plants are ready for harvest in less than 60 days, there is also less chance that pests and other diseases will affect them.
MAKE WAY FOR TOMATOES
It is the planting of the tomatoes that signifies the 2008 garden season is well under way. Tomatoes are without a doubt the most widely planted vegetable in home gardens, and I can't ever recall visiting a garden that didn't have them.
You'll be hard-pressed to find another crop that bears so heavily or tastes as delicious as your own home-grown tomatoes. The real beauty about them is that even average garden soils will produce a reasonable crop of tomatoes. However, a little bit of extra work now will go a long way toward producing a bumper crop of tomatoes over a long time. Here are some tips:
Soil first. Make sure your soil is rich with humus and organic matter. Compost, rotted manure, leafmold, peat moss, and other soil amendment additives perform miracles in keeping problems like blossom-end rot, bacterial blight, sun scald, and growth cracks from happening. Use a granular fertilizer like 5-10-5 at planting time and be sure it is thoroughly mixed into the soil.
Select the right tomato. Most of us will want to grow indeterminate tomato varieties. These tomatoes bear fruit until the first frost, unlike determinate varieties, which set all their fruit in about a two-week period. I'm all for the great taste sensations of the many "heirloom tomato" cultivars, yet modern hybrid tomatoes are hard to beat as they can resist things like verticillium wilt, fusarium wilt, tobacco mosaic virus and nematodes.
Plant deep. I think just about everyone knows this by now, but it is so important and so effective I don't mind repeating it. Set your tomato plants in the ground horizontally in a two- to three- inch deep trench in the soil. Only the top set of leaves (three to four stems) should be showing (strip off all of the lower leaves on the plant) and firm the soil over the buried portion.
New roots will quickly form and give the tomato plants an incredible boost on their way to setting flowers and fruit.
Give 'em room! Stop crowding your plants.
Trust me, you'll get better yields and have healthier plants (hence, more tomatoes) if you space your plants three to four feet apart in rows set four to five feet apart.
Water and feed, carefully. "All tomatoes need even moisture" is the common virtue we are told with regard to tomatoes, but what does that mean?
Even moisture means supplying enough water on a regular basis so that the entire root area is drenched and well-drained afterwards. I can't tell you how much water this will mean during a given week, since watering may be required sometimes daily during periods of extreme heat. The idea here is really to monitor the situation on a daily basis, allowing the soil to become fairly dry before the next watering. Head off problems by watering early and whenever possible; deep-root watering is best, rather than dousing the foliage.
As for feeding, yes tomatoes are heavy feeders, but don't overdo it or you will have the best looking tomato foliage in the neighborhood (with a sparse crop of tomatoes). A side dressing of 5-10-10 every four weeks is plenty of food for tomatoes as a main diet. I'd recommend several foliar feedings with a product like "fermented salmon," especially at the time tomatoes begin flowering.
Stake plants. You are asking for trouble in a home garden if you don't use some kind of staking method, as everything from disease to voles will be inflicting damage on your tomato crop.
Prune suckers or not? Someone has to convince me that pruning suckers really makes a difference. I stopped pruning them a long time ago and I fail to see any decrease in crop production, or tomatoes that bear later than normal during the season as a direct result of this.
Mulch is good. Mulching is an excellent idea for tomatoes, but not until the soil has really warmed up. Get yourself a soil thermometer and when the soil is reading at least 70 degrees, it is time to apply mulch. IRT or infra-red transmitting mulch does more than just keep weeds at bay. It superheats the soil to a condition that makes tomatoes very, very comfortable. Better yet is the "tomato booster mulch," a red mulch that boosts tomato yields as the red material reflects far-red light wave lengths upwards into the foliage, stimulating rapid growth and increase in tomato production.
Pick daily. Keeping the vines frequently picked of all ripened fruit encourages the tomatoes to trudge onwards, producing more foliage and more flowers and more tomatoes.
Have questions? Send them to Bing J. Carbone, 46 Winthrop Woods Road, Huntington CT 06484, or email them to bjcgardens@aol.com.
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