How to Start Your First Vegetable Garden – Waterwise Gardener
The best place for a vegetable garden is close to your kitchen. That makes it easy to step out the door, pick some herbs or veggies, and add them to whatever you are cooking. Plus, the closer the garden is, the more likely you’ll be to tend to your plants regularly.
Shade cloth is a synthetic, breathable fabric that filters sunlight, while still allowing your plants to breathe. Drape it over plants, using sticks or a wire rack to keep it over plants, without touching them. Add more shade to coax leafy greens in summer; remove the shade to grow those same greens in winter, as long as you live where the ground doesn’t freeze.
What are Seeds?
Vegetable Seeds are amazing little things. They look like dead specs of wood but when the temperature is just right, they have something to grow on, and enough light, all you need is water, and they’ll sprout. I’ve been growing plants from seed for years and years, and I’m still in awe of the process. Seeds are so tiny and in just weeks, they grow into huge plants that make food! What are seeds? Every organism’s goal is to reproduce, to perpetuate its species. That’s true for humans, insects, mammals, birds, fungus and every other living thing, including plants. As plants grow, they reach a point of maturity when they are ready to reproduce. When animals reach that point, their bodies are ready to make babies. For plants, maturity means making flowers that then make seeds, some of which are enclosed in fruits. In fact, seeds are plant embryos –…
It’s Bare Root Season – the Best Time to Shop for New Fruit Trees!
Bare root fruit trees in the nursery January is when bare root fruit trees arrive in nurseries – and your best time to shop for them. What is a bare-root fruit tree? It is a young tree grown in the ground, dug up in late fall, and its roots cleaned of all the dirt. Next, the trees are carefully packaged to keep the now “bare” roots moist en route to your local nursery. Because bare root trees are dormant, they travel well and transplant easily. Because they don’t carry the weight of soil, shipping costs are lower than the cost of shipping potted plants. Not all fruit trees are sold bare root – only deciduous fruit trees, those that lose their leaves in fall and winter. Among the many kinds of bare roots, are the grafted trees – peaches, plums, nectarines, almonds (yes, almonds are stone fruits!), and other stone…
Fall is Planting Time
The best planting time of the year is here! Yes, fall is for planting. In other parts of the country, gardeners plant in spring, but here, we plant in fall. As gardeners, our planting goal is for new plants to become “established.” That means plants survive transplant and grow new roots out into the surrounding soil. In addition to firmly anchoring plants in the ground, roots interact with beneficial soil microbes, some of which literally move water and nutrients to the roots. The water and nutrients support the plant to grow stems, branches, leaves, and more. Well-rooted plants become healthy, long-lived plants. As a rule of thumb, the larger the plant, the longer it takes to become established. A one-gallon plant establishes sooner than a five-gallon. A five-gallon plant establishes faster than a 15-gallon, etc. That’s one reason why smaller plants grow better and faster than the same plant in…