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Melon Shmelon
As much as I love to eat them, melons are my garden nemesis. After planting them for just over five years, this is the first summer where it seems I will be able to eat a watermelon from my yard, assuming critters don’t steal them. There are just two growing – one of which we only discovered three days ago. It was hiding beside the fence under a blackberry bush. The other has stopped growing, so I’m assuming it should be ripe soon. Considering we planted many seeds and have at least seven healthy vines growing, two watermelons is pretty low production. I’m not sure what it is about my…
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Creating a Lizard Habitat
We have managed to attracted a diversity of birds and pollinators to our garden, but I’ve only seen one or two lizards in the past year. There are several benefits to having lizards in your home garden. Lizards prey on insects and rodents They help propagate native plants by aiding in pollination and spreading seeds They typically don’t feed on the vegetation but on the pests that may be eating your vegetation They are one more critter for kids to learn about! To create a lizard habitat, I first selected an area of the garden where there wasn’t a lot of foot traffic and there was plenty of vegetative cover.…
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Upcycled String Trellis
Even after I’ve planted my veggies beds to full capacity, there’s always one more packet of seeds I’m drying to make room for. Yesterday it was the handful of French Climbing Beans I saved from my vines last year. They didn’t grow well because the Purple Hyacinth Beans and Turkey Craw Beans choked them out. So instead of eating the few beans that grew, I let them dry on the vines to save for this season. Because these can be trained up a trellis, I decided to plant them at the fence behind the potatoes and corn, where the beds are too deep to reach. I mounted a rooster weather…
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What is a "Last Frost Date" and why should you care?
When I started gardening, there was one phrase I starting noticing on every seed packet: last frost date. Another one I heard almost as often was: last killing frost. I wasn’t sure what exactly the difference was and who exactly determined that date. The Farmer’s Almanac defines frost in the following terms. Light freeze:29°F to 32°F—tender plants killed, with little destructive effect on other vegetation.Moderate freeze:25°F to 28°F—widely destructive effect on most vegetation, with heavy damage to fruit blossoms and tender and semi-hardy plants.Severe freeze:24°F and colder—damage to most plants. When gardeners use the term “last killing frost”, typically they mean a light freeze. When you first put your young…
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Did you forget to start seeds indoors?
If you live in the Southeast, no doubt you’ve been bit by the Spring bug. You can’t go to a grocery store without seeing displays of plants for sale. The Farmer’s Markets are starting to buzz again and seeing all the fresh produce might make you want to get your hands dirty. Yet, what’s that? You forgot to start your seedlings two months ago? That’s right. Some of us gardening crazies started planting our tomatoes and pepper 8 – 10 weeks ago. The good news is, since that last killing frost date is right around the corner (remember, it’s just a statistical date!) you can skip the whole window invasion…
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Lettuce Germination
Lettuce may be one of the easiest crops to grow so long as it isn’t planted too late in hot conditions that make it bolt. Several years ago I had a great crop of Romaine in a raised bed with ideal soil conditions. There was a rich blend of manure compost, peat moss, vermiculite and the existing soil. I started seeds in the early spring, watered regularly, and added tomato plants in to the bed in April which gave the lettuce shade by early summer. The crop lasted several weeks longer than it should have. There was another year when I switched to in-ground beds that I couldn’t get my…
