It’s every gardener’s nightmare: You spend all summer nurturing your lovely tomato and pepper plants along and when the time comes to pick the delicious fruits of your labor you discover they have ugly, black rotting splotches on the bottom of the fruit. You have fallen victim to the aptly-named Blossom End Rot (or BER).…
Keep your tomatoes warm and happy I’ve written before about protecting tomatoes and peppers from cold weather. I even did an experiment a couple years ago that showed using these tomato protectors gave me bigger plants that produced a whole two weeks ahead of plants that didn’t have protection. I started off using Wall-o-Water. That’s…
Wait! Isn’t nightshade a poison?!? Well, yes. if we were talking “nightshade” the plant, that is a poison. But today, we’re talking “nightshade” the family of plants. And they are probably among your favorite veggies. Vegetables in the nightshade or solanaceous family include: potatoes tomatoes peppers (both sweet and spicy varieties) eggplant tomatillos You can…
Meet Lori Living a mile down the road, Lori is my closest neighbor. She has made other attempts at gardening in the past, with varying levels of success. But this year her garden looks to be about the best one ever–lots of lush green plants flourishing in almost weed-free soil. Breaking new ground Her first challenge:…
Want an early start to your tomato harvest? Here is an experiment I did this year to see if using cold-weather protections (like Wall-o-Water) would really make a noticeable difference in production. Last month I told you about using protection to get an early start on planting crops. This spring I wanted to see how…
Love my dried tomatoes I just completed my seventh batch of dried tomatoes. Each batch of tomatoes fills all nine trays in my Excalibur Dehydrator. I get about 20-22 lbs into each batch. That’s the equivalent of about seven quarts of canned diced tomatoes. It takes about 24 hrs for a load of tomatoes to…