Lou

If you have several tomato plants, chances are that, occasionally, you have a surplus of ripe tomatoes. You could share them all with your neighbors or you could simply prepare some or all of them to be canned later. With the healthy plants I had this year, I had so many ripe tomatoes (most of [...]

This year my tomato plants are the healthiest I've had in a long time. Even with the Tomato Spotted Wilt Virus and Early Blight. In fact, they are soooo big that they are overtaking each other. The leaves are extremely dense which contributes to the spread of Blight and TSWV. Also, with the plants so [...]

Powdery Mildew is a common garden problem. It is a common name for several different varieties of fungi and can infect a multitude of garden plants, including perennials, ornamental shrubs, fruit trees, and vegetables. I have found it on my squash plants and my garden phlox.  The bad news is that there really is no [...]

  One of a gardener's worst nightmares is the tomato hornworm. It's a huge caterpillar. When I say huge, I mean huge! They can reach 4 inches long by 1/2 inch in diameter; however, they can get bigger. Look at the size of this one.     They are green...like a leaf, so they are [...]

Early Blight affects tomatoes and other garden vegetables (peppers and potatoes). Blight is a fungus which lives in the soil and is not easily removed, especially here in the South where the winters are not typically cold enough to kill the fungus. Early Blight typically starts at the bottom of the plant and untreated will [...]

At last my summer garden is thriving. Nights stayed cool well into May and early June. Now....hot humid days and warm humid nights which my garden loves! The spring blooms have come and gone and the summer blooms are just beginning. I find myself sitting on my deck and just staring at the new blooms [...]

I check out my garden every morning and it's a good thing I do. In early June I found a couple of my tomato plants that had some brownish spots and brown areas on the leaves. Most of the leaves were on the top of one plant. On closer examination I found similar spots on [...]

OK, for the last few weeks, I have been upgrading this site. Since I'm not an expert at web site development, it took me a while. I found some great tools to add on to the standard Wordpress software which once installed really sped up the process of adding technical features to the site. I [...]

After you have thinned the seedlings (see how to in this postI want to Garden), let them grow until they have multiple real leaves. The first leaves they grow are called cotyledon. All of the seeds I planted (except the onions) have two first leaves and are called dicotyledons. They really don't resemble the later [...]