5 things to do in the garden this week:
1. If you desire to harvest crops of your , plant their seeds or transplants a few weeks apart. , namely corn, cucumber, eggplant, green beans, lima beans, peppers, summer and winter squash, melons, okra, green onions, chives, pumpkins, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, and herbs of every description. You can, of course, also plant those vegetables that in our part of the world may be grown 12 months of the year, namely lettuces and other greens, Swiss chard, turnips, radishes, beets, and carrots.
2. If you plant this year, nip the flower buds (an artichoke is an unopened flower bud) as soon as they appear. If you plant fruit trees this spring, remove any baby fruits the moment they start to grow. The reason for these seemingly barbaric acts is to force your newly planted specimens to put on more leafy growth that will produce more carbohydrate than if you waited to harvest their crops since maturing fruit is a sink for carbohydrate that could better be stored, at this stage, in expanding leaves. This foliar carbohydrate will find its way down to the roots, building a robust root system that will make your artichoke plants and fruit trees better prepared to yield abundant crops in years to come. With asparagus, on the other hand, you will want to allow harvestable spears to grow tall since the extra leafy growth will also result in a stronger root system than if you had harvested the first spears.
3. When , they simply must be caged or trellised. Otherwise, you will have wayward-growing plants that fall over on themselves with fruit that touches the ground and rots. To be safe, no matter what sort of tomatoes you fancy, plant them in a row supported by a trellis. Hammer 8-foot stakes two feet into the ground, one on each end of the row and 10 feet apart within the row. Install hardware cloth (hard wire mesh) between the stakes. Place one tomato plant every two feet. Prune most suckers, allowing two or three shoots to grow. You will not need to tie up your plants; just weave their stems in and out of the wire.
4. I have been enormously pleased with the (Thunbergia alata) I planted a year ago. It stopped flowering briefly this winter but now is in full flowering mode. Although it is typically seen in orange, my variety has lemon-yellow blooms. Barely a foot tall when purchased, it has now shimmied four feet up a patio post in its half-day sun exposure. The only challenge growing this plant is keeping it constantly cut back. It sends tendrils not only around the patio post but along the ground into the adjacent flower bed, necessitating constant pruning to keep it from choking every plant in the vicinity. I can think of no better plant when it comes to covering a chain-link fence, arbor, or gazebo. As its foliage hermetically seals the soil below, very little water is lost other than that taken up by the plant and minimal irrigation is needed to sustain growth.
5. Jack’s Classic All-purpose fertilizer is a handy product for of all vegetables, outdoor annuals and perennials, and indoor plants. It’s a granular 20-20-20 fertilizer which you dissolve in water and apply every 7-14 days both to the soil and to the leaves of your plants. In addition to the three major elements of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, Jack’s also contains important micronutrients – copper, iron, manganese, molybdenum, zinc, and boron – that are not included in most fertilizer products. The iron is also chelated, meaning it will find its way to roots, to be taken up into the plant, even in alkaline soil.
Please send your questions and comments to joshua@perfectplants.com.
