Getting Started with Vine Crops
By: the Editors of National Gardening
Before growing your vine crops, you may need to understand a little bit more about vine crop vernacular.
Seed Know-How
When it's time to choose seeds at the garden center or from a seed catalog, check with a gardening neighbor or your local cooperative extension service agent for advice on which varieties do best in your area. Seed companies have developed strains resistant to mildews, mosaic, scab, anthracnose and leaf spot, so you should look for disease-resistant varieties. These are indicated by capitalized letters on the seed packet or in the catalog. (SMR means scab and mosaic resistant, for example.)
It's also smart to start with seeds that have been treated with a powdery fungicide. The fungicide protects the seeds from rotting before they germinate and from damping off, when young seedlings just keel over and die.
Vine Vocabulary
Burpless - Thin-skinned varieties with a long, slender shape and no bitterness.
Cucurbits - The family of plants that includes cucumbers, melons, squashes, pumpkins and gourds.
Gynecious - Having only female flowers on the vine, requiring the presence of male flowers on an accompanying plant for pollination.
Hill - Group of plants or seeds usually arranged in a circle on level ground.
Monoecious - Having both male and female flowers on the same vine.
Mound - Raised soil used for planting in wet areas or in heavy clay soil; usually isolated to one crop or hill.
Netting - Criss-crossed pattern on the skin of muskmelons that becomes more and more pronounced as the fruit ripens.
Parthenocarpic - Seedless varieties that produce fruit without pollination. Because they produce only female flowers, they must be separated from other cucumber varieties. If parthenocarpic flowers are pollinated, the resulting fruits will be misshapened. Often grown as greenhouse cucumbers.
Ribbing - The series of contours along a melon, pumpkin or squashes outer skin. Some varieties have ribbing, some don't.
Slip - The crack that appears in a melon stem where it attaches to the fruit; indicates ripeness.
Spines - The wart-like bumps on gherkins and pickling cucumbers, which hold protective needles that deter pests.
Garden Planning
It seems to be a law of nature that the sweetest, juiciest garden vegetables are the ones that require the most pampering. To be rewarded with fine melons, for instance, you have to treat the plants as if they're on vacation -- lots of sun, water, food and warm weather. But if you treat them like royalty, they'll return the favor by producing delectable fruits.
Reserve a sunny, well-drained spot for your vine crops, preferably with a slight slope to the south. Sunny means at least six hours of full sun every day. The amount of space you allow depends on how many plants you and your family want, and whether or not you plan to support the vines with trellises or fences. If you've never grown vine crops before, it's best to start small. Cucumbers and summer squashes are especially heavy yielders. One hill per person in the household should be more than enough. If you intend to preserve or store much of the harvest, plant more.
To extend your harvest and avoid an overdose of ripe squash or cucumbers, grow two varieties, one that matures early and one that's later. Or, stagger your plantings for continual harvests and to avoid losing an entire crop if weather or disease problems hit.
Some varieties spread more than others. Keep this in mind as you plan your garden. If you plan to use supports, leave a walkway wide enough for you to cultivate by hand or machine. If you intend to let the vines run freely, beware -- some need lots of room. One good place to plant vine crops is at the edge of the garden, so the vines can spread over the lawn.
When To Plant
Wait to plant sensitive vine crops until after the average last frost date, unless you provide protection for them. Your local weather bureau can tell you when the average last frost date is expected, or ask an experienced gardener in your area. The surprising thing is that it's usually earlier than you think.
Planting Vine Crops
By: the Editors of National Gardening
You can plant vining crops in rows, hills, or mounds depending on the layout of your garden.
Row Planting
A row is seeds planted at regular intervals in a straight line. After preparing the soil and working it one last time on planting day, mark the row by stretching a string along the ground between two stakes.
Using a hoe or tiller, make a furrow beside the string. The depth of the furrow depends on your fertilizer. If you use a commercial fertilizer, the furrow only has to be three to four inches deep. If you have bulkier organic matter, make a four- to six-inch-deep furrow, spread two to three inches of manure in it, and top that with two to three inches of soil.
Drop a seed every six to eight inches in the row, depending on the variety. Firm the seeds into the soil with your hand or the back of a hoe, creating good contact between seeds and soil; this is the key to good germination. Cover the seeds with 3/4 to 1 inch of soil and firm again.
Hills
When it comes to planting, a hill isn't raised soil; it's a circle of four to eight seeds. Use similar planting techniques for hills as you would for rows. Mark the planting area, but instead of making a furrow, dig a four- to eight-inch hole for each hill, depending on the bulk of the fertilizer. Space the holes 3 to 10 feet apart, depending on the vegetable. Place either organic or commercial fertilizer such as 5-10-10 in the hole and fill it back to ground level, making sure that at least two inches of soil cover the fertilizer.
Plant six to eight seeds on the perimeter of a circle at each hill, allowing two to three inches between seeds. Drop each seed, firm, cover with soil and firm again, just as in rows. When the seedlings emerge, thin each hill down to the best four or five plants. The extra seeds just ensure a full hill, even if germination is poor.
Mounds
It's important for vine crops that the soil be dry and warm. If your soil stays very wet and you've had trouble raising healthy vine crops, try building up the hills into three- to five-inch-high mounds before planting. Then plant the way you would for hills. These mounds aid the plant's germination and improve the growing environment because the soil warms up and dries out faster.
Vine Spacing
Generally, the longer the growing season, the more the vines will spread, so you'll want to allow more room for winter squash and melons than for summer squash and cucumbers.
Here are some guidelines for seed and row spacing. You can always plant seeds closer together, just for the insurance of good germination. It's easy to thin if there are too many young plants in a row or a hill; it's harder to patch up an incomplete row.
Seeds in Rows
Cucumber -- 6 to 8 inches apart
Summer Squash -- 8 to 10 inches apart
Winter Squash -- 10 to 12 inches apart
Pumpkins -- 10 to 12 inches apart
Cantaloupe -- 6 to 8 inches apart
Watermelon -- 6 to 8 inches apart
Transplants
Cucumber -- 8 to 10 inches apart
Summer Squash -- 10 to 12 inches apart
Winter Squash -- 12 to 14 inches apart
Pumpkins -- 12 to 14 inches apart
Cantaloupe -- 8 to 10 inches apart
Watermelon -- 10 to 12 inches apart
Rows or Hills
Cucumber -- 4 to 6 feet apart
Summer Squash -- 4 to 6 feet apart
Winter Squash -- 6 to 10 feet apart
Pumpkins -- 6 to 10 feet apart
Cantaloupe -- 4 to 6 feet apart
Watermelon -- 6 to 8 feet apart
To thin the rows or hills, allow the same spacing as for transplants. Sprouted seeds are spaced exactly like non-sprouted seeds.
Planting Tricks
Planted with vine crops radishes seem to repel some harmful insects, such as cucumber beetles and black flea beetles. Whether it's their sharp odor or because they exude some chemical that insects dislike, radishes work. Plus, they sprout quickly to mark the row, so you won't disturb the germinating seeds when you cultivate around the hills or rows to keep down weeds.
Sprinkle a few radish seeds in each planting spot. Any early maturing variety will do. Leave the radishes in place until they're way beyond the eating stage. Pull them up when you harvest the first small fruits from the vine. As you remove the radishes, you loosen the soil around the base of the plants, leaving good-sized cavities where the radish roots were. These holes become ducts for air and water, keeping the vine roots better supplied.
Radishes are most effective at warding off insects when vine crops are young. This is also when cucumber beetles can do the most damage, spreading disease that can knock out an entire young crop. By the time the radishes lose some of their potency, the vines are strong and well-established.
Vine Crop Care
By: the Editors of National Gardening
To get a good crop of squash, pumpkins and other vine crops you'll need to care for them well; weeding, watering and fertilizing.
Weed War
The most crucial time to control weeds is when the plants are young, before they start to run. Using a hoe, rake or cultivating tool, stir up the top quarter- to half-inch of soil around your plants at least once a week.
Stay shallow as you cultivate the soil so that you don't injure plant roots. You'll destroy the weed seeds just below the surface; you don't have to worry about deeper weed seeds -- they can only germinate if they're near the surface.
Once the vines start spreading, the broad leaves will shade out many weeds. However, you're bound to get some at the edges of the patch where you left room for the vines to travel. Rake or cultivate this area (one to two inches deep) once a week before the vines reach it and you'll diminish the weed problem.
Mulching
One of the easiest weed controls of all is mulch. It also improves the growing environment.
To mulch, simply cover the ground around your plants with a layer of protective material (straw, hay, grass clippings, newspapers, black plastic). This shades the ground, making it impossible for most weeds to grow. Mulching also conserves moisture in the soil and, with the exception of black plastic, keeps the soil cool around the plants. This is especially important for southern gardeners.
Wait until the soil has really warmed up before mulching your vine crops. Straw, hay or grass clippings need to be three to four inches thick to do the job effectively. Alternately, five or six sheets of newspapers held down with stones will keep the garden weed-free.
Where growing seasons are short, however, and you want your vine crops to receive all the heat they can, stick to black plastic or use no mulch at all.
Thinning
Young plants need room to develop a strong root structure and stem. If they're crowded, they'll survive, but there may be too much competition for a great crop.
If you plant six to eight seeds in each hill and they all come up, thin out all but the best three or four plants when they're a few inches high.
Thin plants in rows to stand 8 to 12 inches apart, depending on the variety. There's no trick to thinning these vegetables; just pull up the smaller, least healthy-looking plants and leave the others.
Gardeners usually discard the thinnings, but you can also transplant them to fill in a spotty row. If you try this, handle the seedlings with care -- use a big spoon or trowel to dig them and move them with lots of soil surrounding the root balls to protect them.
Side-Dressing Fertilizer
Side-dressing is the application of a small amount of balanced commercial or organic fertilizer to your plants once they're four to five weeks old. It's called side-dressing because you place food a few inches to the side of the plants, where it will gradually seep down to the roots. This boost helps the plants increase production of high quality fruit, and it's especially important for vine crops.
During the plant's development there comes a time when it stands upright at a height of 12 inches or more. That's the time to side-dress. The next time you see it, it will have flopped over and the vines will start to run or sprawl along the ground as they grow. At that point, the plants put their energy into producing vines, blossoms and fruit, and they can really use the extra food.
If you're using balanced commercial fertilizer such as 10-10-10, make a shallow furrow down both sides of each row, or around each hill, about four to five inches away from the base of the plants. Sprinkle the fertilizer evenly in the furrow -- one tablespoon for each two to three feet of row, and the same amount around each hill. Cover the fertilizer with one inch of soil.
If you side-dress with bulky organic matter, such as manure, make the furrow deeper and a few inches further from the plants. Spread the manure evenly in the furrow and cover it with an inch or two of soil.
Make it your golden rule to underfertilize if there's any doubt about how much to add. It's easy to do your plants more harm than good with "one more handful for good measure."
Harvesting Vining Crops
By: the Editors of National Gardening
One of the wonderful things about having your own garden is that you control when you harvest your vegetables. You can pick them immediately before preparing them to ensure that you have the freshest produce anywhere. Even better, you can also have the youngest. Most commercial growers don't pick tiny vegetables, knowing they'll get more for their money by waiting a few days. But the best picks -- especially for cucumbers and summer squash -- are the smallest vegetables on the vine. Don't worry if it takes six zucchini to make a meal -- there will be lots more where they came from, so splurge! Just be careful not to step on the vines when you harvest -- you may kill the plants.
Harvesting Big Squash
If a crop gets ahead of your harvest efforts -- zucchini has a habit of doing this -- and the fruits grow large enough, the plant will stop producing and go on to the next stage of reproduction. You can still eat those larger vegetables, although they won't taste quite as good as younger ones. Cucumber skins toughen as they mature, and summer squash loses some of its flavor.
If your vacation time coincides with the first harvest and you'll be away from home, ask someone to keep the cucumbers or squashes picked, and offer them the produce. When you get back from your vacation, your vines will still be producing actively.
Harvesting Melons
There are several ways to judge a melon's ripeness, and most people learn from experience, which is the most dependable method. Here are tips for valid signs of ripeness for muskmelons and watermelons.
Smell -- check ripeness by smelling for a strong, "musky" or perfumey scent around the stem-end of the melon. That unmistakable odor means ripeness every time.
Skin -- when the skin color changes from green to yellow or tan and the netting becomes pronounced, the melon is ripe.
Stem -- as fruits start to ripen the stems separate or slip from the fruit, with very little pressure. A crack appears between the stem and the fruit, signaling the prime harvest time. When the stem finally separates completely, which is called full slip, the melon is very ripe and won't last long before turning soft and mushy. Watch the slip signs and try to eat the ripest melons first to give yourself a steady supply of good ones.
Harvesting Watermelons
Color -- check the spot where the watermelon rests on the ground. As the melon ripens, that "ground spot" turns from whitish to a deep, creamy yellow. Also, the melon's shiny surface dulls somewhat when it's ripe.
Thumps -- unripe melons make a sharp ringing sound when rapped and ripe ones sound muffled. However over-ripe melons make that same dead sound, so this isn't the most reliable test.
Curly-cues -- watch the tendrils on the stems to judge ripeness. When the tendril closest to a fruit turns brown and dries up, the melon is ripe. Beware, though: Some varieties may show this sign and not ripen for several more days, so you could be disappointed.
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
Gardening Basics: Leafy Greens
Leaf Crop ABC's
By: National Gardening editors
Most greens crops thrive in cool spring and fall weather (50oF to 60oF). Just compare the crisp, flavorful lettuce leaves harvested in spring with the often bitter leaves of a summer cutting and you'll agree. A few greens can handle summer heat, but most of them prefer the cooler temperatures of spring and fall.
A steady flow of moisture and nutrients is important for good greens growth. And for some greens, these supplies have to be near the surface. The roots of lettuce, for example, are close to the surface. They don't grow deep in the soil to search out food and water. If you've gardened in dry times, you know lettuce isn't very drought-resistant. Big-leaved plants give off a lot of moisture. When it's dry, they get very thirsty!
Nitrogen for Greens
Leafy crops need plenty of nitrogen, too. That's the key element in the good growth of leaves and it influences the crispness and quality of leafy crops, as well.
The one thing most greens don't need is a lot of heat. Spinach, for example, will quickly develop a seedstalk and start to stretch upward when it gets too warm. This is known as going to seed or "bolting." When it happens, spinach leaves begin to lose some of their flavor. A long hot spell can spoil heads of iceberg-type lettuce, too. The heat loosens the leaves of the head, and they get soft and sometimes bitter. If you can shade some of these crops as hot weather approaches, you can often keep the harvest going a few weeks longer.
Plant Greens in Wide Rows
By: National Gardening editors
Wide-row planting involves broadcasting seeds in a wide band, thus creating thicker rows with fewer paths in between. Not all vegetables, of course, are meant for wide rows. Squashes, tomatoes, cucumbers and melons are examples of crops that need room to run. But for greens - including head lettuce, collards and kale - wide rows offer many advantages. Most important, you can harvest more than half again as much from wide rows as from single rows using the same space. However, there are other reasons for growing green in wide rows, too:
• Wide rows mean less weeding because after the closely planted greens grow up to shade the ground, they create a "living mulch" or ground cover that blocks out light from weeds, thus checking their growth. Some hand weeding is still necessary, but the living mulch in wide rows take care of most weeding.
• Living mulch shades the soil, keeping it cool and moist, which is very important for crops like lettuce and spinach that get bitter and bolt when the weather warms up. Wide-row growing extends the harvest into summer because the soil in the row stays cooler. The cooler the soil, the better-flavored your crop will taste.
With summer greens like Swiss chard, the moist soil of a wide row helps maintain continuous growth. There's less drying out of the soil, and consequently, less stop-and-go growth.
• Planting is quick and simple. You scatter seed over the wide seedbed with no worry about straight lines or precise spacing.
• Wide rows are proven space-savers. You can do away with long single rows of one variety and plant more varieties of your favorite crops. For example, in a 10-foot-long row, 15 inches wide, you can grow three or four kinds of lettuce.
• Harvesting is fast because you can reach so many more plants from one spot without moving. It sure beats the nonstop stooping and straightening it takes to harvest or weed single rows.
Planting Wide Rows
After you've prepared and fertilized your soil on planting day, follow these easy steps to plant your wide rows of greens and salad crops: Mark the wide row. Stretch a string between two stakes close to the ground for the length of row you want.
Smooth the planting bed. With an iron garden rake, smooth the soil along one side of the string. The rake will mark the width of the row. Don't pack the seedbed down by stepping on it. Always do your work from the side of the row.
Sprinkle the seeds onto the seedbed. Roll seeds off the ends of your fingers with your thumb. Try to scatter them across the seedbed as evenly as you can. The spacing of crops will vary a bit. Lettuce seeds can be planted much thicker than kale or collard seeds, for example. Don't worry if you plant too thickly, thinning will correct that. To give you an idea of how much seed you need, the average packet of lettuce seed will cover three to six feet of a row that's 15 inches wide.
Sprinkle in a few radish seeds. After you've broadcast the main crop, sprinkle some radish seeds down the row. They'll come up quickly and mark the row. Use about five percent as much radish seed as the main seed. You can either pull up the radishes while they're small or harvest them after you pick your crop of greens.
Firm the seeds into the soil with a hoe, so the seeds make good contact with the earth.
Cover the seeds with soil from the sides of the row, pulling it up with your rake. The rule of thumb for the amount of soil to cover seeds is two to four times the diameter of the seed. So for most seeds in the greens group, that's about 1/4 to 1/2 inch of soil. In midsummer or late-summer plantings, an extra 1/4 inch of soil will help keep the seeds from drying out.
Finally, firm the soil once more with the back of a hoe and water gently if the soil is dry.
Single-Row Planting
Use a string to plant a single row, too. Rake the seedbed smooth right over the string and with the handle end of your rake, make a shallow furrow or planting line along the string.
Sprinkle the seeds in the shallow furrow, and walk by a second time and drop radish seeds every five or six inches. After firming the seeds into the soil, cover them with 1/4 to 1/2 inch of soil and firm down gently again. Mark the row with the seed packet or a small sign, remove stakes and string and proceed to the next row to be planted.
Double or Triple Rows
The double-row planting system is two single rows separated by four to five inches. It's a garden space-saver, and it's easier to irrigate, which is very important for gardeners in the West and South.
A simple irrigation system can be made by placing a soaker hose between the two rows. A soaker hose has many tiny holes in it so water oozes gradually from it, irrigating only the soil around your plants. This is a big watersaving advantage over sprinklers, which tend to water the walkways, too. You can even put three or four single rows four to five inches from each other and move the soaker hose to each aisle to water all the plants. This arrangement has the space-saving characteristics of wide-row growing and lets you water all the plants evenly, too.
Cultivating Greens
By: National Gardening editors
Weeds are green and while some, like lamb's quarters and purslane, can be eaten as greens, you really don't want them growing in among your salad crops. They steal moisture, fertilizer and sunlight. Some of the slower-growing greens can be shaded out of your garden forever by weeds.
Weed Prevention
There are ways to avoid weed problems in any garden - even if you've suffered from weeding fits in the past:
* Try to plant your fine-seeded greens in a section of garden that was relatively weed-free the season before. For example, where your thick, weed-smothering wide rows of beans grew.
* Work the soil with a shovel, rake or tiller a couple of times the week or so before planting. This uproots the tiniest weed seedlings and kills them or buries them (which kills them, too).
To Win - Thin!
Whether you plant in wide, single, double or multiple rows, you'll need to thin your greens to have a really successful crop. Because the seeds of most greens are so tiny, we inevitably plant a little too thickly. That's not bad, though - it helps guarantee a good stand of plants.
You just have to thin out the crowd, so your plants will have enough room to grow without too much competition from their neighbors. Thinning also provides good air circulation around plants to keep them from staying wet and becoming diseased. You can spend hours thinning by hand, or you can spend one minute using an iron rake. To thin a row, simply pull the rake across it - with the teeth digging into the soil only about 1/4 inch. The teeth remove just enough seedlings, leaving the remaining ones properly spaced. They'll look a little beat up, but don't panic. The plants will snap back quickly and get growing again, better than ever. Rake thinning also gets rid of many small weeds that may have started to germinate, again saving you tedious hand-weeding time.
To thin by hand, simply bend over and gently pull up enough plants so the remaining ones are spaced correctly. For example, in the case of leaf lettuce, the plants should stand three to four inches apart; butterhead lettuce, four to eight inches (six to 10 inches if you want a bigger head). Leave six to 10 inches between plants if you're thinning collards, kale or mustard.
The First Thinning
Make your first thinning timely. When your vegetable seedlings are 1/4 to 1/2 inch tall, drag an iron rake across the row, as described above. This thins the plants, of course, but it's also your first weeding effort. Hand weed as often as necessary until the wide-row greens develop enough foliage to shade out further weed growth. Remember, the more weeding you do early on, the less you'll have to do later.
If you set out lettuce, collards or other transplants, work the soil before planting them, and wait a week or so for them to take hold before you cultivate near them. In the first few weeks after being transplanted, the plant's roots are quite close to the surface and gaining strength by the day. Don't be careless with a hoe and risk slowing them down or killing them. Keep all cultivation very shallow, 1/2 to one inch deep at most.
Mulching
Use a good mulch "or soil covering" to stop weeds around head lettuce plants, collards or plants in a single row. Hay, straw or other organic matter will stop most weeds except some stubborn perennials, which will grow through it. Pull those by hand.
Pull weeds when they're small. Don't even wait till they come up out of the ground. After a rain, which will cause some weed seeds to germinate, allow the soil to dry slightly and then lightly stir it up with your rake or weeding tool. You'll kill many weeds before they even appear.
Harvesting Greens
By: National Gardening editors
Harvesting is one of the nicest chores of the gardening season. It's easy to do right:
When To Harvest
Start harvesting when there's something to eat. Gardens are for eating, so as soon as your endive, spinach, celery, lettuce or whatever is big enough to toss in a salad - harvest. There will be plenty more to come.
Harvest at peak flavor and freshness. Young greens are the tastiest and most nutritious. Don't wait for prize-winning heads of lettuce - start picking them when they're softball size, still crisp and flavorful.
Preserving Greens
If you're freezing or canning spinach, chard or beet greens, harvest the choicest leaves and plants and process them right away for the best quality. Harvest lettuce and other greens close to meal time to retain as much quality and food value as possible.
Try for two, three or even four cuttings. Leaf lettuce and chard are the best examples of crops that "come again" after you harvest: Cut them an inch above the ground and the plants will send out new, fresh growth in an effort to make seed. A long serrated bread knife is the best tool for harvesting wide rows of greens.
By: National Gardening editors
Most greens crops thrive in cool spring and fall weather (50oF to 60oF). Just compare the crisp, flavorful lettuce leaves harvested in spring with the often bitter leaves of a summer cutting and you'll agree. A few greens can handle summer heat, but most of them prefer the cooler temperatures of spring and fall.
A steady flow of moisture and nutrients is important for good greens growth. And for some greens, these supplies have to be near the surface. The roots of lettuce, for example, are close to the surface. They don't grow deep in the soil to search out food and water. If you've gardened in dry times, you know lettuce isn't very drought-resistant. Big-leaved plants give off a lot of moisture. When it's dry, they get very thirsty!
Nitrogen for Greens
Leafy crops need plenty of nitrogen, too. That's the key element in the good growth of leaves and it influences the crispness and quality of leafy crops, as well.
The one thing most greens don't need is a lot of heat. Spinach, for example, will quickly develop a seedstalk and start to stretch upward when it gets too warm. This is known as going to seed or "bolting." When it happens, spinach leaves begin to lose some of their flavor. A long hot spell can spoil heads of iceberg-type lettuce, too. The heat loosens the leaves of the head, and they get soft and sometimes bitter. If you can shade some of these crops as hot weather approaches, you can often keep the harvest going a few weeks longer.
Plant Greens in Wide Rows
By: National Gardening editors
Wide-row planting involves broadcasting seeds in a wide band, thus creating thicker rows with fewer paths in between. Not all vegetables, of course, are meant for wide rows. Squashes, tomatoes, cucumbers and melons are examples of crops that need room to run. But for greens - including head lettuce, collards and kale - wide rows offer many advantages. Most important, you can harvest more than half again as much from wide rows as from single rows using the same space. However, there are other reasons for growing green in wide rows, too:
• Wide rows mean less weeding because after the closely planted greens grow up to shade the ground, they create a "living mulch" or ground cover that blocks out light from weeds, thus checking their growth. Some hand weeding is still necessary, but the living mulch in wide rows take care of most weeding.
• Living mulch shades the soil, keeping it cool and moist, which is very important for crops like lettuce and spinach that get bitter and bolt when the weather warms up. Wide-row growing extends the harvest into summer because the soil in the row stays cooler. The cooler the soil, the better-flavored your crop will taste.
With summer greens like Swiss chard, the moist soil of a wide row helps maintain continuous growth. There's less drying out of the soil, and consequently, less stop-and-go growth.
• Planting is quick and simple. You scatter seed over the wide seedbed with no worry about straight lines or precise spacing.
• Wide rows are proven space-savers. You can do away with long single rows of one variety and plant more varieties of your favorite crops. For example, in a 10-foot-long row, 15 inches wide, you can grow three or four kinds of lettuce.
• Harvesting is fast because you can reach so many more plants from one spot without moving. It sure beats the nonstop stooping and straightening it takes to harvest or weed single rows.
Planting Wide Rows
After you've prepared and fertilized your soil on planting day, follow these easy steps to plant your wide rows of greens and salad crops: Mark the wide row. Stretch a string between two stakes close to the ground for the length of row you want.
Smooth the planting bed. With an iron garden rake, smooth the soil along one side of the string. The rake will mark the width of the row. Don't pack the seedbed down by stepping on it. Always do your work from the side of the row.
Sprinkle the seeds onto the seedbed. Roll seeds off the ends of your fingers with your thumb. Try to scatter them across the seedbed as evenly as you can. The spacing of crops will vary a bit. Lettuce seeds can be planted much thicker than kale or collard seeds, for example. Don't worry if you plant too thickly, thinning will correct that. To give you an idea of how much seed you need, the average packet of lettuce seed will cover three to six feet of a row that's 15 inches wide.
Sprinkle in a few radish seeds. After you've broadcast the main crop, sprinkle some radish seeds down the row. They'll come up quickly and mark the row. Use about five percent as much radish seed as the main seed. You can either pull up the radishes while they're small or harvest them after you pick your crop of greens.
Firm the seeds into the soil with a hoe, so the seeds make good contact with the earth.
Cover the seeds with soil from the sides of the row, pulling it up with your rake. The rule of thumb for the amount of soil to cover seeds is two to four times the diameter of the seed. So for most seeds in the greens group, that's about 1/4 to 1/2 inch of soil. In midsummer or late-summer plantings, an extra 1/4 inch of soil will help keep the seeds from drying out.
Finally, firm the soil once more with the back of a hoe and water gently if the soil is dry.
Single-Row Planting
Use a string to plant a single row, too. Rake the seedbed smooth right over the string and with the handle end of your rake, make a shallow furrow or planting line along the string.
Sprinkle the seeds in the shallow furrow, and walk by a second time and drop radish seeds every five or six inches. After firming the seeds into the soil, cover them with 1/4 to 1/2 inch of soil and firm down gently again. Mark the row with the seed packet or a small sign, remove stakes and string and proceed to the next row to be planted.
Double or Triple Rows
The double-row planting system is two single rows separated by four to five inches. It's a garden space-saver, and it's easier to irrigate, which is very important for gardeners in the West and South.
A simple irrigation system can be made by placing a soaker hose between the two rows. A soaker hose has many tiny holes in it so water oozes gradually from it, irrigating only the soil around your plants. This is a big watersaving advantage over sprinklers, which tend to water the walkways, too. You can even put three or four single rows four to five inches from each other and move the soaker hose to each aisle to water all the plants. This arrangement has the space-saving characteristics of wide-row growing and lets you water all the plants evenly, too.
Cultivating Greens
By: National Gardening editors
Weeds are green and while some, like lamb's quarters and purslane, can be eaten as greens, you really don't want them growing in among your salad crops. They steal moisture, fertilizer and sunlight. Some of the slower-growing greens can be shaded out of your garden forever by weeds.
Weed Prevention
There are ways to avoid weed problems in any garden - even if you've suffered from weeding fits in the past:
* Try to plant your fine-seeded greens in a section of garden that was relatively weed-free the season before. For example, where your thick, weed-smothering wide rows of beans grew.
* Work the soil with a shovel, rake or tiller a couple of times the week or so before planting. This uproots the tiniest weed seedlings and kills them or buries them (which kills them, too).
To Win - Thin!
Whether you plant in wide, single, double or multiple rows, you'll need to thin your greens to have a really successful crop. Because the seeds of most greens are so tiny, we inevitably plant a little too thickly. That's not bad, though - it helps guarantee a good stand of plants.
You just have to thin out the crowd, so your plants will have enough room to grow without too much competition from their neighbors. Thinning also provides good air circulation around plants to keep them from staying wet and becoming diseased. You can spend hours thinning by hand, or you can spend one minute using an iron rake. To thin a row, simply pull the rake across it - with the teeth digging into the soil only about 1/4 inch. The teeth remove just enough seedlings, leaving the remaining ones properly spaced. They'll look a little beat up, but don't panic. The plants will snap back quickly and get growing again, better than ever. Rake thinning also gets rid of many small weeds that may have started to germinate, again saving you tedious hand-weeding time.
To thin by hand, simply bend over and gently pull up enough plants so the remaining ones are spaced correctly. For example, in the case of leaf lettuce, the plants should stand three to four inches apart; butterhead lettuce, four to eight inches (six to 10 inches if you want a bigger head). Leave six to 10 inches between plants if you're thinning collards, kale or mustard.
The First Thinning
Make your first thinning timely. When your vegetable seedlings are 1/4 to 1/2 inch tall, drag an iron rake across the row, as described above. This thins the plants, of course, but it's also your first weeding effort. Hand weed as often as necessary until the wide-row greens develop enough foliage to shade out further weed growth. Remember, the more weeding you do early on, the less you'll have to do later.
If you set out lettuce, collards or other transplants, work the soil before planting them, and wait a week or so for them to take hold before you cultivate near them. In the first few weeks after being transplanted, the plant's roots are quite close to the surface and gaining strength by the day. Don't be careless with a hoe and risk slowing them down or killing them. Keep all cultivation very shallow, 1/2 to one inch deep at most.
Mulching
Use a good mulch "or soil covering" to stop weeds around head lettuce plants, collards or plants in a single row. Hay, straw or other organic matter will stop most weeds except some stubborn perennials, which will grow through it. Pull those by hand.
Pull weeds when they're small. Don't even wait till they come up out of the ground. After a rain, which will cause some weed seeds to germinate, allow the soil to dry slightly and then lightly stir it up with your rake or weeding tool. You'll kill many weeds before they even appear.
Harvesting Greens
By: National Gardening editors
Harvesting is one of the nicest chores of the gardening season. It's easy to do right:
When To Harvest
Start harvesting when there's something to eat. Gardens are for eating, so as soon as your endive, spinach, celery, lettuce or whatever is big enough to toss in a salad - harvest. There will be plenty more to come.
Harvest at peak flavor and freshness. Young greens are the tastiest and most nutritious. Don't wait for prize-winning heads of lettuce - start picking them when they're softball size, still crisp and flavorful.
Preserving Greens
If you're freezing or canning spinach, chard or beet greens, harvest the choicest leaves and plants and process them right away for the best quality. Harvest lettuce and other greens close to meal time to retain as much quality and food value as possible.
Try for two, three or even four cuttings. Leaf lettuce and chard are the best examples of crops that "come again" after you harvest: Cut them an inch above the ground and the plants will send out new, fresh growth in an effort to make seed. A long serrated bread knife is the best tool for harvesting wide rows of greens.
Gardening Basics: Tomatoes
Choosing Tomato Varieties
By: National Gardening editors
So many tomatoes, so little space!
Healthy, vigorous tomato vines can produce a lot of fruit. If you're new to gardening, try growing just a few tomato plants at first — perhaps two or three plants of two to three different varieties. But of the thousands available, from cherished heirloom types to the hottest new hybrids, how do you narrow your choices?
Criteria for Choosing Varieties
When do fruit ripen? Since varieties mature at different times, you can stretch your harvest over many weeks. If you're buying seeds to start your own plants, read catalog descriptions carefully to discover "days to maturity." This indicates approximately how soon you can expect ripe fruit once you've transplanting seedlings to the garden. Plants sold at garden centers are often labeled "early," "midseason," or "late" to indicate when the variety should start ripening.
Determinate vs. Indeterminate. Another consideration in choosing tomato varieties is whether the vines are determinate or indeterminate. Determinate plants stop growing once the flower buds emerge. Because of their more restrained size, many determinate varieties need no staking or caging, but providing support can improve the quality of the fruit. All the fruit ripens within a relatively short period of time - usually about a week to 10 days. This can be a boon if you're canning, but for the gardener who prefers to have a fewer number of tomatoes over a longer period of time, indeterminate varieties are better. The vines continue to grow and set fruit throughout the season, and won't quit until the weather turns too hot or too cold to sustain fruiting and growth, or kills plants outright.
For gardeners with little space to spare, or only a deck or balcony to grow on, patio and bush varieties are a good option. They're more compact than determinates, yet produce fruit throughout the season like indeterminate types. They are bred to succeed in small spaces.
What to do with the fruit? When selecting a tomato variety, keep in mind what you plan to do with the fruits. There are varieties suited for just about every purpose — eating fresh, making tomato paste, canning, drying — even for cultivating into a county fair prizewinner.
Seeds or Transplants. The easiest way to get your tomato patch started is to purchase young plants, also called transplants or starts. You can pick up plants at garden centers or order them through catalogs or the Internet. For years, gardeners who bought plants had a very narrow field of variety choices, but thanks to an expanding mailorder trade, the options are greater than ever.
That said, starting your own seed gives you an almost endless list of varieties to choose from, allowing you to get just the type that will suit your growing conditions and tastes. Starting seeds gives you a chance to start "gardening" earlier in the season, and nurturing plants from seed to harvest is a great experience. Plant seeds six to eight weeks before the last frost date for your region, and place them under flourescent light. (For seedstarting details go to Starting Tomatoes from Seed. Call cooperative extension Master Gardeners or your local weather service to find out your last spring frost date.
Disease resistance. By planting tomato varieties with built-in resistance to diseases, you can have a bit more control over your garden's success.
For instance, many tomato varieties are resistant to soil-borne diseases such as verticillium and fusarium wilts and nematodes. Most seed catalogs indicate resistance to these diseases by putting F (fusarium), V (verticillium), N (nematodes) after the variety name. You'll also see varieties with resistance to viruses such as tomato mosaic virus (T), and to alternaria (A), the fungus that causes early blight.
Talk to the Master Gardeners office or to neighboring home gardeners. They can tell you if certain tomato diseases are common in your area.
Experiment! If you're not counting on your garden as your only food source, you can certainly afford to risk planting the varieties that appeal to you — perhaps an heirloom that, though not resistant to disease, is reportedly produces the most delicious tomatoes in the world. Experimentation is part of the joy of gardening, and part of your harvest is what you learn along the way.
Photo by Suzanne DeJohn/National Gardening Association
Transplanting Tomatoes
By: National Gardening editors
Transplanting is a major step. If you do it carefully, you can look forward to a crop that will be healthy and prolific. Rushing your plants into the ground before they're properly hardened off, or roughing up the tomatoes' roots when you're handling them can set the crop back. Read Hardening Off Transplants for more information on acclimating your seedlings to the great outdoors.
If you talk to other gardeners, you'll quickly get the notion there are as many methods, tips and tricks to the art of transplanting as there are ways of baking a cake. Read more about the relative benefits of trench and vertical planting before deciding which is right for you. Below are the basics upon which variations are based.
*Plant your tomato patch on a sunny site. These heat-loving vines need at least 6 hours of direct sun to produce a crop, and the cooler and shorter your growing season, the more sun they'll need.
*It's ideal to transplant on a cloudy, calm day to reduce stress from sun and wind, but if your plants have been exposed to these conditions during hardening off they should suffer little or no setback. Planting in late afternoon or evening allows plants all night to settle in before a full day of bright sun.
*An hour before transplanting, soak roots with fish emulsion or seaweed fertilizer diluted as per label directions. Moist rootballs are easier to slip out of pots, and the fertilizer provides nutrients to support plant health during the transition.
*Before taking plants from their pots, prepare the soil, add compost or fertilizer to trenches or planting holes, a full watering can or hose, and material for cutworm collars (see below) at the ready.
Note: If you're using a water soluble commercial fertilizer, cover it with an inch or two of soil before setting the plants in place. If the fertilizer, which is made of soluble salts, comes in contact with roots, it can dehydrate and damage them. Read the fertlizer label carefully and use it only as directed - more is not better!
*Protect against cutworms. These ground-level pests can chew completely through thin tomato stems. Wrap a newspaper or paperboard collar around the "trunk" of each plant so that they span from an inch or two above the soil surface to an inch or two below. These biodegradable barriers last long enough for the stems to grow to the point where they can resist hungry cutworm.
*Working quickly, cup the roots in one hand as you remove the transplant from its container, and tuck it into its home in the garden. A smooth and speedy transition from pot to soil means less shock to the plant.
*Water well to settle soil around the roots, and don't let the soil dry out during this crucial transition time. A layer of mulch - straw, grass clippings, compost, and the like - helps prevent moisture from evaporating from the soil.
Pruning Tomatoes
By: National Gardening editors
Pruning means pinching off the shoots or "suckers" that sprout from the stem in the crotch right above a leaf branch. If you let a sucker grow, it simply becomes another big stem with its own blossoms, fruits and suckers! With staked or trellised tomatoes, pinch off the suckers and just keep the energy of the plant directed at one (sometimes two to three) main stems.
If you want additional stems to develop besides the main stem, allow the suckers closest to the bottom of the plant to grow. These will have more flower blossoms and are easier to train to the outside of the plant than suckers that sprout higher up.
Tomato plants really grow fast when the weather warms up, and new suckers form all the time, so you should go on "sucker patrol" at least twice a week during the heavy growing season.
If you live in a very hot, sunny area, you can let some of the suckers put out a couple of leaves and then pinch out the tips to stop their growth. The sucker provides a little more foliage to help the plant manufacture food and also to help shade tomatoes from the sun.
Pruning Unstaked Plants
Unstaked plants can also be pruned, although it's not as necessary as it is for staked or trellised plants. Pruning improves ventilation, which can help to prevent disease problems. Pruning branches late in the season opens the plant up to more sunlight. Then on cooler days the plants are a little warmer, which is good for ripening tomatoes.
If you're growing determinate varieties of tomatoes, go easy on any pruning. Because these plants are smaller and don't continue to set new fruits throughout the season, heavy pruning may reduce your yield drastically. Also, be careful not to overprune in hot parts of the country. Tomato fruits need protection from the bright sun or they may develop sunscald. Tomatoes ripen better if they're shaded some by foliage.
Pruning Tops of Plants
You can pinch off the tip of the main stem above the top blossom of indeterminate tomato varieties to keep a flourishing plant from getting any higher. This type of pruning can be helpful when a plant is outgrowing its support, or toward the end of the growing season when a taller plant won't help much in terms of increased production. At that point, you'd prefer to see the plant put its energy into ripening the tomatoes already on the vine.
Pruning Roots
Root pruning is a special trick you can use to speed up the ripening of early tomatoes. It simply involves cutting some of the roots of a plant when it has three or four clusters of tomatoes on it. By cutting the roots, you put quite a bit of stress on the plant, which causes it to mature more quickly. It's as if the plant were worried that it might not have time to complete its life cycle, so it rushes to mature some fruit and seed. The plant won't die if you root-prune it correctly; the growth process is simply interrupted. But after a little rest, the plant is ready to start producing again.
To root-prune trench-planted tomatoes, take a long kitchen knife and make a cut down along just one side of the buried main stem, 1 to 2 inches away from it, going down 8 to 10 inches. If the tomatoes are planted vertically, cut halfway around the plant, 1 or 2 inches from the stem and 8 to 10 inches deep. If a knife doesn't work well for you, try a spade or a shovel.
Ripening and Harvesting Tomatoes
By: National Gardening editors
One of the great joys of gardening is reaching for the first red-ripe tomato on the vine and biting into it. There's a flavor, juiciness and pleasure you'll never find in a supermarket tomato. Because tomatoes ripen from the inside out, when the outer skin is firm and red, you know you've got a beautiful ripe one.
Getting Them to Turn Red
The red color of tomatoes won't form when temperatures are above 86oF. So, if you live where the summers get quite hot, leaving tomatoes on the vine may give them a yellowish orange look. It's probably better to pick them in the pink stage and let them ripen indoors in cooler temperatures.
Tomatoes need warmth, not light, to ripen, so there's no need to put them on a sunny windowsill. Place them out of direct sunlight - even in a dark cupboard - where the temperature is 65 to 70oF.
Frost-Time Harvest
Tomatoes succumb to frost, but don't panic when the weatherman predicts the first one and your tomato vines are still loaded with green fruit. If it's going to be a light frost, you can protect the plants overnight by covering them with old sheets, plastic, burlap bags or big boxes. It's usually worth the effort because the second frost is often two or three weeks after the first one.
If a heavy freeze is on its way, go out and pick all the tomatoes. Green tomatoes that have reached about 3/4 of their full size and show some color will eventually ripen, and smaller, immature green ones can be pickled or cooked green.
Some people like to pull up the whole tomato plant and hang it upside down in a dark basement room and let the tomatoes ripen gradually. If you try this system, check them regularly to prevent very ripe fruits from falling onto the floor - splaat!
The Shelf Method
Another method is to put unripe tomatoes on a shelf and cover them with sheets of newspaper. Every few days check under the newspaper and remove ripe fruits or any that have begun to rot. The newspaper covering helps trap a natural ethylene gas that tomatoes give off, which hastens ripening. Some people wrap each tomato individually, but this causes a lot of work when you want to check for ripe tomatoes: You have to open each one! You can also place tomatoes in a paper bag with an apple or banana. The fruits give off ethylene gas, which helps to speed the tomatoes' ripening process.
Fall Tomatoes
In parts of the southern and southwestern states you can grow an abundant crop of fall tomatoes. However, finding young tomato plants to buy in the middle of summer may be hard.
An easy way to solve this problem is to cut small suckers from spring-planted tomatoes and let them grow to full-sized plants. Instead of pinching out most of the suckers on your tomato plants, allow some to grow four or five inches. Then in mid- or late summer, cut the suckers from the plant, remove the lowest set of leaves and place the suckers in a jar of water or moistened sand or vermiculite. This will start the rooting process. Once roots begin to form, plant them in pots or directly in the garden. Firm the soil around the suckers and water them heavily for two or three days.
These plants will do just as well as any you could raise from seed or buy at a garden store. Just be sure they don't have any insect or disease problems or you'll be fighting them all fall. The plants will give you a nice fall crop of tomatoes, too.
By: National Gardening editors
So many tomatoes, so little space!
Healthy, vigorous tomato vines can produce a lot of fruit. If you're new to gardening, try growing just a few tomato plants at first — perhaps two or three plants of two to three different varieties. But of the thousands available, from cherished heirloom types to the hottest new hybrids, how do you narrow your choices?
Criteria for Choosing Varieties
When do fruit ripen? Since varieties mature at different times, you can stretch your harvest over many weeks. If you're buying seeds to start your own plants, read catalog descriptions carefully to discover "days to maturity." This indicates approximately how soon you can expect ripe fruit once you've transplanting seedlings to the garden. Plants sold at garden centers are often labeled "early," "midseason," or "late" to indicate when the variety should start ripening.
Determinate vs. Indeterminate. Another consideration in choosing tomato varieties is whether the vines are determinate or indeterminate. Determinate plants stop growing once the flower buds emerge. Because of their more restrained size, many determinate varieties need no staking or caging, but providing support can improve the quality of the fruit. All the fruit ripens within a relatively short period of time - usually about a week to 10 days. This can be a boon if you're canning, but for the gardener who prefers to have a fewer number of tomatoes over a longer period of time, indeterminate varieties are better. The vines continue to grow and set fruit throughout the season, and won't quit until the weather turns too hot or too cold to sustain fruiting and growth, or kills plants outright.
For gardeners with little space to spare, or only a deck or balcony to grow on, patio and bush varieties are a good option. They're more compact than determinates, yet produce fruit throughout the season like indeterminate types. They are bred to succeed in small spaces.
What to do with the fruit? When selecting a tomato variety, keep in mind what you plan to do with the fruits. There are varieties suited for just about every purpose — eating fresh, making tomato paste, canning, drying — even for cultivating into a county fair prizewinner.
Seeds or Transplants. The easiest way to get your tomato patch started is to purchase young plants, also called transplants or starts. You can pick up plants at garden centers or order them through catalogs or the Internet. For years, gardeners who bought plants had a very narrow field of variety choices, but thanks to an expanding mailorder trade, the options are greater than ever.
That said, starting your own seed gives you an almost endless list of varieties to choose from, allowing you to get just the type that will suit your growing conditions and tastes. Starting seeds gives you a chance to start "gardening" earlier in the season, and nurturing plants from seed to harvest is a great experience. Plant seeds six to eight weeks before the last frost date for your region, and place them under flourescent light. (For seedstarting details go to Starting Tomatoes from Seed. Call cooperative extension Master Gardeners or your local weather service to find out your last spring frost date.
Disease resistance. By planting tomato varieties with built-in resistance to diseases, you can have a bit more control over your garden's success.
For instance, many tomato varieties are resistant to soil-borne diseases such as verticillium and fusarium wilts and nematodes. Most seed catalogs indicate resistance to these diseases by putting F (fusarium), V (verticillium), N (nematodes) after the variety name. You'll also see varieties with resistance to viruses such as tomato mosaic virus (T), and to alternaria (A), the fungus that causes early blight.
Talk to the Master Gardeners office or to neighboring home gardeners. They can tell you if certain tomato diseases are common in your area.
Experiment! If you're not counting on your garden as your only food source, you can certainly afford to risk planting the varieties that appeal to you — perhaps an heirloom that, though not resistant to disease, is reportedly produces the most delicious tomatoes in the world. Experimentation is part of the joy of gardening, and part of your harvest is what you learn along the way.
Photo by Suzanne DeJohn/National Gardening Association
Transplanting Tomatoes
By: National Gardening editors
Transplanting is a major step. If you do it carefully, you can look forward to a crop that will be healthy and prolific. Rushing your plants into the ground before they're properly hardened off, or roughing up the tomatoes' roots when you're handling them can set the crop back. Read Hardening Off Transplants for more information on acclimating your seedlings to the great outdoors.
If you talk to other gardeners, you'll quickly get the notion there are as many methods, tips and tricks to the art of transplanting as there are ways of baking a cake. Read more about the relative benefits of trench and vertical planting before deciding which is right for you. Below are the basics upon which variations are based.
*Plant your tomato patch on a sunny site. These heat-loving vines need at least 6 hours of direct sun to produce a crop, and the cooler and shorter your growing season, the more sun they'll need.
*It's ideal to transplant on a cloudy, calm day to reduce stress from sun and wind, but if your plants have been exposed to these conditions during hardening off they should suffer little or no setback. Planting in late afternoon or evening allows plants all night to settle in before a full day of bright sun.
*An hour before transplanting, soak roots with fish emulsion or seaweed fertilizer diluted as per label directions. Moist rootballs are easier to slip out of pots, and the fertilizer provides nutrients to support plant health during the transition.
*Before taking plants from their pots, prepare the soil, add compost or fertilizer to trenches or planting holes, a full watering can or hose, and material for cutworm collars (see below) at the ready.
Note: If you're using a water soluble commercial fertilizer, cover it with an inch or two of soil before setting the plants in place. If the fertilizer, which is made of soluble salts, comes in contact with roots, it can dehydrate and damage them. Read the fertlizer label carefully and use it only as directed - more is not better!
*Protect against cutworms. These ground-level pests can chew completely through thin tomato stems. Wrap a newspaper or paperboard collar around the "trunk" of each plant so that they span from an inch or two above the soil surface to an inch or two below. These biodegradable barriers last long enough for the stems to grow to the point where they can resist hungry cutworm.
*Working quickly, cup the roots in one hand as you remove the transplant from its container, and tuck it into its home in the garden. A smooth and speedy transition from pot to soil means less shock to the plant.
*Water well to settle soil around the roots, and don't let the soil dry out during this crucial transition time. A layer of mulch - straw, grass clippings, compost, and the like - helps prevent moisture from evaporating from the soil.
Pruning Tomatoes
By: National Gardening editors
Pruning means pinching off the shoots or "suckers" that sprout from the stem in the crotch right above a leaf branch. If you let a sucker grow, it simply becomes another big stem with its own blossoms, fruits and suckers! With staked or trellised tomatoes, pinch off the suckers and just keep the energy of the plant directed at one (sometimes two to three) main stems.
If you want additional stems to develop besides the main stem, allow the suckers closest to the bottom of the plant to grow. These will have more flower blossoms and are easier to train to the outside of the plant than suckers that sprout higher up.
Tomato plants really grow fast when the weather warms up, and new suckers form all the time, so you should go on "sucker patrol" at least twice a week during the heavy growing season.
If you live in a very hot, sunny area, you can let some of the suckers put out a couple of leaves and then pinch out the tips to stop their growth. The sucker provides a little more foliage to help the plant manufacture food and also to help shade tomatoes from the sun.
Pruning Unstaked Plants
Unstaked plants can also be pruned, although it's not as necessary as it is for staked or trellised plants. Pruning improves ventilation, which can help to prevent disease problems. Pruning branches late in the season opens the plant up to more sunlight. Then on cooler days the plants are a little warmer, which is good for ripening tomatoes.
If you're growing determinate varieties of tomatoes, go easy on any pruning. Because these plants are smaller and don't continue to set new fruits throughout the season, heavy pruning may reduce your yield drastically. Also, be careful not to overprune in hot parts of the country. Tomato fruits need protection from the bright sun or they may develop sunscald. Tomatoes ripen better if they're shaded some by foliage.
Pruning Tops of Plants
You can pinch off the tip of the main stem above the top blossom of indeterminate tomato varieties to keep a flourishing plant from getting any higher. This type of pruning can be helpful when a plant is outgrowing its support, or toward the end of the growing season when a taller plant won't help much in terms of increased production. At that point, you'd prefer to see the plant put its energy into ripening the tomatoes already on the vine.
Pruning Roots
Root pruning is a special trick you can use to speed up the ripening of early tomatoes. It simply involves cutting some of the roots of a plant when it has three or four clusters of tomatoes on it. By cutting the roots, you put quite a bit of stress on the plant, which causes it to mature more quickly. It's as if the plant were worried that it might not have time to complete its life cycle, so it rushes to mature some fruit and seed. The plant won't die if you root-prune it correctly; the growth process is simply interrupted. But after a little rest, the plant is ready to start producing again.
To root-prune trench-planted tomatoes, take a long kitchen knife and make a cut down along just one side of the buried main stem, 1 to 2 inches away from it, going down 8 to 10 inches. If the tomatoes are planted vertically, cut halfway around the plant, 1 or 2 inches from the stem and 8 to 10 inches deep. If a knife doesn't work well for you, try a spade or a shovel.
Ripening and Harvesting Tomatoes
By: National Gardening editors
One of the great joys of gardening is reaching for the first red-ripe tomato on the vine and biting into it. There's a flavor, juiciness and pleasure you'll never find in a supermarket tomato. Because tomatoes ripen from the inside out, when the outer skin is firm and red, you know you've got a beautiful ripe one.
Getting Them to Turn Red
The red color of tomatoes won't form when temperatures are above 86oF. So, if you live where the summers get quite hot, leaving tomatoes on the vine may give them a yellowish orange look. It's probably better to pick them in the pink stage and let them ripen indoors in cooler temperatures.
Tomatoes need warmth, not light, to ripen, so there's no need to put them on a sunny windowsill. Place them out of direct sunlight - even in a dark cupboard - where the temperature is 65 to 70oF.
Frost-Time Harvest
Tomatoes succumb to frost, but don't panic when the weatherman predicts the first one and your tomato vines are still loaded with green fruit. If it's going to be a light frost, you can protect the plants overnight by covering them with old sheets, plastic, burlap bags or big boxes. It's usually worth the effort because the second frost is often two or three weeks after the first one.
If a heavy freeze is on its way, go out and pick all the tomatoes. Green tomatoes that have reached about 3/4 of their full size and show some color will eventually ripen, and smaller, immature green ones can be pickled or cooked green.
Some people like to pull up the whole tomato plant and hang it upside down in a dark basement room and let the tomatoes ripen gradually. If you try this system, check them regularly to prevent very ripe fruits from falling onto the floor - splaat!
The Shelf Method
Another method is to put unripe tomatoes on a shelf and cover them with sheets of newspaper. Every few days check under the newspaper and remove ripe fruits or any that have begun to rot. The newspaper covering helps trap a natural ethylene gas that tomatoes give off, which hastens ripening. Some people wrap each tomato individually, but this causes a lot of work when you want to check for ripe tomatoes: You have to open each one! You can also place tomatoes in a paper bag with an apple or banana. The fruits give off ethylene gas, which helps to speed the tomatoes' ripening process.
Fall Tomatoes
In parts of the southern and southwestern states you can grow an abundant crop of fall tomatoes. However, finding young tomato plants to buy in the middle of summer may be hard.
An easy way to solve this problem is to cut small suckers from spring-planted tomatoes and let them grow to full-sized plants. Instead of pinching out most of the suckers on your tomato plants, allow some to grow four or five inches. Then in mid- or late summer, cut the suckers from the plant, remove the lowest set of leaves and place the suckers in a jar of water or moistened sand or vermiculite. This will start the rooting process. Once roots begin to form, plant them in pots or directly in the garden. Firm the soil around the suckers and water them heavily for two or three days.
These plants will do just as well as any you could raise from seed or buy at a garden store. Just be sure they don't have any insect or disease problems or you'll be fighting them all fall. The plants will give you a nice fall crop of tomatoes, too.
Gardening Basics: Onions
How Onions Grow
By: the Editors of National Gardening
There are more than 300 widely scattered species of onions in the world, and the bulb onion we grow is just one of them. The onion is a biennial plant, which means that it grows one year and produces its seeds the second. Between these two seasons onions have a dormant phase, which helps us gardeners.
Onion's Growth Cycle
The first-year onion plants begin their growth by putting out green top leaves during the cool weather. They store a lot of energy in those leaves. When the weather gets warmer and the days longer, the plants stop putting out new top leaves. Instead, they take the energy from the leaves and store it in the expanding bottom bulbs. Eventually the leaves fall over and shrivel up and the plants appear dormant. Inside the bulbs, however, the plants are storing the energy to put out flowering seed stalks when they start growing again. That's the goal of any plant - to produce the seed to keep its species going.
Onion bulbs are best for eating, cooking and storing before they've started to put their energy into making seed. That's why gardeners harvest onions after just one season and pick off any seed pods as soon as they appear.
Planting Onions
By: National Gardening editors
Plant your sets early in the spring. Onions do best if the temperature is cool when they start to grow, and warm as they mature. Northern springs are certainly cool -- and often frosty! But as the saying goes, "You can't kill an onion -- even with a hammer!"
Frost just won't harm sets. As soon as the ground can be worked in the spring, put the sets in. In the North that's usually in late March and early April. Gardeners in the mild winter areas of the Deep South can plant their sets in the fall and get a plentiful supply of fresh onions throughout the winter months.
Why Onions Form Bulbs
Onion sets you plant in early spring will put on a lot of green top growth before they make bulbs. You may ask, "Why don't the bulbs start forming right away?" The answer is that before the plants can make bulbs, they first have to store energy in the top green leaves. Then they must wait for nature's signal to put this energy into bulb making.
The plants usually get the message when the day length and the temperature are right. The onions don't care how old they are or when they were put in the ground; when conditions are right, they simply stop making new leaves and start using the energy they've stored to make bulbs. The size of the onion bulb is determined by how much energy there is in the top green leaves before the light conditions signal to start diverting energy to the bulbs. The more green growth before this time, the more energy there is and the bigger the bulb will be.
Early planting is important because it gives your onions plenty of time to grow tops and to store a lot of energy for the bulbs. If you put your sets in late, they won't have the time for a lot of top growth. As a result, there won't be much energy available when nature whispers to the onion plant, "Make a bulb."
The Wide-Row Method
Plant sets three to four inches away from each other in wide rows (or a little closer if you plan to harvest them when they're small). Wide rows are useful for onions and many other vegetables because you can grow much more using less space. That's especially important if you only have a small plot. Here's why:
If you plant 100 onion sets three inches apart in a single row, your row will be 25 feet long. If you allow a few inches, say three, on each side of the set, the row will be six inches wide. That's a total of 121/2 square feet of garden space for 100 sets. But with a wide row 15 inches across, putting the 100 sets three inches apart in all directions, your row will be just 5 feet long and 61/4 square feet. A wide row is easier to water, weed, fertilize and harvest, too.
In the Ground
There's no need to make trenches or special holes for the sets. Just grasp them at the top (the pointed end) with the root end down and push them into well-prepared soil the full depth of the bulb. The soil should just barely cover the top of the onion sets. If you have some tiny sets, plant them at least an inch in the ground, so they get good contact with the soil. The sets will get a better start. After you've got your sets in the ground, firm the soil around them with a hoe.
Remember, if a set is planted too shallowly, it takes a long time to get started. It's important to push the bulb all the way into the soil. It gets the onion off to a good start for producing a lot of top growth. If the onion sets are a little too deep, it won't hurt. Later, when the bulbs are expanding, pull some of the dirt away from the sides to give the bulbs room to expand.
You may not want to plant all your sets at once. Try keeping back a few handfuls in the refrigerator. When you start harvesting some small onions to eat raw or use in salads and other dishes, replace them with sets from the refrigerator. Just remember that onion sets planted later in the spring won't develop into large onions.
Growing Onions
By: the Editors of National Gardening
As with most vegetables, you can start onions from seed in the garden. But many onions have relatively long growing seasons and onion seeds don't germinate quickly, so it's often better to start the crop another way. You can set out transplants, or you can plant "sets" which are simply half-grown onions.
Where Sets Come From
Many sets are grown from seed on big farms near Chicago. The onion seeds are planted very thickly. Super-crowding of the plants makes the competition for water and fertilizer fairly stiff, so the plants never get very big and the resulting bulbs are quite small.
The small onions are harvested in the late summer or fall and dried for a month or more to rid them of moisture that could cause rot. Then the sets are stored until gardeners need them the following spring.
It's said that Chicago got its name from onions. Indians, who once lived nearby, called the place "Shikako" which means "Skunk Place" after the strong smell of wild garlic, onions, and leeks that once flourished there.
Buying Sets
In the North you'll find the first onion sets of the year at garden centers when there's still snow on the ground.
Using sets is probably the most popular, convenient, and dependable way to get onions started. They're very easy to plant, and you can harvest your first eating onions sooner than if you started from seeds.
Stores usually sell only a few varieties of sets, such as long-keeping white and yellow varieties and a red type or two. You can also grow sets yourself during one season for use the next year.
Sets are sold by the pound or by the scoop; each set is one onion. When you buy onion sets, watch the size. Sets that are smaller than 1/2 inch in diameter take longer to grow, but they'll still produce. Sets larger than 3/4 inch in diameter are very apt to "bolt" or grow seed pods in a hurry after you plant them. If you let them grow seed pods (a pod looks like a miniature version of the domes on the towers of the Kremlin in Moscow), the plants put energy into the seeds and not into the bulb. The bulbs will be small, tough and won't keep, so pick the pods or seed stalks off as soon as you see them.
The most dependable sets are the size of marbles -- 1/2 to 3/4 inch in diameter -- and are quite firm.
Growing Your Own Sets
To save some money and have a little onion fun, you may want to grow your own sets. Here's how to do it: In July in the North, or August farther south, create a small section of your garden to plant a good storage onion such as 'Yellow Globe'. Sow the seeds about 1/4 inch apart in one-foot-wide rows. Give the plants some fertilizer and just let them grow without thinning them at all.
Shortly before the first frost, bend the tops over. Wait a week or so and then dig the small bulbs out of the ground. After curing them for a few weeks, store them in mesh bags in a very cool (40oF) dry, dark place. The following spring you'll have plenty of sets on hand.
Most southern gardeners don't bother with growing sets because they have a pretty long season and don't always need the head start that sets give. If you like to experiment, here is one method that works pretty well in the South; select a short-day onion seed variety that's a good keeper and in early March sow it thickly in a wide row and leave the onions to grow. As they'll be very crowded, the bulbs won't get oversized. Harvest the bulbs when the tops wither from the hot summer sun. Dry them in the sun for a day or so and store them in mesh bags in a very cool, dry place. In the fall you can set them out in the garden again. They'll put on a little root growth before it gets cold and when the weather warms up in the spring, they'll pop back to life giving you very early onions. Of course in the deep South, where the winters are quite often mild, you can plant sets in the fall and harvest onions throughout the winter.
Buying Transplants
The best way to start big-bulb, European-type onions is from transplants. These are thin, young onion seedlings, and the optimum planting size is when they're just the size of a pencil. You can send away to seed or plant companies for bunches of transplants, or you can sometimes buy them at your local nursery. To get mail-order transplants, order the varieties you want sometime during the winter from companies in southern states; they'll ship them to you in the spring. You have to order by the bunch (75 to 100 plants in each bunch). As with many other things, it'll be cheaper if you order in quantity, so getting together with friends on a big order can save you a little money.
Taking Care of Mail-Order or Nursery Plants
The first thing to do when the plants arrive is to unwrap them. The onion plants develop a lot of heat when banded together, and heat encourages rot in onions. Next, put 1/2 inch of water in a shallow baking pan, and stick the roots in the water just enough to get their "toes" wet. They'll revive quickly. Plant your onions as soon as you can after receiving them. If you can't plant them within a few days, forget the bath. Put the unwrapped plants in plastic bags and store them in a cool, dry place until you can plant. The refrigerator is a good spot!
You can also "heel in" your transplants until you have time to plant them where they belong in the garden. Just dig a shallow trench out in the garden (or use a container), set the plants a couple of inches deep and firm the soil tightly around them. Soil in the spring is usually wet enough to keep the roots from drying out.
If any plants have a bad odor or are slimy or slick, they're probably rotting. Separate them from the others right away and throw them out. They won't make it in the garden.
Growing Your Own Transplants
There's a tremendous satisfaction in growing your own plants indoors for transplanting. For one thing you have the benefit of choosing from more varieties.
Buy your seeds early enough to start your plants anywhere from 8 to 16 weeks before the last hard frost in your area. Start the seeds in a 4-to 5-inch deep flat filled with very rich, sterile, loose soil. Sterile soil is free of weed seeds and harmful disease organisms, so the onion seeds have a better chance at the start. The various potting soil and starter mixes on the market are good, but mixing in extra fertilizer before you plant is a must. One or two tablespoons of 5-10-10 fertilizer added to every gallon of potting soil works fine for onions and other vegetables.
Sprinkle the seeds into the soil and gently press them into the soil. Try to space the seeds about 1/4 inch apart, but don't fuss about it. It's impossible to get them spaced exactly right, and you can always thin them if they get too close. After sowing, just barely cover the seed with a little more soil or sand and tamp it down.
Next, moisten the soil and cover the flat with a sheet of plastic and then some newspaper. The plastic creates a greenhouse effect retaining the moisture, and the newspaper keeps the temperature even. (Onion seeds don't need light to germinate.) You won't need to water again until you take off the newspaper or plastic.
Put the flats in a nice, warm spot around 65oF or 70oF if possible. (Don't worry too much about the temperature being exactly right. Onion seeds will germinate anywhere from 40oF to 80oF; they simply prefer a steady 65oF to 70oF.)
Don't put the flats on a window sill before the seedlings come up. The temperature there fluctuates too much: On a sunny day it can rise to 90oF or more, but at night it can be the coldest place in the house. That's not good for germination; onions need an even temperature.
When the seedlings sprout, remove the plastic and newspaper and put the flats by a window or under lights. They won't need too much attention. Just make sure they get enough water, and you should add a little fertilizer from time to time -- about a teaspoon in water every two weeks is good. Pour it around the edges of the flat so that the water spreads across the whole area.
In a few weeks, you'll notice the tiny plants getting tall and spindly. That can be a problem, unless you turn it into a plus. It's very important that your onion seedlings not fall over and get too skinny to transplant, so when they're three inches tall, cut them back to one inch. This is your first harvest! The trimmings are delicious in dips, salads, sandwiches or as a garnish. After you cut them, the plants will naturally produce more tops. When the tops reach three inches again, mow them back to one inch. As long as the plants are indoors, cut them back whenever they grow to three inches. With short tops the plants can put more energy into developing healthy roots, and that will help them get a good start when you put them in the ground. A few weeks before planting, stop trimming them. Top growth will be important outside.
Harvesting Onions
By: the Editors of National Gardening
There's never a time when onions aren't ready for harvesting. They can be picked and eaten at any stage. No matter how many onions you use during the season, though, it's nice to have a crop of big onions mature at the end of summer to store for the fall and winter months.
When to Harvest
You can always tell when onions have stopped growing. The leaves will lose their color, weaken at the top of the bulb and flop over. Each year a few new gardeners watch the leaves die and wonder, "What's wrong?" There's nothing wrong; it's Nature's plan. The leaves' job is done - they've put the last of their energy into the bulbs.
Let most of your onion tops fall over by themselves - maybe 80% or 90% of them - then bend over the rest of the tops. Once they're down, leave the bulbs in the ground for another 10 days to two weeks to mature fully. It's not good to leave the onions in the ground for longer than two weeks after the tops die because they become open to organisms that can cause rot in storage, or they might even start growing again.
Pull your onions up on a sunny day if you can, then let them sit in the sun for another day or so to dry (in hot climates this usually takes just a few hours). This drying kills the root system at the bottom of each bulb. The roots will be like little brittle wires when they're dry.
Picking the right day to pull the onions can determine how well the onions will keep. If you harvest them after some rainy weather they'll have a lot more moisture in them and won't dry out as well.
Curing
After drying the onions in the open for a day or so, it's time to bring them under cover for a second, longer drying or "curing" process.
Some people cut the tops off the onions before curing, but that's not strictly necessary. However, if you do trim the top leaves, don't cut them any closer than one inch from the bulb. Otherwise the neck won't dry out, and the onion could rot in storage.
To cure the onions, spread them out in any warm, airy place out of the sun, such as on a porch. If you find you have too many onions for your available porch space, try spreading them out near the edge of your driveway, covering them with a light cotton (not plastic) sheet to provide shade. The sheet, held in place by stones along the edge, keeps the sun from burning the bulbs but still allows a lot of air circulation. Turn the bulbs a couple of times to promote even drying.
Heavy coverings like canvas or plastic trap moisture inside, so the onions will never get really dry. With the sheet system you won't have to worry about a few scattered rains. The sheets and the onions dry out rapidly together after a shower.
You don't want any wet spots on the onions when you put them in storage, so cure them really well. This can take two to three weeks. After curing them, hang the onions in mesh bags in your garage and dry them some more before putting them in your root cellar. It doesn't take this long in the South, but wherever you live, the longer you cure your onions, the better they'll keep.
Curing Basics
Here are the basics of curing:
* Sun dry for just a short time.
* Cure just the onions you'll store; separate the soft, young and thick-necked bulbs and use them first.
* Cure thoroughly in a warm, well-ventilated area away from direct sun.
* Don't crowd onions during curing; give them room to breathe.
* Onions are ready to store when the skins rattle and the roots are dry and wiry.
By: the Editors of National Gardening
There are more than 300 widely scattered species of onions in the world, and the bulb onion we grow is just one of them. The onion is a biennial plant, which means that it grows one year and produces its seeds the second. Between these two seasons onions have a dormant phase, which helps us gardeners.
Onion's Growth Cycle
The first-year onion plants begin their growth by putting out green top leaves during the cool weather. They store a lot of energy in those leaves. When the weather gets warmer and the days longer, the plants stop putting out new top leaves. Instead, they take the energy from the leaves and store it in the expanding bottom bulbs. Eventually the leaves fall over and shrivel up and the plants appear dormant. Inside the bulbs, however, the plants are storing the energy to put out flowering seed stalks when they start growing again. That's the goal of any plant - to produce the seed to keep its species going.
Onion bulbs are best for eating, cooking and storing before they've started to put their energy into making seed. That's why gardeners harvest onions after just one season and pick off any seed pods as soon as they appear.
Planting Onions
By: National Gardening editors
Plant your sets early in the spring. Onions do best if the temperature is cool when they start to grow, and warm as they mature. Northern springs are certainly cool -- and often frosty! But as the saying goes, "You can't kill an onion -- even with a hammer!"
Frost just won't harm sets. As soon as the ground can be worked in the spring, put the sets in. In the North that's usually in late March and early April. Gardeners in the mild winter areas of the Deep South can plant their sets in the fall and get a plentiful supply of fresh onions throughout the winter months.
Why Onions Form Bulbs
Onion sets you plant in early spring will put on a lot of green top growth before they make bulbs. You may ask, "Why don't the bulbs start forming right away?" The answer is that before the plants can make bulbs, they first have to store energy in the top green leaves. Then they must wait for nature's signal to put this energy into bulb making.
The plants usually get the message when the day length and the temperature are right. The onions don't care how old they are or when they were put in the ground; when conditions are right, they simply stop making new leaves and start using the energy they've stored to make bulbs. The size of the onion bulb is determined by how much energy there is in the top green leaves before the light conditions signal to start diverting energy to the bulbs. The more green growth before this time, the more energy there is and the bigger the bulb will be.
Early planting is important because it gives your onions plenty of time to grow tops and to store a lot of energy for the bulbs. If you put your sets in late, they won't have the time for a lot of top growth. As a result, there won't be much energy available when nature whispers to the onion plant, "Make a bulb."
The Wide-Row Method
Plant sets three to four inches away from each other in wide rows (or a little closer if you plan to harvest them when they're small). Wide rows are useful for onions and many other vegetables because you can grow much more using less space. That's especially important if you only have a small plot. Here's why:
If you plant 100 onion sets three inches apart in a single row, your row will be 25 feet long. If you allow a few inches, say three, on each side of the set, the row will be six inches wide. That's a total of 121/2 square feet of garden space for 100 sets. But with a wide row 15 inches across, putting the 100 sets three inches apart in all directions, your row will be just 5 feet long and 61/4 square feet. A wide row is easier to water, weed, fertilize and harvest, too.
In the Ground
There's no need to make trenches or special holes for the sets. Just grasp them at the top (the pointed end) with the root end down and push them into well-prepared soil the full depth of the bulb. The soil should just barely cover the top of the onion sets. If you have some tiny sets, plant them at least an inch in the ground, so they get good contact with the soil. The sets will get a better start. After you've got your sets in the ground, firm the soil around them with a hoe.
Remember, if a set is planted too shallowly, it takes a long time to get started. It's important to push the bulb all the way into the soil. It gets the onion off to a good start for producing a lot of top growth. If the onion sets are a little too deep, it won't hurt. Later, when the bulbs are expanding, pull some of the dirt away from the sides to give the bulbs room to expand.
You may not want to plant all your sets at once. Try keeping back a few handfuls in the refrigerator. When you start harvesting some small onions to eat raw or use in salads and other dishes, replace them with sets from the refrigerator. Just remember that onion sets planted later in the spring won't develop into large onions.
Growing Onions
By: the Editors of National Gardening
As with most vegetables, you can start onions from seed in the garden. But many onions have relatively long growing seasons and onion seeds don't germinate quickly, so it's often better to start the crop another way. You can set out transplants, or you can plant "sets" which are simply half-grown onions.
Where Sets Come From
Many sets are grown from seed on big farms near Chicago. The onion seeds are planted very thickly. Super-crowding of the plants makes the competition for water and fertilizer fairly stiff, so the plants never get very big and the resulting bulbs are quite small.
The small onions are harvested in the late summer or fall and dried for a month or more to rid them of moisture that could cause rot. Then the sets are stored until gardeners need them the following spring.
It's said that Chicago got its name from onions. Indians, who once lived nearby, called the place "Shikako" which means "Skunk Place" after the strong smell of wild garlic, onions, and leeks that once flourished there.
Buying Sets
In the North you'll find the first onion sets of the year at garden centers when there's still snow on the ground.
Using sets is probably the most popular, convenient, and dependable way to get onions started. They're very easy to plant, and you can harvest your first eating onions sooner than if you started from seeds.
Stores usually sell only a few varieties of sets, such as long-keeping white and yellow varieties and a red type or two. You can also grow sets yourself during one season for use the next year.
Sets are sold by the pound or by the scoop; each set is one onion. When you buy onion sets, watch the size. Sets that are smaller than 1/2 inch in diameter take longer to grow, but they'll still produce. Sets larger than 3/4 inch in diameter are very apt to "bolt" or grow seed pods in a hurry after you plant them. If you let them grow seed pods (a pod looks like a miniature version of the domes on the towers of the Kremlin in Moscow), the plants put energy into the seeds and not into the bulb. The bulbs will be small, tough and won't keep, so pick the pods or seed stalks off as soon as you see them.
The most dependable sets are the size of marbles -- 1/2 to 3/4 inch in diameter -- and are quite firm.
Growing Your Own Sets
To save some money and have a little onion fun, you may want to grow your own sets. Here's how to do it: In July in the North, or August farther south, create a small section of your garden to plant a good storage onion such as 'Yellow Globe'. Sow the seeds about 1/4 inch apart in one-foot-wide rows. Give the plants some fertilizer and just let them grow without thinning them at all.
Shortly before the first frost, bend the tops over. Wait a week or so and then dig the small bulbs out of the ground. After curing them for a few weeks, store them in mesh bags in a very cool (40oF) dry, dark place. The following spring you'll have plenty of sets on hand.
Most southern gardeners don't bother with growing sets because they have a pretty long season and don't always need the head start that sets give. If you like to experiment, here is one method that works pretty well in the South; select a short-day onion seed variety that's a good keeper and in early March sow it thickly in a wide row and leave the onions to grow. As they'll be very crowded, the bulbs won't get oversized. Harvest the bulbs when the tops wither from the hot summer sun. Dry them in the sun for a day or so and store them in mesh bags in a very cool, dry place. In the fall you can set them out in the garden again. They'll put on a little root growth before it gets cold and when the weather warms up in the spring, they'll pop back to life giving you very early onions. Of course in the deep South, where the winters are quite often mild, you can plant sets in the fall and harvest onions throughout the winter.
Buying Transplants
The best way to start big-bulb, European-type onions is from transplants. These are thin, young onion seedlings, and the optimum planting size is when they're just the size of a pencil. You can send away to seed or plant companies for bunches of transplants, or you can sometimes buy them at your local nursery. To get mail-order transplants, order the varieties you want sometime during the winter from companies in southern states; they'll ship them to you in the spring. You have to order by the bunch (75 to 100 plants in each bunch). As with many other things, it'll be cheaper if you order in quantity, so getting together with friends on a big order can save you a little money.
Taking Care of Mail-Order or Nursery Plants
The first thing to do when the plants arrive is to unwrap them. The onion plants develop a lot of heat when banded together, and heat encourages rot in onions. Next, put 1/2 inch of water in a shallow baking pan, and stick the roots in the water just enough to get their "toes" wet. They'll revive quickly. Plant your onions as soon as you can after receiving them. If you can't plant them within a few days, forget the bath. Put the unwrapped plants in plastic bags and store them in a cool, dry place until you can plant. The refrigerator is a good spot!
You can also "heel in" your transplants until you have time to plant them where they belong in the garden. Just dig a shallow trench out in the garden (or use a container), set the plants a couple of inches deep and firm the soil tightly around them. Soil in the spring is usually wet enough to keep the roots from drying out.
If any plants have a bad odor or are slimy or slick, they're probably rotting. Separate them from the others right away and throw them out. They won't make it in the garden.
Growing Your Own Transplants
There's a tremendous satisfaction in growing your own plants indoors for transplanting. For one thing you have the benefit of choosing from more varieties.
Buy your seeds early enough to start your plants anywhere from 8 to 16 weeks before the last hard frost in your area. Start the seeds in a 4-to 5-inch deep flat filled with very rich, sterile, loose soil. Sterile soil is free of weed seeds and harmful disease organisms, so the onion seeds have a better chance at the start. The various potting soil and starter mixes on the market are good, but mixing in extra fertilizer before you plant is a must. One or two tablespoons of 5-10-10 fertilizer added to every gallon of potting soil works fine for onions and other vegetables.
Sprinkle the seeds into the soil and gently press them into the soil. Try to space the seeds about 1/4 inch apart, but don't fuss about it. It's impossible to get them spaced exactly right, and you can always thin them if they get too close. After sowing, just barely cover the seed with a little more soil or sand and tamp it down.
Next, moisten the soil and cover the flat with a sheet of plastic and then some newspaper. The plastic creates a greenhouse effect retaining the moisture, and the newspaper keeps the temperature even. (Onion seeds don't need light to germinate.) You won't need to water again until you take off the newspaper or plastic.
Put the flats in a nice, warm spot around 65oF or 70oF if possible. (Don't worry too much about the temperature being exactly right. Onion seeds will germinate anywhere from 40oF to 80oF; they simply prefer a steady 65oF to 70oF.)
Don't put the flats on a window sill before the seedlings come up. The temperature there fluctuates too much: On a sunny day it can rise to 90oF or more, but at night it can be the coldest place in the house. That's not good for germination; onions need an even temperature.
When the seedlings sprout, remove the plastic and newspaper and put the flats by a window or under lights. They won't need too much attention. Just make sure they get enough water, and you should add a little fertilizer from time to time -- about a teaspoon in water every two weeks is good. Pour it around the edges of the flat so that the water spreads across the whole area.
In a few weeks, you'll notice the tiny plants getting tall and spindly. That can be a problem, unless you turn it into a plus. It's very important that your onion seedlings not fall over and get too skinny to transplant, so when they're three inches tall, cut them back to one inch. This is your first harvest! The trimmings are delicious in dips, salads, sandwiches or as a garnish. After you cut them, the plants will naturally produce more tops. When the tops reach three inches again, mow them back to one inch. As long as the plants are indoors, cut them back whenever they grow to three inches. With short tops the plants can put more energy into developing healthy roots, and that will help them get a good start when you put them in the ground. A few weeks before planting, stop trimming them. Top growth will be important outside.
Harvesting Onions
By: the Editors of National Gardening
There's never a time when onions aren't ready for harvesting. They can be picked and eaten at any stage. No matter how many onions you use during the season, though, it's nice to have a crop of big onions mature at the end of summer to store for the fall and winter months.
When to Harvest
You can always tell when onions have stopped growing. The leaves will lose their color, weaken at the top of the bulb and flop over. Each year a few new gardeners watch the leaves die and wonder, "What's wrong?" There's nothing wrong; it's Nature's plan. The leaves' job is done - they've put the last of their energy into the bulbs.
Let most of your onion tops fall over by themselves - maybe 80% or 90% of them - then bend over the rest of the tops. Once they're down, leave the bulbs in the ground for another 10 days to two weeks to mature fully. It's not good to leave the onions in the ground for longer than two weeks after the tops die because they become open to organisms that can cause rot in storage, or they might even start growing again.
Pull your onions up on a sunny day if you can, then let them sit in the sun for another day or so to dry (in hot climates this usually takes just a few hours). This drying kills the root system at the bottom of each bulb. The roots will be like little brittle wires when they're dry.
Picking the right day to pull the onions can determine how well the onions will keep. If you harvest them after some rainy weather they'll have a lot more moisture in them and won't dry out as well.
Curing
After drying the onions in the open for a day or so, it's time to bring them under cover for a second, longer drying or "curing" process.
Some people cut the tops off the onions before curing, but that's not strictly necessary. However, if you do trim the top leaves, don't cut them any closer than one inch from the bulb. Otherwise the neck won't dry out, and the onion could rot in storage.
To cure the onions, spread them out in any warm, airy place out of the sun, such as on a porch. If you find you have too many onions for your available porch space, try spreading them out near the edge of your driveway, covering them with a light cotton (not plastic) sheet to provide shade. The sheet, held in place by stones along the edge, keeps the sun from burning the bulbs but still allows a lot of air circulation. Turn the bulbs a couple of times to promote even drying.
Heavy coverings like canvas or plastic trap moisture inside, so the onions will never get really dry. With the sheet system you won't have to worry about a few scattered rains. The sheets and the onions dry out rapidly together after a shower.
You don't want any wet spots on the onions when you put them in storage, so cure them really well. This can take two to three weeks. After curing them, hang the onions in mesh bags in your garage and dry them some more before putting them in your root cellar. It doesn't take this long in the South, but wherever you live, the longer you cure your onions, the better they'll keep.
Curing Basics
Here are the basics of curing:
* Sun dry for just a short time.
* Cure just the onions you'll store; separate the soft, young and thick-necked bulbs and use them first.
* Cure thoroughly in a warm, well-ventilated area away from direct sun.
* Don't crowd onions during curing; give them room to breathe.
* Onions are ready to store when the skins rattle and the roots are dry and wiry.
Gardening Basics: Corn
Planning Your Corn Crop
By: National Gardening editors
If you've never grown corn before, check with a local farm or garden store, a neighbor who raises corn or your Cooperative Extension Service agent before you buy seeds. They can tell you what varieties do particularly well in your area, as well as some of the disease, pest or weather problems you may encounter.
Corn Varieties
When asking for advice, keep in mind that gardeners are often emotionally attached to their favorites. For instance, some people always plant Silver Queen corn, even though the first, creamy white ears won't be ready to harvest until fall. That waiting is part of what makes 'Silver Queen' special, and the long-awaited fall harvest is one of life's fine pleasures. Other people feel the same about 'Country Gentleman' or 'Stowell's Evergreen'.
Sweet corn varieties are usually grouped according to the length of their growing season. You can really extend your harvest by planting more than one group at the same time. The tassel time won't overlap, so you won't have to worry about cross-pollination between varieties.
Despite the preference for a particular type of corn, it's a lot of fun to try a new variety or two every year. However, although the latest hybrids often produce beautifully, watch the results of a few seasons before you depend on a new one for your main crop.
Common Sense and Cross-Pollination
You may come upon words of caution in a seed catalog or have had another gardener tell you to isolate certain types of corn to avoid cross-pollination. It's true that corn's dependence on the wind for pollination means you sometimes have to watch out for accidental mixing of different varieties, but in most home gardens this is a minor problem, if one at all.
The technical explanation for the way corn changes when it's pollinated by another variety has to do with recessive and dominant genes, plus a number of other factors. Luckily, you don't have to be a plant breeder to understand how to keep your garden corn from having an unwanted mix-up. You can just use common sense.
When one type of corn tassels - letting its pollen loose - that pollen can land on the silks of any corn in the immediate area. If only one variety of corn is silking at any given time, crossing cannot take place. This is usually the case in home gardens, where the varieties planted tend to have significantly different flowering and growing seasons.
If two similar varieties cross, the difference in the resulting ears may be unnoticeable. However, because of their genetic makeup, some types of corn suffer if they cross with a stronger or dominant variety.
What's a Home Gardener To Do
There are three instances where this can be a concern in the home garden. First, yellow corn is dominant over white. If a yellow and a white variety cross, the white corn could end up with some yellow kernels. Because it's dominant, yellow corn wouldn't be affected by the cross.
Second, both popcorn and field corn have genes that are dominant over sweet corn. If a cross takes place with either popcorn or field corn and sweet corn, the sweet corn is likely to be tough and starchy. Again, because they're dominant, popcorn or field corn wouldn't be affected by the cross.
Third, many of the genes for supersweet flavor are recessive, so they're affected by any corn that crosses with them. That's why the seed companies advise isolating these varieties.
Corn Isolation
Isolating just means preventing an unwanted cross, and you have a choice of ways to do this. All you have to do is prevent cross-pollination. Simply plan to keep different varieties of corn that enter the tassel and silk stage at the same time far enough apart that their pollens won't mix. The recommendations vary from 100 feet to 600 feet, depending on whom you ask. Naturally, the farther apart the better, but about 200 feet is fine unless you regularly experience very strong winds.
To isolate corn you can choose varieties with different days to maturity, or stagger plantings of varieties that have a similar number of days to maturity. Allow at least 10 days between plantings, and your crops shouldn't cross.
Another trick is to plant the dominant corn on the prevailing downwind side of any variety that will suffer if they cross. If you're not sure in which direction the prevailing winds blow in your area, check with your local weather service.
Some gardeners claim that planting a "fence" of two rows of tall sunflowers between corn varieties is enough to prevent cross-pollination. This works most of the time, because the odds are generally in your favor when it comes to accidental crossing.
Old Favorites
An open-pollinated corn variety is a nonhybrid or a strain that has grown for many generations without plant breeders' modifications. With the revived interest in heirlooms, many other varieties such as 'Country Gentleman', 'Golden Bantam', 'Stowell's Evergreen', and 'Ashworth' are becomming more readily available to home gardeners.
Open-pollinated corn grows just like its parent plants, so you can save the seed from one year to the next with good results. If you want to save the seeds of an open-pollinated variety, isolate the crop from other varieties, so there won't be an accidental mixing of pollens to affect the next generation.
Corn: Planting Basics
By: National Gardening editors
There's an old farmer's rhyme about planting corn seed: "One for the blackbird, one for the crow, one for the soil and one to grow."
Although it's not necessary to plant four times the amount of seed that you actually want to grow, a little extra doesn't hurt, if only to ensure good germination. As for the blackbird and the crow, they may be tough to beat in large cornfields, but there are a few ways to outwit them in the home garden.
Planting Methods
Once the seedbed is well worked and fertilized, you're ready to plant. There are two traditional ways to plant corn: three to five seeds grouped together in small circles, or "hills,"or spaced evenly down straight rows, one behind the other.
Many people find that planting corn in rows takes less time. There's usually less thinning needed, and it's easy to cultivate rows during the season. To plant in rows, stake each row the length you want and stretch a string along the ground to mark the planting line. Use the edge of a hoe or the end of its handle to draw a shallow furrow, one to two inches deep, along one side of the string. A handy way to fertilize the row at this time is to draw a second shallow furrow down the other side of the string. Sprinkle a band of fertilizer in this furrow. When it's time to cover the seeds, one pass with a hoe will cover the fertilizer at the same time.
How To Plant
To plant, just drop seeds into the planting furrow, spacing them 8 to 10 inches apart. Firm the seeds into the soil with the back of a hoe to keep the seeds in place. This allows good contact with the soil, which is important for germination.
Next, cover the seeds with one to 1 1/2 inches of soil. You can draw the hoe along the string to flatten the ridge of soil created by making the furrow. This automatically brings the planting and fertilizer furrows to ground level, covering the seeds and fertilizer with the right amount of soil. You can also cover corn seeds by raking one to 1 1/2 inches of soil over them, using soil from the edges of the furrow. Firm the soil one more time after covering.
Leave 24 to 36 inches between the rows for cultivation, and plant at least four rows for the best pollination. Many short rows will provide better pollination than just a few long ones. If you intend to weed and cultivate the corn rows with hand tools, you don't need as much room between the rows as you do if you plan to cultivate by machine.
Planting in Hills
To plant in hills, stake out the rows, but don't make the straight-line planting furrow. Instead, every 18 to 24 inches, use your hoe to draw a circular planting furrow, about six inches in diameter. Place a small handful of fertilizer to the side of the seeds and cover it. Plant three to five seeds in each circle. Firm the seeds, cover with one to 11/2 inches of soil and firm again.
If all the seeds in each hill come up, you'll have to thin out all but the two or three strongest or the seedlings will be too crowded. If you don't like to thin corn, don't plant in hills. However, plenty of gardeners don't mind hand thinning. Try planting both ways and decide for yourself.
Corn Care
By: the Editors of National Gardening
Corn doesn't need any more attention than other garden vegetables, but it's a crop that can take up a fair amount of time if you plant a lot. Make it easier by combining tasks. For instance, when you side-dress, pull any weeds you see, or side-dress at the same time you hill the rows.
Weed Control
Like any plant, corn produces better if it doesn't have to compete with weeds. It's especially important to keep weeds out when corn plants are young. Once the stems and leaves are established, they can tolerate weeds better. Plus, the stems and leaves of larger corn plants shade the soil somewhat to block out weeds.
Weed your corn every few weeks, starting before you even plant a seed. Work the soil several times before planting. This not only conditions the soil, it stirs up and kills tiny weed seeds lurking near the surface. It also buries some seeds so deeply that they never get a chance to sprout.
Once the corn is planted, scratch the surface of the planting bed every week or so with a weeding rake. When the corn is tall enough to be hilled, you'll automatically get rid of weeds by covering them with soil as you hill.
Hilling
Hilling is pulling up soil to mound it around the base of a plant. When you hill a young corn plant, the added soil around its stem helps support it as it grows taller. This protects it from being blown over in a strong wind. To really anchor plants, it's a good idea to hill corn every two to three weeks until the plants start to tassel.
Hilling also covers and smothers any weeds around the base of your corn plants. You might say you're creating a "soil mulch" around your plants. If dryness is a problem, extra soil helps the corn roots retain moisture.
You can hill with a hoe by scooping a few inches of soil from the walkways into loose mounds on both sides of the corn. If you want, you can hill your corn by machine, using a tiller with a special hilling attachment. This is both faster and easier than using a hoe, and it also does a uniform job.
Side-dressing
The more you feed corn, the more it will feed you, so side-dressing (a second dose of fertilizer that boosts growth) is a must with corn.
You can use any high-nitrogen fertilizer to side-dress corn, because nitrogen is the plant nutrient needed. A commercial fertilizer such as 10-10-10 works well, but you can also use well-composted or dehydrated manure, or commercial organic fertilizers like cottonseed meal.
Side-dress corn twice: when it's knee high and when it tassels. To side-dress, sprinkle a thin line of fertilizer or manure about four inches from the plants on both sides of each row of corn. To side-dress hill-planted corn, simply sprinkle fertilizer around each hill, about four inches away from the cornstalks. It often helps to make a shallow furrow first for either rows or hills. The furrow serves as a guide and the indentation helps the fertilizer stay put.
If you side-dress shortly before it rains, you're lucky. Otherwise, you should water, so the fertilizer leaches into the soil where it can be taken up by the corn roots.
Watering
Corn doesn't need more water than other vegetables. It just suffers more if the supply runs short. The plants are relatively tall and exposed to the wind and drying heat of summer, so they often "transpire" or give off moisture faster than their roots can take it up.
Corn's need for water is most critical from the time it tassels until the ears are ready for harvest. At this time, the plant is devoting all its energy to seed production, holding nothing in reserve for a dry spell.
During its growing season, corn needs at least an inch of water per week. If it has to go through a dry stretch, it may not produce well. Use a rain gauge to keep track of weekly rainfall. If your garden receives less than an inch of rain in a week, water.
When you water, water thoroughly. If you're using an overhead sprinkler, use your rain gauge to determine how long it takes to deliver an inch of water. Or, simply water until the soil feels moist three to five inches down, depending on your soil type. (Sandy soil absorbs water faster than clay.) One sign of too little water is the corn leaves curling or rolling. If you want healthy, sweet, well-filled ears, pay close attention to the weather at the tail end of the season and water if your corn needs it.
If you have the equipment, it's most efficient to water corn with a soaker or drip irrigation hose, or to use furrow irrigation. A soaker hose is made of a material such as perforated canvas that lets water seep out slowly. Drip irrigation has lines running straight to each plant that constantly drip a small amount of water to the roots. If you water directly from a hose or bucket into a furrow, it accomplishes the same beneficial watering at the base of the plant. With these watering methods, less water is lost to evaporation than if you use an overhead sprinkler. The water doesn't end up on the leaves of tall corn plants, instead it's near the roots where it's really needed.
Harvesting Corn
By: the Editors of National Gardening
Harvesting corn is a matter of picking the ears at peak flavor. Here's how to know when to harvest.
The Sweetness Factor
The prime harvest time for sweet corn passes quickly for most varieties except the supersweets, so gardeners need to know how to judge when to harvest to get the most from their crop.
Corn is ready to be picked as soon as the ears have completely filled out. This goes for sweet corn and roasting ears.You can tell when this happens by feeling the end of an ear. If it's rounded or blunt rather than pointed, the ears are ready. The silks also dry up when the ears are almost ready to be picked.
If you don't trust your judgment, you can pull back a bit of the husk and check to see if the ear looks well filled and the kernels are creamy yellow or white. Many gardening guides tell you to pierce a kernel with your thumb nail to test for ripeness. If the liquid inside is watery, that ear isn't quite ready. If the liquid is white or "milky," you're in business.
Although opening the husk is a fairly sure test, try not to do this. Once you open an immature ear, it's susceptible to insect and bird attacks as it continues to ripen. It usually takes only a little practice to become a good judge by feeling the ends of the ears.
Sweetness is the key, so it helps to understand what makes corn sweet and why timing is so important in your harvest. The plant manufactures natural sugars when the kernels are filling out. These kernels are seeds that each contain a natural food-storage compartment as well as the corn embryo. A seed can't store sugars, but it can live on stored starches throughout the winter months and in its early stages of growth the following season. As soon as the kernels are full of sugar, the plant begins to convert it into starch. For best flavor, harvest the corn before this change can take place.
The sweetness of corn depends on the variety, temperature and amount of sunlight during the day when the ears are forming. The plant makes the most sugar on cool, sunny days. If the temperature is too hot, the sugar-making process is slowed. That's why the long, crisp, sunny days of early fall produce the sweetest corn.
Time It Right
If you have a choice, it's a good idea to harvest corn as close to the time you're going to eat or use it as possible. In fact, you might want to have the water boiling for corn on the cob before you head out to harvest.
To harvest sweet corn, grab an ear and twist it down and off the stalk.
If you want the sweetest corn possible, try to harvest each ear at its peak. Keep in mind that the natural conversion of sugar into starch is speeded up when you harvest. The moment you pick an ear of sweet corn, its sugars start to change into starches because the natural goal is to nourish seed for reproduction. In 24 hours, most varieties convert more than half their sugar content to starch. However, the new supersweet varieties stay sweet much longer after harvest than the old standards.
The loss of sugar is much slower at lower temperatures, so refrigerate corn if you're not going to be able to eat it right away. If you're not near a refrigerator and you have some harvested corn, keep the freshly picked ears in single layers, rather than stacking them. Corn tends to overheat inside its tight husks, so give each ear as much breathing room as possible. It also helps to cover the ears with a damp cloth.
Supersweet varieties have been developed to slow down the conversion of the natural sugars into starch, which makes these varieties last longer on the stalk, and helps them retain their flavor for a few days once harvested. Many seed catalogs claim that supersweet types are twice as sweet at harvesttime as ordinary hybrids, and four times as sweet after 48 hours.
Some people prefer corn that's less sweet, with more texture in each kernel. They take advantage of the natural conversion process and don't harvest corn until it's somewhat doughy from the increased starch content. They may also wait a day or two to serve it after picking.
If you want to store corn over the winter or grind your own cornmeal, give it time to harden completely. This means it has passed through its entire carbohydrate production cycle. It will then contain such heavy starch that it will be too hard to bite and it will keep for many months in storage.
Popcorn Pointers
The only way that growing popcorn differs from growing sweet corn is at harvesttime, and popcorn is actually easier to harvest because you don't have to catch it at the peak of sweetness. Leave popcorn in the garden until the stalks and husks are brown and dry, then twist and snap each ear from the stalk. Do this before the frost hits. To prepare popcorn for indoor curing, carefully strip away the dried husk from each ear. The kernels will be partially dried or "cured," a necessity for long-term storage.
Besides drying on the stalks, popcorn requires another four to six weeks of thorough drying in a warm, well-ventilated place. Corn can't pop unless there's the right amount of moisture inside the kernel. When it's heated, the moisture turns to steam, which causes the kernel to burst.
Place the ears in mesh bags or spread them out in an area where they'll have warm air circulating around them. You can also hang mesh bags full of popcorn ears in your garage for about four weeks. After curing, hang the bags of corn from the rafters of your root cellar. The corn can keep for years in the cool, dry, dark conditions there.
After a month of curing, the kernels can be taken off the ears and stored in airtight jars. Whether you're removing the kernels before storage or just before popping, there's no real trick to it. Simply grasp the ear firmly in both hands and twist until the kernels drop out. Once started, the kernels drop off with very little pressure. However, beware of the sharply pointed kernels if you're using your bare hands. After two or three ears, you may have a few nicks and scratches. If you want to remove the kernels from a lot of ears, it might be a good idea to wear gloves.
Popcorn doesn't take much garden space for a sizable harvest. Each ear is loaded with tiny kernels come harvesttime, and three or four five-foot-long rows should be plenty. Many popcorn varieties produce one or two ears per plant, so you may have enough by growing just five or six plants.
Pop homegrown popcorn just as you would store-bought. Heat a few tablespoons of oil in a deep pot. Sprinkle in enough kernels to coat the bottom and cover the pot. If not, as soon as you hear the first kernel pop, shake the covered pot vigorously while the rest pop. Shaking prevents the kernels from burning, and the unpopped kernels stay on the bottom nearest the heat. If you're using a popcorn popper, follow the manufacturer's instructions.
When the popping stops, remove the pot from the heat and take off the lid to let the steam escape. The popcorn is ready. Enjoy it plain, or add your favorite topping.
By: National Gardening editors
If you've never grown corn before, check with a local farm or garden store, a neighbor who raises corn or your Cooperative Extension Service agent before you buy seeds. They can tell you what varieties do particularly well in your area, as well as some of the disease, pest or weather problems you may encounter.
Corn Varieties
When asking for advice, keep in mind that gardeners are often emotionally attached to their favorites. For instance, some people always plant Silver Queen corn, even though the first, creamy white ears won't be ready to harvest until fall. That waiting is part of what makes 'Silver Queen' special, and the long-awaited fall harvest is one of life's fine pleasures. Other people feel the same about 'Country Gentleman' or 'Stowell's Evergreen'.
Sweet corn varieties are usually grouped according to the length of their growing season. You can really extend your harvest by planting more than one group at the same time. The tassel time won't overlap, so you won't have to worry about cross-pollination between varieties.
Despite the preference for a particular type of corn, it's a lot of fun to try a new variety or two every year. However, although the latest hybrids often produce beautifully, watch the results of a few seasons before you depend on a new one for your main crop.
Common Sense and Cross-Pollination
You may come upon words of caution in a seed catalog or have had another gardener tell you to isolate certain types of corn to avoid cross-pollination. It's true that corn's dependence on the wind for pollination means you sometimes have to watch out for accidental mixing of different varieties, but in most home gardens this is a minor problem, if one at all.
The technical explanation for the way corn changes when it's pollinated by another variety has to do with recessive and dominant genes, plus a number of other factors. Luckily, you don't have to be a plant breeder to understand how to keep your garden corn from having an unwanted mix-up. You can just use common sense.
When one type of corn tassels - letting its pollen loose - that pollen can land on the silks of any corn in the immediate area. If only one variety of corn is silking at any given time, crossing cannot take place. This is usually the case in home gardens, where the varieties planted tend to have significantly different flowering and growing seasons.
If two similar varieties cross, the difference in the resulting ears may be unnoticeable. However, because of their genetic makeup, some types of corn suffer if they cross with a stronger or dominant variety.
What's a Home Gardener To Do
There are three instances where this can be a concern in the home garden. First, yellow corn is dominant over white. If a yellow and a white variety cross, the white corn could end up with some yellow kernels. Because it's dominant, yellow corn wouldn't be affected by the cross.
Second, both popcorn and field corn have genes that are dominant over sweet corn. If a cross takes place with either popcorn or field corn and sweet corn, the sweet corn is likely to be tough and starchy. Again, because they're dominant, popcorn or field corn wouldn't be affected by the cross.
Third, many of the genes for supersweet flavor are recessive, so they're affected by any corn that crosses with them. That's why the seed companies advise isolating these varieties.
Corn Isolation
Isolating just means preventing an unwanted cross, and you have a choice of ways to do this. All you have to do is prevent cross-pollination. Simply plan to keep different varieties of corn that enter the tassel and silk stage at the same time far enough apart that their pollens won't mix. The recommendations vary from 100 feet to 600 feet, depending on whom you ask. Naturally, the farther apart the better, but about 200 feet is fine unless you regularly experience very strong winds.
To isolate corn you can choose varieties with different days to maturity, or stagger plantings of varieties that have a similar number of days to maturity. Allow at least 10 days between plantings, and your crops shouldn't cross.
Another trick is to plant the dominant corn on the prevailing downwind side of any variety that will suffer if they cross. If you're not sure in which direction the prevailing winds blow in your area, check with your local weather service.
Some gardeners claim that planting a "fence" of two rows of tall sunflowers between corn varieties is enough to prevent cross-pollination. This works most of the time, because the odds are generally in your favor when it comes to accidental crossing.
Old Favorites
An open-pollinated corn variety is a nonhybrid or a strain that has grown for many generations without plant breeders' modifications. With the revived interest in heirlooms, many other varieties such as 'Country Gentleman', 'Golden Bantam', 'Stowell's Evergreen', and 'Ashworth' are becomming more readily available to home gardeners.
Open-pollinated corn grows just like its parent plants, so you can save the seed from one year to the next with good results. If you want to save the seeds of an open-pollinated variety, isolate the crop from other varieties, so there won't be an accidental mixing of pollens to affect the next generation.
Corn: Planting Basics
By: National Gardening editors
There's an old farmer's rhyme about planting corn seed: "One for the blackbird, one for the crow, one for the soil and one to grow."
Although it's not necessary to plant four times the amount of seed that you actually want to grow, a little extra doesn't hurt, if only to ensure good germination. As for the blackbird and the crow, they may be tough to beat in large cornfields, but there are a few ways to outwit them in the home garden.
Planting Methods
Once the seedbed is well worked and fertilized, you're ready to plant. There are two traditional ways to plant corn: three to five seeds grouped together in small circles, or "hills,"or spaced evenly down straight rows, one behind the other.
Many people find that planting corn in rows takes less time. There's usually less thinning needed, and it's easy to cultivate rows during the season. To plant in rows, stake each row the length you want and stretch a string along the ground to mark the planting line. Use the edge of a hoe or the end of its handle to draw a shallow furrow, one to two inches deep, along one side of the string. A handy way to fertilize the row at this time is to draw a second shallow furrow down the other side of the string. Sprinkle a band of fertilizer in this furrow. When it's time to cover the seeds, one pass with a hoe will cover the fertilizer at the same time.
How To Plant
To plant, just drop seeds into the planting furrow, spacing them 8 to 10 inches apart. Firm the seeds into the soil with the back of a hoe to keep the seeds in place. This allows good contact with the soil, which is important for germination.
Next, cover the seeds with one to 1 1/2 inches of soil. You can draw the hoe along the string to flatten the ridge of soil created by making the furrow. This automatically brings the planting and fertilizer furrows to ground level, covering the seeds and fertilizer with the right amount of soil. You can also cover corn seeds by raking one to 1 1/2 inches of soil over them, using soil from the edges of the furrow. Firm the soil one more time after covering.
Leave 24 to 36 inches between the rows for cultivation, and plant at least four rows for the best pollination. Many short rows will provide better pollination than just a few long ones. If you intend to weed and cultivate the corn rows with hand tools, you don't need as much room between the rows as you do if you plan to cultivate by machine.
Planting in Hills
To plant in hills, stake out the rows, but don't make the straight-line planting furrow. Instead, every 18 to 24 inches, use your hoe to draw a circular planting furrow, about six inches in diameter. Place a small handful of fertilizer to the side of the seeds and cover it. Plant three to five seeds in each circle. Firm the seeds, cover with one to 11/2 inches of soil and firm again.
If all the seeds in each hill come up, you'll have to thin out all but the two or three strongest or the seedlings will be too crowded. If you don't like to thin corn, don't plant in hills. However, plenty of gardeners don't mind hand thinning. Try planting both ways and decide for yourself.
Corn Care
By: the Editors of National Gardening
Corn doesn't need any more attention than other garden vegetables, but it's a crop that can take up a fair amount of time if you plant a lot. Make it easier by combining tasks. For instance, when you side-dress, pull any weeds you see, or side-dress at the same time you hill the rows.
Weed Control
Like any plant, corn produces better if it doesn't have to compete with weeds. It's especially important to keep weeds out when corn plants are young. Once the stems and leaves are established, they can tolerate weeds better. Plus, the stems and leaves of larger corn plants shade the soil somewhat to block out weeds.
Weed your corn every few weeks, starting before you even plant a seed. Work the soil several times before planting. This not only conditions the soil, it stirs up and kills tiny weed seeds lurking near the surface. It also buries some seeds so deeply that they never get a chance to sprout.
Once the corn is planted, scratch the surface of the planting bed every week or so with a weeding rake. When the corn is tall enough to be hilled, you'll automatically get rid of weeds by covering them with soil as you hill.
Hilling
Hilling is pulling up soil to mound it around the base of a plant. When you hill a young corn plant, the added soil around its stem helps support it as it grows taller. This protects it from being blown over in a strong wind. To really anchor plants, it's a good idea to hill corn every two to three weeks until the plants start to tassel.
Hilling also covers and smothers any weeds around the base of your corn plants. You might say you're creating a "soil mulch" around your plants. If dryness is a problem, extra soil helps the corn roots retain moisture.
You can hill with a hoe by scooping a few inches of soil from the walkways into loose mounds on both sides of the corn. If you want, you can hill your corn by machine, using a tiller with a special hilling attachment. This is both faster and easier than using a hoe, and it also does a uniform job.
Side-dressing
The more you feed corn, the more it will feed you, so side-dressing (a second dose of fertilizer that boosts growth) is a must with corn.
You can use any high-nitrogen fertilizer to side-dress corn, because nitrogen is the plant nutrient needed. A commercial fertilizer such as 10-10-10 works well, but you can also use well-composted or dehydrated manure, or commercial organic fertilizers like cottonseed meal.
Side-dress corn twice: when it's knee high and when it tassels. To side-dress, sprinkle a thin line of fertilizer or manure about four inches from the plants on both sides of each row of corn. To side-dress hill-planted corn, simply sprinkle fertilizer around each hill, about four inches away from the cornstalks. It often helps to make a shallow furrow first for either rows or hills. The furrow serves as a guide and the indentation helps the fertilizer stay put.
If you side-dress shortly before it rains, you're lucky. Otherwise, you should water, so the fertilizer leaches into the soil where it can be taken up by the corn roots.
Watering
Corn doesn't need more water than other vegetables. It just suffers more if the supply runs short. The plants are relatively tall and exposed to the wind and drying heat of summer, so they often "transpire" or give off moisture faster than their roots can take it up.
Corn's need for water is most critical from the time it tassels until the ears are ready for harvest. At this time, the plant is devoting all its energy to seed production, holding nothing in reserve for a dry spell.
During its growing season, corn needs at least an inch of water per week. If it has to go through a dry stretch, it may not produce well. Use a rain gauge to keep track of weekly rainfall. If your garden receives less than an inch of rain in a week, water.
When you water, water thoroughly. If you're using an overhead sprinkler, use your rain gauge to determine how long it takes to deliver an inch of water. Or, simply water until the soil feels moist three to five inches down, depending on your soil type. (Sandy soil absorbs water faster than clay.) One sign of too little water is the corn leaves curling or rolling. If you want healthy, sweet, well-filled ears, pay close attention to the weather at the tail end of the season and water if your corn needs it.
If you have the equipment, it's most efficient to water corn with a soaker or drip irrigation hose, or to use furrow irrigation. A soaker hose is made of a material such as perforated canvas that lets water seep out slowly. Drip irrigation has lines running straight to each plant that constantly drip a small amount of water to the roots. If you water directly from a hose or bucket into a furrow, it accomplishes the same beneficial watering at the base of the plant. With these watering methods, less water is lost to evaporation than if you use an overhead sprinkler. The water doesn't end up on the leaves of tall corn plants, instead it's near the roots where it's really needed.
Harvesting Corn
By: the Editors of National Gardening
Harvesting corn is a matter of picking the ears at peak flavor. Here's how to know when to harvest.
The Sweetness Factor
The prime harvest time for sweet corn passes quickly for most varieties except the supersweets, so gardeners need to know how to judge when to harvest to get the most from their crop.
Corn is ready to be picked as soon as the ears have completely filled out. This goes for sweet corn and roasting ears.You can tell when this happens by feeling the end of an ear. If it's rounded or blunt rather than pointed, the ears are ready. The silks also dry up when the ears are almost ready to be picked.
If you don't trust your judgment, you can pull back a bit of the husk and check to see if the ear looks well filled and the kernels are creamy yellow or white. Many gardening guides tell you to pierce a kernel with your thumb nail to test for ripeness. If the liquid inside is watery, that ear isn't quite ready. If the liquid is white or "milky," you're in business.
Although opening the husk is a fairly sure test, try not to do this. Once you open an immature ear, it's susceptible to insect and bird attacks as it continues to ripen. It usually takes only a little practice to become a good judge by feeling the ends of the ears.
Sweetness is the key, so it helps to understand what makes corn sweet and why timing is so important in your harvest. The plant manufactures natural sugars when the kernels are filling out. These kernels are seeds that each contain a natural food-storage compartment as well as the corn embryo. A seed can't store sugars, but it can live on stored starches throughout the winter months and in its early stages of growth the following season. As soon as the kernels are full of sugar, the plant begins to convert it into starch. For best flavor, harvest the corn before this change can take place.
The sweetness of corn depends on the variety, temperature and amount of sunlight during the day when the ears are forming. The plant makes the most sugar on cool, sunny days. If the temperature is too hot, the sugar-making process is slowed. That's why the long, crisp, sunny days of early fall produce the sweetest corn.
Time It Right
If you have a choice, it's a good idea to harvest corn as close to the time you're going to eat or use it as possible. In fact, you might want to have the water boiling for corn on the cob before you head out to harvest.
To harvest sweet corn, grab an ear and twist it down and off the stalk.
If you want the sweetest corn possible, try to harvest each ear at its peak. Keep in mind that the natural conversion of sugar into starch is speeded up when you harvest. The moment you pick an ear of sweet corn, its sugars start to change into starches because the natural goal is to nourish seed for reproduction. In 24 hours, most varieties convert more than half their sugar content to starch. However, the new supersweet varieties stay sweet much longer after harvest than the old standards.
The loss of sugar is much slower at lower temperatures, so refrigerate corn if you're not going to be able to eat it right away. If you're not near a refrigerator and you have some harvested corn, keep the freshly picked ears in single layers, rather than stacking them. Corn tends to overheat inside its tight husks, so give each ear as much breathing room as possible. It also helps to cover the ears with a damp cloth.
Supersweet varieties have been developed to slow down the conversion of the natural sugars into starch, which makes these varieties last longer on the stalk, and helps them retain their flavor for a few days once harvested. Many seed catalogs claim that supersweet types are twice as sweet at harvesttime as ordinary hybrids, and four times as sweet after 48 hours.
Some people prefer corn that's less sweet, with more texture in each kernel. They take advantage of the natural conversion process and don't harvest corn until it's somewhat doughy from the increased starch content. They may also wait a day or two to serve it after picking.
If you want to store corn over the winter or grind your own cornmeal, give it time to harden completely. This means it has passed through its entire carbohydrate production cycle. It will then contain such heavy starch that it will be too hard to bite and it will keep for many months in storage.
Popcorn Pointers
The only way that growing popcorn differs from growing sweet corn is at harvesttime, and popcorn is actually easier to harvest because you don't have to catch it at the peak of sweetness. Leave popcorn in the garden until the stalks and husks are brown and dry, then twist and snap each ear from the stalk. Do this before the frost hits. To prepare popcorn for indoor curing, carefully strip away the dried husk from each ear. The kernels will be partially dried or "cured," a necessity for long-term storage.
Besides drying on the stalks, popcorn requires another four to six weeks of thorough drying in a warm, well-ventilated place. Corn can't pop unless there's the right amount of moisture inside the kernel. When it's heated, the moisture turns to steam, which causes the kernel to burst.
Place the ears in mesh bags or spread them out in an area where they'll have warm air circulating around them. You can also hang mesh bags full of popcorn ears in your garage for about four weeks. After curing, hang the bags of corn from the rafters of your root cellar. The corn can keep for years in the cool, dry, dark conditions there.
After a month of curing, the kernels can be taken off the ears and stored in airtight jars. Whether you're removing the kernels before storage or just before popping, there's no real trick to it. Simply grasp the ear firmly in both hands and twist until the kernels drop out. Once started, the kernels drop off with very little pressure. However, beware of the sharply pointed kernels if you're using your bare hands. After two or three ears, you may have a few nicks and scratches. If you want to remove the kernels from a lot of ears, it might be a good idea to wear gloves.
Popcorn doesn't take much garden space for a sizable harvest. Each ear is loaded with tiny kernels come harvesttime, and three or four five-foot-long rows should be plenty. Many popcorn varieties produce one or two ears per plant, so you may have enough by growing just five or six plants.
Pop homegrown popcorn just as you would store-bought. Heat a few tablespoons of oil in a deep pot. Sprinkle in enough kernels to coat the bottom and cover the pot. If not, as soon as you hear the first kernel pop, shake the covered pot vigorously while the rest pop. Shaking prevents the kernels from burning, and the unpopped kernels stay on the bottom nearest the heat. If you're using a popcorn popper, follow the manufacturer's instructions.
When the popping stops, remove the pot from the heat and take off the lid to let the steam escape. The popcorn is ready. Enjoy it plain, or add your favorite topping.
Gardening Basics: Beans
How Beans Grow
If you've ever walked by containers of bulk seed in a garden store, you may have been surprised by the many different colors, sizes and shapes of the beans -- even by the variety of designs on the seed coats and their descriptive names: 'Soldier', 'Wren's Egg', 'Yellow Eye', 'Black Eye', and others.
Maybe you were impressed, too, with how big some of these seeds are. Underneath the large, hard seed coat is an embryo, a tiny plant ready to spring to life. When you plant a bean seed, the right amount of water, oxygen and a warm temperature (65oF to 75oF) will help it break through its seed coat and push its way up through the soil.
The Seed of Life
Most of the energy the young plant needs is stored within the seed. In fact, there's enough food to nourish bean plants until the first true leaves appear without using any fertilizer at all.
As the tender, young beans come up, they must push pairs of folded seed leaves (or cotyledons) through the soil and spread them above the ground. Beans also quickly send down a tap root, the first of a network of roots that will anchor the plants as they grow. Most of the roots are in the top eight inches of soil, and many are quite close to the surface.
What Beans Need
Beans need plenty of sunlight to develop properly. If the plants are shaded for an extended part of the day, they'll be tall and weak. They'll be forced to stretch upward for more light, and they won't have the energy to produce as many beans.
The bean plant produces nice, showy flowers, and within each one is everything that's necessary for pollination, fertilization and beans. Pollination of bean flowers doesn't require much outside assistance -- a bit of wind, the occasional visit from a bee, and the job is done. After fertilization occurs, the slender bean pods emerge and quickly expand. Once this happens, the harvest isn't far off.
Although beans love sun, too much heat reduces production. Bean plants, like all other vegetables, have a temperature range that suits them best: They prefer 70oF to 80oF after germinating. When the daytime temperature is consistently over 85oF, most beans tend to lose their blossoms. That's why many types of beans don't thrive in the South or Southwest in the middle of the summer -- it's simply too hot.
Beans don't take to cold weather very well, either. Only Broad or Fava beans can take any frost at all. Other types must be planted when the danger of frost has passed and the soil has warmed up.
Wide Row Planting for Beans
For years, many gardeners have planted their bush bean seeds in single-file, straight-line rows with lots of room between the rows. However, some gardeners consider this method a waste of valuable growing space and not the most productive way to grow beans.
Instead, these gardeners use a wide-row technique that allows them to double and sometimes even triple their bean crops. With this method, you simply spread seeds over a wide seedbed, instead of putting one seed behind another in a row. The wide area contains many more plants than a single row of the same length, so you can harvest much more from the same area.
A row 16 to 18 inches across - about the width of a rake head - is very easy to plant, care for and harvest. With a little wide-row experience, you may want to try even wider rows.
Why Wide-Row?
The advantages to wide-row growing are many.
* You can grow two to four times as many beans in the same amount of space.
* Weeding is reduced to a minimum. As the beans grow, their leaves group together and form a "living mulch," which blocks the sun, inhibiting weed growth.
* Many gardeners spread mulch - organic matter such as hay, pine needles or leaves - around all their plants in the garden to fight weeds and retain moisture in the soil. Wide rows mulch themselves, so you only need to use small amounts of mulch to keep weeds down in the walkways and to help retain moisture. You'll also have fewer walkways using wide rows, so you really can save a lot of space, effort and mulch.
* Moisture is conserved by the shade because the sun can't scorch the soil and dry it out as much. Moist soil stays cooler, so beans in very hot climates don't wither as much or stop producing as quickly.
* The plants in the middle of the rows are protected from the full effects of hot, drying winds. They don't dry out rapidly like those in a single row. This can be especially important in water-short areas of the country.
* Harvesting is easier with wide rows. You can pick much more without having to continually get up and move down the row. It's pleasant to take a stool into the garden, sit down and enjoy picking beans by the bushel.
How to Plant Wide-Row Bush Beans
Prepare the soil. Using a steel garden rake, smooth out the seedbed. Be careful not to pack the seedbed down by stepping on it. Do all your work from the walkway beside the row. If the soil is dry, wait to water until after planting. If you water before, you pack the soil down.
Stake out a row 15 to 18 inches wide (or wider if you like) and whatever length you want. Drop the seeds three to four inches apart from each other in all directions in the row. One two-ounce package of snap beans covers roughly 10 feet of rake-width row. Firm the seeds into the soil with the back of a hoe, and cover the seeds with about an inch of soil. Using a rake, pull the soil from the side of the row and smooth it evenly over the seeds. Firm the soil again with the back of a hoe.
Leave a path or walkway wide enough to walk on once the plants have grown and spread out. You'll need at least 16 inches, and more if your cultivator or tiller is wider.
Remember, wide rows work well for all beans except the pole varieties.
Single Row Method
Single row is another planting method to use. The best way to plant a single row is to make a shallow furrow with a hoe. Drop in a bean seed every three to four inches, cover the furrow with one inch of soil and then firm it. A two-ounce packet of bush snap bean seeds sows a single row 30 to 40 feet long.
Double Row Method
Make two shallow furrows four to five inches apart, and plant in the same manner as for a single row. This arrangement is especially handy if you need to irrigate regularly. You can put a soaker hose - a kind of garden hose with tiny holes in it - between the two rows and water the plants quite efficiently.
Another easy irrigating system with the double-row system is to dig an additional shallow furrow in between the two seed rows. Make this channel when you're planting the beans. To water the beans, simply run water down the channel between the two rows of plants.
Using Raised Beds
If you garden where it's very rainy, if your soil stays damp or if you have clay soil, planting in raised beds is a good idea because the soil drains better. Good drainage helps to prevent diseases and warms the soil more quickly early in the season.
Try to build up the seedbed four to six inches above the walkway. To get the most for your extra effort, plant a wide row or at least a double row to guarantee a plentiful harvest.
Caring For & Harvesting Beans
Once you've planted beans, you can relax because growing them is easy. They grow very well all by themselves, and that's one of the prime reasons they're so popular with home gardeners. To have a satisfactory bean harvest the two most important things are to stay out of the garden when it's wet to avoid spreading diseases, and to keep picking snap beans when they're young for a continuous harvest.
Weeding Fundamentals
The third important thing is to be careful when weeding. Beans grow quickly and shade out weeds, particularly if the beans are grown in wide rows. If you've prepared the soil well, your weed worries will be few. The only time to be concerned is when beans are very young, before they've developed their leafy shade.
If you're working around young bean plants with a hoe or other weeding tool, or if you're cultivating between rows, remember to stay near the surface. Weed seeds are tiny and must be very close to the surface to germinate -- not like beans, which are planted at least one inch deep. A gentle stirring of the top 1/4 inch of soil every 4 to 5 days pulls the germinating weeds out of the soil and exposes their roots to the sun, which kills them.
Shallow is Better
Deep cultivation is bad for two reasons: It injures the roots of the beans, and it brings more weeds up near the surface of the soil where they'll germinate. A good time to cultivate is after a rain but when the plants are completely dry and the soil has dried out a little. This is when many weeds start to germinate.
Once the bean leaves grow enough to shade the ground, there shouldn't be any weed problem within the row, and a good heavy mulch or regular cultivation in the pathways should take care of weeds there.
Harvest Time
It's best to harvest snap beans when they're just about the diameter of a pencil or even a bit smaller. Simply snap them off the plant - take care, though, because hard jerking may tear the vines, reducing later harvests.
Pick'em Young
For the best flavor and nutritional value pick snap beans when they're young and tender. You really can't overharvest snap beans. When you pick the pods, you encourage more blossoms and more pods. That's because the plant is trying to produce large, mature seeds to complete its life cycle. When it succeeds in producing seeds, the plant will stop blossoming and making pods, so keep picking.
After your first picking, you can probably pick again three to five days later. Just pick, pick, pick, and in order to keep the harvest going as long as possible, don't let any seeds develop inside the pods.
Picking Green Shell Beans
When shell beans are young, they're greenish. They begin turning color when they're ready for picking at the green shell stage. 'Horticultural' beans turn a strawberry roan color, 'Kidney' beans become red and limas mature to a creamy white color. When you pick them, pick only the pods without damaging the plants.
Picking Dried Shell Beans
By: the Editors of National Gardening
It's easy to produce dry, mature shell beans for winter storage. In warm parts of the country, the beans and pods will mature and dry very well right in the garden. In the North, it's cool and sometimes wet in fall, so the beans often require additional drying. Pull up the plants and pile them around a fence post, roots to the post (like spokes in a wheel), to dry them some more. If you're having a wet fall, hang the plants from rafters in your garage or your attic. Anywhere that's airy and relatively dry will do. You can hang the plants themselves or put them in burlap or mesh bags. It's easy to tell when the beans are dry: They're so hard, biting into one won't even make a dent.
Threshing
Threshing by hand sounds like an old-fashioned chore, but it's simply the removal of the beans from the pods once the beans are dry. To thresh, take some of the plants by the roots - pods, beans and all - and whack them back and forth inside a clean trash can. The dry pods shatter, and the beans drop into the can. Toss the threshed plants aside and pick up the next bunch.
There are other ways to thresh beans, too. A fun method is to put the plants, again pods and all, in a big burlap or cloth bag. Then get a bunch of kids to walk and jump on the bag for a few minutes. Roll the bag over, and let them jump some more. Because the beans are dry and hard, the kids won't hurt them a bit. You can also let them have a good time hitting the bag with a baseball bat. Then open the bag, vigorously shake the plants to make sure all the beans are out of the pods, and remove the plants. You'll just have beans and small bits of debris, or chaff, in the bag. Alternately, you can cut off a small corner of the bag and let the beans drop out, leaving the plants inside.
Old-timers used to thresh beans with a homemade bean flail. The flail was made of two wooden sticks (one short, one long) hitched together at one end by a leather strap. They gripped the long stick and whirled the short one against a pile of dried bean plants laid out on a sheet of canvas on the floor of a barn. It was important to hold onto the long handle and use the shorter one to flail. The short stick couldn't whirl back and rap one's knuckles. After flailing awhile, you lifted the plants with a hay fork, shook them and then tossed them aside for the compost heap, leaving behind a pile of beans and chaff.
Winnowing
Once you've threshed the beans, you need to separate out the chaff, and that's called winnowing.
On a windy day, take a basket of beans - chaff and all - and, holding it up high, pour the beans slowly into an empty basket on the ground. Repeat this a few times. The wind will blow all the chaff away as the beans fall. (It's a good idea to put a sheet under the basket on the ground to catch any beans that miss or bounce out.)
If you have a friend to help you winnow, spread the beans and chaff on a spare window screen outside on a windy day. When the two of you lightly jiggle and shake the frame, the chaff will blow away, leaving only the beans.
Sorting
The final step before storing shell beans is sorting. It's important to remove the discolored, immature and misshapen beans from the good ones, because the bad ones could affect the taste.
An easy way to sort beans is to spread a white sheet over the kitchen table and pour the beans onto the sheet. The sheet makes it easy to roll the beans around, allowing you to check them carefully. Using this technique it's especially easy to spot bad white beans. Sorting is a chore, but if you enlist a friend to help, it can also be a time for a chat.
Dry beans will keep well in tightly capped, airtight containers, stored in a cool, dry, dark spot.
If you've ever walked by containers of bulk seed in a garden store, you may have been surprised by the many different colors, sizes and shapes of the beans -- even by the variety of designs on the seed coats and their descriptive names: 'Soldier', 'Wren's Egg', 'Yellow Eye', 'Black Eye', and others.
Maybe you were impressed, too, with how big some of these seeds are. Underneath the large, hard seed coat is an embryo, a tiny plant ready to spring to life. When you plant a bean seed, the right amount of water, oxygen and a warm temperature (65oF to 75oF) will help it break through its seed coat and push its way up through the soil.
The Seed of Life
Most of the energy the young plant needs is stored within the seed. In fact, there's enough food to nourish bean plants until the first true leaves appear without using any fertilizer at all.
As the tender, young beans come up, they must push pairs of folded seed leaves (or cotyledons) through the soil and spread them above the ground. Beans also quickly send down a tap root, the first of a network of roots that will anchor the plants as they grow. Most of the roots are in the top eight inches of soil, and many are quite close to the surface.
What Beans Need
Beans need plenty of sunlight to develop properly. If the plants are shaded for an extended part of the day, they'll be tall and weak. They'll be forced to stretch upward for more light, and they won't have the energy to produce as many beans.
The bean plant produces nice, showy flowers, and within each one is everything that's necessary for pollination, fertilization and beans. Pollination of bean flowers doesn't require much outside assistance -- a bit of wind, the occasional visit from a bee, and the job is done. After fertilization occurs, the slender bean pods emerge and quickly expand. Once this happens, the harvest isn't far off.
Although beans love sun, too much heat reduces production. Bean plants, like all other vegetables, have a temperature range that suits them best: They prefer 70oF to 80oF after germinating. When the daytime temperature is consistently over 85oF, most beans tend to lose their blossoms. That's why many types of beans don't thrive in the South or Southwest in the middle of the summer -- it's simply too hot.
Beans don't take to cold weather very well, either. Only Broad or Fava beans can take any frost at all. Other types must be planted when the danger of frost has passed and the soil has warmed up.
Wide Row Planting for Beans
For years, many gardeners have planted their bush bean seeds in single-file, straight-line rows with lots of room between the rows. However, some gardeners consider this method a waste of valuable growing space and not the most productive way to grow beans.
Instead, these gardeners use a wide-row technique that allows them to double and sometimes even triple their bean crops. With this method, you simply spread seeds over a wide seedbed, instead of putting one seed behind another in a row. The wide area contains many more plants than a single row of the same length, so you can harvest much more from the same area.
A row 16 to 18 inches across - about the width of a rake head - is very easy to plant, care for and harvest. With a little wide-row experience, you may want to try even wider rows.
Why Wide-Row?
The advantages to wide-row growing are many.
* You can grow two to four times as many beans in the same amount of space.
* Weeding is reduced to a minimum. As the beans grow, their leaves group together and form a "living mulch," which blocks the sun, inhibiting weed growth.
* Many gardeners spread mulch - organic matter such as hay, pine needles or leaves - around all their plants in the garden to fight weeds and retain moisture in the soil. Wide rows mulch themselves, so you only need to use small amounts of mulch to keep weeds down in the walkways and to help retain moisture. You'll also have fewer walkways using wide rows, so you really can save a lot of space, effort and mulch.
* Moisture is conserved by the shade because the sun can't scorch the soil and dry it out as much. Moist soil stays cooler, so beans in very hot climates don't wither as much or stop producing as quickly.
* The plants in the middle of the rows are protected from the full effects of hot, drying winds. They don't dry out rapidly like those in a single row. This can be especially important in water-short areas of the country.
* Harvesting is easier with wide rows. You can pick much more without having to continually get up and move down the row. It's pleasant to take a stool into the garden, sit down and enjoy picking beans by the bushel.
How to Plant Wide-Row Bush Beans
Prepare the soil. Using a steel garden rake, smooth out the seedbed. Be careful not to pack the seedbed down by stepping on it. Do all your work from the walkway beside the row. If the soil is dry, wait to water until after planting. If you water before, you pack the soil down.
Stake out a row 15 to 18 inches wide (or wider if you like) and whatever length you want. Drop the seeds three to four inches apart from each other in all directions in the row. One two-ounce package of snap beans covers roughly 10 feet of rake-width row. Firm the seeds into the soil with the back of a hoe, and cover the seeds with about an inch of soil. Using a rake, pull the soil from the side of the row and smooth it evenly over the seeds. Firm the soil again with the back of a hoe.
Leave a path or walkway wide enough to walk on once the plants have grown and spread out. You'll need at least 16 inches, and more if your cultivator or tiller is wider.
Remember, wide rows work well for all beans except the pole varieties.
Single Row Method
Single row is another planting method to use. The best way to plant a single row is to make a shallow furrow with a hoe. Drop in a bean seed every three to four inches, cover the furrow with one inch of soil and then firm it. A two-ounce packet of bush snap bean seeds sows a single row 30 to 40 feet long.
Double Row Method
Make two shallow furrows four to five inches apart, and plant in the same manner as for a single row. This arrangement is especially handy if you need to irrigate regularly. You can put a soaker hose - a kind of garden hose with tiny holes in it - between the two rows and water the plants quite efficiently.
Another easy irrigating system with the double-row system is to dig an additional shallow furrow in between the two seed rows. Make this channel when you're planting the beans. To water the beans, simply run water down the channel between the two rows of plants.
Using Raised Beds
If you garden where it's very rainy, if your soil stays damp or if you have clay soil, planting in raised beds is a good idea because the soil drains better. Good drainage helps to prevent diseases and warms the soil more quickly early in the season.
Try to build up the seedbed four to six inches above the walkway. To get the most for your extra effort, plant a wide row or at least a double row to guarantee a plentiful harvest.
Caring For & Harvesting Beans
Once you've planted beans, you can relax because growing them is easy. They grow very well all by themselves, and that's one of the prime reasons they're so popular with home gardeners. To have a satisfactory bean harvest the two most important things are to stay out of the garden when it's wet to avoid spreading diseases, and to keep picking snap beans when they're young for a continuous harvest.
Weeding Fundamentals
The third important thing is to be careful when weeding. Beans grow quickly and shade out weeds, particularly if the beans are grown in wide rows. If you've prepared the soil well, your weed worries will be few. The only time to be concerned is when beans are very young, before they've developed their leafy shade.
If you're working around young bean plants with a hoe or other weeding tool, or if you're cultivating between rows, remember to stay near the surface. Weed seeds are tiny and must be very close to the surface to germinate -- not like beans, which are planted at least one inch deep. A gentle stirring of the top 1/4 inch of soil every 4 to 5 days pulls the germinating weeds out of the soil and exposes their roots to the sun, which kills them.
Shallow is Better
Deep cultivation is bad for two reasons: It injures the roots of the beans, and it brings more weeds up near the surface of the soil where they'll germinate. A good time to cultivate is after a rain but when the plants are completely dry and the soil has dried out a little. This is when many weeds start to germinate.
Once the bean leaves grow enough to shade the ground, there shouldn't be any weed problem within the row, and a good heavy mulch or regular cultivation in the pathways should take care of weeds there.
Harvest Time
It's best to harvest snap beans when they're just about the diameter of a pencil or even a bit smaller. Simply snap them off the plant - take care, though, because hard jerking may tear the vines, reducing later harvests.
Pick'em Young
For the best flavor and nutritional value pick snap beans when they're young and tender. You really can't overharvest snap beans. When you pick the pods, you encourage more blossoms and more pods. That's because the plant is trying to produce large, mature seeds to complete its life cycle. When it succeeds in producing seeds, the plant will stop blossoming and making pods, so keep picking.
After your first picking, you can probably pick again three to five days later. Just pick, pick, pick, and in order to keep the harvest going as long as possible, don't let any seeds develop inside the pods.
Picking Green Shell Beans
When shell beans are young, they're greenish. They begin turning color when they're ready for picking at the green shell stage. 'Horticultural' beans turn a strawberry roan color, 'Kidney' beans become red and limas mature to a creamy white color. When you pick them, pick only the pods without damaging the plants.
Picking Dried Shell Beans
By: the Editors of National Gardening
It's easy to produce dry, mature shell beans for winter storage. In warm parts of the country, the beans and pods will mature and dry very well right in the garden. In the North, it's cool and sometimes wet in fall, so the beans often require additional drying. Pull up the plants and pile them around a fence post, roots to the post (like spokes in a wheel), to dry them some more. If you're having a wet fall, hang the plants from rafters in your garage or your attic. Anywhere that's airy and relatively dry will do. You can hang the plants themselves or put them in burlap or mesh bags. It's easy to tell when the beans are dry: They're so hard, biting into one won't even make a dent.
Threshing
Threshing by hand sounds like an old-fashioned chore, but it's simply the removal of the beans from the pods once the beans are dry. To thresh, take some of the plants by the roots - pods, beans and all - and whack them back and forth inside a clean trash can. The dry pods shatter, and the beans drop into the can. Toss the threshed plants aside and pick up the next bunch.
There are other ways to thresh beans, too. A fun method is to put the plants, again pods and all, in a big burlap or cloth bag. Then get a bunch of kids to walk and jump on the bag for a few minutes. Roll the bag over, and let them jump some more. Because the beans are dry and hard, the kids won't hurt them a bit. You can also let them have a good time hitting the bag with a baseball bat. Then open the bag, vigorously shake the plants to make sure all the beans are out of the pods, and remove the plants. You'll just have beans and small bits of debris, or chaff, in the bag. Alternately, you can cut off a small corner of the bag and let the beans drop out, leaving the plants inside.
Old-timers used to thresh beans with a homemade bean flail. The flail was made of two wooden sticks (one short, one long) hitched together at one end by a leather strap. They gripped the long stick and whirled the short one against a pile of dried bean plants laid out on a sheet of canvas on the floor of a barn. It was important to hold onto the long handle and use the shorter one to flail. The short stick couldn't whirl back and rap one's knuckles. After flailing awhile, you lifted the plants with a hay fork, shook them and then tossed them aside for the compost heap, leaving behind a pile of beans and chaff.
Winnowing
Once you've threshed the beans, you need to separate out the chaff, and that's called winnowing.
On a windy day, take a basket of beans - chaff and all - and, holding it up high, pour the beans slowly into an empty basket on the ground. Repeat this a few times. The wind will blow all the chaff away as the beans fall. (It's a good idea to put a sheet under the basket on the ground to catch any beans that miss or bounce out.)
If you have a friend to help you winnow, spread the beans and chaff on a spare window screen outside on a windy day. When the two of you lightly jiggle and shake the frame, the chaff will blow away, leaving only the beans.
Sorting
The final step before storing shell beans is sorting. It's important to remove the discolored, immature and misshapen beans from the good ones, because the bad ones could affect the taste.
An easy way to sort beans is to spread a white sheet over the kitchen table and pour the beans onto the sheet. The sheet makes it easy to roll the beans around, allowing you to check them carefully. Using this technique it's especially easy to spot bad white beans. Sorting is a chore, but if you enlist a friend to help, it can also be a time for a chat.
Dry beans will keep well in tightly capped, airtight containers, stored in a cool, dry, dark spot.
Gardening Basics: Strawberries
Strawberry Essentials
By: National Gardening editors
Planning
• Plants bear in their second season.
• Plan to set your new plants out in early spring, just as the trees in your area leaf out.
• For best yields, start a new bed of plants each year and take out beds that have fruited.
Preparation
• Select a site that offers full sun and good drainage and air circulation.
• Apply aged manure and a complete fertilizer such as 5-10-10 (1 pound per 50-foot row) before planting in the spring.
Planting
• Space your rows 4 feet apart.
• Trim the roots of the new plants to no more than 6 inches long. Soak the roots in water for about an hour before planting.
• Set the plants 18 inches apart in the rows.
• Dig holes in the ground deep enough so the roots are covered but the crown isn't buried. Pack the soil against the roots and add about 1/2 pint of water mixed with a diluted soluble fertilizer.
Care
• First year, spring: Keep the bed free of weeds. Pick off blossoms to prevent fruiting and encourage production of healthy daughter plants.
• Late spring: 5 to 6 weeks after planting, train daughter plants to take root in a 9-by-9-inch spaced row system.
• Late spring and summer: Side-dress with ammonium nitrate (1/2 pound per 100-foot row), 5-10-10 (2 1/2 pounds per 100-foot row), or manure tea (1/2 to 1 pint per plant). Side-dress again 1 month later.
• Late fall: After a few freezes, mulch with 5 to 6 inches of straw or 4 to 5 inches of pine needles.
• Second year, late spring: Remove the mulch gradually in spring, but protect blossoms from late frost with covers of mulch, if needed. Provide 1 inch of water per week while the fruit is developing, through harvest.
• Cover the patch with tobacco cloth or strawberry netting to keep birds out.
• Summer: After harvest, till the plants under, plant a cover crop, and prepare the bed for new plants next spring.
Harvesting
• The berries will ripen about I month after the plants bloom. Expect 2 to 3 weeks of harvesting for each variety.
• Pick the plants clean every 2 or 3 days. Avoid the green-tipped berries; they're not fully ripe.
• When harvesting, don't leave berry remnants on the plants. They encourage plant rot.
Getting Ready for Strawberries
By: National Gardening editors
Probably nothing beats the taste of a just-picked, sun-ripened strawberry. Strawberries are loaded with natural sugars, but these sugars rapidly convert to starch once the berry is picked. So it is not mere pride that makes a freshly picked home-grown strawberry taste better - it really does. The fresher the berry, the sweeter the taste. Strawberries are high yielders. From a single, well-cared-for 2-year-old plant, you can expect to harvest 1 to 2 quarts of strawberries. That's 50 to 100 quarts of berries from a bed 15 feet long and three plants deep - about 50 plants.
Keep Planting Strawberries
You can maximize yields by continually renewing your strawberry bed with new plants. Many gardeners try to keep old plants producing year after year, but this inevitably leads to decreased yields and increased disease problems. You can start out in the spring with ten plants that will each produce five healthy daughter plants in the first year - and they'll bear an abundant crop of strawberries the second year. Keep two beds in rotation and every year you can count on 50 to 100 quarts of juicy red berries - enough for about thirty strawberry-drenched shortcakes and fifty pints of preserves to enjoy all winter and fifty helpings of Sunday brunch strawberry waffles, not to mention the sweetest possible berries for eating straight out of the garden.
Photography by NationalGardening.com
Buying Strawberry Plants
By: National Gardening editors
Strawberries are in full production in their second year. The first year, you buy plants - usually in bunches of 25 or 50. (For large quantities or special varieties, order from a mail-order nursery.) These plants are sometimes called mother plants because 5 or 6 weeks after planting they will start sending out runners, a few or many, depending on the variety. When a runner reaches 8 to 10 inches in length, it will bend upward and begin to form a new daughter plant; the runner will continue outward and set several more daughter plants. The daughters provide most of the crop the following year.
How Many Plants?
How many plants you'll need depends on how many strawberries you want. As a rule of thumb, buy one plant for every 1 or 2 quarts of berries you'd like to harvest. Of course, this formula assumes you'll be taking good care of every plant. If you start with 10 plants the first year - and they each produce five healthy daughter plants - you'll get from 50 to 100 quarts of berries. Selecting the right type of strawberry requires a little research. You can buy varieties that are resistant to diseases such as red stele or verticillium wilt, and different varieties are suited to different parts of the country.
Everbearing Varieties
Everbearing varieties yield a light crop in early summer, a few berries during the summer, and then another heavier crop in late summer or fall. "Day-neutral" varieties bear all season, but this term is often used interchangeably with everbearers. To be really technical, day-neutrals are sometimes everbearing, usually on the West Coast, but the reverse is never true.) Regular spring- or June-bearing varieties yield more than everbearers, but over a shorter season. Everbearers often fare poorly in the southern and northern extremes of the country; they are best suited to the middle regions, zones 5 to 8.
Digging Plants
Whatever variety you choose, try to buy new plants from a commercial grower. Digging your own daughter plants from an old bed leads to diseased, weakened, unproductive plants that aren't worth the money saved. When ordering from a commercial grower, specify fall-dug plants (commercial suppliers are able to store them well over the winter). These may look scrawny and pathetic after winter storage, but they will rapidly overtake the more attractive spring-dug plants. If you do use spring-dug plants, however, they will suffer some root loss, so you should remove about half the leaves to balance the tops with the reduced root systems - and keep them moist while they await planting.
Planting Strawberries
By: National Gardening editors
Strawberries will do best in soil that has been thoroughly prepared. If your future strawberry bed was plowed last year, you're ahead of the game. But if you're starting with land that was in sod, allow an extra year or the soil will be tough to cultivate, and you'll really pay later when you are confronted with weeds (especially grass) and grubs. Strawberries do best in soil with a pH of 5.5 to 6.5. Apply aged manure and a complete fertilizer such as 5-10-10 (1/2 pound per 25-foot row) before planting in the spring. To further improve the soil, you can plant a winter cover crop. If you have heavy soil, raised beds will provide better drainage and encourage healthy roots.
Planting the Berries
You can usually set out your new plants in the strawberry bed when the trees in your area are just beginning to leaf out. Suppliers try to ship them at the appropriate time for your region. If you're not ready when the plants arrive, you can store them in the refrigerator for a couple of weeks. Let out any moisture from the shipping bag and wrap the roots in plastic. Do not let the roots dry out. Space your rows 4 feet apart, and leave 18 inches between plants. Cut back the roots of your new plants to not more than 6 inches long; put them in a bucket and soak the roots in water for about an hour just before planting. Make absolutely sure you set them in the ground at the right depth so the roots don't dry out and the crown isn't buried. Pack the soil against the roots, and water each plant with about 1/2 pint of water mixed with a soluble fertilizer; don't overdose.
Care and Harvest of Strawberries
By: National Gardening editors
You won't be idle until your first harvest. You must not let the new plants set berries in their first year. They will try to fruit, but you must pick off the blossoms as they appear. This way, instead of fruiting, the mother plants will produce vigorous daughters that will yield well the following year.
Keep Weeds Away
Keep the bed weed-free throughout the growing season. Some people use a sheet of black plastic to smother weeds, leaving holes for the strawberry plants, but that's more work than weeding when it comes time to position the runners and the daughter plants.
Training the Runners
After 5 or 6 weeks in the ground, your plants will begin to "run." A first daughter plant will form and root, then the runners will set more daughters. Keep only the first daughter of each runner. It will bear better than a second or third daughter on the same runner. When most mothers have produced daughters that are ready to take root, it's time for you to establish the 9-by-9-inch spaced row system. Although it's more work, it's more berries. Let five strong daughters from each mother plant take root; clip off all others. (If you don't have five daughters on a plant, make do with what you have.) As these daughters grow, space them around the mother at 9-inch intervals. Weigh the runners down with soil, stones, or hairpins to hold the daughters in place; they'll root by themselves.
It will take two or three passes over the course of the summer to arrange the plants correctly and get rid of unwanted runners. While the arrangement may not look quite as tidy in your strawberry patch as it does on paper, you will have created three parallel rows with plants spaced roughly 9 inches apart in each one. Unlike other systems in which all plants are permitted to run freely, this system discourages sibling rivalry and gives each selected plant plenty of room to grow. The result is more and bigger berries. When the first bearing season is over, you'll do best to till in all the plants and start again. Each successive year you prolong their lives will yield fewer berries - and more weeds and disease.
Two Berry Beds
To have strawberries every year, you should maintain two beds: one to bear fruit and one to produce next year's fruit-bearers. After the harvest, plant a short-season vegetable where the berries were, if you like, then a winter cover crop like buckwheat or rye. Crop rotation has many advantages: the roots of the strawberry plants don't have a chance to get bound up, infestations of diseases are less likely, and rotation is an effective method of weed control. The following spring, you'll set new strawberry plants in that bed and begin the cycle again. Many gardeners prefer to renovate their beds, thinning out most of the plants and leaving some strong ones to produce runners and daughter plants for the third year. If you've enjoyed a productive, disease-free season, you may decide to renovate at least part of the bed for another year or two before cleaning out the whole bed entirely:
Renovating the Bed
Here are the basics in renovating an existing strawberry bed.
1. Just after harvest, cut off all the leaves with a scythe, sickle, or lawnmower set high enough not to hit the crowns.
2. Turn under the two daughter plants on either side of each mother row (preferably with a tiller), which should leave a 6-inch- wide row.
3. Add a complete fertilizer such as 5-10-10 C/2 pound per 25-foot row) to the bed and get rid of all weeds. Thin the plants to stand 9 inches apart, leaving only the strongest ones.
4. Allow only two runners from each plant; set each runner 9 inches from the mother plant on either side.
5. Side-dress with 2 1/2 pounds of 5-10-10 or its equivalent per 100 feet of row.
6. Apply winter mulch as before. Await spring and your second - and somewhat smaller - harvest.
Harvesting Your Berries
In the second year, the berries will ripen about 1 month after the plants bloom, with the bigger berries developing at the center of each cluster. To harvest, don't squeeze a ripe berry; pinch the stem behind it with your thumbnail. Every 2 or 3 days, pick all the ripe berries. Avoid picking green-tipped berries - they're not fully ripe. They'll taste much better in a day or two. Don't leave berry remnants on the plants because they encourage plant rot. You can expect 2 to 3 weeks of harvesting for each variety. If you find yourself deluged by berries, you can make them into jam or freeze them.
By: National Gardening editors
Planning
• Plants bear in their second season.
• Plan to set your new plants out in early spring, just as the trees in your area leaf out.
• For best yields, start a new bed of plants each year and take out beds that have fruited.
Preparation
• Select a site that offers full sun and good drainage and air circulation.
• Apply aged manure and a complete fertilizer such as 5-10-10 (1 pound per 50-foot row) before planting in the spring.
Planting
• Space your rows 4 feet apart.
• Trim the roots of the new plants to no more than 6 inches long. Soak the roots in water for about an hour before planting.
• Set the plants 18 inches apart in the rows.
• Dig holes in the ground deep enough so the roots are covered but the crown isn't buried. Pack the soil against the roots and add about 1/2 pint of water mixed with a diluted soluble fertilizer.
Care
• First year, spring: Keep the bed free of weeds. Pick off blossoms to prevent fruiting and encourage production of healthy daughter plants.
• Late spring: 5 to 6 weeks after planting, train daughter plants to take root in a 9-by-9-inch spaced row system.
• Late spring and summer: Side-dress with ammonium nitrate (1/2 pound per 100-foot row), 5-10-10 (2 1/2 pounds per 100-foot row), or manure tea (1/2 to 1 pint per plant). Side-dress again 1 month later.
• Late fall: After a few freezes, mulch with 5 to 6 inches of straw or 4 to 5 inches of pine needles.
• Second year, late spring: Remove the mulch gradually in spring, but protect blossoms from late frost with covers of mulch, if needed. Provide 1 inch of water per week while the fruit is developing, through harvest.
• Cover the patch with tobacco cloth or strawberry netting to keep birds out.
• Summer: After harvest, till the plants under, plant a cover crop, and prepare the bed for new plants next spring.
Harvesting
• The berries will ripen about I month after the plants bloom. Expect 2 to 3 weeks of harvesting for each variety.
• Pick the plants clean every 2 or 3 days. Avoid the green-tipped berries; they're not fully ripe.
• When harvesting, don't leave berry remnants on the plants. They encourage plant rot.
Getting Ready for Strawberries
By: National Gardening editors
Probably nothing beats the taste of a just-picked, sun-ripened strawberry. Strawberries are loaded with natural sugars, but these sugars rapidly convert to starch once the berry is picked. So it is not mere pride that makes a freshly picked home-grown strawberry taste better - it really does. The fresher the berry, the sweeter the taste. Strawberries are high yielders. From a single, well-cared-for 2-year-old plant, you can expect to harvest 1 to 2 quarts of strawberries. That's 50 to 100 quarts of berries from a bed 15 feet long and three plants deep - about 50 plants.
Keep Planting Strawberries
You can maximize yields by continually renewing your strawberry bed with new plants. Many gardeners try to keep old plants producing year after year, but this inevitably leads to decreased yields and increased disease problems. You can start out in the spring with ten plants that will each produce five healthy daughter plants in the first year - and they'll bear an abundant crop of strawberries the second year. Keep two beds in rotation and every year you can count on 50 to 100 quarts of juicy red berries - enough for about thirty strawberry-drenched shortcakes and fifty pints of preserves to enjoy all winter and fifty helpings of Sunday brunch strawberry waffles, not to mention the sweetest possible berries for eating straight out of the garden.
Photography by NationalGardening.com
Buying Strawberry Plants
By: National Gardening editors
Strawberries are in full production in their second year. The first year, you buy plants - usually in bunches of 25 or 50. (For large quantities or special varieties, order from a mail-order nursery.) These plants are sometimes called mother plants because 5 or 6 weeks after planting they will start sending out runners, a few or many, depending on the variety. When a runner reaches 8 to 10 inches in length, it will bend upward and begin to form a new daughter plant; the runner will continue outward and set several more daughter plants. The daughters provide most of the crop the following year.
How Many Plants?
How many plants you'll need depends on how many strawberries you want. As a rule of thumb, buy one plant for every 1 or 2 quarts of berries you'd like to harvest. Of course, this formula assumes you'll be taking good care of every plant. If you start with 10 plants the first year - and they each produce five healthy daughter plants - you'll get from 50 to 100 quarts of berries. Selecting the right type of strawberry requires a little research. You can buy varieties that are resistant to diseases such as red stele or verticillium wilt, and different varieties are suited to different parts of the country.
Everbearing Varieties
Everbearing varieties yield a light crop in early summer, a few berries during the summer, and then another heavier crop in late summer or fall. "Day-neutral" varieties bear all season, but this term is often used interchangeably with everbearers. To be really technical, day-neutrals are sometimes everbearing, usually on the West Coast, but the reverse is never true.) Regular spring- or June-bearing varieties yield more than everbearers, but over a shorter season. Everbearers often fare poorly in the southern and northern extremes of the country; they are best suited to the middle regions, zones 5 to 8.
Digging Plants
Whatever variety you choose, try to buy new plants from a commercial grower. Digging your own daughter plants from an old bed leads to diseased, weakened, unproductive plants that aren't worth the money saved. When ordering from a commercial grower, specify fall-dug plants (commercial suppliers are able to store them well over the winter). These may look scrawny and pathetic after winter storage, but they will rapidly overtake the more attractive spring-dug plants. If you do use spring-dug plants, however, they will suffer some root loss, so you should remove about half the leaves to balance the tops with the reduced root systems - and keep them moist while they await planting.
Planting Strawberries
By: National Gardening editors
Strawberries will do best in soil that has been thoroughly prepared. If your future strawberry bed was plowed last year, you're ahead of the game. But if you're starting with land that was in sod, allow an extra year or the soil will be tough to cultivate, and you'll really pay later when you are confronted with weeds (especially grass) and grubs. Strawberries do best in soil with a pH of 5.5 to 6.5. Apply aged manure and a complete fertilizer such as 5-10-10 (1/2 pound per 25-foot row) before planting in the spring. To further improve the soil, you can plant a winter cover crop. If you have heavy soil, raised beds will provide better drainage and encourage healthy roots.
Planting the Berries
You can usually set out your new plants in the strawberry bed when the trees in your area are just beginning to leaf out. Suppliers try to ship them at the appropriate time for your region. If you're not ready when the plants arrive, you can store them in the refrigerator for a couple of weeks. Let out any moisture from the shipping bag and wrap the roots in plastic. Do not let the roots dry out. Space your rows 4 feet apart, and leave 18 inches between plants. Cut back the roots of your new plants to not more than 6 inches long; put them in a bucket and soak the roots in water for about an hour just before planting. Make absolutely sure you set them in the ground at the right depth so the roots don't dry out and the crown isn't buried. Pack the soil against the roots, and water each plant with about 1/2 pint of water mixed with a soluble fertilizer; don't overdose.
Care and Harvest of Strawberries
By: National Gardening editors
You won't be idle until your first harvest. You must not let the new plants set berries in their first year. They will try to fruit, but you must pick off the blossoms as they appear. This way, instead of fruiting, the mother plants will produce vigorous daughters that will yield well the following year.
Keep Weeds Away
Keep the bed weed-free throughout the growing season. Some people use a sheet of black plastic to smother weeds, leaving holes for the strawberry plants, but that's more work than weeding when it comes time to position the runners and the daughter plants.
Training the Runners
After 5 or 6 weeks in the ground, your plants will begin to "run." A first daughter plant will form and root, then the runners will set more daughters. Keep only the first daughter of each runner. It will bear better than a second or third daughter on the same runner. When most mothers have produced daughters that are ready to take root, it's time for you to establish the 9-by-9-inch spaced row system. Although it's more work, it's more berries. Let five strong daughters from each mother plant take root; clip off all others. (If you don't have five daughters on a plant, make do with what you have.) As these daughters grow, space them around the mother at 9-inch intervals. Weigh the runners down with soil, stones, or hairpins to hold the daughters in place; they'll root by themselves.
It will take two or three passes over the course of the summer to arrange the plants correctly and get rid of unwanted runners. While the arrangement may not look quite as tidy in your strawberry patch as it does on paper, you will have created three parallel rows with plants spaced roughly 9 inches apart in each one. Unlike other systems in which all plants are permitted to run freely, this system discourages sibling rivalry and gives each selected plant plenty of room to grow. The result is more and bigger berries. When the first bearing season is over, you'll do best to till in all the plants and start again. Each successive year you prolong their lives will yield fewer berries - and more weeds and disease.
Two Berry Beds
To have strawberries every year, you should maintain two beds: one to bear fruit and one to produce next year's fruit-bearers. After the harvest, plant a short-season vegetable where the berries were, if you like, then a winter cover crop like buckwheat or rye. Crop rotation has many advantages: the roots of the strawberry plants don't have a chance to get bound up, infestations of diseases are less likely, and rotation is an effective method of weed control. The following spring, you'll set new strawberry plants in that bed and begin the cycle again. Many gardeners prefer to renovate their beds, thinning out most of the plants and leaving some strong ones to produce runners and daughter plants for the third year. If you've enjoyed a productive, disease-free season, you may decide to renovate at least part of the bed for another year or two before cleaning out the whole bed entirely:
Renovating the Bed
Here are the basics in renovating an existing strawberry bed.
1. Just after harvest, cut off all the leaves with a scythe, sickle, or lawnmower set high enough not to hit the crowns.
2. Turn under the two daughter plants on either side of each mother row (preferably with a tiller), which should leave a 6-inch- wide row.
3. Add a complete fertilizer such as 5-10-10 C/2 pound per 25-foot row) to the bed and get rid of all weeds. Thin the plants to stand 9 inches apart, leaving only the strongest ones.
4. Allow only two runners from each plant; set each runner 9 inches from the mother plant on either side.
5. Side-dress with 2 1/2 pounds of 5-10-10 or its equivalent per 100 feet of row.
6. Apply winter mulch as before. Await spring and your second - and somewhat smaller - harvest.
Harvesting Your Berries
In the second year, the berries will ripen about 1 month after the plants bloom, with the bigger berries developing at the center of each cluster. To harvest, don't squeeze a ripe berry; pinch the stem behind it with your thumbnail. Every 2 or 3 days, pick all the ripe berries. Avoid picking green-tipped berries - they're not fully ripe. They'll taste much better in a day or two. Don't leave berry remnants on the plants because they encourage plant rot. You can expect 2 to 3 weeks of harvesting for each variety. If you find yourself deluged by berries, you can make them into jam or freeze them.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)