It has been a hard year in the garden. The heat and drought left our plants looking pitiful for most of the summer. If you feel like the time has come to put the garden to bed for the season, why not plant a cover crop? Cover crops can add organic matter to the soil, reduce soil erosion, weed suppression, and help to maintain the integrity of the soil. Continue reading
Category Archives: Vegetables
Successfully Transplant Vegetables
With springtime finally here, we turn our attention to the vegetable garden. Getting your transplants up and growing will give you some delicious homegrown produce in the months to come. Continue reading
Spring Garden Tilling
With warmer weather often comes ‘Spring Fever’. Home gardeners hit hard with this condition might often be tempted to rush to do their spring tilling when the ground is wet. Don’t make this mistake as you can potentially damage the structure of your garden soil for years to come. Continue reading
Plan Your Spring Garden Now
Each year new people get into vegetable gardening. Success or failure of home vegetable production can depend on many things, but some major reasons for failure are negligence, not following the proper instructions and not keeping up with current vegetable developments. Continue reading
Fall Cleanup is Essential for Spring Success
Some homeowner’s fall gardens are in full swing now. However, a majority of home gardeners seem to prefer skipping the fall garden ritual as they are ready to forget about dealing with plant disease and insects in the vegetative garden until next spring. Even so, this time of year is actually the perfect time to start controlling next year’s disease and insects. A little work in the fall can prevent a lot of trouble next spring. Continue reading
Fall Tips for the KY Garden
Fall is a beautiful time in Kentucky gardens, but it can also be a messy time. Tree leaves turn from green to vibrant fall colors and then drop, creating big piles. Then there are the leaf and spent shoots from our flower beds. The way we address our yard waste can have a significant impact on our gardens and on the environment. Gardeners commonly rake up and bag leaves to haul away to yard waste dumps. Continue reading
Squash Pests
I know some of you out there are having squash and zucchini problems this year and you aren’t alone. A week ago, I noticed my first and most prolific zucchini plant starting to yellow and wilt. I checked the stem to see if there were any squash borers and sure enough there were a couple a cracks in the stem and some saw dust like stem bits hanging out beside the cracks. Hoping to save the plant I stuck a sharp wire into the holes hoping to kill the borers and covered it with soil (like the U.K. entomologists say). Saturday the plant was just about gone, so I pulled it up, dissected the stem and found 7 one-inch long borers about as big around as a pencil munching away! I have to admit I took great pleasure avenging my beloved zucchini plants death. Continue reading
Controlling Tomato Diseases
Nothing can ruin a mouthwatering tomato more than reaching for one on the vine only to find an ugly, flattened spot on it. If the ugly spot is located on the fruit opposite the stem end, it is likely blossom end rot, a disease caused by a lack of calcium that commonly occurs in tomatoes but can also affect eggplant, peppers and many cucurbits. Continue reading
Controlling Tomato Diseases
Tomatoes are the one vegetable—or fruit, botanically speaking—that most of us look forward to when we plant our gardens in the spring, however; this year more than most it seems diseases are lurking around every corner threatening to destroy our harvest. There are dozens of diseases that can infect tomatoes, however, it is usually a handful that cause major problems. Continue reading
Seed Saving
In the last Seed Saver article we gave a brief introduction to some of the basic concepts of seed saving. In this edition we will continue our discussion with more information on harvesting and storing seeds that you are saving. Continue reading
Kentucky Hort News 