Maintain a Weedless Organic Garden. Weedless gardening! That’s an oxymoron, an impossibility, right? Well, my gardens may not be 100 percent weed-free, but they are 100 percent free of weed problems. I’ve achieved this happy state in four ways: 1) never tilling or otherwise disturbing the soil, so dormant weed seeds stay asleep, away from light and air; 2) designating permanent areas for walking and for planting to avoid compaction and the need for tillage; 3) maintaining a thin mulch of weed-free organic material to snuff out any weed seeds that blow in or are dropped into the garden by birds; 4) using drip irrigation whenever watering is called for to avoid promoting weed growth in paths and between widely spaced plants.
Those are the basics of keeping my garden free of weed problems. Over the years I’ve honed some details of this weedless gardening system, and I’d like to share them with you. A particularly nice aspect of this weedless gardening system is how much it simplifies fertilization. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. How to Prune Bee Balm.
Perrenial Fruits. Spuds. Corrugated roof. OCEAN 120 Personality Test. Your tomatoes are glad the heat is gone, better days ahead. Good "sleeping weather" for us is good fruit setting weather for a number of vegetables. This is particularly so for tomatoes, peppers and green beans. If you look carefully, you may notice a lack of fruit-set on your tomato plants from last week. That is because of the heatwave we just had. View full sizeTomato fruit set response to environmental stress from temperature.Horticultural Sciences Department, Florida Cooperative Extension Service, Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, University of Florida.
Original publication date July 2012. During a heatwave, when the temperature is consistently in the 90s by day, warmer than 70 at night or, cooler than the low 50s by night, most tomato plants will drop their blossoms. Sometimes you can actually see evidence of previous heat waves or cold snaps by looking at your tomato plant from the ground up. The tomatoes will show up in vertically stacked groups with vacant layers of no tomatoes in between.
Better days ahead:
Squash. Kale. Well water. Harvest at Peak Flavor. Soil. Fall veggie garden. Grains. Home — Beyond Pesticides. Staple or calorie crops. Mushroom logs. Accessing growing degree days with Enviro-weather. Take the MSU Extension and AgBioResearch Survey to Sharpen Our Focus Understanding and using accumulated growing degree days can help you know when to expect pests. This is one of the services Enviro-weather offers Michigan growers. Posted on May 23, 2013 by Beth Bishop, MSU Enviro-weather One thing is for sure about Michigan’s weather: it’s always different.
Just compare this spring (2013) to last spring. This time last year the season was two weeks or more ahead of normal in most of Michigan. This year, the majority of the state is days or even weeks behind normal. This variability means that each year the development of crops, weeds, insects and diseases is different. Most living things depend on external temperatures to fuel their growth and development. Growing degree days are a way of measuring accumulated heat above a certain temperature threshold (minimum temperature below which development stops). Photo 1. Photo 2. Related Articles.
Mushroom logs. Berry%20Plant%20Structure%20Poling. Partial Sun Fruit. Hugelkultur Raised Beds - Mindful Making. Design and layout. Permaculture. Fertilizer. Tip sheets | Gardening in Michigan. Skip to content Michigan State University Gardening in Michigan MSU Extension’s Plant and Grow Tips These tips sheets are a quick reference for gardeners. Don’t have Adobe Acrobat Reader for pdf files? Download it here. Plant and Grow Tip Sheets Smart gardening NEW: Don’t guess - soil test!
The basics Flowers Vegetables Vegetable diseases Fruit Around the home Funding provided by MSU Extension. . © 2013 Michigan State University Board of Trustees . STAR - Global Vegetation Health Products - Global Vegetation Health Products: Archived Images. <h3 class="noscriptWarning">Javascript is currently disabled on this computer. Without javascript, some display enhancements do not work; however, all content is fully visible and accessible.
</h3> Global and Regional Vegetation Health (VH) is a NOAA/NESDIS system estimating vegetation conditions, health and the related products. This product contains several Vegetation Health Indices (VHI) derived from the radiance observed by the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) onboard the NOAA-7, 9, 11, 14, 16 and 18 afternoon polar-orbiting satellites. The VH were produced from the NOAA/NESDIS Global Area Coverage (GAC) data set for the period 1981 to the present. The following indices and products are available: Key words: Vegetation Health, Drought, Moisture Conditions, Thermal Conditions,Soil Saturation, NDVI, Brightness Temperature, Fire risk, Ecosystem Resources Note: For NOAA 16 (2001-2005), NOAA18 (May 2005 to present), these satellites were/are in the afternoon orbits. Expert Assessments: United States Seasonal Drought Outlook. GARDEN NEWS | Log House Plants.
Comfrey. Grafting Tomatoes. Herbs. Cover crops. Compost tea. Forcing Rhubarb. Friday, February 08, 2013by Benedict Vanheems - Categories: perennial vegetables, shade, cold frame < Back to the GrowBlog Index It was a trip to my local food store a few years ago that got me onto growing my own rhubarb. I needed a few of the teasingly tart stalks to cook one of my childhood favourites – rhubarb crumble. The mean portion of bagged up stems on offer was, in my opinion, ambitiously priced, so I settled for apple crumble instead.
There's immense please to be had from snapping free a stalk or two for an impromptu desert. Wakey, wakey! Rhubarb will naturally break its fat, overwintering buds in early spring, as soon as temperatures are consistently mild. Forcing rhubarb creates stems that etiolate – botanical speak for growing pale. For the gardener these stretched stems have far less of the bitterness associated with traditional, non-forced rhubarb. How to force You can buy purpose-made terracotta forcing pots. Maintaining stock Forcing rhubarb isn't a natural process.
Charts and guides. Biointensive gardening. Frost-free dates. Perrenial Vegetables. The Best Organic Fertilizers for a Vegetable Garden. 02-Composting-Biernbaum. Veggie Varieties. Garden info tables. Rainwater Harvesting. Growing Herbs at Home. In a botanical sense, an herb is a plant that does not produce a woody stem and dies back to the ground each winter to a perennial root system. Herbaceous plants in the landscape and garden normally include annuals, perennials, biennials, bulbs and grasses. In the garden sense, herbs are plants that serve as a major source of seasonings in the preparation of foods. In an even broader sense, herbs include those plants that are also useful for scents in cosmetics or for medicinal purposes. Some of them are woody and outstep the definition of a herbaceous plant.
In the gardens of American pioneers, herbs were the major source of seasonings for foods. They were also used for curing illnesses, storing with linens, strewing on floors, covering the bad taste of meats before refrigeration was devised, dyeing homespun fabrics and as fragrances. With the advent of the supermarket, growing herbs in the garden declined because a wide range of dried herbs became available in stores. General culture.
Living fence. Garden plans. Flowers. Wildflowers and beneficials. Garden tea. Beans. How to Deal with Weeds. Thursday, July 19, 2012 by Benedict Vanheems - Categories: weeding, mulch, planning They're the bane of every kitchen gardener's life and they seem to appear the moment your back is turned. I'm talking about weeds of course! I recently tried to work out exactly how much time I spend weeding – either on my haunches plucking weeds one by one from between my veg, or slicing (or, rather, gliding!) Back and forth with the hoe. Perhaps unsurprisingly the answer I came to was 'a lot' of time. By the middle of summer you will either have managed to keep your plot pristine or the weeds may well be gaining the upper hand.
Weeds can be divided into two known enemies: the annual weeds that set seed in a blink of the eye, often in as little as three or four weeks, and perennial weeds, which will spread primarily by stealth means, creeping along using rhizomes, roots and by layering. Annual weeds Play detective – look under the leaves of crops and pull out any lurking weeds.
Perennial weeds.
Overgrown, bitter, bolted lettuce. Suppliers. Storage shed. Trees. Indoor gardening. County MSU Extension > Horticulture > Growing Fruits. Garden Economic Value. Trellising. Extend growing season. Cold frames. High tunnels and hoop houses. Tools.