Greene Food Garden Coaching

If your tomato seedlings are getting too big for their pots, but you can't plant them out yet, it's time to pot them up to a larger pot. You'll know when roots are coming out the drainage holes or the roots are wrapping around the root ball when you gently pull the rootball out of the pot. I encourage you to do this even if your planting out date is only a couple of weeks away. Tomatoes don't like to be rootbound and will grow quickly if given the right conditions and a bi...g enough pot. The first four photos shows a tomato plant that's ready to be moved up to a larger pot. The plant is large and sturdy, and the roots are filling the pot but not yet crowding it. Now here's a trick for even greater success: plant your tomato as deep as you can in the new pot. First remove all the lower leaves and shoots that will be buried under the soil (photo 5), leaving a bare stem with a few leaves and the growing tip at the top (photo 6). (It's OK, your plant will thank you for it.) Then plant it as deeply as possible without burying the last inch or two of the tip of the plant (photos 7 and 8). (I mix some complete organic granular fertilizer in the soil mix.) Roots will grow all along the stem, providing even more roots to pull up water and nutrients for your plant. Tamp the soil down well, and water it in (photo 9). Grow it as you have been, if necessary potting it up again in the same way if it begins to crowd its pot. They are fine with being potted up multiple times if necessary, and prefer it, in fact, to being root bound. Start hardening it off about a week before planting it out. When you plant it out in its final spot, again plant it as deeply as possible, or alternately, dig a trench and lay the stem down in the trench, bending the growing tip up so it does not get buried, and filling the trench back in all along the stem. I used to grow 1200 tomato plants a year for my small farm's plant sales. I always made sure to pot them up when the roots got to the bottom of the pot. Using this technique, I often had plant sale customers tell me that my tomato plants always performed better than the ones they bought at nurseries. See more

The lilacs are starting to bloom! Are you ready to plant some of your warm weather vegetable crops? For those of us who follow phenological indicators (phenology translates from its Latin roots as the "study of appearance") in our vegetable gardening, this is a long anticipated time, because when common lilacs in our garden area are in full bloom (95-100% of the flower clusters have no unopened flowers), we know the conditions are right to plant beans, corn, cucumbers, melon...s, pumpkins, squash, and zucchini in our gardens. How do we know this? Since 1956, scientists have been conducting large-scale, coordinated phenological monitoring of lilacs, which have shown that they "respond predictably to air temperature and accumulated heat in a regionally coherent pattern". If you have a lilac in your garden area, keep an eye on it, and once it's in full bloom, research tells us that you can confidently plant those crops (barring a freak weather event). I find this kind of science-based scheduling makes far more sense than going by the calendar, particularly in these times of climate change. Incidentally, your local lilac also tells you that when it's in "breaking leaf bud" stage (that is, when "the widest part of the newly emerging leaf has grown beyond the end of its opening winter bud scales, but before it has fully emerged to expose the leaf stalk or leaf base") you can plant beets, carrots, brassicas, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, collards, lettuce, and spinach. It's worth considering planting a lilac in your garden for this important information if you're a vegetable gardener. I'll continue to post these updates as we near the phenological events, so please follow me for more tips.

When the grape hyacinths are blooming in your area, phenology research tells us that conditions are right for planting broad beans, broccoli, cauliflower, celeriac, celery, corn salad, and Florence fennel. Do you use phenological indicators to guide your vegetable garden planting schedule?

One of my favourite garden accessories is my minimum/maximum thermometer. It has two mercury columns, one that registers the highest temperature reached during a given period, and one that registers the lowest temperature reached. The mercury pushes steel indexes which remain in place at the most extreme point on each column until you reset them with the push of a button. These are very handy for keeping track of, for example, the temperature in your greenhouse overnight, ...or whether your cold frame is staying warm enough to plant out tomatoes in it. The photo shows a thermometer that came out of an unheated small greenhouse. You can see that the temperature at that moment in the greenhouse is 35 degrees F, that the lowest temperature reached in the time period since it was last reset was 5 degrees F and the highest temperature reached in that time period was 37 F. This tells me that it's still too cold for tomatoes at night, and that the greenhouse heated up faster that day than we expected, so we need to plan to open it sooner. While there are also lots of digital thermometers, for my (low) budget, this one has been the most reliable, lasting over ten years, while the more expensive digital one gave up the ghost after just a couple of years. If you've ever wondered or stressed about the temperature in your greenhouse or cold frame, I highly recommend acquiring one of these. See more

Dandelions, like forsythia, are another good phenological indicator for those of us trying to use signs from nature to time our vegetable plantings. When dandelions are blooming in our area, that tells us that conditions are now warm enough for certain plants in our particular micro-climate. Fortunately (or maybe not, depending on how you feel about dandelions), most of us are likely to have dandelions growing nearby. Research tells us that when they are blooming, we can plant: beets, plants in the Brassica family like Brussels sprouts and cabbage, carrots, chervil, collards, endive, escarole, kohlrabi, leeks, lettuce, parsley, parsnips, peas, onions (seeds and sets), potatoes, radish, salsify, spinach, Swiss chard, and turnips.