Transplanting Tomatoes

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.

By: National Gardening editors

Technorati Tags: flower bulbs, garden, seedlings, tomato, vegetable plants, Vegetables

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?

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.

By: National Gardening editors

Technorati Tags: beginning gardening, flower bulbs, garden, seedlings, tomato, vegetable plants, Vegetables

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.

By: the Editors of National Gardening

Technorati Tags: beginning gardening, flower bulbs, garden, picking dried shell beans, seedlings, tomato, vegetable plants, Vegetables

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.

By: the Editors of National Gardening 

Technorati Tags: beginning gardening, flower bulbs, garden, how to harvest beans, seedlings, tomato, vegetable plants, Vegetables

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.

By: the Editors of National Gardening 

Technorati Tags: flower bulbs, garden, seedlings, tomato, vegetable plants, Vegetables, Website Information