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Archive for the 'Winter Preparation' Category

Gardening Advice, Vegetables, Winter Preparation

Tomatoes All Year Long!

Imagine - your favorite fruit ripe and ready to eat all year long.  So says Mother Earth News - offering the five smart strategies and four special varieties to ensure whatever the season - it’s Tomato Time!

Even winter?  Yep - here’s what they recommend for winter: grow cherry tomatoes indoors:

Near Decorah, Iowa, David Cavagnaro harvests cherry tomatoes from plants he grows indoors through winter in 10-gallon containers (see “Winter Tomatoes,” October/November 2004). He starts with cuttings rooted from his summer stock, and grows them in a sun-drenched window. If you don’t have a big south-facing window (or sliding glass door), provide supplemental light from an overhead fluorescent fixture — a great job for a grow-light that would otherwise be gathering dust until it’s needed for spring seedlings.

Do you have a favorite variety of tomato?  Any advice to share on growing tomatoes?

 

photo from Idaltu

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25 Feb 2008 GBP 0 comments

Winter Preparation

Propagate Your Hardwoods

Fall is the perfect time for propating hardwoods such as , red-twigged dogwoods, boxwood, hollies, willow, arborvitaes or false cypress.

Adam Wheeler, of the Broken Arrow Nursery in Hamden, CT, offers three simple steps for success propagation:

  1. CUT.  Clip a branch within the “cone of juvenility” and remove the new growth at the tip.  Reduce your cutting to six to eight inch long segments for deciduous shrubs or three to five inch long segments for evergreens.  Be sure each has at least one leaf node.
  2. Prepare the cutting. Strip any leaves off the lower end of the cutting. Reduce the upper leaves by cutting them in half. Wound the lowest inch of stem on one side by whittling away the bark. This will foster root formation. Hold the cutting in hardwood rooting hormone for 10 seconds.
  3. Stick.  Fill a pot with a mixture of moist perlite and peat based potting mix. Stick the lower tip of each cutting into the medium and firm it in. Insert a 10 inch bamboo stake and slip a plastic bag over the pot, propping it up on the stake. When the cuttings resist a tug, roots have rooted. By spring, they should be ready to brave the outdoors.

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02 Oct 2007 GBP 0 comments