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Spider mites are a very serious problem for people gardening at home, and they’re surprisingly tricky to find. Even though we usually think of them along with bugs, they are actually arachnids, and they’re incredibly small, less than a millimeter long. Most of the time, by the time gardeners spot the very fine webbing on the undersides of leaves, and the speckled, yellowing of the leaves themselves, the mites have been steadily increasing in number for weeks. One female spider mite can have millions of babies in a single growing season when it’s warm, and that’s why finding them early and dealing with them quickly is so important for plants that are being harmed.

Agricultural experts say spider mite numbers grow fastest when it’s hot and dry, which is exactly what happens in heated houses in the winter, and in gardens during a hot, long drought in midsummer. Knowing that the weather causes this growth is the first thing to do to either get rid of them or stop them from becoming a problem in the first place.

How to Confirm a Spider Mite Infestation

When spider mites start eating a plant, the first thing you’ll probably notice is a lot of very fine speckling on the tops of the leaves. These are incredibly small yellow or bronze dots, each one marking a plant cell the mite has broken into to get its food. At first people often think this is the plant not getting enough food or being scorched by the sun. To be sure, you can hold a white sheet of paper under a leaf you suspect is infested and give the leaf a firm tap. If mites are there, they’ll fall onto the paper and look like very small things wiggling around; you’ll have to look carefully to see them. If you see delicate, silky webbing between the lines of a leaf or where the leaf joins the stem, then a colony of spider mites is definitely living on the plant. By the time you can see the webbing, there are a lot of mites, and you’ll need to do a lot to get rid of them.

 

Step 1: Isolate and Spray Down Affected Plants

When dealing with houseplants that have pests, get the affected plant away from your others right away; this stops the tiny creatures getting around by being blown on the breeze or by touching. Then, spray it completely with water at normal room temperature. Pay special attention to the undersides of all the leaves, because the pests like to hang out there. This will get rid of a lot of them. For plants in the garden, a strong spray from the hose, aimed at the undersides of the leaves, does the same thing. Often just the water will lower the number of pests by fifty, sixty, or even seventy percent and you should do this again every three or four days for a fortnight.

Step 2: Apply Insecticidal Soap or Neem Oil

Once you’ve washed the plants with a strong spray, you can get after the mites that are left using insecticidal soap or neem oil from the garden center; both will do a better job of finishing them off. Insecticidal soap only kills if it actually touches the mites, and it does so by breaking apart the walls of their cells, which dries them out and kills them pretty quickly. Neem oil both kills on contact and also throws off the development of any mites that happen to live through the first application, so they can’t breed as usual. When you use either of these, cover all parts of the leaves, especially the bottoms, the stems and where the leaves attach to the stems. You’ll need to repeat the application every five to seven days for at least three times in a row, as both the soap and the neem oil won’t affect the eggs and so more mites will appear between treatments.

Step 3: Increase Humidity to Discourage Reinfestation

Spider mites really like it when it’s dry, but they have a hard time when there’s lots of moisture. With houseplants, if you make the air around the plant more humid, a dish of pebbles with water, a humidifier nearby, or simply putting several plants close to one another will slow down how quickly the mites make more mites, even if you don’t get rid of every last one. Gardeners outside can lower the number of spider mites by watering regularly, keeping the garden a little more humid than the hot, dusty settings they’re keen on. Though usually we don’t recommend it as it can cause fungal problems, spraying water over the leaves can actually be helpful during a spider mite attack; the water on the leaves isn’t something the mite communities do well with.

 

Prevention: Keeping Mites From Returning

It’s a lot simpler to stop spider mites from becoming a problem in the first place than to get rid of them once they’ve settled in. Checking the undersides of leaves often, and especially when it’s hot and dry or during the winter while your indoor heating is on, will help you find them early at the time they’re easiest to manage. Plants do better if they get enough water and aren’t in a place that’s too dry, because these conditions are what spider mites like. In gardens outside, you can help other mites that eat spider mites, plus other helpful insects, by not using pesticides that kill everything – this lets these biological controls keep the spider mite numbers down by themselves.

Key Takeaway

Spider mites are really small and breed very quickly, and they love it when it’s hot and dry. To get rid of them best, you should blast them with a strong spray of water (do this every three or four days), apply insecticidal soap or neem oil (for three rounds, with an application every five to seven days) and make the air around the plants that have them a bit more humid. If you check your leaves fairly often and make sure your plants get enough water, you’ll likely stop spider mites from becoming a problem in the first place. Also, in gardens outside, helping creatures that naturally eat spider mites will give you lasting control of them, meaning you won’t have to keep treating the plants.

Tomato gardeners get worried when their tomato plant leaves start curling, and it’s easy to see why. Tomatoes are what most people really look forward to, and spend a lot of time caring for, in their kitchen garden. When leaves roll in on themselves, or turn up into a cup shape, or twist down, you instantly think of sickness, bugs, or losing all your tomatoes. However, experts in plant diseases say tomato leaf curl has at least five different reasons for happening. Most of these aren’t a big deal or are pretty simple to fix, and only one is a really serious danger to the plant. If you figure out exactly how the leaf is curling and what causes that particular kind of curl, you won’t worry for nothing and will know the best thing to do.

1. Physiological Leaf Roll: The Most Common and Least Concerning

What causes tomato leaves to curl up the majority of the time is physiological leaf roll. Essentially, when the lower leaves are stressed, they roll in on themselves from edge to edge to make a tube. This happens most often when the plant is growing quickly, has lots of tomatoes developing, has been given too much nitrogen, or has been heavily pruned. These rolled leaves will feel quite thick and a little tough, yet they stay green and are otherwise perfectly fine. Plant experts think the plant does this to limit how much leaf area is out in the sun and breeze, especially when it is losing a lot of water.

Physiological leaf roll won’t impact how many tomatoes you get, it isn’t contagious to other plants, and you don’t need to do anything to fix it. It’s something you’ll see more with tomatoes that grow as a vine (indeterminate types), and it will often go away by itself as the weather and how the plant is doing gets to be more consistent. If the curl is all over the plant, but the leaves are green, firm, and don’t have bugs on them, physiological leaf roll is almost certainly what is going on.

 

2. Water Stress: Both Too Much and Too Little

When tomatoes don’t have the right amount of water, their leaves will curl. Surprisingly, this happens whether they have too little or way too much; the effect on the leaves looks pretty much the same. Tomato leaves that are drying out from lack of water usually curl upwards and in on themselves and become dry and crunchy around the edges. The plant does this to try to lose less water by having less of the leaf out in the air. If tomato plants get too much water, the leaves curl downwards, look swollen and full of water, and begin to turn yellow starting at the bottom and going up. You can tell which problem you have almost immediately by how moist the soil is when you stick your finger in two or three inches. If it’s dry, it’s drought; if it’s very wet, you’re overwatering. Using drip irrigation and a layer of mulch to give a steady, consistent amount of water will stop both kinds of leaf curling caused by water.

3. Herbicide Drift Damage

Tomato plants are amazingly affected by any herbicide left behind, much more than most things you’d grow in a garden. Really small amounts of weed killers for broadleaf plants (like 2,4-D and dicamba) that blow over from someone treating their lawn nearby can dramatically change the shape of the leaves. They twist, cup upwards, get long and thin, and curl in ways that are noticeably unlike damage from other issues. This harm will generally show up within a day or two of the plants being exposed, and the newest leaves are the ones that are worst hit. Leaves that have been damaged by herbicide become oddly long and thin, and their lines look very obvious and all out of shape. If plants on just one part of your garden are doing this – the part which faces a lawn or field which has recently had something sprayed – then the weed killer has probably blown onto them. Plants that haven’t been too badly exposed might get better, but if it was a lot of herbicide, you can expect a much smaller crop.

4. Viral Infection: The Serious Concern

Tomato yellow leaf curl virus (TYLCV), and other similar viruses, makes leaves turn upwards, get yellow between the veins, and the plants don’t grow as well; they also make far fewer tomatoes. Unlike when leaves naturally roll upwards, this virus causes the whole plant to curl, and as they curl, the leaves turn yellow and their shape changes. Whiteflies spread these viruses, and sadly, you can’t get rid of the virus in a plant that has it. If you’re certain a plant has one of these viruses, you need to remove it and destroy it, to stop it from getting to your healthy plants. Where TYLCV is a problem, the best way to stop it is to control the number of whiteflies, using things like sticky traps, shiny mulch, and insecticidal soap.

 

5. Environmental Extremes: Heat, Wind, and Transplant Shock

When you first put tomato plants outside, their leaves often curl a bit while they get used to being in the open, and this is even more common if you didn’t slowly introduce them to outside conditions first. This curling from the move itself generally goes away in a week or two as the roots start to grow in the garden. Very high temperatures (over 95 degrees during the day) will also make leaves curl upwards for a little while, as the plant tries to deal with the heat, but the leaves will flatten out when it cools down. Continual, heavy wind can curl leaves because the plant is being physically pushed around. Importantly, all of these things – the move, the heat, the wind – will fix themselves and you just need to make sure the plant has enough water, some shade during really hot spells, and that you get your plants used to being outside gradually before putting them in the ground.

Key Takeaway

There are five main reasons why tomato leaves curl. The most frequent one, and it doesn’t do any harm, is just how the leaf grows. Leaves will also curl from a lack of water, but that is easily fixed by watering your tomatoes regularly. If people nearby have been treating their lawns with weed killer, that could be drifting onto your tomatoes. A virus is a less common, but quite bad, reason, and if leaves are affected by this, you should get rid of those plants. Lastly, very hot or cold weather can cause curling, but this will go away by itself. To figure out what’s going on, think about whether the curled leaves are still green, strong and generally good – in which case it’s nearly certainly nothing to worry about. Or are they yellowing, strangely shaped and not growing very well? Those are the symptoms that suggest a virus or the weedkiller.

Powdery mildew is the most common fungal problem for vegetables and pretty flowers in gardens all over the world. That very obvious white or kind of gray-white powder on leaves? It’s caused by a lot of different kinds of fungus, and each one usually attacks certain plants. Squash, cucumbers, peas, roses, zinnias, lilacs, grapes are very often troubled by it, but pretty much any type of plant can get it. Most fungal diseases need water sitting on the leaves to start an infection, but powdery mildew actually likes it when it’s warm and dry with a lot of dampness in the air – a typical late summer situation in most places.

Experts who study plant diseases point out that powdery mildew doesn’t often completely kill a plant that’s already grown, however bad cases of it lessen the plant’s ability to get energy from sunlight, make it weaker, lower the quality and amount of fruit, and allow other illnesses to get in. Spotting it early and dealing with it quickly will stop a small bit of it on the surface of leaves from spreading to be all over your garden.

Recognizing Powdery Mildew

Powdery mildew usually starts on the top sides of the oldest leaves near the bottom of the plant. It shows up as little, round areas of white or grayish, powdery stuff. These spots get much bigger quickly, soon covering the whole leaf and then moving to the stems, flower buds, and if it’s really bad, even the forming fruit. Leaves that are infected will twist, turn yellow and fall off before they should. What’s different from downy mildew (which is caused by a totally different type of thing) is that powdery mildew grows only on the leaf and you can actually wipe it away with your finger. However, rubbing it off won’t destroy the fungus or stop it from coming back.

 

Organic Treatment Options

If you deal with powdery mildew as soon as you notice it, quite a few natural solutions can get it under control. A spray for all parts of the leaves, made by mixing one tablespoon of baking soda (that’s sodium bicarbonate) with one teaspoon of liquid castile soap in a gallon of water, will make the leaf’s surface more alkaline, and that stops the fungus from growing. Potassium bicarbonate, which you can buy as a natural fungicide, is better at this than sodium bicarbonate and won’t leave sodium in the soil. Neem oil sprays both kill fungus and insects, and are really helpful if you have both mildew and bugs. And, believe it or not, milk sprays (40% milk to 60% water) are also good at fighting powdery mildew; studies have confirmed this, and the proteins in the milk act as a germ killer when the sun hits them. You’ll have to apply any of these natural treatments every seven to ten days, and they’re most useful for stopping mildew starting or in its early stages, not for fixing a bad case of it.

Cultural Practices That Reduce Infection Risk

How far apart you plant things is really the biggest thing you can do to prevent powdery mildew. When plants are packed too close together, and their leaves touch, the area around the leaves gets still and humid, and that’s exactly what the fungus causing powdery mildew likes. If you give your plants the space they need (the seed packet or plant label will tell you this), and don’t cram more in just to get more to grow, air will move around the leaves and won’t let humidity build up. You can also lower the chances of infection by trimming off the leaves at the bottom and the branches inside the plant so air flows within the plant itself. Watering from above doesn’t cause powdery mildew (which is different from many other fungal problems), but if you water irregularly and the plant is then weakened, it is more likely to get the mildew.

Choosing Resistant Varieties

If you get powdery mildew in your garden every year, the best thing to do over the long run is to grow kinds of plants that were specifically developed to fight it. You’ll see “PM” (for powdery mildew) in the disease resistance information in seed catalogues for each type of plant. You can easily find powdery mildew resistant cucumbers, squash, melons, peas, zinnias, and they’re pretty much as good as the types that get the disease…but they are so much less likely to get powdery mildew! In the last twenty or thirty years, those who develop new plants have made a lot of progress with mildew resistance, and more and more resistant types are available to choose from every year.

 

Key Takeaway

White, powdery looking spots on leaves when it’s warm and damp? That’s most likely powdery mildew, the fungal disease you’ll find in home gardens more than anything else. If you catch it early, you can deal with it using things like potassium bicarbonate, neem oil, or a spray made of milk, and you’ll need to reapply those every 7 to 10 days. For a lasting solution, though, give your plants enough space, trim them to allow air to move around the leaves, and choose varieties that are labelled “PM” in the garden catalogue as being mildew-resistant. Treating it quickly will stop a small amount of mildew on the surface of the leaves from decreasing how much you get from your plants and from going to plants nearby.

Plants use light for absolutely everything they do to grow: for roots to grow, for stems to be strong, for leaves to appear, when they flower, and for fruit to form. Because plants respond slowly to a lack of light, the effects show up over days or even weeks, so you might not notice them or think they’re due to something else like not enough water, a lack of food for the plant, or bugs. However, if you do understand exactly how a plant looks when it isn’t getting enough light, you can fix the problem before the plant gets too sick to bounce back.

Experts who study plants say a shortage of light is one of the three most common reasons for houseplants to do badly (the other two are giving them too much water, and having them in a pot where the roots have nowhere left to go), and it severely decreases how much produce you get from vegetables in the garden if they aren’t in a sunny spot for as many hours as they need.

1. Leggy, Stretched Growth

When plants don’t get enough light, you’ll easily see it in their long, stretched stems and very wide spaces between the leaves – this is etiolation. Because light is scarce, the plant is using all its energy to get taller to find a brighter spot, and as a result it doesn’t develop strong stems or proper leaves. Plants like this have stems that are very thin and flimsy, so they can’t hold themselves up and will likely bend or fall over. Both plants you’re growing inside and those in the garden that are in too much shade will do this.

2. Smaller Leaves Than Normal

When plants don’t get enough light, their new leaves are quite a bit smaller than they’d normally be. The plant makes leaves smaller to save energy; a normally sized leaf needs energy from photosynthesis to grow, and the plant simply isn’t making enough of that energy in dim conditions. So, if you see that the leaves growing now are always much smaller than the ones the plant had before, not enough light is probably part of the problem.

 

3. Pale or Washed-Out Leaf Color

Leaves are healthy and full of chlorophyll, that green stuff which grabs sunlight to make food for the plant (photosynthesis). When plants don’t get enough light, they can’t make chlorophyll as quickly as they should, and their leaves look a light green, yellowish-green, or just faded when compared to the nice deep green they normally are. This all-over lightness is different from leaves turning yellow in spots or patterns, which happens if the plant isn’t getting the right food or if it’s getting too much water.

4. Loss of Variegation

If your colorful houseplants (the ones with white, cream, yellow, or pink in with the green in their leaves) start to become completely green, it’s usually because they aren’t getting enough light. The colorful parts of a variegated leaf don’t have as much chlorophyll, and chlorophyll is what plants use for photosynthesis. When a plant doesn’t get a lot of light, it makes more chlorophyll in all of its cells to make up for the lack of brightness. This basically covers over the color pattern, making the leaves a uniform green. If you put the plant in a brighter spot, new leaves should be colorful again, but leaves that have already gone all green won’t change back.

5. No Flowers or Fruit Production

Plants spend a lot of energy on flowers and then on making fruit, and they simply won’t bother with either if they aren’t getting enough light to get that energy from. So if your veggie plant has nice green leaves but doesn’t bloom or grow fruit, even if the temperature and water are good, it’s almost certainly not getting enough sun. Tomatoes, peppers, squash, beans – these all need six to eight hours of direct sunshine to make a good crop of fruit. What’s more, even a little bit of shade, getting only four or five hours of sun instead of six, can cut your harvest from these plants by 50% or even more.

6. Leaning or Growing Toward the Light Source

Plants grow towards the light, and this is called phototropism. If they don’t get enough light, this natural behavior is taken to an extreme. So a houseplant bending a lot towards a window, or an outdoor plant growing all to one side towards a space in the branches above, are both showing you they aren’t getting enough light all around. Turning houseplants a little bit each week, about a quarter of the way around, will spread the light out more equally. But, if the plant keeps bending, it’s a sign it needs to go somewhere brighter.

 

7. Slow or Stalled Growth During the Active Season

If your plants aren’t putting out new leaves, shoots or roots at the time of year they normally would (so for most kinds, that’s spring and summer), a lack of light is probably the problem, not a shortage of food, water or a temperature issue. You can really see this happen when identical plants in a brighter spot are growing as they should. Giving houseplants an extra grow light or moving plants outside to somewhere sunnier will frequently get them growing again in fourteen to twenty-one days.

8. Dropping Lower Leaves

If a plant isn’t getting enough energy from sunlight to keep all its leaves alive, it will drop some. It’s the ones doing the least work that go first, so generally the oldest leaves, those at the bottom of the plant, and the ones that are furthest from the light and hidden by the leaves above. A slow disappearance of leaves from the bottom of a plant that looks otherwise healthy, especially a houseplant that isn’t near a window, is a pretty sure sign it isn’t getting enough light for all its leaves. This will keep happening with more and more leaves falling until the plant balances the number of leaves it has with the amount of light it receives, and unfortunately this usually means the plant will end up thin and not very pretty.

Key Takeaway

When plants don’t get enough light, they all show pretty much the same problems. They stretch for the light, their leaves become small and light in color, any patterns in the leaves disappear, they won’t bloom or produce fruit, they’ll clearly bend towards the window, their growing stops, and they slowly lose leaves from the bottom up. These things happen slowly, and people often think the plant is having trouble with how much water it’s getting or with its fertilizer. But you can easily tell what’s happening: if the plant gets better in two to four weeks when you move it somewhere brighter or give it a grow light, then it was the light all along.

Lots of people grow tomatoes at home, and most people think you need a big garden in the ground to do it. However, tomatoes in pots can be just as productive as those in a garden, if you pick the right kinds of tomatoes, use containers big enough, and are a little more careful about how much water and plant food they get. Balcony owners in apartments, people with patios, and tenants who aren’t allowed to alter the landlord’s garden…all of these people can now easily grow their own tomatoes with containers.

Choosing the Right Container Size

When you are growing tomatoes in containers, choosing the right size container is the most important thing, and is what a lot of beginners get wrong. Bush tomatoes, which are called determinate, need at least a five gallon container, which is about the size of a typical bucket for paint. Tomatoes that are vining (indeterminate) get much bigger and give you tomatoes for a longer time, so they need a ten gallon container at the very least, though they do best in pots of fifteen to twenty gallons. It’s pretty simple to understand: more soil holds onto water, and is better at keeping the temperature steady, than a little pot, and bigger roots mean bigger plants with a larger crop. Fabric grow bags, cut in half whiskey barrels, and big plastic tubs are all great for tomatoes. Whatever you use for a container absolutely has to have holes in the bottom, because tomato roots will get root rot in just a few days if they sit in water.

 

The Best Varieties for Container Growing

For pots, the most trustworthy choices are “bush” or compact tomato types. They grow to a set height, usually three or four feet and then stop, all their tomatoes ripen at once, and their roots do better in a restricted pot. Patio, Tiny Tim, Tumbling Tom, Bush Early Girl, and Celebrity are all varieties that have worked well for container gardeners. Cherry and grape tomatoes (Sun Gold, Supersweet 100, Sweet Million are good examples) do excellently in containers and will give you loads of tomatoes all summer long. You can successfully grow large tomatoes like Brandywine and Cherokee Purple in containers of fifteen gallons or more, but you will need strong supports for the plants and a lot more looking after.

Soil, Watering, and Feeding

When planting tomatoes in pots, use a really good potting mix. Don’t use garden soil, as it gets too solid in containers and doesn’t let water go through. For container roots to get the drainage, air, and nutrients they require, either get a mix specifically for vegetables, or a standard potting mix with added compost and perlite. The biggest problem with looking after container tomatoes is the watering. Soil in containers gets dry much more quickly than in a garden in the ground, and even more so when it’s hot or windy. Big pots during the height of summer might even need water twice a day. To avoid both not giving them enough water and giving them too much, push your finger about two inches into the soil before you water. Also, every two weeks during the growing months, give them a balanced liquid feed to replace the goodness that washes out of the soil with all the watering.

 

Support and Positioning

Even smaller bush-type tomatoes do well with something to lean on. A little tomato cage or three stakes forming a triangle around the plant will stop the branches, which get weighed down with tomatoes, from breaking and will also hold the developing tomatoes up and away from the surface of their container – that way they won’t get harmed by dampness or bugs. Ideally, put containers in the sunniest spot you have, giving them six to eight hours of sunshine each day. South or southwest sides of buildings are best in the north. If you put containers on plant trolleys with wheels, you can easily turn them to follow the sun as it moves across a patio during the day, or get them safely inside if the weather gets very bad.

Key Takeaway

You’ll get lots of tomatoes from plants grown in pots if the pots are big enough – at least 5 gallons for bush (determinate) types, and 10 to 15 gallons for vining (indeterminate) ones. They need to be in good quality potting mix, watered regularly, and in hot weather you may have to water them twice a day. You should feed them with liquid fertilizer every couple of weeks. Bushy, smaller determinate kinds and cherry tomatoes are the ones that do best in containers. And to finish up what your tomato plants need for a good crop of tomatoes in pots, they love being in sunshine all day, a strong support to lean on, and soil that drains well.

You can get a surprisingly large harvest of potatoes from a small area in your garden. In fact, with the best way of planting and building up soil around the stems, just one raised bed can yield between fifty and a hundred pounds of potatoes during the growing season. Raised beds are great for potatoes for a couple of reasons. They have the deep, uncompacted, good draining soil potatoes need to swell properly, and it’s much simpler to ‘hill’ (slowly cover with soil as they grow to get more potatoes) in a raised bed than it is with a typical garden patch.

Selecting Seed Potatoes

You grow potatoes from seed potatoes, which are either small whole potatoes or pieces of bigger potatoes. Each piece needs to have at least two “eyes”, the little dips where the new shoots come from. It’s best to get seed potatoes from a gardening shop, because potatoes from the supermarket are often treated to stop them sprouting and might have illnesses that stay in your garden soil for ages. Yukon Gold and Red Norland are types that are ready to harvest in 70 to 90 days if you plant them early in the year. Kennebec and All Blue are mid-season potatoes needing 90 to 110 days to grow. Russet Burbank and German Butterball are late in the season, taking 110 to 130 days, but generally give you the biggest amount of potatoes and the best ones for keeping.

 

Planting and the Hilling Technique

When you plant potatoes in a raised bed, put them in a ditch or separate holes that are between four and six inches deep and about a foot apart, making sure the ‘eyes’ are pointed up. You don’t have to fill the entire bed with soil when you first plant them; six to eight inches of soil is fine, as you’ll need space for ‘hilling’ later. Once the green leaves poke out of the ground and get to six or eight inches high, heap more soil, compost or straw around the stems so that just the top couple of inches of leaves are still showing. You’ll do this hilling up process two or three more times as the plants grow, and eventually the bed will be completely full of soil. Each time you add soil, you’re giving the potato plants more space underground for new potatoes to grow, and this is how you get a bigger crop.

Growing Conditions and Care

Potatoes do best when it’s not too warm, and soil between 60 and 70 degrees Fahrenheit gives you the most potatoes. They need a pretty steady amount of water, about an inch or two each week, but they absolutely won’t thrive if the ground is soaking wet; that causes the potatoes to rot. A raised bed with soil that drains well and lots of compost and perlite will generally stop this happening. A balanced, natural fertilizer at planting time and when you ‘hill’ the potatoes for the first time will give most types of potato all the food they require. Don’t use too much nitrogen, though. Too much makes a lot of leaves, but fewer and smaller potatoes. Gardeners often make this error, as they use the same fertilizer on potatoes as they do on tomatoes and other plants that are very hungry.

Harvesting and Curing

You can pull up potatoes early in the season as “new potatoes”, which are small potatoes with delicate skins that you get by digging them up whilst the potato plant is still green and has flowers, and eat them right away. To get a good size and to store them for later, though, let the plant continue growing until all the green leaves and stems turn yellow and die. Then, two or three weeks after the leaves have died, dig up the potatoes and ‘cure’ them. This means leaving them for one or two weeks in a place that is cool, dark and has plenty of air circulation. Curing makes the skins harder and any little injuries from digging repair themselves, and if you get the conditions right (between 40 and 50 degrees Fahrenheit, 85-90% of the air being moisture, and total darkness) they’ll last four to six months.

 

Key Takeaway

Potatoes do really well in raised beds. This is because they like soil that’s deep, easily dug, and doesn’t stay soggy, and raised beds also make ‘hilling’ (building up the soil around the plants) easier which gives you a much larger crop. For the best, highest quality potatoes to store, use seed potatoes that have been certified, and put them in the ground four to six inches deep. As the plants grow, cover the stems with soil two or three times, keep the soil evenly moist but not flooded, and let the leaves and stems turn brown and die back on their own before you dig them up. You can expect a 4 by 8 foot raised bed to give you a pretty good haul of between 50 and 100 pounds of potatoes in a single year.

Lots of people new to gardening get everything in the ground in the springtime, have a big harvest in a couple of months, and then find the garden starts to go downhill as the plants stop giving vegetables; this means a lot of the time when things could be growing is wasted. Succession planting solves this boom and bust problem. It’s all about sowing the same thing repeatedly, with a set amount of time between each sowing during the whole season, so you continually have things ready to pick. Rather than thirty lettuces all at once (a lot more than most families can use before the lettuce starts to flower) with succession planting you’d get six lettuces every two weeks for many months. This provides a nice, reasonable amount of food, minimizes waste, and lets you harvest from spring until autumn.

The Basic Principle: Stagger Plantings by Time

Lots of people new to gardening get everything in the ground in the springtime, have a big harvest in a couple of months, and then find the garden starts to go downhill as the plants stop giving vegetables; this means a lot of the time when things could be growing is wasted. Succession planting solves this boom and bust problem. It’s all about sowing the same thing repeatedly, with a set amount of time between each sowing during the whole season, so you continually have things ready to pick. Rather than thirty lettuces all at once (a lot more than most families can use before the lettuce starts to flower) with succession planting you’d get six lettuces every two weeks for many months. This provides a nice, reasonable amount of food, minimizes waste, and lets you harvest from spring until autumn.

 

Replanting After Harvest: The Second Form

With the second way of succession planting, you simply follow one crop with another once the first is done. For instance, as soon as you’ve picked all the spring peas and taken out their plants in June, you can put in a crop that likes heat, such as bush beans or cucumbers, right in the same spot. And then when those are finished for the year in September, you can fill the bed with fall spinach or lettuce. This method is occasionally referred to as relay planting and it really gets the most out of all your garden area by stopping any patch of ground being unused during the time things are growing. If you think about these swaps ahead of time, preferably even before the gardening year starts, you won’t have empty beds sitting around for ages while you work out what to do with them.

Choosing the Right Crops and Intervals

Some plants are better suited for succession planting than others. Things that grow and are ready to harvest quickly are ideal; you can sow lettuce every two weeks, radishes every two weeks, arugula every two to three weeks, bush beans every three weeks, cilantro every three weeks, and carrots every three or four weeks. Plants like tomatoes, peppers, squash, and cucumbers will give you produce for months from just one planting, so they don’t need succession planting. Corn, though, only makes a ear or two on each plant, and if you sow it every three weeks you’ll have a more manageable amount to pick each time instead of a huge pile all at once.

How to Calculate the Last Succession Planting

Figuring out when to finish with succession planting is just as key as understanding when to begin. You can work out the very latest you can plant any crop by taking the number of days it takes to grow to harvest and subtracting that from when you expect the first frost in autumn. Then, because things grow more slowly in late summer and early fall, add on an extra two weeks to be safe. So if you have a lettuce which is ready in 45 days and your first frost is October 15th, you could plant it up to around mid-August (October 15th, minus 45 days, minus that 14 day buffer gives you roughly August 17th). If you write down the dates of your frosts, along with how long each of your succession crops needs to mature, you’ll be able to plan all your planting for the whole year before you plant your first seed.

 

Key Takeaway

Instead of getting all of something at once then nothing at all, succession planting gets rid of that ‘boom and bust’ way of harvesting. You do this by planting the very same thing every two or three weeks all during the growing season. Things that grow quickly, such as lettuce, radishes, beans, cilantro, are perfect for this. If you take out a crop as soon as it’s done and put something else in its place (this is also called relay planting), you get the most from each part of your garden. And to be sure all of your successions are ready to pick before it gets too cold, you’ll work out the last date you can plant, based on when the first frost is expected and how long the crop needs to grow.

The law says that any fertilizer you buy in the US, whether it’s in a bag, box or bottle, must have three numbers on the label, set apart by dashes. You’ll see things like 10-10-10, 5-10-5, or 24-0-4. These three numbers are called the NPK ratio and show how much by weight of the three main nutrients plants use a lot of – nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), potassium (K) – are in the fertilizer. Lots of home gardeners are still confused by these numbers even though they are on all fertilizer, and they usually pick a fertilizer because of the brand or how cheap it is, instead of choosing one with a nutrient mix that does what their soil specifically needs.

If you know what each number means and what each nutrient does for a plant, choosing fertilizer stops being a random thing. You can then make a much more accurate decision, get much better growth, and avoid wasting money, fertilizer and causing environmental issues by using a product your garden doesn’t even need.

The First Number: Nitrogen (N) — Fuels Leaf and Stem Growth

The initial number in a fertilizer’s NPK ratio tells you how much nitrogen is in it. Nitrogen is the nutrient that does the most for strong, green growth of the part of the plant you see – the leaves, stems and the plant’s energy overall. For example, a 10-10-10 fertilizer is 10% nitrogen when weighed. A 24-0-4 fertilizer has 24% nitrogen, so a lot more of it. Plants grown for their leaves, like lettuce, spinach, kale, and grass, need a lot of nitrogen. But if you give too much nitrogen to plants that are meant to produce fruit and flowers, such as tomatoes and peppers, they will grow loads of leaves but not many blooms or fruit. This is something people who have gardens at home do wrong quite often.

The Second Number: Phosphorus (P) — Supports Roots and Flowers

That middle number on a fertilizer package tells you how much phosphorus is in it. Phosphorus is what plants need for roots to grow, to flower, for fruit to develop on the plant, and to make seeds. In fact, fertilizers with a really big second number (like 5-10-5 or 10-30-10) are sold as ‘bloom boosters’ or ‘starter fertilizers’ because they have lots of the nutrient plants need when roots are first becoming established and when they are changing from flowers into fruit. Soil experts warn though, that phosphorus is not usually what is lacking in most home gardens – at least not nearly as much as fertilizer companies make it seem! A lot of garden soil has enough phosphorus already, and if you add extra when it isn’t required, it can be bad for the environment. Too much phosphorus is a major reason for the growth of algae in lakes, rivers and streams that get water from gardens and farms.

 

The Third Number: Potassium (K) — Strengthens Overall Plant Health

The third number on the label tells you about potassium, and potassium does a lot for a plant’s wellbeing. It controls how much water the plant takes in, makes the walls of its cells stronger, helps it fight off illness, and even makes produce taste better and last longer when you keep it. If a plant isn’t getting enough potassium, you’ll likely see older leaves get brown or look burnt around the edges. Potassium is especially important to root vegetables like potatoes, carrots, beets, and to anything you get fruit from, such as tomatoes or peppers, while they are growing and producing fruit.

How to Choose the Right NPK Ratio

Instead of just going with what’s generally suggested, the best way to choose fertilizer is to look at what your soil actually needs. If your soil test says you have enough phosphorus and potassium, but not much nitrogen, you’ll want a fertilizer with a lot of nitrogen (blood meal 12-0-0 or ammonium sulfate 21-0-0 are options) and not a ‘all in one’ one that will give you phosphorus and potassium when you don’t require them. When your soil is lacking in all three main nutrients, a fertilizer with equal amounts of each, like 10-10-10, or a compost based fertilizer which gives a reasonable amount of all three, is a good choice. If you haven’t had your soil tested, a standard organic fertilizer with a reasonably balanced NPK ratio – something like 4-4-4 or 5-5-5 – is a pretty safe bet and won’t lead to an overload of any one nutrient.

 

Key Takeaway

Those three NPK numbers you find on all fertilizer packaging tell you what percentage of the fertilizer is nitrogen (which helps leaves grow), phosphorus (for good roots and lots of blooms), and potassium (for the plant to be strong and resist illness). You’ll get much better results by using a fertilizer with a ratio of these three things that fits what your particular plant needs, and what your soil already has in the way of nutrients; and a soil test is the best way to find out what your soil has. Lots of nitrogen is good for leafy plants, but it can mean you get fewer fruits or vegetables. Phosphorus is often used in home gardens more than necessary, so only add it if a soil test says you’re actually short on it. If you don’t know anything about your soil, a fertilizer that’s fairly equal in nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium and is organic is the most reliable option.

When you start a garden in a newly built place, on a lot that’s just been levelled, or on ground that’s had grass for ages, you’ll usually find the soil is hard, lacks goodness, and doesn’t have much life in it. The best bit of soil – the dark top layer full of rotted stuff where most roots grow and most soil creatures live might have been taken away when the building work happened, covered by poorer soil from underneath, or spoiled by many years of using chemicals on the lawn. You absolutely can turn this poor starting point into good, productive soil, but you need to do things in a sensible order and accept it will take time.

Soil experts say making soil healthy is really about making a good home for all the life in the soil. Bacteria, fungi, worms, and loads of other things are the ones who break down organic matter into food plants can use, build the soil’s form and hold, and generally keep the complicated system going that allows plants to grow well. As a gardener, your main role is to give food to these soil creatures, and they do the actual work of improving the soil.

Step 1: Assess What Exists

It’s a good idea to find out what your soil is like before you start changing things. You don’t want to waste time or money. You can get a proper soil test from your county extension office for between ten and twenty-five dollars and it will tell you the pH, how many nutrients are in the soil, the amount of organic material, and the soil’s texture. All of these details are important for deciding what to add to the soil and how much. For a quick look at texture, you can do a jar test – shake some soil with water and look at the layers of sand, silt and clay as they settle. As for compaction, try to push a screwdriver or metal rod into the soil. If you can’t get it in more than six inches because of resistance, the soil is compacted and needs to be loosened with a machine before you add anything to it.

 

Step 2: Break Up Compaction

When the ground gets packed down, roots have trouble growing, water can’t soak in easily, and importantly, the living things in the soil don’t get the air they need to live and work. For a small garden, you can really improve things quickly by double digging, which is to say, using a garden fork to loosen the soil to between one and two feet deep. For bigger spaces, a broadfork or a mechanical tiller (but just for that first loosening, not all the time!) will break up the hard layers. After you’ve dealt with the packed soil, you really want to make sure it doesn’t get that way again. To do this, set up paths and growing areas that you always use, and never walk on the soil where your plants are growing, to keep it loose, full of air, and productive.

Step 3: Add Massive Amounts of Organic Matter

If your soil is bad to begin with, adding organic matter is the best thing you can do to fix it. Compost, well-rotted manure, shredded leaves and composted wood chips are all organic matter and they do a lot of good for the life in the soil, they help sandy soil hold water, improve how water goes through heavy clay, and slowly give plants all the nourishment they require. If the soil is really, really poor, digging six to four inches of ready to use compost into the first eight to twelve inches of soil will make a really obvious, quick difference. Then, each year after that, adding an inch or two of compost will keep the organic matter going up and improving. Good productive garden soil will have five to eight percent organic matter when weighed, and to go from just one or two percent to that takes about three to five years of regularly adding organic material.

Step 4: Plant Cover Crops Between Seasons

Instead of being grown to be collected, cover crops are plants for improving the soil. They quickly improve the soil by making organic material right where it is, by giving food to the life in the soil through what their roots give off, and by stopping the soil from washing or blowing away when you aren’t using it for your main crops. Winter rye, crimson clover, buckwheat, field peas are some of the best cover crops for a garden at home. If you grow these during autumn and winter, then chop them down and dig them into the soil in the springtime, you will add a lot of organic material and soil life, something you just can’t get from something you buy. Cover cropping is especially helpful for the first two or three years of improving your soil as the basis of soil life is being created.

 

The Realistic Timeline

If you’re starting with really bad soil and adding a lot of compost, you’ll likely see plants that are doing much better and giving you a bigger harvest in that first year compared to if you hadn’t added anything. By the end of the second or third year you will probably start to see the soil itself is getting better: it will begin to clump together in chunks, you’ll see earthworms around, and it will feel soft and full of life. But to get soil that’s truly good, full of life, and will give you a lovely garden, needs three to five years of regularly adding things like compost, planting cover crops and generally looking after it. It can seem like a long wait, but each year what you do builds on what you did the year before and the improvements get faster and faster as time goes on.

Key Takeaway

To create really good garden soil when you’re beginning with nothing, you first need a soil test to see what you have to work with. Then you have to physically break up any hard layers in the soil. What follows is a lot of compost at the beginning, so you’re digging in a four to six inch layer into the top twelve inches of soil. Each year after that, you should add a one to two inch layer of compost to the top. Also, when you’re not actively growing things, use cover crops. You’ll see a difference in the first year, but the soil will be truly changed for the better after three to five years. The main thing that makes this happen is keeping the life in the soil happy by consistently adding things that used to be alive. These living things are what build the soil and move nutrients around, and that is what allows you to have a successful garden.

If you’re gardening at home, being clear on which jobs need doing and when is probably the best way to get yourself organised. In areas with normal seasonal changes (USDA zones 4 to 8), the year for growing things has a pattern: preparing the soil, putting plants in, looking after them, collecting what you’ve grown, and letting the ground recover. But what exactly you do and the best time to do it will change as each month goes by. A good monthly plan gets rid of having to guess and rush around at the last minute, which causes you to miss chances to plant, forget to do important maintenance, and ultimately get a lower yield.

This guide breaks down the year month by month for gardeners in temperate climates. However, you’ll need to adapt the actual dates to your area, because the first and last frosts of the year can happen weeks apart, even in the same zone, depending on how high up you are, how close you are to water, and small differences in climate.

January and February: Plan, Order, Prepare

Winter, when the garden is resting, is the perfect time to go over what you wrote about last year’s garden. You can plan how your flowerbeds will look, get seeds from catalogues and check what tools and supplies you have. When it comes to seed packets, sort them by the month you intend to plant. By the end of February, things that are slow to start growing like onions, leeks and celery can be begun inside with grow lights. These in particular are inside for a really long time – a typical ten to twelve weeks before they are planted in the ground.

March: Indoor Seed Starting Begins in Earnest

For many gardeners in zones 5 to 7, March is when you really begin starting seeds inside. You’ll want to get tomatoes, peppers, eggplants going indoors six to eight weeks before the last frost of spring is likely to happen. Broccoli, cabbage, and kale are good to begin from seed inside at the same time, and then you’d put them in the garden in late April or early May. Outside, you can take the covers off your garden beds and let the sun warm things up. And when the soil isn’t frozen, and a soil thermometer says it’s over 40°F, you can plant peas, spinach, lettuce, radishes, and other things that can handle the cold, directly in the ground.

 

April: The Transition Month

April is when you’re doing the most with plants that like cooler weather. You can keep sowing lettuce, spinach, radishes, carrots… in fact, you can plant some every fortnight. Now is the time to get onion sets and young plants in the soil and put the potatoes in. About two weeks before the final frost is predicted, you need to start to toughen up seedlings you’ve grown inside. This means slowly getting them used to being outside, for a little longer each day. Also, your garden beds should get a yearly helping of compost, and you ought to check and fix any problems with your watering system before you actually need it.

May: Warm-Season Planting

When you’re sure there won’t be any more frost, you can put tomato, pepper, eggplant, squash and cucumber plants in the garden. Once the soil gets to between 60 and 65 degrees, you can plant bush beans, corn, and basil right into the ground. Once the soil is nice and warm, put a layer of mulch around those plants you’ve transplanted. It’s best to put up plant supports like cages, stakes, or trellises at the same time as planting; you don’t want to mess with their roots later. And now’s when to start planting short-growing things like lettuce and radishes at intervals, so you can keep picking them all summer.

June and July: Maintain, Harvest, Replant

When you’re sure there won’t be any more frost, you can put tomato, pepper, eggplant, squash and cucumber plants in the garden. Once the soil gets to between 60 and 65 degrees, you can plant bush beans, corn, and basil right into the ground. Once the soil is nice and warm, put a layer of mulch around those plants you’ve transplanted. It’s best to put up plant supports like cages, stakes, or trellises at the same time as planting; you don’t want to mess with their roots later. And now’s when to start planting short-growing things like lettuce and radishes at intervals, so you can keep picking them all summer.

August: The Second Planting Season

As we’ve covered in another article in this set, August is really the make-or-break month for your fall garden. Plant lettuce, spinach, kale, radishes, turnips, beets, carrots, peas, cilantro directly in the ground to get a fall harvest. Also, put out broccoli, cabbage, and cauliflower that you started from seed in July. Now is the time to order garlic and bulbs for flowers in the spring that you’ll plant in the fall. Don’t stop picking your summer vegetables; the more you harvest, the more they’ll keep producing. And, collect seeds from the plants that have done the best. Finally, trim your herbs to get a lot of new growth to use in the fall.

 

September and October: Harvest, Protect, Prepare

The fall harvest is at its best right now, with things like root vegetables, winter squash, and tomatoes that are still growing before the first frost. Once a light frost has killed off plants that are easily damaged, get rid of the plants that are finished and add any healthy parts to your compost pile. About a month or six weeks before the ground gets frozen, plant garlic bulbs. For garden beds that are now empty, either put down a thick layer of winter mulch or plant a cover crop. If you have plants that can withstand some cold and are still giving you food, you can use row covers or cold frames to help them last longer. Also, move potted plants that will be harmed by frost inside.

November and December: Rest, Reflect, Plan

As the ground gets to freezing, most gardening outside stops. However, if the winter isn’t too harsh, you can sometimes still get lettuce, spinach, kale from cold frames or low tunnels. You need to clean your tools, sharpen them, and put them away. And, to stop them from breaking with the cold, you should drain your watering systems. Around December, seed catalogues will start to be delivered, which is when you begin planning for the next year’s garden. Also while you still remember everything, you ought to add the last details of the season to your garden journal. This time for resting and thinking is just as important for how well your garden does in the long run as all the months of actually growing things.

Key Takeaway

Instead of just dealing with things as they come up in the garden, a calendar that breaks the year down month by month will get you onto a more organized and fruitful gardening routine. The year itself has a flow to it: January and February are for planning and ordering things you need, March and April are when you begin to start seeds and get cold-weather plants into the ground. After the last chance of frost has passed in May, you can plant your plants that like warmth, and from June to August you’ll be looking after everything and planting more of things as you go. August through October is for gathering your harvest and putting in plants for the fall, and then November and December are for a bit of a break to think about what you’ve done. You can easily fit this general pattern to your own garden by changing the dates to fit when your frosts usually happen and what your local conditions are.