For people who want to grow more food with less work. 🌱 This is my weekly newsletter loved by 38,000+ subscribers—here's what one of them had to say: "These are not the regular run-of-the-mill garden-based emails. You actually touch on more unusual tidbits that encourage me to keep growing and learning."
the sideways planting trick for tomatoes 🍅
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Are you planting tomatoes in the ground yet? If so, I'm jealous. 😊 We're far from transplant weather here in Bend, at least for warm-weather crops like tomatoes... but I can only dream and count down the days to Memorial Day (when it's considered "safe" to put tomatoes outside with frost protection—I use these tomato teepees every year). In other parts of the country where it's actually spring, you may have already repotted your tomato seedling once, possibly even twice... and soon you'll be moving it to the garden after a period of hardening off. If you followed all my tomato growing tips and your seedling has grown into a 3-foot-tall beauty, you may be wondering how to get that thing in the ground when the usual advice is to bury tomato stems as deeply as possible. Do you need to dig a 2-foot-deep hole? (Yikes, no thanks.) The answer, my friend, is planting your tomato sideways. This is a little trick that saves your back from digging AND gives you a bigger, healthier tomato plant, thanks to a clever way of planting in a trench so that tons of adventitious roots start growing once your plant hits the ground. (It's also a great way of "saving" an extremely leggy tomato plant you might buy from a garden center, since those places aren't exactly known for their optimal growing conditions. Refer back to yesterday's email about leggy seedlings and what you can do about them.) So if you're not keen on digging huge holes, see how I plant my tomatoes sideways. This week I'm going all in on spring cleaning my garden. We've already started by weed whacking in between the raised beds; next I'll be sowing a few pounds of miniclover and Johnny-jump-up seeds (for a pretty ground cover). The winter rye that I tried as a cover crop last fall (and grew really well) will get cut back (though I'm leaving the Austrian winter pea cover crops for a few more weeks because my kids love picking and eating pea shoots—they are seriously so delish). Then, I'm starting on my next garden project: planting a (mostly perennial) edible flower bed. I've grown edible flowers throughout my vegetable garden in years past, including nasturtiums, pinks (dianthus), calendula, and borage, but this year I want a bed that's solely dedicated to flowers. About three-quarters of the bed will be perennial (I've already ordered a few varieties of bee balm, echinacea, and hollyhocks, and will be moving my pinks from other beds to this new one) and the rest of the bed will go to annual flowers that reseed easily. Are you surprised to hear that you can eat hollyhocks? The whole plant, even: roots, leaves, and flowers. The gorgeous garden flower is related to common mallow, which is a weed you can eat. Snapdragons are also edible, and while they aren't my favorite flower flavor-wise, I love how they look in the garden and also on a plate. I only have a 4x8 space to work with, so we'll see what I narrow it down to. 😉 P.S. No need to dig a 2-foot-deep hole to get your tomato in there. Plant it sideways and help it grow an even bigger root system! P.P.S. Don't forget to use your FastGrowingTrees discount by May 30. If you're looking for a new tree, shrub, or hedge for your yard, new customers can use code GARDENBETTY10 for 10% off their purchase of $75+ 🙌 |
Garden Betty
Gardening made easy, life made simpler.
For people who want to grow more food with less work. 🌱 This is my weekly newsletter loved by 38,000+ subscribers—here's what one of them had to say: "These are not the regular run-of-the-mill garden-based emails. You actually touch on more unusual tidbits that encourage me to keep growing and learning."