Get your garden summer-ready with easy-to-follow tips for beginner gardeners. This section breaks down the basics for a range of sun-loving veggies.
You might be wondering if a tomato dubbed “dwarf” is really worth staking. If the vines only get a few feet tall, do you really need to worry about trellising it like you’d trellis a full-size indeterminate tomato? Most dwarf tomatoes will need staking before they reach maturity and start yielding full-size fruit. A tomato…
Introduction: What are blackfly? Blackfly is a general classification for over 2,000 different species of flies in the family Simuliidae (which includes aphids, midges, mosquitos, and lakefly). The only trait they share is that they are all black or dark grey. What most gardeners are referring to when they talk about blackfly on broad beans…
Tomatoes grown in cultivation need fertilizers, or at the very least, vastly improved soil. In this article, I’ll break down NPK, share some tomato growing hacks, and explore how to choose the right fertilizer for the right stage, and the best NPK ratio for tomatoes. What is NPK? NPK is a common fertilizer nutrient guide…
Broad beans are frost hardy annual vegetables that can be planted in autumn, winter or spring, and will germinate outdoors at temperatures as low as 2oC (36oF). Once germinated they will, in theory, tolerate anything down to -10oC (14oF). Also known as fava beans, these deliciously earthy pulses are incredibly easy to grow, but also…
Cross-pollinating cucumbers, to cut a long story short, won’t actually harm your crop, but it will change it, and if you intend to save seeds you need to take some serious precautions to make sure you know exactly what you’re growing next year. In some cases, cross-pollination is actually pretty essential for cucumbers to crop…
To prune or not to prune? This is the question many gardeners ask themselves when it comes to cherry tomatoes. Some don’t touch them at all, others prune them diligently, and there’s no right or wrong way to do it. Cherry tomatoes are a different kind of beast – and they really do grow into beasts – so I personally prefer pruning just to keep them under control.