Garden Rescue 9-1-1
Choosing the right fertilizer
Does growing organic mean skipping fertilizers altogether? Not in my garden- you just gotta choose the right one.
While it may be tempting to buy the jug featuring the cool skull and crossbones on it, um… yikes. Reach for the fish fertilizer instead.
Just drop by your hardware or gardening shop and look for a jug of the liquid stuff. All you gotta do is mix a bit into your water jug and water your plants like you always do. You can pay a bit extra to get the kind that doesn’t stink, but I like the stinky stuff ’cause it brings the cats a-runnin’, so save your pennies.
You’ll see a series of three numbers on the label. Those numbers represent the amount of nutrients in the fertilizer.
Here’s what you really need to know: the first number is for developing leafy greens, the second number is for developing fruit and flowers, the third number is for developing roots. So if you’re looking for a fertilizer for your root crops, look for one that has a high third number. For lettuce, you want a high first number. For tomatoes, the first and second numbers are the most important, and so on.
Now here’s the crazy thing: all save-the-world-soapboxing aside, organic fertilizers actually work better.
Blossom End Rot
Every so often your parents are right. They show you up, prove you wrong and leave you remembering the good old days when you really needed their guidance. Like, remember that undercut you really wanted in 1992, and dad put his foot down and said no? Well, thanks dad, I owe you one.
This week, mom proved once again that your parents can still be right.
After picking a few ripe tomatoes for a bococcini salad the other night, I came back in the house and cried bloody murder over my blighted-ass tomatoes. I showed her the damage.
“That’s not blight,” she said.
Long pause.
“What?”
“No, that’s not blight. That’s blossom end rot.”
Blossom end rot, as it turns out, is another little problem you’ll run into with your tomatoes this time of year. It looks like a gross black spot on the bottom of your tomato (not the top). This black spot continues to grow on the fruit as the plant develops and becomes thick and leathery in texture.
Blossom end rot is usually caused by infrequent watering. The true cause of the problem › Continue reading
Martha’s Tomato Tart
Bitter, gritty and horrible when fresh, green tomatoes are very sweet when slowly cooked in the oven. This recipe is like a pizza, but without the surly delivery guy or greasy box to hide your shame.
Admittedly, this is a fussy Martha frou-frou recipe and I love-to-hate that bitch. But it’s worth making once a year if you have some time and want to get fancy.
This was featured in the July 2005 edition of Martha Stewart Living- great way to use green tomatoes without frying them.
I’ve got tonnes of flowers but no tomatoes, what the hell?
It’s all about the birds and the bees.
Here’s how it works (don’t laugh): fruit requires pollination to actually produce. You’ve grown a great looking plant, lots of beautiful flowers, and now you’re waiting for the fruit to show. For this to happen, the pollen from your male flowers needs to make it over to the female flowers, if you know what I’m saying.
Normally, bees go from flower to flower throughout your yard collecting pollen to make honey back at the hive. Inevitably, they transfer a bit from one flower to another, thereby pollinating and allowing the fruit to develop. I like to think of bees as the original artificial insemination scientist of nature, but really they’re just pimps looking for some sugar.
Sometimes, this doesn’t always happen though. Why?
My tomatoes are cracking on the bottom, what the hell?
This happened to me this year and I didn’t know what it was. I consulted my mom, and she consulted the Reader’s Digest garden tome for me. We discovered it’s due to infrequent watering. Ooops!
If you see this happening, go water your tomatoes. To prevent, keep watering every 2 days if they are in buckets. They will taste just the same as a regular tomato, but they look kinda freaky- like they’re missing a couple of chromosomes. Butter luck next time, kid.
Cracked Pot Pix
