Garden advice, tips & tricks for the home gardener

Fireblight primarily attacks apple and pear trees and is easily recognizable. The fruit tree will look as though it has been burned with fire. Blackened twigs and branches with dry, brown curled up leaves.
Fireblight will spread throughout the tree and kill it if the disease is not controlled. Uncontrolled Fireblight will spread to nearby fruit trees also.
To treat a fruit tree that has Fireblight, prune away all affected limbs and branches. Make the cut 8 inches below each blackened branch.
It’s important to disinfect the pruning shears between each cut, if you don’t the shears will spread the Fireblight with each cut. Make a disinfecting solution of 1 part bleach and nine parts water, dip the pruning shears into the disinfecting solution between each cut.
Clean up all debris after pruning and discard the Fireblighted branches away from all other trees.

The last thing you want is for any of your hard garden labor to be lost, you want to enjoy the fruits of your labor by feasting on those fresh garden vegetables. But if your garden potatoes turn green, your labor was in vain. Eating garden potatoes with green skins can cause sickness, even if the potatoes don’t make you sick, the bitter flavor will stop you from eating them.
Examine your garden potatoes while they are still in the soil. If you see any potatoes poking through the soil, the portion exposed to the light will turn green.
Covering your garden potatoes with a thick layer of soil or mulch as soon as the potato vines are about a foot high will protect your potatoes from light exposure and green skin.

Have your vine crops began to take over the garden and are now creeping out into your lawn? This is a situation that happens to the best of gardeners, we underestimate the amount of space that our watermelon vines, cantaloupe vines, cucumber vines, etc., need when they are mature. Sometimes even when we allow enough space for our vine crops, they amaze us by growing beyond our expectation.
It’s an easy fix to keep those vine crops from taking over, just pinch off the fuzzy growing tips. Not only will this tips keep your vine crops within their boundaries, it will direct the garden plant’s energy into ripening the fruit instead of producing more vines for you to have to deal with.

Many garden vegetables produce flowers prior to producing vegetables, like the tomato plant and cucumber plant, but few produce flowers as beautiful as the okra plant.
The large yellow flower on the okra plant resembles a large lily bloom, but the showy bloom will only last one day. After of a day of being fully opened, the yellow okra flower will have either been pollinated and form a new okra pod at the base of the wilt bloom, or the un-pollinated okra bloom will just wilt and drop off the okra plant.
Okra will be in bloom and okra production from mid-summer right up until frost, planting okra near the forefront of your garden where it’s most visible will not only give you vegetables, but garden beauty as well.
Okra cooking tip: You can prevent the okra from becoming slimy while cooking if you leave the stem on the okra pod. The stem (cap) is edible.

For the absolute best flavor of a ripe garden tomatoes, pick them only on a as needed basis. The tomato flavor peaks within 3 minutes of being picked. If your hankering for a ‘mator sammy’, it’s best to have the sliced bread already spread with mayonnaise and your drink poured before you run out to the garden and pick the tomato for the sandwich!
If you must harvest tomatoes and store them prior to their use, don’t place them in the refrigerator, store the tomatoes on the counter or other similar room temperature location.
When tomatoes are stored in the refrigerator, they quickly lose flavor, texture and aroma.

Tomato plants are self-pollinating and transfer pollen through plant movement, usually do quite nicely without human intervention. However, in the middle of summer when the temperatures are hot and the wind is calm for several days in a row, your garden tomato plants will fare better with a little help from you.
To help your tomato plants pollinate, just gently shake them to ensure pollen transfer between the tomato plants.
Normal tomato harvesting will usually provide enough plant movement, but when the weather is hot, dry and the air calm, tomato production slows down and you may not be harvesting tomatoes daily, so go give your tomato plants a good shaking to help their self-pollination process along.

After your strawberry plants have finished producing and the last strawberry has been harvested, don’t neglect your strawberry beds.
Keep the strawberry beds cleaned and well maintained for an improved harvest next season. Clean, well maintained strawberry beds discourage insects and disease, so your strawberry plants will be healthier and more vigorous growing.
Remove all strawberry plant runners, unless you are forming new plants with them, and remove all unhealthy looking crowns from the strawberry plants. Add a fresh layer of straw or whatever type of mulch you are using to continue retaining moisture, even when the strawberry plants are not producing fruit, they are still growing and need moisture.

When your garden plants or flower plants are spent (done bearing/blooming) remove them from the soil and re-plant something else in their places. Leaving them in the garden soil is using up precious soil nutrients and as the garden plants begin to die, they are an open invitation for pests.
Pull up the spent garden plants, roots and all, shake off the garden soil from the roots and add the spent plants to your compost pile. Re-plant some late season vegetables like cabbage or turnips in the vegetable garden, or try some fall blooming flowers like Chrysanthemums in your flower garden.
Some flower seeds like Hollyhocks need to be planted in late summer for next year’s production, and spring flowering bulbs need to be planted in the fall, so you might want to consider removing the spent flowers, amending the soil and re-planting something for next year in their places.

Squirrels are fun to watch when they are playing in your backyard, but can become a pest when they won’t stay out of your bird feeders. Squirrels, birds, bird feeders and you can all co-exist peaceably, if you’ll use fishing line to suspend your bird feeders from tree branches or poles.
30 pound test fishing line is strong enough to hold up a normal sized bird feeder filled with bird seed, but so small that a squirrel can’t climb on it or slide down it to reach the bird seeds. The 30 pound test fishing line is virtually invisible, so it will add an element of beauty to your garden, making your bird feeder appear to be floating in thin air.
If you suspend a bird feeder with fishing line from a tree branch, pad the tree branch to keep the fishing line from cutting into the branch over time. A small piece of cut garden hose with the fishing line run through it on the branch will offer unobtrusive protection to the tree branch.

I’ve noticed a few Japanese Beetles buzzing around my garden, even found a couple in the throes of passion on my bean vine. Ugh. So it’s the time of year for the Japanese Beetle invasion.
Don’t invite the Japanese Beetles over to your garden for lunch by setting out Japanese beetle traps. The beetle traps attract the Japanese Beetles into the area, the concept is to attract and capture the Japanese Beetles with the traps. While the concept of trapping beetles does work to some extent, many Japanese Beetles are attracted by the scent of the beetle traps, but never go into the beetle traps. Instead they munch on your garden offerings and have a bountiful lunch.
Keep a close eye on your garden and hand pick the Japanese Beetles off whatever they are feasting on and dispose of the critters.
If you have more than you can hand pick and dispose of, it’s time to do chemical warfare with them. Sevin dust or Sevin spray will do the trick to get rid of the Japanese Beetles.