Your Backyard Garden

Q. Can tomatoes grow in shade?

A. Not very well; they like a bright spot in your garden.  Also, they don’t mind fairly heavy soil.

Q. I want to grow an herb garden. What’s the best location?

A. Generally where nothing else likes to grow. Herbs as a rule like sandy or gravelly soil, since most of them are in the same family as many a weed.

Q. Does an herb garden have to be formal?

A. Of course not; where did you ever get that idea? Plant herbs for convenience: put some of the more fragrant ones close to the patio and the ones you use for cooking near the house while dill, the gangly one, is usually hidden. You’ve probably seen the pictures of a wagon wheel buried in the ground and different herbs planted between the spokes. Let your imagination be your guide.

Q. Which are the best herbs to plant for the average home?

A. There is no such place as an average home; each home is special. Here’s a list of herbs you might get the most out of:  chives, parsley, dill, thyme, sage, mint, fennel, chervil, borage, basil, anise, rosemary, tarragon, sweet marjoram, savory, and coriander. That ought to keep your home, kitchen, and life spiced up.

Q. Which herbs do you use for preparing wildfowl?

A. Hunters use dirty hands, but you can try marjoram and sage.

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Q. Why do melons rot on the ground side or take so long to ripen?

A. Heat speeds up the ripening. Place young melons on a brick while they’re still attached to the vine and you’ll speed up their ripening.

Q. How come melon seed doesn’t sprout as well as other seed?

A. Because melon seeds have a large case with a soft center, they’re more often injured or crushed in handling or shipping than a smaller, uniformly harder seed would be. Cantaloupe, pumpkin, watermelon, cucumber, and squash seeds all have this problem. To avoid disappointment, why don’t you soak your seed to speed germination and let it sprout before you plant? Soak the seed in a cup of lukewarm tea for two hours, then soak a big old bath towel in weak tea and wring out well. Now place a row of seed in the middle of the towel and fold the towel over the seed. Place the whole shebang in a plastic garbage bag and keep it at 70 degrees for six days. Then remove the seed and plant the sprouted seed in the garden.

Q. Can mustard greens be grown indoors?

A. They sure can. Put them in large pots on a sunny windowsill, and they’re usually ready to eat in five to six weeks after planting—that’s the same length of time as grown outside. Remember, you can plant mustard greens early and then again in August to September, as they like cool weather. For those of you who’ve never eaten, greens, you don’t know what you’re missing. Their taste is a great addition to any salad bowl.

Q. I heard that you don’t have to plant peas in soil but can plant them in straw. ls that true? 

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Q. How do you keep the damn ‘coons, mice, birds, squirrels, or whatever from digging up your beans?

A. The same way my Grandma Putt cured me from biting my fingernails. She always cleaned out gourds by drilling a hole in them with her potato peeler and then saved the seeds for next year. She also saved the juice and flesh, added water to them, and kept the mixture in a jar. She would put some of this juice on my nails, and the rest she poured on corn and other big seeds just as she planted them. It’s the bitterest juice you ever tasted, and I reckon the varmints must hate it as much as I did.

Q. When do you thin beans?

A. Never; I plant pole beans two feet apart and bush beans nine inches apart. The seeds are large enough to plant separately.

Q. Why do my lima beans get so leggy and not have many beans?

A. You must pick the beans just as quickly as they mature. They want a sunny, warm location, with good drainage; very little food is necessary. Beans and peas are the best investment a gardener can make, as they give the biggest return for space and time invested.

Q. I think I have every seed catalog offered, and the more I look at them the more confused I become. Each company says their seeds are new and improved. Which are and which aren’t, and which bean would you recommend in each category?

A. I wish to give the seed growers a pat on the back because they’re all working hard to develop varieties that will resist bugs and diseases and need less water, food, and care—all for our benefit. To answer the first part of your question, they’re all improved. In my opinion, Top-Crop snapbean is a great bush bean, and you just can’t seem to beat Kentucky Wonder as a reliable, tasty, heavy producing pole bean. And I always recommend Clark’s Green-seeded Bush lima bean.

Q. Why don’t my beets ever get any bigger than a Ping-Fong ball? 

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Q. How do you plant on the side of a hill?

A. Very carefully, or your garden will wash away. We call it contour planting: the rows follow the curve around the hill, not up and down the slope. Mountain gardens should have about a 5-degree slope to the southeast.

Q. lf you have a good spot to grow a garden, but it’s very small and you want flowers as well as vegetables and berries, can you plant them all together without altering the flavor of food or fragrance of flowers?

A. Absolutely; I never give it a thought. I use salad greens, spinach, mustard, lettuce, and red cabbage as borders in front of evergreens while growing pole beans up my downspouts near my roses, and I mix carrots and parsnips with marigolds as sidewalk borders.

Q. Do strawberries, raspberries, and blueberries need a different soil and location from my regular garden? Can they really be grown with each other?

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Q. Our cucumbers get all eaten up, and I am too old to dust every week. Any green thumb magic?

A. There is no magic, lotion, motion or potion in gardening, but interplanting sure resembles it. Plant a few radishes in each cucumber mound.

Q. I have heard that you can pinch tomatoes to make them climb, instead of spread out. Where do you pinch?

A. If you’re going to train your tomatoes to grow up a stake, you should pinch out the side shoots that grow out of the crook of the main side stems.

Q. What variety of cucumber won’t give you gas?

A. If you like cucumbers, but they don’t like you, try the ones they call lemon cucumbers.

Q. Where is the best place to grow vegetables?

A. Any place that gets six to eight hours of sun a day and where you can get an eight- to ten-inch depth of soil together—wooden boxes, wastepaper baskets, tubs, cement blocks, wooden frames, on a roof, driveway, or walk.

Q. What kind of dirt do you need for a good garden?

A. To begin with, the word is soil, not dirt. Soil is a productive composition of decayed materials such as leaves, grass clippings, sawdust, weeds, and fallen trees, while dirt is a collection of filth. Any well-drained soil will do nicely. While water should not stand in pockets on top neither should the soil be pure sand, which will not hold any moisture at all.

Q. I live in a new subdivision where heavy clay was used as backfill, and I just can’t get a good garden started. What will really break up the clay?

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Don’t buy for the future. When applying a chemical control, use it only at the strength described. You see? We don’t treat the plant world any differently from the way we would treat ourselves—and we’d be foolish to self-prescribe-an overdose.

After I’ve identified an insect infestation on a lawn, I follow these steps:

1. I remove the thatch in the infected area and for the same distance beyond.

2. I aerate the area with golf shoes and a pointed stick or other sharp object.

3. I water lightly.

4. I shampoo the area.

5. I apply the chemical control prescribed exactly as recommended.

6. I cover the treated area with a weighted down thin mesh cloth, like cheesecloth, to discourage pets and birds from entering the area.

7. I keep adults and children from the area. . I follow these steps to protect the plant area—it’s weak and ill and needs just like any other patient—and to protect any visitors that wander by.

Because I haven’t come out against hard pesticides, I’ll probably get many letters and cards from would-be conservationists and self-styled do-gooders who don’t practice what they preach but live by the adage, “Do as I say, not as I do.”

I have received so many preprinted cards berating the hard pesticides, some signed and some not, that I could probably give next year’s supply free to all the sending organizations by returning what I’ve got. We use—and abuse—medicines on ourselves and our loved ones, day in and day out, in the form of both patented and prescribed medicine.

We ballyhoo their benefits through advertisements in the press, on TV and over the radio. Take “Aspirin A,” or drink “Solution. B,” or take “Zap” and sleep better. Any one of these, I am sure, can be misused and dangerous. Why isolate DDT for attack when it’s increased the yield per acre over the years so that we now feed millions more than we did formerly? The so-called hard pesticides have provided us with many benefits over time. Banning them outright is like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. But I’ll leave this subject to you to decide.

When you have an insect problem and must use a chemical control, you’ll be dealing with one of two types. The first is a contact killer, which paralyzes the insect on contact. The second is a stomach poison, and this the insect must eat. Both are sold under the category of soil insect controls; some will be recommended for lawns, some for food gardens, and some for nonfood gardens.

They are available in dry form or liquid. When it becomes necessary to use a soil insect control, make sure you first treat your lawn with the bar laundry soap solution with tobacco juice added. If these fail, move on to the flea and tick shampoo. Always add any chemical spray to one of the soap solutions when you do use it.

Using predator insects, parasites, and other natural organisms instead of chemical controls has come to be an everyday practice, recommended even by its former critics. Bacillus thuringiensis is the best and safest caterpillar killer. Bacillus popilliae, known as milky spore, controls grubs for up to five years. If biological controls like Grub Attack are available, try them first. Only if they can’t cure the disease should you go to chemical controls.

What’s a body to do? You work hard to maintain a good-looking lawn, and just when it looks its best, wham! A brown spot appears here, a yellow patch there. It seems you can’t win.

Hold on! Winners never quit and quitters never win. When you’re fighting the insect armies you must keep this slogan in mind at all times. In order to better fight your enemies, the lawn insects, you must realize one thing: they appreciate you a lot more than you do them. (more…)

Q. Every time we put pepper or tomato plants in the ground, something breaks them off at the soil line.

A. That something is cut worms. Place aluminum-foil collars two inches high around the stems, making sure that one inch is below the soil. Mulch with oak leaf mulch.

Q. Is it necessary to add lime every year to my table garden?

A. It’s not necessary unless the soil has become acid. Don’t ever use anything that isn’t necessary.

Q. Can you suggest a tomato that 1 can grow in a small area?

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Q. How do you know how much lawn food you need for your lawn?

A. Multiply the length of your property by the width (subtract the area of buildings, drives, walkways, and beds) and divide by ten. Then divide that answer by the nitrogen figure on any fertilizer bag or box. The end result will tell you exactly how many pounds you must buy of the stuff you’re looking at.
L x W ÷ 10 ÷ N = your purchase in pounds 100 feet x 200 feet = 20,000 square feet
20,000 = 2000 10
Lawn food is labeled 20-10-5, so divide by 20.
2000 = 100 pounds of 20-10-5 lawn food. 20
You would need to buy one hundred pounds of this lawn food and then apply it at one-half the recommended rate and Epsom salts and powdered sugar and double your money.

Q. Is it good to use a different type of lawn food in the spring, summer, and fall?

A. I do, and my golf course and sod growers do, regularly—lawn food in the spring, Milorganite summenzer for the summer, and garden food in the fall or winter, but always add the magnesium salts in Epsom salts.

Q. Is there something you can put on your grass to keep it from growing? (more…)

Q. Do mosquitoes live in grass? And how do you get rid of them?

A. They sure do live in the grass, and in all other cool damp places. Mosquitoes can be controlled in your own area by spraying shrubs, grass, gutters, under lawn furniture, and wet spots with Methoxochlor, Diazinon, and flea and tick shampoo.

Q. We have small dogs that are being driven nuts by ticks. What’s safe to use around the dogs?

A. To begin with, dust the dog with the proper medication recommended by your vet. If the dog runs near shrubs and small tree areas spray those areas with Sevin, Diazinon, or Malathion.

Q. I would sure like to get rid of the ants that fly, crawl, and march around my yard and garden, but if I stop them in one place they show up in another. Is there a way?

A. Rent a roller with an attachment that has small spikes for making holes. Now add only enough weight to just make the points go into the ground. After rolling the whole lawn, water the lawn with one ounce of liquid dish detergent per gallon of water per 2500 square feet, and follow up with Diazinon.

Q. My grass gets more diseases than my kids did. Where do they come from and how do you get rid of them?

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