Here in Kentucky it’s time to get started with plans for the fall garden. This second growing season is often the best. Many of the problems we have with insect pests are reduced as the weather cools, and we sidestep the insects live cycle.

So I’ve begun planning for the fall.

Timing on fall planting depends on plant hardiness. When will frost get here? The standard way to decide is to locate your plant hardiness zone in the USDA plant hardiness zone map.

Remember  the good old days when there were maybe six or seven zones? Well times have changed. The zone map now has 13 zones. Oh, and that’s not all – each zone is subdivided as well. All this detail makes the map complex and confusing.

To help see your area more clearly, the USDA has a map for each state. Just click your state on the main map, and you’ll get a larger map of your state, showing each county. If you’re in a county which is split between two zones, like I am, you still may not be sure what exact zone you live in.

There is a box at the top of the page where you can input your zip code, and you’ll get your exact hardiness zone.

All this minute details seems over the top to me. I just don’t want to think that hard about my garden. This map really isn’t much use to us gardeners. It tell you what the average low temp is for your area. That’s an interesting statistic, but not very handy for garden planning.

If you’re planning a fall garden, what you really need to know is when to expect the first frost in your area. You can then take that date, backtrack using the days to harvest number on the seed packet, and figure out when to plant the seeds.

I’ve found a few online resources to help you get your frost numbers

Victory Seeds

The folks at Victory Seeds have a page for finding frost dates. Pick your state from the list and you’ll get a list for frost dates for several cities in your state. Choose the city closest to you.

Dave’s Garden

There is a frost date finder at the Dave’s Garden website. You start by entering your zip code. You’ll get the dates for frost danger in your personal zip code area. You also get a big chart of percentages that is pretty confusing at first glance. Read the examples below the charts and things will clear up for you.

About.com

The About.com page for frost dates gives you the first and last frost dates for the USDA hardiness zones. Their chart only lists 11 zones, and the USDA now lists 13, but you can still get a general idea for your area.

Tomatoes are America’s favorite garden vegetable. One big reason for that is tomatoes are pretty easy to grow. Still, there are problems you could face when you’re growing them. If you’ve experienced difficulty raising “maters”, you may be interested in some disease resistant varieties and hybrids. But codes like “VF”, “VFFA”, and “VFNT” can be somewhat obscure.

What different types of problems are normal to tomatoes, and how can you tell if a particular variety is resistant to the disease you are encountering in your garden? The capital letters that follow the names of some tomatoes should tell you what disease resistances that type has.

Breaking the Code

“V” – indicates the plant is resistant to the fungi that cause Verticillium wilt, Verticillium dahliae and V. albo-atrum. Signs and symptoms of Verticillium wilt don’t usually arrive until the plant is bearing fruit or it goes through a dry period. Symptoms include V-shaped lesions on the leaves.

“F” or “FF” – means the plants are resistant to the Fusarium oxysporum fungi that cause Fusarium wilt. This is a serious disease that shows itself in the wilting and yellowing of leaves starting at the foot of the plant. Left unchecked, Fusarium wilt can kill tomato plants well before harvest time. Some Fusarium fungi have overcome the initial “F” resistance tomatoes. If your tomatoes are afflicted with this second type, choose plants with the “FF” designation.

“N” – means that the tomatoes are resistant to the parasitic round worms, nematodes that often lie dormant in the dirt. Symptoms of nematode infestation include root galls that are up to an inch in diameter. Afflicted plants are less healthy, do not respond to fertilizer, and tend to wither more easily in hot weather.

“A” – indicates resistance to the Alternaria alternata fungus that causes Alternaria stem canker. Tomato stems, leaves and fruit are afflicted with cankers that range from dark brown to black. If the cankers appear on the stem they can be accompanied by brown streaks. Stem cankers can girdle and kill a plant before harvest.

“T” – means that the plants are resistant to the Tobacco Mosaic Virus (TMV). TMV causes a mottled appearance in tomato leaves and reduced tomato size and yield. Sometimes unripe fruit of plants afflicted with TMV will brown.

“St” – designated plants are resistant to Stemphylium or gray leaf spot. Afflicted plants develop brown to black spots on older leaves. As the disease progresses, the spots get bigger while the center become gray. The gray centers eventually drop out, leaving behind small holes. The Stemphylium solani fungus causes gray leaf spot.

“TSWV” – indicates resistance to the Tomato Spotted Wilt Virus. Symptoms of infection vary widely between tomato species, but include yellow and brown rings and brown streaks on plant stems, dead leaf spots and tips, and severely reduced growth. Fruit may have red and orange discolorations at maturation.

Remember that resistance is not the same as immunity. Tomatoes such as Early Cascade VF Hybrid can still be attacked with Verticillium and Fusarium Wilt. They just won’t be as susceptible to harm as their non-resistant cousins.

Along with growing the appropriate resistant strains, you should use good gardening methods to keep these fungal, viral, and parasitic pests under control. Rotating your tomato crops with annual rye, alfalfa, peas or clover will prevent most nematodes and fungi from proliferation. Just make certain that you choose species and cultivars that do not harbor the particular pest you’re trying to control.

Soil solarization will kill off many more nematodes, fungi, and disease vectors (aka, weeds and larval insects).

By keeping your tomato plants as healthy and vibrant as they can be, good watering, drainage, and mulching also help control pests.

Finally, do NOT re-incorporate diseased plant matter into the soil at the end of the season — compost from a diseased plant will just infect your next crop, so it is best to either burn it or throw it away.

The trick to growing delectable tomatoes in your backyard is to find out what pests it already harbors, choose tomato varieties specifically resistant to those pests, and follow good gardening/pest-control techniques. Once you have grown a few good crops and have your pests down to a reasonable level, you can even move on to grow more exotic tomato varieties.

Spring, that exciting time of year when we gardeners start seeing big red tomatoes dancing in our dreams. We’re ready to plant something.

You want to grow great healthy garden crops that will help you shed pounds and be a healthier you, right? One of the keys for success in the garden is to start with the best plants.

You will generally get a better quality plant from a garden center and it will be less likely to have disease or other problems that could spread to other plants in your garden.

There is still the possibility that the garden center plant might not be the healthy specimen that you might expect so you should still check it out before parting with your money.

The first thing you need to do is look at the plant and see whether it looks healthy. Plants are very good at showing any signs of distress so a plant that doesn’t look healthy, generally isn’t.

How to Spot Healthy Plants.

• Good plants should have nice strong, stocky stems. You should avoid plants with leggy weak looking stems.
• Check the conditions of the leaves for insect damage and good color.
• It’s always best to buy plants that have yet to bloom or set fruit, as they will withstand the trauma of transport and transplanting better. If there is no alternative to plants that already have blooms, you should remove all the flowers to give the plant a better chance of survival. Yeah, I know, it hurts because you think those blooms and small fruit give you a head start. They don’t.
• When picking plants to transplant, bigger isn’t better. Go for stocky plants that have a nice proportion between roots and plant mass. Really tall plants tend to be root bound. They will need to grow more roots to support all that foliage, before they can get started in new growth.

If there is anything on the plant that concerns you seek advice or decide against having that plant in your garden. Bringing sick plants into your garden can lead to insect damage and disease spreading to other plants.

The Problem With Tomato Plants

Tomato plants form what are called suckers. Suckers form at the junction of the main trunk of the tomato plant with the branches. If left alone tomato plant suckers will develop into full fledged branches. This will make a nice full bushy plant. But most experts tell you to remove the suckers.

The Problem With Suckers

Suckers turn into branches and set fruit just like the normal branches do. So what’s the problem?

Growing all that greenery takes nutrients and plant energy. Those nutrients could be going into making bigger tomatoes. Generally, if you leave the suckers you can expect to get more tomatoes, but they’ll be smaller. Most people like bigger fruit.

It’s really a matter of choice, you can have more smaller tomatoes or fewer but larger ones.

My dad has decided it’s no longer worth the trouble for him.

Last year I didn’t do anything to my tomato plants but pick the fruit. We were disappointed in the size of the crop.

So this year I’m removing the suckers from my tomatoes.

It's best to remove the suckers from your tomato plants when they are still small like this.

Removing Suckers from Your Tomatoes

The sucker in the picture at the top of this post is getting pretty big. It’s still easy to remove. Just snap them off.

It’s best to avoid being a procrastinator like me and get them while they are still small. Like the one in the picture above.

You can add them to your compost pile.

I’ve also heard of potting the suckers. They will supposedly develop roots and can then be transplanted to the garden. I’ve never done this. By the time I need to remove suckers I’m tired of planting tomato plants and I don’t want more.

Organic gardening gurus preach the benefits of companion planting.

What is companion planting?

Some plants help one another when they’re planted together. They may just grow faster, bigger, and stronger together. Or one plant might repel bugs that would harm the other plant.

One of the plants that has bug repelling power is the marigold.

So I put a marigold plant in the space between each of our tomato plants.

I don’t know if it will chase the bugs away, but at least it’ll make our garden a bit nicer to look at.

You can lose weight by working in a garden. That’s one of the core ideas of this site. Gardening can be a weight-loss tool in many ways.

One of those is sunshine.

When you work in your garden you soak up sunshine… unless you garden at night.

Contrary to currently popular lore, the sun is good for you. And it helps you shed fat.

Being exposed to plenty of sunlight actually helps fire up your metabolism. When your metabolism is cranking along you burn more fat.

It goes back to our caveperson days. When winter was approaching our cave dwelling kin needed to put on fat. It provided a store of usable energy when food got scarce. It also acted as insulation.

The body uses sunlight levels to know when winter is on the way. As the days shorten, the body turns down the metabolism and starts storing energy – as fat.

Getting out in the garden, and the sun also lets your body make vitamin D. This is a biggie for health.
Of course you need to take care to not get too much sun. You have to know your limits.

Compost is the mother’s milk of gardening.

Good compost just has that “smell of the earth”; that great aroma that makes plants want to grow just because of the smell. You know how the aroma just lifts you up when you walk into a bakery and smell all those fresh baked goodies? I think the compost pile is the bakery of the plant world. Open up the pile and you can hear the plants saying, “Ummm, that smell good.”

Compost has many benefits.

Compost has several advantages in your garden.

• It is one of the best fertilizers for your vegetable garden
• It improves the soil – adding organic matter – giving the soil better water holding capacity and structure
• The rich dark color just looks good against the fresh green plants. It’s pretty.

Compost gardening has problems too.

I’ve been using the Ruth Stout “no dig” approach to gardening for several years now. With this method of gardening you bury the ground under huge loads of mulch, and plant into the mulch. This works great for transplants – you can just pull back the mulch and make a hole in the ground for the plant, then put the mulch back around the plant. Works pretty nice.

But you don’t always transplant plants into your garden. You often plant seeds. Tossing a bunch of seed out on top of a pile of grass clippings and covering them with more grass clippings just doesn’t work so great. You need a more suitable growing medium to plant seeds into. Compost is ideal for this.

But that requires a lot of compost.

If you’ve ever built a compost pile for your garden waste, you know a good sized pile “cooks” down into a fairly small amount of finished compost. It won’t yield enough to plant a large garden.

You can buy compost by the bag at your local garden center. This can get expensive fast.

The solution – build a huge compost heap.

Last winter we had several trees removed from our yard. Most of the limbs went into a monster grinding machine. I had the two truck loads of wood chips dumped beside my garden plot. I intended to just spread them out for mulch. I’ve decided to use them in a super compost pile instead.

I use a Cyclone Rake vacuum attachment on my riding mower. I get a lot of grass clippings with this thing.

So I’m building a huge grass clipping/wood chip compost heap. I alternate several inches of wood chips then several inches of grass clippings.

I have enough chips and a seemingly endless supply of grass clippings, so I’ll probably build a couple of piles. I may even turn the piles a couple of times this summer.

Hopefully by fall I’ll have a nice supply of compost.

The tomato call.

“The tomato plants are already too tall. You need come get them today, before the rain gets here.”

That was my dad’s message late in Mother’s Day afternoon. Dad is the tomato plant supplier for our whole family. He starts the plants from seed and passes the plants to us.

So we spent a lot of Mother’s Day putting out tomato plants in the garden.

Easy tomato planting method.

I like to do mulch gardening. Each summer I cover the ground with grass clippings. In the fall I add chopped up leaves.

When spring comes I use this planting process:

• Pull back the mulch to expose the earth.
• Dig a hole big enough for the tomato plant.
• Plant the tomato plant and water it in.
• Replace the mulch around the plant.

Two ways to plant tomatoes.

These were really tall plants. Rather than plant them at the same depth they were in the pots they were started in, it’s best to take off the bottom leaves and plant most of the stem in the ground. New roots will form along this stem making a stronger plant.

You can do this in one of two ways.

1. Dig a really deep hole. I use a post hole digger for this. It makes getting all that dirt up out of way a simple thing. Stick the plant in the hole, pack the dirt back in around the plant, and water.
2. Plant the tomato plant in a trench and bury most of the stem in this trench. As you bend the plant up out of the trench to get it pointing straight up, it’s very easy to break the plant. Careful handling in required.

I did 20 plants with the deep hole method. I used the trench method for the other 5 plants.

Yes we put out 25 tomato plants.

I’ll post a list of varieties later.

I harvested the first goodies from the garden for this year. Radishes.

I just picked a few of them. Took them in and shared them with my wife.

They were nice and crispy and just a little tangy. Just like I like them.

The plan was to gather several more along with some of the green onions growing beside them to add to a nice big salad over the weekend. But Saturday morning we woke to rain. And it rained and rained. On Sunday it got serious and really rained.

So the salad idea got put on hold.

Still, it was nice to finally eat something from the garden.

If you have ever talked to any old farmers you’ve probably heard of planting by the moon. This is planting a garden and harvesting according to what phase the moon is in. Mr. Carriss, who used to farm the fields beside my house, used to tell me about it.

He would even use moon phases to decide when to put rock on his driveways. He said if you put them down in the wrong moon they would just get pulled into the earth sooner.

The Moon Has Known Effects On the Earth
Before you think it’s total hogwash, consider that the moon already has a big influence on our planet earth. It’s the gravitational pull of the moon that causes our ocean’s tides to go in and out. It may not be so far-fetched to consider that the moon might have some influence on the earth’s plants.

Gardening by the light of the moon, or moon phase gardening, has been around as long as people have been gardening, and many swear that it works very well. Let’s go over the key elements of moon phase gardening and then you can decide whether to give it a try or not.

First off, you will need to know your area’s first and last frost dates as well as the moon cycles. Those are easy enough to look up online or in a gardening book. It’s also helpful to find a forum or blog where knowledgeable people talk about when they plant what. These forum people can also answer any questions you might have.

Here’s the guide to planting your seeds or seedlings by the moon phases:

New Moon to 1st Quarter Moon
Plant your leafy crops like spinach, lettuce, bok choy, herbs, broccoli, grains, and annuals.

1st Quarter Moon to Full Moon
Plant flowering crops such as beans, squash, eggplant, tomatoes, melons, peas, and zucchini.

Full Moon to Last Quarter Moon
Plant your crops that produce below the ground – carrots, onions, radishes, and potatoes.

Last Quarter to New Moon
Don’t plant anything at this time. Take care of all your other garden chores. In moon phase gardening, this is considered the best time to cultivate, harvest, and prune your plants.

Planting by the moon can possibly produce a healthier and more productive garden for you. There aren’t a lot of complicated rules, but you do need to create a workable plan ahead of time. Planning it out will help you to plant your seeds or seedlings on schedule, rather than when the mood strikes you. Why not give it a try? It certainly can’t hurt to give your seedlings all the help you can early on so that come late summer they can give up their wonderful produce!