Farm Ways & Gardening

Good Friday was April 2 this year, and typically in the south you get your garden in by then.
I don’t worry about Good Friday being a “deadline.” I study the weather, expected rain, and current temperatures. We plant differently each year. This year, we chose to start planting the Monday after Easter, which was April [...]

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Lettuce Varieties
If you want to grow lettuce, you first need to decide what types of lettuce varieties you want to plant.
Crisphead lettuce forms into a round head and the lettuce is all bunched up together; these are your typical Iceberg types of lettuce such as those at your local grocery and are not heat tolerant. [...]

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Home canning supplies, tools and equipment are available to make your job easier.
First of all, purchase jars that are designed for high heat. The most popular manufacturers of home canning jars are Mason, Ball, and Kerr. Canning jars are purchased in cases or boxes and usually contain metal lids, screw bands, and jar [...]

When people think of preserving peppers, most often they think of freezing them or drying them. Those are fine ways to preserve peppers, but here at the ranch we tend to go a little further with our pepper preservation by making hot pepper vinegar, salsa, piccalilli, chow-chow, hot chili sauce, hot pepper sauce, spicy [...]

Late June. Harvesting plenty of zipper peas, okra, cucumbers, yellow squash, zucchini, peppers, tomatoes, eggplant. We’ve got Sweet 100 tomato plants almost reaching up to the second story and summer is far from over. Lots of melon blooms on the cantaloupe vines. We were fortunate with lots of rain up until now. Every day is [...]

I love the idea of organic gardening. I try as hard as possible to only garden organically. I love using organic fertilizer in my vegetable and flower gardens. I am no saint, and occasionally I find it necessary for some reason or other to use other products, but primarily I believe in [...]

Daisy Mae and I have been together a long time. Daisy Mae is “My Mule.”
LB’s daddy used a real mule to plow. But times have changed, so I use Daisy Mae.

Daisy Mae is the most reliable “mule” I ever used. She is a Yard Machine. Sometimes I get really tuckered out after a full day [...]

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I have one tomato variety, an heirloom known as Mountain Pride, that produces some really nice tomatoes that are crack resistant, disease resistant, and determinate so this is one variety that works well for container gardening.
I noticed it was the only variety in my vast array [...]

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I noticed something on my tomatoes in the blossom clusters.
I have seen this before, yet never had the time to find the cause. I tried to Google a cause and a remedy, but I could not seem to come across the right keywords or search words [...]

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It is the end of May here in the Deep South.
I just did one of my many daily “tours” through the garden(s), and I saw:
Lots of green tomatoes on the tomato vines.
I saw miniature Ichiban eggplant on my container eggplant.
My larger eggplant variety has several blooms on it and has grown profusely in the last [...]