Walking out to find your tomatoes covered in cracks, weird scarring, or brown patches mid-July is a special kind of gardening dread. Most of it traces back to one thing. Here’s how to diagnose what you’re actually seeing and fix it cheap.
Sunscald on tomatoes and peppers shows up as white papery patches and it’s almost always caused by fruit that suddenly has no shade. Learn how to prevent it with cheap materials you already own, why over-pruning makes it worse, and how to salvage fruit that’s already been hit.
Two stacked 5-gallon buckets and about an hour of drilling is all it takes to build a self-watering planter with a reservoir and wicking cup. Here’s how to do it cheap, and why your patio tomatoes will immediately stop resenting you.
June in the PNW is prime time for tomato care. Here’s how to sucker, stake, mulch, and feed your plants without spending much, and why mulching right now is the highest-payoff move of the whole season.
I killed a lot of tomato plants before I admitted it was my fault. These are the most common summer tomato mistakes I kept making, and the cheap fixes that actually helped once I stopped ignoring the problems.
You don’t need raised beds or a big yard to grow real food. A mini vegetable garden in a single container on a tight budget is completely doable, and June is a great time to start. Here’s how to do it without overcomplicating it.
Ollas are ancient buried clay pot irrigators that slowly seep water into the root zone, and you can build one for under $7. Here’s how to glue two terracotta pots together, bury them in your summer beds, and keep tomatoes, peppers, and squash happy through a Redmond July without running a hose twice a day.
Tomato suckers are usually something you snap off and toss. Turns out they’re also free, ready-to-root plants. Here’s how to root them in water or damp potting mix and get fruit before fall.
A lot of standard gardening advice was written for somewhere warmer and sunnier than the Pacific Northwest. Here’s how growing potatoes, onions, tomatoes, brassicas, garlic, and mulch timing actually changes depending on your climate.
Fertilizing fruiting plants isn’t just about feeding them, it’s about feeding the right thing at the right time. Get the timing wrong and you’ll grow a beautiful plant with nothing on it. Ask me how I know.
If you’re in zone 8b around the PNW, knowing when to start seeds indoors makes the difference between a great transplant and a leggy mess. Here’s the full countdown from last frost, what to start when, and what you can still do right now in April.
Fertilizing at the wrong time can give you huge leafy plants with almost no fruit. Here’s when to feed your vegetables at each stage, from planting through harvest, and why the timing actually matters.