How Fertilizers Harm Earth More Than Help Your Lawn – Scientific American
July 26, 2009 by Tee
Filed under Gardening In The News
Dear EarthTalk: What effects do fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides used on residential lawns or on farms have on nearby water bodies like rivers, streams—or even the ocean for those of us who live near the shore?
– Linda Reddington, Manahawkin, NJ
With the advent of the so-called Green Revolution in the second half of the 20th century—when farmers began to use technological advances to boost yields—synthetic fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides became commonplace around the world not only on farms, but in backyard gardens and on front lawns as well. Continue »
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5 Tips For Preventing Plant Diseases
One of the biggest challenges that many vegetable gardeners face is fending off plant diseases. There are many factors that can contribute to plant diseases, such as cultivar type, weather, insect pests, and crop rotation just to name a few. Prevention can go a long way towards keeping diseases at bay. Becoming proactive in your garden defense is always much better than being reactive. Usually once a disease has started rearing its ugly head, it can be too late to control or eliminate it. Continue »
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Lessons Learned From The Squash Patch
It seems as though for every triumph in the vegetable garden there is always at least one failure. The same can surely be said about some things in my own vegetable garden this year. One vegetable that I am growing this year is on its way to a very slow death. Some of it was slightly beyond my control, but for the most part I have learned a valuable lesson on what not to do next season. Continue »
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Yellowing Leaves On Tomatoes
If you go out to the garden one day and find the bottom leaves yellowing on your tomatoes, don’t go into a panic. There are many reasons why tomato leaves turn yellow, and usually it is a fairly easy fix. Some situations that can cause yellowing leaves are under-watering and over-watering, nitrogen deficiencies in the soil, a lack of sunlight on the bottom leaves, or a possible disease. Let’s discuss each one of these, and hopefully one, or a combination, will help your tomatoes. Continue »
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Tips For Preventing and Treating Tomato Blights
You have worked hard on growing your tomatoes this season – you
prepared the prefect soil, carefully tending the tomato seedlings, and planted them with supreme care. Now it’s time to start thinking about all the different uses for those delicious tomatoes from your garden. Then one day you go out to the garden and notice that some brown spots are forming on the bottom leaves of a particular tomato plant. Crikey! It’s early blight! What do I do now? Here are some tips to help prevent early and late blight in tomatoes: Continue »
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12 Homemade Natural Remedies For The Garden
Whether it is some pesky bug or fungus, there are always issues to tend to in the garden. It seems that gardeners have always been on the cutting edge of natural solutions for common problems in the garden and the home. There are several reasons for using natural remedies in the garden:
- The ingredients are readily available
- The ingredients are usually very inexpensive
- These rememdies are very environment-friendly
- The remedies are very simple to make
- The remedies will not harm your vegetables
Here are 15 recipes for dealing with common problems in the garden: Continue »
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Tomato Disease Resistance List
Whenever you look at the plant tag or seed packet of tomatoes, you may see a bunch of strange abbreviations. Those abbreviations indicate that the cultivar has been bred for specific disease resistance. Combinations of V, F, and N are the most important to look for, but try to choose cultivars bred for resistance to problems common in your geographical area. To help clarify what these abbreviations stands for, I developed this list: Continue »
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What To Do If Your Garden Fails
As the economy flounders, more and more people are becoming interested in growing their own vegetables. With this incoming wave of vegetable gardening popularity comes a new group of novice gardeners. This is great news for the vegetable gardening community, and I say it’s about time you got involved in growing your own vegetables.
Growing your own vegetables is not easy. Like the saying goes – You get out of it what you put in. A vegetable garden can be very rewarding and delicious, but it is also a lot of work.
As long-time gardeners have learned, no matter how hard you work on your garden, there will be times when things won’t go right. You will loose certain plants or maybe even whole crops; it’s just a fact of gardening. Continue »
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