Tomato season is upon us and, after deciding which tomatoes you’d like to grow, they need to be planted! For this project, we chose a Brandywine heirloom tomato to plant into a container, but the same steps work for planting tomatoes in the ground in a garden bed.
It’s April and tomatoes are here! We know you’re ready to get them planted since it’s sunny (wait… now it’s cold and raining…. wait! It’s sunny again! Wait…) ;) but your tomato plants won’t grow into incredibly prolific tomato producers if you don’t protect them until the night temperatures remain consistently above 50 degrees. Most of us at Swansons swear by protection tools so we can plant our warm-season vegetables earlier and encourage larger, stronger plants and better harvests. Here’s what we use and how to use them.
For many of us, the choice of which tomatoes to grow can be daunting. We've boiled down the tomato decision process into a few helpful questions and our suggestions: a secret (tomato) sauce, if you will, of how to make the right choice for your individual tomato needs. At the end of this post are a handy infographic and a link to our tomato variety list.
In this post, I’m repotting a very rootbound Marble Queen Pothos plant. I’ll walk you through all the steps for a successful repotting. These steps are essentially the same for all types of indoor and outdoor plants, so you can take these tips and use them for any potted plant.
No matter whether this is your first-ever vegetable garden or just the first time planting this year, if you take a little time to prepare before you plant, everything will go more smoothly and you’ll be more successful. Here are a few simple things to consider when starting a vegetable garden this spring.
Often, one of my first orders of business when designing a garden is to embellish the immediate surroundings of the house. Carefully selecting plants to enhance the view just outside of our windows can go a long way toward staving off the winter blues, and if those plants offer a bit of fragrance as we scurry back and forth while gathering provisions, so much the better. Here are a few options to brighten the dreary Northwest wintertide.
With cheerful red bracts and delicate yellow flowers framed against velvety green leaves, colorful poinsettias are an indisputable symbol of Christmas. In fact, poinsettias are the most commercially important potted plant in the world because of their endearing association with the December holiday season. But how did this warm-weather shrub native to western Mexico become so closely associated with Christmas?
Imagine Puget Sound in winter. Dark in the morning. Dark in the afternoon. And it's mostly dreary in between. As a saving grace, our relatively moderate winter temperatures offer a hospitable climate for a dazzling array of winter-blooming shrubs. And there is no better winter-blooming shrub for greater Pugetopolis than Mahonia x media 'Charity'.
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