Vegetable growing

Looking through all the beautiful tomato pictures in a seed catalog, how do you choose the best cultivars for your garden? Every gardener knows nothing is more disappointing than to raise a tomato plant, finally have it loaded with fruit, when suddenly it wilts and dies. One way to prevent this disaster is to choose tomato cultivars carefully with disease resistance in mind.

Each winter, many gardeners eagerly look forward to getting back out into the vegetable garden. Most gardeners realize that the average last spring frost date in eastern Nebraska is May 10th. Meaning until that date, some vegetable transplants or new seedlings planted outside may need extra protection in the event of a frost.

Sometimes understanding gardening terms is difficult. For example, what exactly is a hybrid vegetable? How do hybrids differ from heirlooms? What are open pollinated varieties? Let's take a look at the meaning of these terms and why it's important for gardeners to understand them.

Only have a small space for a vegetable garden this year? There are several ways to practice intensive gardening, making every inch of garden space count.

Square Foot Gardening

The garden centers beckon and planting season has begun. Many gardeners have already started planting seeds of cold-hardy crops like carrots, radishes and lettuce, and ornamentals like panies. But if you've purchased transplants for your garden, or grown them yourself, make sure you get them off to a good start by hardening them off before planting them outside.

Many people don't have a large landscape, but still enjoy gardening. A windowsill, patio, balcony or doorstep can provide sufficient space. Whether it’s flowers, herbs or vegetables you want to grow, container gardening may be the answer to your gardening needs. Problems with soil-borne diseases, nematodes, or poor soil can also be overcome by switching to containers.

A cold frame or hotbed is an easy and inexpensive structure to create. It functions as a small greenhouse, enabling gardeners to extend their growing season in both spring and fall. It can be used to harden off seedlings in spring or grow late season crops of cold tolerant plants like greens.

Building a cold frame or hot bed enables urban gardeners and small scale vegetable growers to protect young plants from adverse weather in spring and fall, extending their growing season. They are relatively inexpensive, simple structures that function as mini-greenhouses;

With a growing interest in locally produced foods and many new gardeners experimenting at growing their own food, it's a shame to waste the winter production season. Fall is a great time to build a cold frame or hotbed for use this winter or next spring

Earlier this spring, we looked at three ornamental plants promoted this year by the National Garden Bureau – dahlia, snapdragon and Salvia nemorosa. It’s getting warm enough now (at least most days!) that we can begin planting their final “Year of the…” feature – pumpkin.

Pumpkins are a fun plant to grow, especially when gardening with children, with many uniquely colored or shaped cultivars from which to choose.

Due to extremely frequent spring rains, some vegetable gardeners may not have been able to plant all the vegetables they would have liked. 

You might think “vegetable gardens can only be planted in spring, right?” Wrong – you can go on planting vegetables throughout summer and even into August if you choose your crops and cultivars carefully. Crops grown for their roots or foliage do particularly well in the fall garden. 

Planting onions from small bulbs or "sets" is not the best way to grow large onions for storage. Plants grown from sets often begin blooming in mid-summer and stubbornly refuse to stop. Once that happens, onion bulbs don't increase much in size.