Tag: plants
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Pest Control Without Panic
The Urban Farm: Chapter 8 Healthy, well-fed plants attract attention — and learning how to respond calmly keeps small problems from becoming big ones. If you grow vegetables, you will see insects. At some point in every garden season, something unexpected shows up. A hole in a leaf. A cluster of insects under a stem.…
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Feeding Container Plants
The Urban Farm: Chapter 7 In container gardening, plants depend on you for everything. When water is managed well, nutrition becomes the next limiting factor in container garden success. In the ground, soil acts like a pantry. It stores nutrients, buffers mistakes, and provides a slow, steady supply of what plants need to grow. Containers…
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Water Wisely
The Urban Farm: Chapter 6 In container gardens, water is more than maintenance — it is the difference between steady growth and constant struggle. Water is where many container gardens succeed—or fail. Container gardening has a single point of success or failure. Not fertilizer. Not sunlight. Not even container size. It’s water! Water determines how…
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Growing Up: Using Vertical Space
When ground space runs out, productive gardens don’t stop — they grow upward. In every urban garden, there comes a moment when the ground feels full. Containers line the sunniest spots. Walkways narrow. The footprint seems maxed out. At that point, many gardeners assume they’ve reached the limit of what their space can produce. But…
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Gary’s 10 Non- Negotiable Rules for Growing Tomatoes in Containers
Since we are celebrating Easter this weekend, and in Mississippi Good Friday is the go date to plant your warm season veggies (even though there is a 6 week swing with Good Friday, I wrote a blog about that, The Moon, the Cross and Tomato Planting on Good Friday , this is a good time…
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Growing Native Milkweeds
Almost every gardener I’ve met in the last 15 years seems to have questions about growing milkweed because of the Monarch butterfly. In the deep south perhaps the most common milkweed found in nurseries is the tropical milkweed, Asclepias curassavica. Where I live on the MS Gulf coast these plants are perennial and pose the…
Gary Grows at Heritage Cottage 