This Week In Gardening – How To Grow Gargantuan Vegetables

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I’m just curious….what’s the biggest, most outrageous thing you’ve ever grown in your garden?

When I was a wee lad I went the to the Austin Thresherman’s Reunion.  It was a end of summer festival in the village next to mine where they would race ancient thrashing tractors from a century ago.  You never saw so much smoke, steam and swearing in your life!

There would always be cotton candy so I was eager to go with my father.  We’d pop into the cattle auction and see all the livestock.  But what got my attention (other than the candy) were the pumpkins.  Giant, humongous pumpkins the size of a small car.  When you’re 6 years old, anything giant is fascinating.  The pumpkins in our yard I could carry with 2 hands … the pumpkins at this fair I could hollow out and sleep inside!

How To Grow Gargantuan Vegetables

This weeks round-up of amazing garden bloggers is all about tips for growing your vegetables.

I share a lot of powerful content on Twitter and Facebook and this resource list is even more valuable.  You can get it every week in your in-box by joining our private list by clicking here.

 

  • how do you grow your own monster veg?
  • what’s the secret to growing in part shade?
  • what is the kiss of death when growing your own vegetables?
  • how do you  grow heirloom tomatoes?
  • how can you eliminate pests and damaging insects?
  • is there a secret to attracting more bees to pollinate my cucumbers?
  • how big do giant pumpkins actually get?

Here Are Some Of The Top Gardening Articles This Week:

Organic Pest Management – I know you don’t want to hear this…but sometimes keeping bugs from eating your vegetables will require hands on intervention.  This article has some ideas on doing just that.  When I was a kid, my first paid job was picking potato bugs by hand off the plants and putting them in a jar with some gasoline in it.  It didn’t pay particularly well, but hey I was five years old.  Potato chips were 20 cents a bag in those days.

A Weed Is Just An Unloved Flower – I am totally guilty have having trepidation and hesitating with pulling a weed until a couple of weeks into its life cycle.  Our gardening friend Doug Oster writes a brilliantly intense piece on the role that certain weeds play in attracting pollinators into your garden.  If you want tons of vegetables in your garden, doesn’t it make sense to atrract bees to do their job for you? Doug, how do you fit so much wisdom into so few words?  Great stuff, thanks for this piece!

How To Attract Good Bugs – this post will illuminate the need to drop the 1940’s mentality of “kill all the bugs and let God sort them out”.  Dr. Mary Gardiner (yes, that’s her last name!) has written the authoritative book on taking measure to get good bugs into your garden and bad bugs out.  She chats with Margaret Roach about the growing shift in thinking amongst some gardeners to a more enlightened view of the role bugs play in growing food.

bumblebeeblueflower

How To Start Your Own Vegetable Garden – Kirsten Lints is a Master Gardener and chats with me about strategies for water conservation in your garden, how to start seeds indoors in January, and the critical link between being a good gardener and having a love of great cooking.  This interview was loaded with great little tips and ideas for beginning gardeners especially!

Shade Is Not The Enemy Of Taste – what do you do if part of your vegetable garden is in shade for a chunk of your day?  Move?  Sell the house?  Give up?  Or do you ask garden genius Niki Jabbour?  Niki breaks down 5 things you can grow in your shade garden besides a headache.  I was happy that I’m growing 4 of her 5 this year…next year I need to add mizuna.  Does watercress count Niki?

Help! My Corn is 10 Feet High And Blocks My Nieighbor’s View Of The Sunrise! – Corn can take up a ridiculous amount of space, especially in a back yard garden.  So what do you do?  Savvy Gardener Jessica has a couple of great ideas to combine corn with sunflowers and leverage that combo to attract pollinators to boost the fruit set in the rest of your vegetable patch!

cornfieldsunrise

A Brain Strain And Garden Gallery – ok, so this one isn’t exactly about growing big veggies…but I wanted to give you something to stimulate the other hemisphere of your brain.  Stephanie’s blog has a spectacular visual gallery of incorporating metal into your garden space.  Some of it will CHALLENGE you I promise…when you see the bed springs you’ll know what I mean.  But you will find some inspiration or maybe a gold nugget idea to incorporate into your garden.

What Do I Do With My Tomato Suckers? – ah, this old argument…does pulling the suckers off a growing tomato plant really make a difference?  Tom is a garden writer and actually works in a real garden…this post details exactly step-by-step what he does in a week.   If your garden is a couple of pots on a balcony, prepare to have an ah-ha moment.

How To Grow Heirloom Tomatoes – I asked 40 gardening experts to share their strategies and techniques to grow amazing tomatoes.  This post took on a life of its own, and has been shared over 800 times on social media!

 

On Back To My Garden This Week

Jane PerroneWhat’s It Like To Garden in the UK

Jane Perrone is the garden editor at one of the largest newspapers in England.  We had a laugh as she schooled me on the amazing history of United Kingdom gardening.  I’ve said it a dozen times on the podcast…no one on the planet can hold a candle to British gardeners!  I hope you enjoy this episode.

 

Back To My Garden TV – Latest Episode with David R. Clark

We have uploaded 90% of the podcast episodes to our Youtube Channel (click here to subscribe for free) for your listening pleasure.  Did you know that you can embed all of our videos onto your own blog to add value to your site and it’s easy to share them on Facebook as well?

 

Useful Gardening Info:

 

We Want To Hear From You!

Do you have any favorite ways to attract pollinators to YOUR garden?  How do you deal with invasive weeds?  Any old school gardening tips for growing award-winning vegetables.  Please share this post and leave us a comment below…you are appreciated!

 

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