Vegetables – Page 2 – GRO Big Red

Drip, Drip, Drip – Efficient Watering for Veggie Gardens

Are you looking for a good way to water your veggie garden? Think drip. Drip irrigation has many advantages over overhead watering, including less evaporation loss, fewer foliar diseases and fewer weeds.

Winter Damage and Herbicide Drift

Winter Damage February’s deep cold separated the marginally hardy plants from those that weathered the winter without problems. The lower portions of stems of some trees and shrubs, protected by the snow, flowered as usual and are sending out new leaves. Unfortunately, the portions of plants not protected by snow remain lifeless or are slow…

Rules 8-10 of Garden Catalog Shopping

With site assessment, spacing, sun/shade and other considerations covered in Rules 1-7, it’s time to think about the actual plants in the catalogs. Rules 8-10 highlight the need for color, accents, textures, massing, repetition, all season color and experimentation in the landscape.

Virtual Learning Series: Vegetable Garden Basics

Join the GROBigRed team for our virtual learning series via Zoom. Sessions are Saturday mornings starting at 10am CT and we’ll cover two topics each week. Come prepared to learn and to ask questions – our experts will be standing by to answer your burning vegetable garden questions. Sessions are free and hosted via Zoom….

Rules 3 and 4 of Garden Catalog Shopping

The first two rules of shopping for landscape plants with garden catalogs are centered around needs, much like shopping for groceries. The next two focus on the landscape itself in terms of cold tolerance and disease susceptibility of certain plants.

Hydroponics for the Holidays? Home Systems are a hot holiday gift list item

This article was originally published on the Garden Professors Blog on Nov 22, 2020. Check out that blog for more great articles from John Porter and extension colleagues from across the country. Systems to grow fresh produce in your home using hydroponics or other automatic processes have been popular for several years but seem to…

Veggie Garden Cleanup in Late Fall

We’re nearing the end of the veggie harvesting season with the coldest of cold hardy plants possibly still hanging on. It’s time to move to the next phase in edible gardening – the cleanup and storage phase.

Cleaning up Your Diseased Garden

Let’s face it, by the end of the growing season, many plants aren’t looking too good. The heat, drought, bugs and diseases have turned them from assets into liabilities. If the spots and rots have been active with your shrubs, perennials and other garden plants, it’s time to act.

Cucumber Bitterness

The compound that imparts the bitter taste in cucumbers is cucurbitacin. Wild cucumbers have a large amount of cucurbitacin, which discourages feeding by wild animals and insects. Today’s hybrids have been bred to have lower amounts of cucurbitacin in the fruit and what cucurbitacin is in the plant is concentrated in the roots, leaves, and…

Is COVID-19 an issue on homegrown or purchased produce?

This post was originally published on The Garden Professors blog in May 2020. Now that much of the world’s attention is focused on limiting the spread of pathogens, well one pathogen, it seems like a good time to talk about some of the questions or concerns we’ve seen regarding vegetable gardens, community gardens, and farmers…