Calling all gardeners!
Weekly Gardening Thread
I would not, in case your plants this year had a fungus that could spread as you put the resulting mulch in next years garden, but that’s just me.
You can compost plants for next year ONLY if you had no disease and you plan upon using the compost for other plants. Tomato blight will live even if you live in a cold climate. My advice, compost in a separate pile.
The only tomato plants I have that are surviving our heat and lack of rain are ones I didn’t plant. They are “volunteers” from the volunteers I had last season. It’s really weird.
I’ve had tomato plants sprout up in the weirdest places over the years, like in the burn pile where I had tossed some that had gotten over ripe.
I don’t because of the possibility of disease.
Saving the seed is fine for heirlooms.
Just bag them all up and put them in the trash. Any and every tomato gardener/farmer will tell you to never compost tomato foliage/stems/roots.
So what did you grow this year? Any heirlooms? I am still staring down my green fruits and waiting for first blush. I have 7 different varieties this year, all heirlooms. Foliage disease is something I know a lot about.
Compost away. The heat/action of composting plus the microbiotic critters will take care of things for you.
I compost everything except for plastics and steel.
I do not compost my tomato plants.Composting the plants can spread disease.
Tomato plants can harbor diseases that cause havoc in the garden the next season. Even if you are rotating crops you are going to mixing the composted material in throughout the garden-possibly spreading disease far and wide.
Clean all the fish you catch for the balance of the year and composte the heads.
As mentioned above, burn those stalks AND roots.
Once you get the tomato blight and/or the white mold in your garden bed you’re pretty much screwed until you remove and replace the entire soil structure down to the lowest root level.
After burning you can scatter the ashes on the bed. Also, you can add coffee grinds while burning the stalks, and then spread the ashes, it fixes the Ph imbalance, or so I’ve been told and have done so for years.
We have a problem with tomato bligth in my area of NC. I always take all tomato plants and get rid of them one way or the other after they are done producing. Never compost them. As vegans we compost all vegetable matter from the kitchen, grass clippings too and get enough compost for the year. I get a lot of volunteers also and let them grow until they too are done.
Next year, avoid planting tomatoes where tomatoes, peppers, eggplants or potatoes were planted the year before. Rotate tomatoes into areas where unrelated plants, such as beans, corn or lettuce were planted.
Tomato plant bump.
My horses managed to undo the gate to my garden and ate everything that was still there. It is so clean I will have a very easy time tilling and readying for next year’s garden.
I can’t believe it, they ate my Basil, squash plants, corn stalks, pepper plants, tomato plants, EVERYTHING. I was shocked.
Since we are talking about composting. I have several large Oak trees. Can I use the leaves in the compost pile?
No problem ! Properly done, composting’s heat will kill any residual fungi spores. FWIW, you should also be adding your lawn/kitchen veg scraps to the mix as well. Best - if your’s is a small operation - to use a retail “composter” in order to get sufficient density/heat generation. Or you can make one out of a 55 gal plastic barrel. Plans are everywhere on the net. >PS
Already? My Julienne tomato's are still producing like crazy, along with the cucumber and peppers. Zukes have bit the dust though.
Like most here, I do not compost tomato and pepper plants. I also do not compost cucumber, melon, and pumpkin vines.
Actually I do not “compost” anything in a “compost pile”. I do till asparagus fern, onion leaves? stalks?, corn stalks and husks, lettuce, spinach, carrot, and radish tops, and bean vines into my garden to let them decompose “in place”, along with all my grass clippings and leaves that blow into my yard from my neighbors’ trees.
My garden gets taller every year, and my soil test last spring showed about 9% organic material. My local Ag. Extension Agent told me that was the best soil test results he had ever seen in this area.