How to Grow Healthier Plants

Guest post by our gardener, Barb Tewell:

Keep flowering plants deadheaded and pruned; this maintains the shape of the plant and encourages more flower production.  Remove seedpods from rhodies, magnolias, and other shrubs to promote stronger leaves and structural growth.

Staking and pruning tomatoes pays off with bigger, more abundant fruit.  Staked plants produce fruit weeks earlier than ones allowed to lie on the ground.  Leaves must get sun to produce sugar which makes the fruit.  Suckers that grow between the branches and main stem reduce the amount of sunlight that can reach the other leaves.  Simply pinch out these suckers and tie up your plant as it grows.  Staked plants dry off quicker preventing the formation of molds and disease.  Finally, about 30 days before frost, remove the top growth of the plant above any fruit!  This directs all sugar production into the last tomatoes of the season – I know this is hard but then, spring will be just around the corner.