For people who want to grow more food with less work. 🌱 This is my weekly newsletter loved by 38,000+ subscribers—here's what one of them had to say: "These are not the regular run-of-the-mill garden-based emails. You actually touch on more unusual tidbits that encourage me to keep growing and learning."
the sideways trick for planting tomatoes 🍅
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Are you planting tomatoes in the ground yet? If so, I'm jealous. 😉 We're almost warm enough to transplant here in Bend, at least for summer crops like tomatoes... but I can only dream and count down the days to Memorial Day (when it's considered "safe" to put tomatoes outside with frost protection—I use tomato teepees every year, which also work for peppers, squash, and other frost-sensitive plants). In other parts of the country where it's actually spring, you may have already repotted your tomato seedling once, possibly even twice (which I often recommend for stronger roots)... and soon you'll be moving it to the garden after a period of hardening off. If you followed all my tomato growing tips and your seedling has grown into a 3-foot-tall beauty, you may be wondering how to get that thing in the ground when the usual advice is to bury tomato stems as deeply as possible. Do you need to dig a 2-foot-deep hole? (Yikes, no thanks.) The answer, my friend, is planting your tomato sideways. This is a little trick that saves your back from digging AND gives you a bigger, healthier tomato plant, thanks to a clever way of planting in a trench so that tons of adventitious roots start growing once your plant hits the ground. (It's also a great way of "saving" an extremely leggy tomato plant you might buy from a garden center, since those places aren't exactly known for their optimal growing conditions.) So if you're not keen on digging huge holes, see how I plant my tomatoes sideways. Seasonal TipsP.S. No need to dig a 2-foot-deep hole to get your tomato in there. Plant it sideways and help it grow an even bigger root system! P.P.S. Planting tomatoes sideways is just one of my many lazy gardening techniques for working smarter, not harder in the garden—without sacrificing yields. In fact, I have an entire course about these strategies to help you grow more food with less work. Gardening doesn't have to be hard and you don't have to spend your whole summer battling pests or pulling up weeds on your knees. You can easily create an organic, regenerative vegetable garden (a fancy way of saying a biodiverse garden that nearly takes care of itself) if you follow my approachable methods in Lazy Gardening Academy. They work in any climate. (I've used these same methods in my zone 10b garden in California and my zone 5 microclimate in Oregon.) |
Garden Betty
For people who want to grow more food with less work. 🌱 This is my weekly newsletter loved by 38,000+ subscribers—here's what one of them had to say: "These are not the regular run-of-the-mill garden-based emails. You actually touch on more unusual tidbits that encourage me to keep growing and learning."