Fixing those early garden problems

In my opinion one of the most important things in the early garden is doing it right. Sweating the small stuff. Paying attention to details. Getting it right. Plants are under minimal stress. Deviations from optimal weather conditions are taken care of with season extenders or other protection.

The problem I had this year is that things can and do go wrong. Some tomato leaves got sun bleached from being in the season extenders too long. Spraying some weaker plants with epsom salts caused symptoms consistent with magnesium deficiency. At one point I was starting to wonder if I would see any success at all.

Here it is mid-season as I write. The peppers have been in for 4 weeks, the tomatoes for 6 weeks. Those tomatoes that I thought were gone are about 3 feet tall now and green and healthy. It took a lot of care and some worry to reverse the problems I created from lack of care early on, but things are shaping up. All of the ’First Lady II’ tomatoes have little tomatoes on them which is right on schedule for when they were planted. The peppers that had buds on them when planted now have peppers and some are good sized. I even have one bell with 8 peppers and it looks like more on the way!

In short, it doesn’t matter what happened early on in the season. We can’t possibly know everything and I know personally when I learn something new it is usually too late to apply it this season. Plants are remarkably resilient and seem to tolerate less than ideal conditions. If you made mistakes early in the season just continue on. Try and keep your plants well watered and fertilized and free from the stress of wild temperature extremes. Buy a soil testing kit and see what your soil lacks. Keep an eye open for diseases and insects and remedy them quickly.

Even though you may not be exactly where you want with your garden this year, you can still get a great harvest. Seeing as how you started your garden early you’ll probably still be ahead of the game. After all, the best part of the ’early garden’ is still the ’garden.’