Category: Wine Cellars

Gardeners outside Hawaii, Florida and Southern California must protect guava (Psidium guajava) trees from chilly, and even cool, temperatures since the tropical shrub, hardy to U.S. Department of Agriculture planting zone 10, develops best when summer temperatures are over 60 degrees Fahrenheit. Whenever your guava fruits, starting in its second to fourth year, do not allow the care you’ve put in your tree go to waste by harvesting in the wrong moment. Baseball-sized guavas immediately go from hard and sour, to overripe mush. Learn to pick and eat guavas in their summit, and that means that you can, quite literally, enjoy the fruits of your labour.

Look at the colour of the fruit. If it changes from bright green to light yellow with a touch of pink, depending on cultivar, it’s ready to choose.

Smell the fruit. As stated by the California Rare Fruit Growers, the odor of this guava changes when it’s ripe becoming musky, candy and”penetrating,” so you need to be able to smell it without needing to put the fruit up on your nose.

Press gently on the rind of this fruit. Though the skin may be thin or thick, depending on variety, a ripe guava should be slightly soft under stress.

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Starting vegetable crops in a greenhouse is a great way to get the maximum from this gardening season. It’s possible to determine a planting program based on the best times to place specific vegetables in your own garden. Some seeds just require two weeks to germinate before transplanting, while others want up to twelve weeks. Your seed starting and transplanting schedule will also be informed by the cool-weather or warm-weather nature of the vegetables you may like to grow.

Hardy Vegetables

Plant frost-tolerant plants on your greenhouse first. Start these in December or even January. Harden them off by gradually conditioning them to outside conditions over a couple of days. Transplant them on your garden starting in February or even March. Common frost-tolerant vegetables include beets, leafy salad greens, Swiss chard, spinach, bulb onions, turnips, radishes and carrots. Beets and carrots can be continually transplanted from March through August or September. Bulb onions may transplantes as early as January. These are the hardiest and many frost-tolerant of all cool-season vegetables.

Cool-Season Crops

Start most cool weather vegetables in the greenhouse starting in March. Recommended cool weather plants include broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower and lettuce.These prefer average ambient growing temperatures of 55 to 65 degrees Fahrenheit. Harden off and transplant these plants starting in April. As a rule of thumb, hardy and cool-season crops require a more germination period than warm-season varieties, typically seven to fourteen days.

Warm-Season Vegetables

Start warm-season vegetables on your greenhouse starting in March and April. They’re not frost tolerant and many germinate well in four to eight weeks. Gardeners in higher elevations, where freezing temperatures may occur well into spring, might prefer to wait till mid-April or early May. Where freezing temperatures are rare, wait to harden off and transplant warm-season plants until typical temperatures hit the preferred minimum of 70 F. These include favorites such as strawberries, vining beans, cucumbers, legumes, squash, peppers, eggplant, potatoes, peas, corn and melons. You may also follow this planting program for beginning warm-season ornamental annual flowers.

Second Crops

In temperate Mediterranean climate regions, you can start another crop of cool-season vegetables in preparation for the cooler temperatures and rains of fall. Start these on your greenhouse during July and August. Harden off and transplant them late in August and September. It is possible to harvest these later in fall through the next early spring.

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Before telltale red grapes look on a strawberry plant, you might have trouble identifying it. Strawberry plants grow low to the floor and can be difficult to find, particularly if mixed in with other plants from the forest or your garden. If you find a plant and you’re not sure what it is, take some opportunity to identify it by taking a look in its fruit, leaves and flowers. Identification will let you know if the plant is safe to deal with and its fruit good to eat.

Look for strawberries to the plant. Ripe strawberries are usually bright red and unripe berries may have an off-white or yellow look, though some varieties stay white, such as “Pineapple Crush” and “White Delight.” Many strawberries grow to about 1 inch in diameter, but wild strawberries are occasionally much smaller.

Analyze the leaves. Start looking for the strawberry plant’s dark green compound leaves with three rounded leaflets and deeply serrated edges, a ridged texture and medium depth.

Look for telltale strawberry plants’ vine-like runners that develop between 8 and 18 inches long, spreading across the floor and putting down roots to enlarge the range of the plant.

Identify strawberry blossoms which grow to around 1 inch in diameter with a yellow center surrounded by five white petals.

Watch for animals which eat the fruit of the strawberry plant, such as white-tailed deer, wild turkey, skunk and bluejay.

Examine the plants growing nearby, as strawberry plants tend to develop near poison ivy, violets, red clover, Queen Anne’s lace, pokeweed and cinnamon fern.

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