Ideas For Vegetable Garden Produce

• The soil is the life blood of your vegetable garden so you should take the time to test the acidity or alkalinity of the soil in your backyard. You can buy a cheap soil testing kit and follow the packets instructions to test the soil across you backyard. Use soil from just below the surface and as a general rule a pH of 6.5 is what you should be aiming for.
• To ripen green passionfruit from your garden put them in a paper bag and then place them in a warm area.
• Passionfruit can also be placed straight from the vine into the freezer. There is no need for a plastic bag as this garden produce will taste as fresh as the day that they were picked.
• The soil type can also play a big part in how well your garden plants and vegetables grow, as well as how much work you have to do. For example sandy soil is easy to dig and prevents plants sensitive to wet conditions from becoming waterlogged, but can dry out quickly in the summer months and requires a lot of extra compost to provide much needed nutrients to your vegetable garden produce.
• On the other hand clay soil is very fertile, provides excellent nutrients to plants and retains water well, but it can become rock hard in summer making it hard to dig and waterlogged in the winter time.
• Whenever you collect seeds from your own flowers or vegetable garden produce it is a good idea to always label them with a name and date using a waterproof marker.
• If you have a pumpkin vine in your vegetable garden and it is failing to produce any pumpkins, or they are falling of when very small, it is because they have failed to pollinate. You can pollinate the pumpkins by rubbing the pollen from the male flowers, which have the fingertip, onto the female flowers, which have the small pumpkins beneath them.
• When it comes to watering your plants and veggies it is important to do so in the early morning or late evening, as this gives your plants the most amount of time to soak up the water.
• Another great way to preserve passionfruit is to place the pulp into ice cube trays and freeze it. Then pop them out of the trays into a freezer bag ready to use when required.
• It is also a good idea to water you vegetable garden beds with a good long soak instead of watering lightly more frequently. This is because light watering encourages the roots of the plants to grow closer to the soil's surface, making them dry out quicker in hot weather.