Heirloom Tomato Varieties & Reviews | Tomat-Pomidor
Honest reviews of global tomato varieties from a 15-year-old growers community.
🍅 Quick take: In this thread, veteran growers discuss the critical importance of measuring actual soil temperature rather than relying on air temps or old wives’ tales when planting early spring crops. The conversation also covers preventing leggy seedlings and a traditional method for curing onions in braids to prevent top-down rot. In this thread: … Read more
📌 Quick Summary: Old-School Allium Secrets 🧅 Why Onion Tips Turn Yellow: A sudden lack of topsoil moisture causes the tips of onion and garlic leaves to dry out and turn yellow. An old farmer’s trick is to leave tiny weeds alone (they shade the soil) and avoid wild moisture swings. ☀️ Exposing the Bulbs: … Read more
📌 Quick Summary: Market Garlic & Fall Planting Secrets 🧄 The Stem Test: If you buy unnamed garlic at a farmers market and want to plant it, look at the center of the bulb. If it has a woody, rigid stalk in the middle, it’s a Hardneck (winter) variety. If it is soft and papery, … Read more
📌 Are Fall Onion Sets Easier Than Spring Seeds? 🌱 The Seedling Burnout: Starting onions from seed indoors takes months of babying. As disease pressures (like Downy Mildew) get worse every year, some of our veteran growers are ready to ditch the seed trays entirely and switch to overwintering (fall-planted) onion sets. 🍂 The Great … Read more
📌 Quick Summary: Growing & Using Giant Sweet Onions 🧅 The Giant Onion Appeal: Growing colossal sweet onions (like the ‘Exhibition’ variety) takes patience, but the payoff is huge. When you need 3 lbs of onions for a canning recipe, you only have to peel two bulbs! ⚖️ Alternatives to Exhibition: If you want … Read more
📌 Quick Diary Summary: Sinking Garlic & Mid-Summer Harvest 🧄 The Disappearing Garlic: Garlic actively pulls itself deeper into heavy soil to survive the winter using specialized “contractile roots”. While this is a natural biological process, it makes harvesting in clay a nightmare. See the forum discussion below for practical tips on how growers safely … Read more
📌 Quick Diary Summary: Mid-July Harvests 🧄 The Whole-Bulb Garlic Trick: You don’t always have to separate garlic into cloves. If you plant a whole garlic bulb directly into a strawberry bed (as a companion plant), it will grow a cluster of slightly smaller bulbs that are just as good as single-clove plantings! 🥒 Spider … Read more
📌 Quick Diary Summary: The No-Rotation Method 🤝 Planting Onions & Garlic Together: Yes, you can plant garlic and onions side-by-side in the same bed! Because they share the exact same watering schedule and fertilizer needs (low Nitrogen, high Phosphorus/Potassium), they make easy bedfellows—just space them well so their roots don’t compete. 🔄 The Crop … Read more
📌 Quick Summary: Watering Onions in the Heat 🧅 Green Means Grow: As long as your onion tops (leaves) are standing tall, green, and actively growing, they need water. If you let them dry out in a heatwave, the bulbs will stop swelling. 🛑 When to Stop Watering: You should only completely stop watering onions … Read more
📌 Quick Summary (TL;DR): Falling Garlic & Planting Depth 🥀 Why do garlic stems flop over? If you planted individual cloves and the stems are falling over, it usually points to root rot or a lack of water during active leaf growth. (However, see the hilarious whole-bulb exception at the bottom of this thread!) 📏 … Read more
📌 Quick Summary (TL;DR): Harvesting Garlic Scapes ✂️ How Low Should You Cut? Standard advice says to cut or snap only the curly top part of the scape to leave maximum foliage on the plant. However, some experienced growers cut the scape very low on the stalk—taking the top two leaves with it. The lower … Read more
📌 Quick Summary (TL;DR): The “Wet Cure” Storage Hack Editor’s Note: This bizarre storage method has gained massive approval across our Russian gardening community. If the hardcore gardening women of Siberia and the Urals swear by it to keep their garlic fresh for a full year, you folks in Minnesota and Wisconsin should probably give … Read more