Climate, soil and potatoes

Potatoes are an amazing crop. The amount of nutrients produced on a hectare of potatoes is staggering. It’s virtually a complete food, with a high nutritional

What’s striped, smaller than a grape, and sells for $24 a pound? It’s the Mexican sour gherkin, a dwarf cucumber rapidly winning fans among farmers, gardeners

Officially, the world’s number one weed is nutgrass, more correctly called ‘nutsedge’, as it’s not a grass but a sedge. (Sedges don’t have nodes as do true gras

The appearance of one or two unknown weeds on my land has reminded me of the danger of leaving them unattended just because they appear to pose no threat due to

To many farmers and home gardeners, crop rotation is a holy grail – they’ll never plant the same crop consecutively in the same ground.

A type of kweek grass, called couch paspalum (Paspalum distichum), is gaining a foothold on many vegetable farms. Also known as ‘kweek paspalum’

Recently, I wrote about the necessity of ensuring vegetable transplants have enough nitrogen in the plug or in the plant to stimulate root growth and ensure

‘Sunlight is the ultimate limiting factor. Water and nutrients will only optimise the limits set by day length.’

Here are seven tips from Joy for those planning a similar schlep to the pumpkin patch.

We’ve covered the requirements for the most suitable seedlings in the past few articles. It doesn’t stop there, though, as all this good work can be

In addition to seedling hardness, there’s also the matter of seedling size, which, of course, depends on the size of the cell – or plug – in the seedling tray.

Brussels sprouts is a luxury item not part of our daily cuisine and usually reserved for special treats. It is generally well known that this crop is a dedicate

With spray adjuvants, many farmers think that mixing a sticker and a wetter/spreader into the water are the same thing. This is certainly not true.

Seedlings need to be hardened to enable the plants to survive in the new environment where they are planted. hardening has another advantage.

Vegetable seedlings vary quite a bit, so make sure you tell your seedling grower what you need.

Gardeners in the north of England, Durham and Northumberland particularly, have made the growing of exhibition leeks very much their own

The global sugar industry is often slammed for wasting freshwater resources. In SA, sugar farmers and processors have found practical ways to improve water use

Disease symptoms are caused by fungi, bacteria and viruses. They are parasitic organisms, that is to say, ones that take their food from other living creatures

American farmer David Hula holds the current world record for maize grain yield. On a recent lecture tour of South Africa’s principal grain farming