There are two types of cracking of tomatoes, longitudinal cracks and radial cracking. Radial cracking is mostly a varietal issue.
Home and Garden
Nitrogen causes stem growth as well as dark green leaf color. Adding only an iron fertilizer or chelate causes the new growth to become green but does not stimulate new growth that much.
Phone apps are good for predicting a possible freeze, but nothing replaces verification that an actual freeze happened. Maximum/minimum thermometers are a good bench check against your phone app or the National Weather Service predictions.
Once a landscape design is finished, the amount of water it needs is fixed. You won’t be able to change the amount it needs, by much, without removing plants or changing them.
It common for the chitalpa tree to partially defoliate in the summer.
Desert willow can look shaggy during the winter because of the brown seedpods that hang from the tree. The seedpods provide a good supply of birdseed for various desert birds during the fall and winter months.
Adding woodchips to the soil as an amendment has gained popularity largely because of social media. Woodchips applied to the soil surface as a mulch is OK, but mixing these into the soil can lead to problems if you aren’t careful.
Horticulture expert Bob Morris answers readers’ questions.
Q: You mentioned controlling borers with chemicals, but can borers in trees be controlled without using chemicals?
Q: Can you give some tips on how to survive this latest bout of heat? Is it simply too hot right now for plants? Is shade cloth the answer?
Let’s talk about wind damage. If you didn’t sustain wind damage to your landscape, you are extremely lucky. It was fortunate these high winds occurred early in the season, and many trees were not yet full of leaves. If it had been a few weeks later, the damage would have been worse.
Question: My mother’s mimosa tree was fine May 24. Something has attacked it. I attached before-and-after photos, with close-ups of a couple of damaged areas.
Q: I noticed last year that I didn’t get nearly the same number of tomatoes that I had harvested in previous years. I have a raised bed with a blend of about 4-to-1 cheap compost and our desert soil. Each year I have continued adding compost from my own yard and vegetable scraps. Last year the tomato plants themselves grew well and I saw lots of flowers, but the tomatoes just never developed.
Question: Our Meyer lime is full of blooms. In previous years, it has yielded lots of fruit. However, last year, the blooms were abundant, but all of the bloom fell off, and we had a crop of one lime. What happened?
