Smart tricks for vital vegetables

• Sun boxes for vegetable seedlings

When you’re starting vegetables indoors near a normally sunny south-facing window but the early spring sun won’t cooperate, maximize the rays with aluminium foil-lined sun boxes. Cut out one side of a cardboard box and line the three inner ‘walls’ with foil. When you face the boxes towards the outside, sunlight will reflect back onto your vegetable seedlings. Plants will not only catch more sun, but their stems will grow straight rather than bending towards the light.

•  Foiling cutworms

Before setting out a tomato seedling, wrap each stem with a 10 x 10-cm collar of foil, leaving it loose enough to allow the stem to grow as it expands. Plant the seedlings with 5cm foil above the soil and 5cm below so that the cutworms won’t be able to penetrate the shiny armour.

•  Night-time warmers

If an unseasonably cold night has been predicted, get outdoors as early as you can and flank your vegetable plants with something that will absorb the heat of the sun all day and radiate it at night. That ‘something’ could be large, flat stones or terracotta tiles left over from your new floor. Another solution is to bend wire coat hangers into hoops, secure them over the plants and drape them with black plastic garbage bags for the night.

• Secure trellis-grown melons with pantihose

If you grow your melons on a trellis, a sling made from a pair of old pantihose will keep the enlarging melons from falling to the ground. Cut off a leg of pantihose, slip it over a melon and tie each end of the pantihose to the trellis.

•  Keep root vegetables straight

To prevent horseradish and special varieties of carrots and parsnips from forming forks or getting bent out of shape, which is usually A caused by stones, grow them in sections of PVC pipe placed vertically in the ground and filled with rich soil and humus. When you harvest the roots in autumn, you’ll be surprised at how straight and thick your vegetables have grown.

•  Hang a bag of mothballs

Mothball-haters include rodents and insects, so consider putting some of these smelly balls into your vegetable garden. Caution: don’t let mothballs touch the soil or the toxic chemicals in them (usually naphthalene or dichlorobenzene) could contaminate it. If you think you can simply place mothballs on lids, tiles or other flat surfaces to keep them off the ground, think again. In no time at all, wind and garden invaders will knock them off. For safety’s sake, put a few mothballs in small mesh bags and hang them from a trellis.

•  Grow onions through newspaper

Here’s a bit of headline news: one of the easiest ways to grow healthy onions is through newspaper mulch. Why? Because onion stalks cast a very slim shadow at best, letting in the sunlight that will sprout weed seeds. A block-out mat of newspapers will stop weeds short.

In early spring, wet the soil of the onion patch. Then spread three or four sections of newspaper over the area, hosing down each one. With one or two fingers, punch holes about 12-15cm apart through the wet mat and place an onion set or onion seedling within each. Firm moist soil around the sets or seedlings and cover the mat with shredded leaves and grass clippings. Weeds won’t survive as your onions grow and thrive.

•  A tyre tower for potatoes

Increase your potato yield by growing potatoes in a stack of tyres. Fill a tyre with soil and plant two whole or halved seed potatoes about 5cm deep. Once the potatoes have sprouted around 15-25cm of foliage, place a second tyre on top of the first and fill with more soil, leaving 8-10cm of foliage exposed.

Repeat the process again and your three-tyre tower will triple your potato crop. Potatoes sprout on the underground stems — and the taller the stems, the greater the number of tasty tubers you will produce.

•  Two sprays for pumpkins

Ward off fungal diseases in a pumpkin patch by spraying each pumpkin with a homemade mixture of 1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda and ½ teaspoon vegetable oil stirred into 1 litre water.

Fungal diseases aside, some gardeners claim that they can enrich a pumpkin’s colour with a different spray: aerosol whipped cream, applied around the base of each plant every three weeks.

•  Grow your own loofahs

The loofah gourd (Luffa cylindrica) is a purely practical choice for gardeners: it’s grown primarily for its dried pulp, which we know as the exfoliating beauty sponge of the same name. Simply plant and cultivate loofahs as directed on the seed packet — although in cooler climates with short growing seasons you’ll need to start the loofah gourd seeds indoors.

When a gourd lightens in weight and its skin begins to brown, peel it. Wet it thoroughly and squeeze out the seeds with both hands, then put the gourd on a rack to dry for two to four weeks or until hard. (Placing the gourds near a heating source will speed the process.) Use a sharp knife to slice the dried loofah crossways into rounds to make homegrown skin scrubbers that the whole family can use.