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In my opinion, staking plants in the vegetable garden is one of the biggest challenges. It's
an important thing to do, because you want to keep your plants healthy and looking good
all summer long. Take tomatoes for instance: if they're growing on the ground, you've got
the plants on the ground, the vegetables on the ground, they're going to be more prone
to insects and diseases; and of course mice and other rodents are going to be able to
feed on them. Whereas if they are up off the ground, they're going to be nice and look
good all season long. Also they are not going to have soil splashing all over them. Plus
you're going to get much better production when you stake and raise them off the ground.
When growing tomatoes, the whole goal is to achieve that largest, juiciest tomato that
you can get. However, tomato plants have a tendency to develop suckers. These are the
little growth pieces that come out of the stem and basically have no value to the plant.
They crowd the plant, they take away light and nutrients, removing the nutrients and
so forth from your tomatoes. So you want nice big tomatoes and you want to remove those
suckers. We call this suckering. And basically you're going to go in and pinch those suckers
out. That opens up the plant, gives it lots of sunshine and allows the nutrients and water
to be delivered right to those juicy tomatoes. Nobody wants to share their vegetables with
insects so the first thing you can do is inspect your garden on a regular basis. Even if you
don't pick plants, or pick weeds, or do any work in the garden, just walk through the
garden every night. Look at the plants closely, look underneath the leaves, look on top--know
what's right about those plants in order to know what's wrong with them. Then if you see
something that's wrong, catch it early. Many times if you catch a problem early, let's
say tomato horn worms for instance, you can hand pick and remove them without having to
use any kinds of pesticides. So good pest control in a vegetable garden starts with
regular inspection.