Garden Detective

It’s time to prepare for the 7th annual Great Long Island Tomato Challenge! This year’s contest will be held at 7 p.m. on Aug. 23 at Newsday headquarters (235 Pinelawn Rd., Melville.)

Give your plants plenty of tender loving care all summer long, then bring your biggest, heaviest ripe fruit to the event. I’ll weigh your tomatoes personally and crown the 2013 Tomato King or Queen.

The...

Many on Long Island whose gardens were flooded by superstorm Sandy are wondering whether it’s safe to eat vegetables grown in soil contaminated by water that not only contained salt but might have transported chemicals, bacteria and other pathogens to their gardens. Others fear plants may not grow there at all.

Both concerns are valid, but the situation is not hopeless: In the months since...

Ever notice how most years, you only see a few cicadas, and you don't hear them chirping all that much? And then other years you find their discarded exoskeletons on everything from gas grills and swing sets to front doors and mailboxes? Ever notice how those are the years when it sounds like an Alfred Hitchcock movie outside your window every night around Memorial Day?

That's because after...

It's time for our annual Garden Poetry Contest, and this year's topic is "Lucky Seven."

Send in your original poem of exactly seven lines that conveys seven things you love about gardening. Write an ode to your seven favorite plants, set your seven seed-starting steps to prose or rhyme seven uses for your homegrown radicchio. Use your imagination!

The best submissions will...

The annual Orchid Show at the New York Botanical Garden gets lots of well-deserved fanfare, but this year Long Island will get its own piece of the orchid pie.

The Long Island Orchid Society's first-ever Long Island Orchid Festival hits the scene this week, running from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on May 3-5 at Planting fields Arboretum State Historic Park in Oyster Bay. The festival will host orchid...

It's time to start focusing on the outdoors, and getting better educated is always part of the fun. Benner's Farm in Setauket (56 Gnarled Hollow Rd., 631-689-8172) has unveiled a roster of workshops that will get you on your way, help the little ones get involved and even give teens something to look forward to. 

Eat Dirt You Worm! (Ages 5 and up, $35) Saturday, April 20, 10 a.m.-noon

Learn...

Looking to get outside this weekend? Farmingdale State College's Ornamental Horticulture Department has your back, as it's holding its third  Educational Field Day and Open House Saturday from 8:30 a.m.  to 4:45 p.m.

The teaching gardens on the campus, 2350 Broadhollow Rd.,  will be open all day. There will be plant sales (and a raffle), plus lectures, workshops, garden tours...

Lots of readers tell me they talk to their plants -- some even sing to them -- and they all claim the plants benefit from the interactions. I used to think the only benefit to plants was the carbon dioxide exhaled through speech (or song), but a couple of years ago I read a study that showed tomatoes grew better and bigger when exposed to music -- from a radio.

And now a new "Nature"...

I was driving home from dinner last night and almost drove off the road when I spotted the most beautiful moon I've ever seen hanging out nonchalantly over Hempstead Harbor as I made my way from Port Washington to Roslyn.

I learned later this was the "Monster Moon," an astrological occurrence that results in a perfectly round, full, yellow-hued, awe-inspiring sphere hanging above...

Hungry? So are some plants growing out in the wild, maybe right in your town. And they want more than just fertilizer, water and sunlight. They want meat. Really.

If this interests you and watching "Little Shop of Horrors" on Netflix over the weekend won't satisfy your, er, thirst, I've got just the show for you.

Matt Kaelin, somewhat of a carnivourous plant conoisseur, for...