Vegetable Gardening

24,795 Garden Web Discussions | Vegetable Gardening




I grow purple for summer, and Gigante for winter. Gigante gets huge (needs one and a half foot spacing) and still does not get woody. Purple I direct seed, Gigante I seed in flats and transplant. Will be interesting to find out if in your area you can grow these all winter.
Our favorite way to eat it is peel, slice thin, and dip in Annie's Goddess dressing :)

Planted the giant variety in mid feb, morning sun till almost noon, harvested for 4th of july. Still delicious and not woody at all.
TIP: don't plant spinach near it, maybe that is why it took so long to grow as i thought it was spinach and kept harvesting the leaves for 6-8 weeks before noticing a little bulb at the base.
New raised bed, but used less organic matter to see if there would be a difference. I learned my lesson, don't pinch on incorporating the organic
This kohlrabi recipe got great reviews at a dinner party. I also used purple zebra carrots and made the harissa too.
http://food52.com/recipes/14545-kohlrabi-and-carrot-salad-with-harissa


I thought pepper blossoms were self-pollinating, so crossing isn't a big problem unless you're growing different varieties near each other? I've saved seed from a number of open-pollinated varieties of peppers (mostly chiles) over the years & they all came true. Chile peppers are often open pollinated, & the pics look a lot like piquin/pequin peppers, tho there's a chance it may be a hybrid. You'll definitely get a pepper plant from the seeds & it could be a fun experiment...

Agree that they could also be pequin. And while pepper blossoms are self pollinating they are also prone to crossing by insects. Some pepper seeds I got in a trade last year ended up being crossed.
If you have other peppers growing nearby then all you have to do to get pure seed is to bag some blossoms until the peppers start to form. At which point you can take the bags off and mark the peppers with yarn so you know what peppers to save seeds from. Little organza bags you can get at craft stores work well to prevent cross pollination. This is assuming the plant is open pollinated to begin with and isn't a hybrid.
Rodney

All of that information is freely available at your local county extension office. The layout is nice but information is tedious to input and your weather integration will likely be off. I don't think you add $15/year in value which is what you intend to charge people. Sounds harsh but if you're going to tell people to try out your beta version you should hear it now.
All that information could easily be inputted into a simple, offline spreadsheet that is free. Calculations, type of vegetables, crop rotations, weather days, etc could be already inputted and linked as well. Google spreadsheets will even email when a certain date occurs i.e. harvest, spray, check, frost day approaching, etc:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IbCbxutPxqE9vIJV5jXNghPXQzu7rCtXY05oAH9nnA0/edit?pli=1
I'd scale back to just your region, integrate more with smartphone app, and get that right first. You would also know your own weather better as well.

Thanks A J - appreciate your time to look and your feedback. The pricing was an old model, which I don't think will work out, as you rightly point out. My current interest in the tool is more as a means to capture the great information that people have in their spreadsheets and help draw intelligence from that for others (I am not looking to make some $). My sense is that the experienced gardeners have extensive knowledge about what to do, both instinctively and based on data over the years. Some of that is apparent in forums like this one, but the data that they have is less obvious.
The weather integration is an open question, and that is what I wanted to check with a broader data set. From the research that I have done, there are crop maturity models for grains based on degree-days, but not so much for vegetables. The local extensions do provide great information, and I have talked to master gardeners from my local extension and they have been great sources of advice, specially where pests are concerned.
Once again - thanks for you input!

Thanks for the replies. I've got a garden weasel but since this tool has such small tines and unique look I figured it had to have some very specific job. It doesn't work in grass nor does it work on hard or even semi-hard ground (not that I really expected it too).
And I did find some more markings under the tool when I brushed away some dirt and rust. AT-200 C 5 -8 (or maybe it's 8- ). With the C, 5, and -8 off on their own. These haven't helped me either.
Rodney

Gardevator! That's what it's called. It was damn near impossible to find much information about it but it was made by Ansan Tool and Manufacturing Company in Chicago, IL.
Earlier today I got some space cleared out in my garden for me to finally try using this tool on some freshly turned soil and it's awesome. Effortless to use and makes a smooth, uniformly textured seed bed in just mere moments. If anyone happens to come across one I highly recommend you get it.
Rodney

Ok - thank you. I've read about people saying to use it and others say it doesn't really matter. Since I have a small area that I'm growing the vetch, I'll give the inoculant a try.
Hopefully the shelf life is longer than one year, since I'll have 1 lb of vetch seeds and inoculant that treats 8 lbs.
Thanks again.
Chris

It probably depends on how well your garlic bed drains. If the soil drains well the rain should not be a problem and the moisture will help the garlic to sprout and grow roots. If the soil drains poorly then it could cause cloves to rot before getting well established. But then again poorly draining soil may be problematic for the garlic period.



Thought I would report back on my results of this fall planting. The Boston Pickling Cukes began flowering Sept 6 and I started harvesting Gherkin sized cukes on Sept 19. They are still producing but the fruits are maturing much slower than they do in July from my spring planting. The plants are also starting to look pretty ragged and don't seem to care much for the cooler weather and looking at the current blossoms it looks like 90% or more are male with very few females currently coming on. I am going to do one more batch of pickles this weekend and then inspect again for female blossoms and if I don't see many I think I will pull the plants and put that bed to rest for the winter. I think Mid July will be the latest that I try to sow Cukes in the future.
The yellow squash plant didn't do much at all. It didn't get enough sun due to some shading from a cherry tomato plant and trees. The plant never got over about 1 ft tall and 2 ft across but the poor little thing still tried to put out a few mini squash that only got about 4" long.



So my vetch has been growing since probably the third week in August and I'm confused as to why the sunnier spot is doing so poorly.
Just FYI, as someone who spent years in the tropics, and who has also lived in the Southwest, I knew that ;-) I was addressing the OP in Florida, where a squash from somewhere like Thailand might feel right at home.
Right. We got diverted to "high temperatures", which, to a northerner, I guess Florida might seem to be.