23,948 Garden Web Discussions | Vegetable Gardening
I've had nothing but trouble with bugs in my veggies whenever I've used any kind of mulch: it provides them with too good a living environment and especially a good haven in the winter. A friend of mine who owns a CSA organic farm says he's done with mulch for the same reason. I've used both straw and wood chips. I would do whatever is easiest to remove the straw. Tilling it in would be OK, but that sounds like more work than removing and composting it.
I've read the opposite - that straw is good under squash plants. It deters the cucumber beetle from laying eggs in the soil at the base.
If you are not bothered by cucumber beetles your best bet to deter squash bugs is bare soil. Then the squash bugs have nowhere to hide.
I don't till in straw, it doesn't break down enough by spring in my long winter. I rake mine up and put it in the compost pile.
I've been growing this for a number of years. It's a staple of Italian cooking, great recipes available, and it's not bitter at all. It's mild, with a texture all its own. I mostly use it in several soup recipes and in a couple with cannellini beans. Great fall crop.
Lettuce is hardy to a few degrees below freezing, but it does tend to lose quality after repeated exposure to hard frost especially if daytime temperatures are also cold.
A tunnel on its own can make things worse. Since your coldest nights probably follow a fresh snowfall, and because snow has excellent insulating capacity, plants outside under a blanket of snow will fare better than those in a tunnel.
If you can get your hands on some spun-bonded row cover, lay that on the plants starting in November and then erect your tunnel over. If not, skip the tunnel.
This was my first year at growing onions and it went better then I thought. I started the seeds in garden last October and then in April I moved them to there final location. Right now there in the final curing stages. This October I will do Walla Wallas again, and then a long storage type and then a long storage red onion.
Walla Walla Onions
I had very late development of the hard seed coat on my cukes this year, and suspect it was weather dependent. The temps varied little from day to night, and we had numerous showers and it was like growing in a greenhouse. Some of the fruits I nearly discarded because of their size turned out to be quite palatable yet, with small, tender seeds and lacking the tough kernels. If your marketmores (and it's a variety I grow every year along with my picklers) were still green, they were immature. A ripe cuke goes yellow. Poor pollination on a marketmore would have yielded no or misshapen fruit, not one with no seed coat.
The fingernail test is the best way to tell if they are not ready. If a thumbnail easily pierces the rind, not ready. With pumpkins color is a good indicator, and with others you can check the bottoms of the fruits for a color change toward yellow or orange.
My Baby Pam pie pumpkins are on the curing shelf along with a few buttercups, but most of the fruits aren't ready. The longer they stay on the vine, the better, but bad things don't happen to them on a shelf in warm shade. I do leave the field pumpkins out until the vines start dying back.
Thank you, defrost49! I was wondering if the sugars would be better after sitting. I would have made a mistake. I will let them cure before eating them.
planatus, I so agree! Bad things can and do happen on the vine. I am debating it right now just for that very reason. I will look at the bottoms for coloring and keep doing the fingernail test. Thank you!
Wood remnants grow fungi dedicated to the breakdown of dead materials. As far as I know, this is an entirely separate plate of beans from the predatory things that may be affecting your living plants. For instance, the two main "mildews" that affect cukes may gather in wood chips but they would also do the same in bare dirt, straw, pine needles, old gloves, and so on. The spores are everywhere, but wood is no magic safe nurturing harbor for them.
Hmmmmmmm. Lori, You may have helped me with a dilemma I've had! DH bought me a pretty cheapo tumbler. It's almost impossible to get the stuff out without spilling it all over the place.
If I just place it over a fallow bed and dump it every once in awhile I'll have the best of both worlds!!!!!!! Thanks! Nancy
I've been using a 'chicken coop composter'. The chickens live over the compost and scratch and shred it, and eat the kitchen scraps. It takes up relatively little room. I posted videos on youtube on how to make it. Just search my user name, chickencoopcomposter, on youtube.
Here is a link that might be useful: youtube
Growing up on the farm, raccoons in the corn was a real problem. I remember my parents trying just about everything. The thing that finally worked was the least expensive of all.
My teenage brother had horrendously smelly feet. Mom would make him do a few barefoot laps around the corn patch very couple of days.
I know it sounds ridiculous, but it worked.
Slimy- about as sure as I can be without a camera monitoring it! But really it is that they do not ripen when brought inside after collecting fallen fruit.
I thought the premise was that the fruit only fall off the plant when ripe or very near ripe- the husk is yellow to brown and papery dry. So when you scoop them off the ground you bring them in and let them sit a couple of days or so then open your husks to hopefully find ripe fruit. What I have been finding is distinctly greenish fruit in a brown husk and those fruit stay green for so long (weeks, months) I eventually toss them. There are usually a few that are actually ripe.
Lily, thanks for the commiseration! If I ever figure it out, I'll pass along the info!
Just came home from our 4-H daycare garden. The Ground Cherries (Aunt Molly) are ripe this year and a big hit with the kids. I have heard that they are poisonous until they fall off the plant. I warned the kids that they need to carefully pull up the leaves to find the ripe ones on the ground. This is an unusually warm sunny summer here in PNW so there should be a lot of GC until fall. I tasted some and very sweet - almost like a cherry. The fruit was almost the size and color of sungold tomato.
Cucurbits so far not minding the mud, but the brassicas and tomatoes are doing even worse than the peppers. Some tomato plants gone almost totally yellow, and today I saw that the outer leaves of the cabbages are yellow.
I did spot a low-growing cucumber gone all moldy from lying in the mud. I think I'll put something under the butternut squash fruits.
We have had more rain than last year, which is lessening the severity of the drought. My place has gotten less than other areas of my small town. It has been nice to see what is possible with some of my perennials with the rain (like the roses) and it has kept some of my vegetables alive that I was prepared to give up on because of pests.
Last September, we received gobs of rain and my red mustard was about 6 feet tall. I loved seeing that.