23,948 Garden Web Discussions | Vegetable Gardening
I always thought that they only carried 1 or 2 fruits per vine to ripeness. I don't think the vines have the nutrients to ripen all those potential fruits, so they are unneeded backups. But maybe I'm mistaken, it's only my second season growing winter squashes.
Hi, shelleyk.
You might want to ask this in the Australian vegetable gardening forum, since your challenges and options for dealing with them are going to be different than they are in the US, where most of the folks who post here live.
Here is a link that might be useful: Australian vegetable gardening
Ok, great, you're having almost exactly the same weather I have. To get brussels sprouts in the fall I have to buy transplants in august, then feed them a fair bit to get them to size up quickly. Then they will make sprouts in very late fall and through the winter. I also buy broccoli and cabbage transplants, but they will give me a harvest in the actual autumn months. I would start my own seeds, but I always lose track of them in the hurry to do everything else and they inevitably end up crisped. Cheers and good luck!
If you don't mind hand picking - the little buggers will tend to come up to the top if you go along with a hose and water with one of those nice drenching shower head type of wands. You can spray down into the crown of the plant and under the leaves some. Apparently they breathe thru their skin and so are coming up for air. I have been picking them off the prize-choi which they seem to truly love and have the upper hand on them for now. As you have the water wand in your hand you can also rinse their yellow guts off your fingers after dispatching them.
I put my winter squash, Taybelle acorn and Hi Jinx pumpkin in on June 11th. My garlic harvest was about a month early for all varieties and I have already harvested the pumpkin and am waiting for the acorns as they took longer to put out female flowers and set fruit. I did find, however, that both the acorn and the pumpkin dropped polinated and un-developed female flowers when they had set as many fruit as they could carry. For the pumpkins that was three per vine, one of the acorns has three good sized ones and the others have 4 or 5 each which I expect won't be overly large. Some are very dark green with hard skin and others are still a lighter green and soft. I did break off two of the acorns accidentally and am glad that I can go ahead and eat them. One of the summer squashes I planted, Heirloom Yellow straight neck, did not taste good if harvested too early.
Thanks for all the good information.
I am anxious to get the squash harvested so I can begin to prepare the soil for the main event, garlic.
The ones I harvested tasted great... not really sweet, but I don't think bush acorn squash is supposed to be sweet. Very flavorful and not stringy. And they did make more.. but all my plants had SVB so they are small and not fully matured :(
I have only 1 neighbor with squash type plants. I don't destroy the surrounding barriers as I live in the country and need barriers against field spraying. Actually, if faithfully done, killing any adults in the fall works pretty good.
I've tried just about all these methods with the exception of planting later, and if I can make myself wait maybe that would help. Our daughter planted a big pumpkin patch in an area that didn't have anything planted before, and there are lots of squash bugs and too many plants to rely on picking the bugs off, unless that's your full-time job. We pick off eggs and squish the bugs or spray them with soap water which works great but only kills the bugs you hit with it. As the plants started dying off I got frustrated to the point of using chemicals a couple times, using a long sprayer arm to target just the vines those bugs love to eat while trying to avoid getting any on the flowers to avoid harming bees but I doubt that's completely possible.
My tomatillos don't seem to be making it to maturity. They are still dropping at a steady rate. The few that have matured are currupted by a worm. :( I have dusted with Bt with the hope that will help, but I haven't ID'd the worm yet so who knows.
Any other thoughts why the fruits aren't making it to maturity?
I have an insane number of plants.... planted a full seed packet thinking germination might be a problem. Obviously it wasn't. Could overcrowding be an issue? Lack of sunlight in the interior of the tomatillo jungle?
some are weeds, probably crab grass, and some are lettuce. for example, mapping the picture onto (0,1) in x and (0,1) in y, the group at (0.7,0.3) is mostly lettuce. the group at (0.2,0.8) is mostly crabgrass. you have crab grass in the spinach picture too, with very little spinach (not uncommon, spinach are slow germinators, specially in warm soil).
Agree with the others. Harvest the ones you've planted. You could replant yours but it would probably be a couple years or so before the bulbs sized back up. So unless the garlic you are growing are either hard to find or expensive to buy, it would be best to start with fresh stock planted in the fall. And as has been mentioned, hardneck garlic are usually hardier and will probably do better for you than softnecks.
Rodney
