23,948 Garden Web Discussions | Vegetable Gardening

Yes, spinach is good. Also any kind of fast-growing Asian green like bok choy, tatsoi, gai lon. Other good choices are kale, cilantro, dill, radishes, chard, leaf lettuce. You may be able to pull off beets. Keep the soil moist and shaded to encourage germination.

I suggest a hoop house too. -30C is -22F, I don't think anything uncovered can survive that, unless there is good snow cover.

Oh, thank you! I didn't know this.

Armenian cucumbers are never bitter, even if they get 10 lbs. they're a melon but taste like a great cucumber. More heat tolerant,too.

So where exactly do I cut them? an inch from the ground? or how much from the ground? Where the stalks split? After?

6 inches from the top of the bud. should leave you plenty of plant to regenerate.

I came across this information on facebook & thought it would be a great share here.

To make a Concoction (Egg Amino Acid)

Take 2 Organic eggs (without breaking it) in a glass container and soak them entirely with lemon juice. Seal it and keep it away from direct sunlight.
Open the Jar every 3 days to let the gases out.
At the end of 18 day period, you would notice all the calcium has dissolved and settled at the bottom.

You add 250gms of powdered jaggery, stir it (your eggs would have broken down during this period) and store it for a period of 10 days.

What you have is an effective concentrate. You would need to dilute in proportion and store the balance concentrate.
For spraying on vegetables - ratio of 2 ml to 1 lit of water
For pouring on soil - ratio of 100 ml to 3.5 lit of water.

Benefits:
Gives new Vigor to the plant, increasing flowering & gives good fruiting results.

Credit: Sourced from Mr Binuraj Purushothaman.

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This post was edited by ashok767 on Wed, Aug 13, 14 at 3:51

I used eggs as fertilizer under my eggplants and got these results :

Yes, a Bad Yoke I know.

Most anything can be grown in a pot. But I think most any plant will be more vigorous grown in the ground.

Herbs are good ones for pots. I find pots are my best way to grow cilantro. But that's because I can bring it inside to try and delay bolting. I grow a lot of peppers in pots as well because I want to bring them inside over the winter without trying to dig them out of the ground. I also grow carrots because there are so many rocks around me that my options are either growing them in containers or building more raised beds than I can afford, or putting up with the consequences or rocky soil for carrots.

Angie

Make sure you have a layer of mulch on top of the pots.

Also, if you can put the pots inside other bigger pots, that will help. If not, maybe try to change the color to something lighter so it reflects the sun. Maybe wrap them in white towells??

You mention you have a smaller garden and only one zucchini plant this year. You need to have a male and female flower both blooming on the same day (and each flower only blooms for one day). Having more plants ups the chances that both kinds will be present on any given day. So yes, having only one plant could be part of the problem.

A bit more on the multiple plants for more flowers story:

Zucchini can be pollinated by any Cucurbita pepo varieties which include acorn squash, spaghetti squash, delicata squash, many pumpkins, and some other vining squashlike varieties. So while having only one C. pepo plant can limit flower availability, you could add more plants to help with pollination that would produce something themselves that would not be a zucchini. Your squashes/pumpkins/zucchini would all develop true to type....just don't save seed and expect to grow uncrossed varieties from them in later years.

If you are ordering in the spring next time, I bought that mix Peas/Oats/Vetch from FEDCO and have been very happy with it. I have a stand of it growing in a raised vegetable bed right now. Although the point of using this mix is so you get a lot of voluminous green matter to turn in, so they suggest you plant it in the spring and get a lot of bang for your buck. I planted mine the beginning of July though and as much growth as I get I get. I plan to turn it under in the fall.

In the past I've used just Vetch when it was this late in the season. I would plant in August and it would germinate and I'd let it stand over winter and turn it under in early spring. It worked very well for me. Advantages -- it was easy to turn under with a pitch fork in a raised bed and it didn't really come back after that. And could plant fairly quickly after turning it in bc it breaks down quickly.

I would definitely say it has helped the fertility in my beds. As a matter of fact, this year we built new beds and increased the size of the garden x 3 and didn't have enough soil from the old garden to fill all the new beds and had to purchase soil. So two beds had soil from the old garden and three beds had purchased soil. It has been a very noticeable difference and I've been so happy to see my soil perform so well with nothing more than a little alfalfa meal added in the spring before planting and some fish/seaweed emulsion liquid used a few times over the season.

And now I have the three beds with the new soil in them in cover crop for the rest of the season to get a good start on next year.

Sorry to hear about your groundhog problem. They are the worst! Had one one season and that was so frustrating.

thank you both for the quick response, time to order some

Ah... that's confusing :)

Yes, the 5-1-1 refers to the growing mix, not the NPK ratio. I haven't pampered the peppers at all except to dust them with DE. The CRF that is in the 5-1-1 mix is all that was used to feed them (and the rest of my veggies).

My first year with the Trionfo Violetto beans. Got 10 seeds in a GW trade, all 10 germinated! The leaves are colored much like the almost mature beans; dark green with a strong purple tint. They produce well and look healthy, so I guess they're supposed to be that way.

Wayne, thatâÂÂs a good idea. I can plant the starts between the mature plants and pull them when they are in the way. Thanks!

And saving me money on fertilizer too. :-)

Oldmobie, oh good that the purple cast on the foliage is supposed to be there. I am really enjoy our vines this year. They are a good size bean and turn green when cooked and I love how easily they pull away from the vine when you are harvesting.

That's a nice cattle panel tunnel you have there too!

I think I might have found a way. First, I disturbed their nest which was on my raised bed, and then I flooded it. They moved to the oppposite corner and have some satellite ant beds in between. I disturbed those the next day and flooded them again. Then they moved to I wasn't sure where, I couldn't find a nest anymore, but fewer showed up on my okra plants. They still showed up to chew on my okra. One developing okra had been trying to grow long for over a week now, and it's at like 2 inches only, all chewed up and ugly, I think I just may have to cut it off.

Then a friend of mine told me to use coffee grounds, oatmeal, molasses. I went to Starbucks to get coffee grounds, covered the soil with it. They still came. I had kelp+molasses+fish emulsion plant food in liquid form, I got that mixed with water and sprayed all the leaves and stems and buds, stems, everywhere. I also sprayed the coffee grounds so they splattered all over the stalks.

That was like a week long process! Today, I went out, no ants!! Hope they have moved on and don't come back. But some aphids eggs are back. I squished them all. How do they get up to the leaves to lay eggs??

it has been said.. in the garden clinic forum ... that many of the dish products are a detergent.. rather than a soap ... as we define soap in the garden ...

on the other hand.. if it works.. it works ...

i hope i quoted that properly.. if you are interested.. ask in that forum ... ask for kmmer ... lol..

ken

I realize this is a very old thread, however, it is new to me and I need a question answered I cannot seem to find anywhere.

Kandy Corn is a hybrid, the seeds are terrible at germination, so therefore, what on earth are Kandy Corn's parents? What are two corns I can plant and have the seeds of the two produce Kandy Corn?

Even though Kandy Korn is one of the first se corns, the parentage may still be proprietary. Syngenta I think is the producer of the variety.

except for bacterial wilt, carried by the CBs. I'd really like to see melons resistant to that one.

The Raspa watermelons in the home garden are huge and nearly ready. The tendrils turned brown maybe nearly 3 weeks ago, but the other indications say wait....still growing!!!!, dullness, thump, bottom color. The bottom spot is more white than cream yet.

This post was edited by wayne_5 on Tue, Aug 12, 14 at 10:59

Kings (pleurotus eryngii) taste different from the others and is my favorite tasting oyster, it is a lot like eating a wild boletus. However it is more fastidious to grow then the other ones and may not produce unless the conditions are just right.
The other oysters are really easy to grow. I have cloned them from supermarket mushrooms with no problems, they also taste pretty good and are one of my favorite mushrooms.
Last have you tried Stropharia? They are extremely easy to grow and make a lot of big mushrooms. The taste of Stropharia was a little bit different at first, kind of like potato, but really grew on me after a season.

Yes, I agree that king is different, but not a real oyster culture-wise. I think it is a mediterranean fungus, and not really well suited for the colder parts of the US (which, compared to the mediterranean, is 95% of the US).