24,795 Garden Web Discussions | Vegetable Gardening


the cordless cultivator. no spend money on something else. best used after it is worked up for weed control. 30' x 5' garden a good hoe would be better investment. may want to consider spading that size garden with a spading fork. it doesn't have to be done all at 1 time. or consider a mantis type tiller. check e-bay for mantis tillers. $300 new.

My raised bed is 4x8 and I have found that 5 untrimmed indeterminates that are tied to a zig zagged line of pig wire are all I can handle. I put my sungold cherry in a 3x3' bed by it's self cause it gets so big. Nancy

I was told we can't grow tomatoes here because it gets too hot in summer. I have one Big Boy purchased at HD now growing in partial shade. I know jalapeno peppers do fine in partial shade, so giving tomatoes a whirl too. Nice to know sort of what to expect. There are only two of us, so we figured one plant would suffice. The jalepeno went in a month earlier than the tomato and is already producing. No flowers yet on the 1' tall tomato, but it's growing. Soon!

I a lot of people in the far north plant runner beans. I've also heard that they start their regular beans indoors. In a greenhouse is another option, although that wouldn't work for you.
Can you put the seeds in a very large pot of soil in the house and take them in and out for sunny weather for a month or so? Then just move them outdoors when it's warm enough? Beans hate colder weather. They also don't do well in extreme heat like AZ. I always had to really on yardlongs and cowpeas when I was in AZ.
Also, bush beans have shorter days to maturity. But, hard to get much from a couple of pots of bush beans.

in my case I, too, don't get much from runners, so I stick to regular pole. Warm the soil with black plastic, and consider putting up a small hoop house to protect the beans until it is warm enough. The yield of pole beans is largely determined by how long they can produce, and you are in Zone 2.



Any organic matter helps - leaf mold, chopped straw or hay, cotton or coffee hulls, etc. Not as effective at compost but helps. Peat skews your soil pH so use depends on your pH. Sand, per all the discussions over on the Soil forum, doesn't help much and it takes a lot of it. Even unfinished compost works and it finishes composting in place. Did you fill the whole bed with only compost? Nothing else?
Your compost contains enough diverse components or just turf. Perhaps it needs more carbons added to decompose. Do you run an active hot compost pile or a stacked cold pile? What is available to you locally?
Dave

If you have soil that is heavily clay and tends to be slow to dry out, warm up, and tends to be cloddy, I think 3 inches of medium/ coarse sand can do wonders to loosen that soil up. For my silty clay loam I also add a good bit of peat moss. I love what this does for my soil. Just today I went out and tilled in the planting rows for a row of gladious and a half row of super sugar snap peas. How did the ground work up here in wetish Indiana?...like a sand box.



Rhizo1 ; Thanks for correcting my radical spelling of radicle. I actually do know better, but I'm getting old .....
(Interestingly the gardenweb spellchecker is objecting to "radicle." I wonder if I actually had it right to begin with, but the software radicalised it. Anyway, GW should know better!)

A passing update to soaking seeds, I also purchased some Lupine flowers which I hear are infamous for not sprouting without a good soak and possibly even some husk scoring. I soaked the seeds for 24 hours, and got about 50% of them swell and crack the skins to their seeds right off. Inside was a classic green embryo, however the others had shown no signs of swelling. I scored the ones who had not swollen with a simple nail file, and of those about 85% caught up to their siblings within just a few hours.
I've planted all my seeds now and already a Lupine has pushed from the starting medium and is trying to push out two cotyledons after only 12 hours. I expect 100% success with the lupines. :)

I'm never a fan of planting only 1 of anything. It cuts your odds of having any success way down. 2 plants will double your odds, 3 will triple them. Especially when cross-pollination is required. And one doesn't normally only plant one melon plant per mound anyway, you plant 2 and often 3 to insure adequate male and female blooms at the same time.
So I would success you sort your seeds, and if you don't want to grow them as transplants but decide to direct seed instead then plant 5-6 seeds of each in separate hills next to each other, close enough that the vines will be able to intertwine for pollination, and then thin each hill to 3 plants once the plants are 3-4" tall.
Dave

Hi Dave - thanks for the feedback. I do have asparagus in a bed all its own I have too many onions to put out in other places, and was thinking I might be able to use the room in the asparagus bed around the asparagus so it's not "wasted space" once the asparagus is growing to fern. Thanks for the quick feedback.


If your mix already has a little fertilizer in it, you're probably OK. You don't want to risk burning them. My eggplants were planted on March 14 and are still in their seed starting mix. I just gave them a very light feeding at 1/4 strength. In a week or so I will transplant to regular mix in 4-inch containers. They look a week behind the one you call your good one.





It isn't so much breaking the rules as it saves us from having to ask about all the other things that could be causing the problems and then waiting for the answers. All info up front is a big help. :)
It does sound from reading your other post, that you went over-board with the additives. Not sure why all that is needed, especially since you added all of them last year too. Minerals are retained in soil for a long time and you can easily create a toxic buildup of them by over-applying mineral based supplements. Unless you have had a professional soil test done that recommended all those additives. Is that case?
Based on the pics I would agree that you have some sun and wind damage from insufficient hardening off, especially in the last pick. But the issue in the first pic and the top leaf in the middle pic shows interveinal chlorosis and that is a nutrient issue. It can be caused by exposure to weather extremes and by excess water (yours or Mother Nature's) AND by a severe nutrient imbalance or a skewed pH in the soil.
Greensand can be lethal if over applied - did you use only per label directions? Did you till it in well before planting? Then you doubled up on all the Mg, Zinc, Copper, Moly and especially the Manganese with the Azomite and some of your leaves appear to me to be showing symptoms of manganese toxicity and the accompanying iron binding. Google images of 'manganese toxicity in plants' to see many pics to compare to your plants. And the link below gives you great info on toxicity symptoms in plants.
https://www.hydroponics.net/learn/deficiency_by_element.asp
This is further compounded by clay soil if you have that (and it looks like clay in the pics).
So if I'm right, what to do? First, get a professional soil test done. Contact your local county ag extension office for that. Ask for an organic matter % and especially a pH and follow their recommendations. Then assuming the local source of compost is providing quality product I'd side dress all the plants with several inches of it in the hopes of binding up as much of the elemental toxicity as possible and hope the plants make it. They may adapt and compensate to some degree. Then lay off all the additives. :) Assuming your soil has an active soil food web they aren't needed anyway and repeated applications are definitely not needed.
Hope this helps. Good luck.
Dave
Dirt said it all but I would just add that there was no question of rule breaking, just that without all the details the answers you get will not be as informative as they could be. Good luck in the garden.