23,594 Garden Web Discussions | Vegetable Gardening
While I garden at home, I spend way too much time going back forth for things and since there is more than 1 gardener in my household, I am finding it a necessity to develop my own garden bag (akin to a tool bag) that will house my favorite implements. These will include:
Stiff tape measure
Spade with a ruler engraged in it
Pruners (precision and larger)
Ziploc baggies
Plastic bags (for plant trimmings that cannot go into the compost, trash, etc)
Alcohol swabs (sterilizing pruners)
Gloves (more than 1 pair, just in case)
Hand cultivator (one side has tines, one has a hoe, great for breaking up roots)
Weeding sickle
Rasp for sharpening things
Strips of old T-shirts for tying things
Pocket knife/Leatherman
Zip ties
Wide brimmed hat.
If I gardened away from the house I would probably add sun screen, water bottle and a camera to document anything that I feel I would need to research later (bugs, foliage spots, etc), for many people this could be accomplished with their phone, but I would not trust my memory when comparing images online later. Pen and paper is always a good idea too.
Some pics from this afternoon, three weeks after transplanting. You can see how the tomatoes next to my garage are doing great compared those in my garden.
A couple additional items of interest...
-This weekend I covered the raised beds with my first batch of compost of the season to serve as a mulch. I had to screen it first.
-Any powdery residue on foliage is from DE that I applied two weeks ago.
-I am already starting to see some brown spots and holes on my cuke leaves for the third year in a row. Seriously losing hope that I'll ever be able to get cukes to thrive in this garden. My older house just 5 miles away was cucumber heaven.
wow yall,
I have been growing them in 3 ft square wooden bins. for like three or four years now,,,,,,, bottom layer is hardware cloth to keep out the voles etc,,, also there are ground hogs here
Plus adopted outside stray cat, tries to use them as litter boxes, so I had to put fencing over them and sometimes use screens too over the bins when newly planted etc...
I presently supposedly to have now Royal jewel, and something called Tennessee something, probably Beauregard
I grew some of my slips .yesterday planted more of them in my bins
only thing I use on my sweets ,to eat is coconut oil, organic that is. baked in the oven and sliced in big slices.. Peeled of course. I even give some regular sweet potatoes to my chickens...
Lots of flea market pot slips no one knows the names or kind sometimes.
I bake a corning ware full at a time of plain baked ones... and store them in refrigerator and eat them cold...
Candying any of them is blasphemy, LOL
My option choices would be:
(1) add blood meal or other high N nutrient (per label directions) to the bed and till/mix up the whole bed contents so all evenly distributed then plant. Add N as needed throughout the season.
(2) rake off all the leaves and manure into a pile and mix in blood meal or other high N nutrient with them, plant in the raked off bed, then once plants established, use the raked off pile as mulch around the plants.
Either way you will need N supplements until the leaves decompose more.
I'd do #1 as even shredded leaves mixed with composted manure can take 6 months to balance out, 3 months with the blood meal mixed in too.
Dave
Thanks - the manure doesn't have much N left in it, so I as going to add bloodmeal (or maybe coffee chaff - not good as mulch since it packs and becomes hydrophobic, but good compost activator) anyway.
DH says he scraped the leaves off to the sides and put manure in the middle (and some fell on top of leaves), that's why it looks like there is such a thick layer. I was going to use the leaves as mulch, he misunderstood when I said I'd "use them on top". But we have plenty.
Glad to see you recommend #1 - less work (I think) than scraping it all off to mix, then putting it back on.
Almost done with 2nd side (60+ ft) of raised beds in tunnel - got west side all filled yesterday AM after double-digging on Sat PM.
If it rains a lot , then you cannot prevent over watering by nature. So the cure is to fertilize more to replenish the depleted Nitrogen by leaching. OR, top dress with good manure. Manure, not compost ! This way the rain will do the fertilizing.
"Daily watering" is almost always over-watering. Add rain and it definitely becomes too much water.
But in this case i suspect lack of any nutrients is the main issue. They need to be fed. All plants need to be fed something and in containers it needs to be fed regularly..
I would normally recommend one of the many organic liquid fertilizers available but in order to recover from the excess water, a granular one would work better this time.
There are probably 35-40 different organic granular fertilizers available so it all depends on what you can find locally. Any of the big box stores like Walmart, Home depot, Lowe's etc sell them, so do most nurseries.
Follow the label directions for amount and frequency of application.
Dave.
Just in case, if you're not familiar with the Colorado Potato Beetle, do a quick image search and make sure you're not seeing those guys instead. (They could look vaguely similar.)
That said, I haven't killed the CPBs either - they don't seem to do too much damage in my situation.
Laceyvail is right. Even if you get down to one vole, they can do a lot of damage. One year I had them eat every potato in a 25-foot double row!
Go figure, but they seem to lose interest in my garden in midsummer. If I hold some potatoes and green them up really well and plant in mid-June they leave them alone and I get some late potatoes.
Juicy fruit doesn't work, ditto gummy bears. When I find their runs, I poke stout sticks in them, which at least makes them work harder. When you find a major corridor, you can excavate a hole, place a snap-type mouse trap baited with apple in it, and cover with a board. You can trap a lot of voles this way.
Drat. Doesn't sound promising about the voles. I saw a lot of holes in April, so I went around with repellant and raspberry cane trimmings. Fewer holes now. Hoping they'll leave my main crop potatoes (planted last week) alone.
Floral -- I threw a little Dr. Earth in when planting (new to me, I used to pour a little fish emulsion in, but decided it was probably best not to wet them). That's it on feeding. Oh, and they were covered for a month w/ AG 19 so maybe they were reaching a bit for sunshine? But, I'm short, so thigh high may be shorter than you're imagining :)
Sweet potatoes are different. They need heat, and you definitely want to harvest before frost. They also need long curing at relatively high temperature and humidity.
"Irish" potatoes can tolerate cooler temperatures, poor soil, and are true tubers. You can dig them after the plant flowers as new potatoes (after 1.5 - 2 months), or wait until the foliage dies either naturally or of frost, and then dig as storage potatoes. They are susceptible to late blight and many of the same diseases as tomatoes since they are also in the nightshade family. Sweet potatoes are related to morning glories and have similar vines and flowers.
BTW, you can eat sweet potatoes leaves but Irish potatoes leaves (and the actual fruit, if you get any, look like little green tomatoes) are toxic.
What an amazingly informative post! Thanks for settling the question of when to dig sweet potatoes! I have dug mine before frost most years but many of the "old timers" around here believe that letting the frost kill the vines and then digging up the potatoes the next day somehow makes them keep better over the winter. Most likely an old wives tale it sounds. Also nice to hear about curing....Last year for first time I laid my sweet potatoes out on a wire bakers rack in an 85- 90 degree attic area with a fan on them for almost 2 weeks....they kept INCREDIBLY well all winter long and I still have viable sweet potatoes I dug last October. So I can vouch for your curing statement! Also fascinating to hear that "Irish" (I thought that was just rural-speak for describing Idaho-type potatoes but is what we call them too) potatoes are closely related to tomatoes. As you probably can tell reading this thread, I have far less experience with "irish" potatoes than with sweet potatoes. I love the latter, not only because I prefer to eat them, but I also enjoy watching the vines grow so vigorously. Now I have to go research your last statement...who knew you could eat sweet potato leaves?:) Sorry if this thread has veered to far off from original question, but the subsequent posts have been so interesting I couldn't resist. thanks all.
Asparagus needs to have good draining soil to perform well. Your enriched soil and compost would have been well served to have had some sand with it. Were the asparagus placed over hard pan non-draining soil there may be a problem with standing water...but at any rate, have patience, I remember it took almost 2 months before my ass-per-grass came thru...
Either but most likely both. As they can be an issue even in gardens without mulch. Bare soil plants in mine that I hadn't mulched yet since it was still so cool are covered with them too. Like ticks and other damp, cool soil lovers it is a record year for them unfortunately.
Dave
After my post I went out and looked at the bale of straw, just covered with the beasts. I'm guessing they were in the cool interior and I opened Pandora's box. The whole thing went in the city yard debris for compost. My pile will never kill them.
Interestingly, last year I grew tomatoes in a straw bale with reasonable success and never had a flea beetle problem. Go figure! Time will determine how bad they get. Now if I could just get my carrots going.
Pat
Wood ends up as a mulch here because it takes an extra year or so to break down after I add it in a layer of compost. Like digdirt said, fungus and wood go together.
I got the fruiting heads after a few weeks of laying out a new bed for flowers, and the thin white stuff came in the same bed after about two more months. There's been fungi in there all this time, growing and spreading and doing other general fungus-y things. Oh, also had a slimy one that glowed an intense yellow when hit with a LED flashlight after dark, but no pic. It's always with the top shredded wood layer. Go figure.
The big box boys need to come up with a Morel inoculant, or Destroying Angel, depending on how one treated their customer service reps on the latest call...
Rita, I'm curious, how did your second planting of cucumbers do last year?
I really really hate this thread ;) because I can't come anywhere near this level of production at my new house. I keep getting hit with brown spots on leaves, three years in a row. Even my three week old seedlings are already starting to get it. At my old house I had SO many cukes every single year that they were coming out of my ears.