23,948 Garden Web Discussions | Vegetable Gardening
Could they be the same as the Dwarf Grey Sugar Pea?
Annette
Here is a link that might be useful: Dwarf Grey Sugar/Cabbage Pea
Loribee, are the openings in the rabbit fencing big enough to get your hand thru the fence. I am using nylon trellis because, as you said, the cattle panels are too big to fit in anything but a truck. Here is another trellis for rattlesnake beans. I need a wide enough opening to get my hands into the middle trellis.
Please see this discussion about this question from a bit further down the page.
Dave
Here is a link that might be useful: Squash volunteer
"Is it possible for those two types of yellow squash to cross-pollinate? If so, then what would I call these?"
They have certainly cross-pollinated. You can call them whatever you like as long as the name isn't already taken. It's your own variety of squash. If you keep them from being pollinated by another variety and save the seeds, you can grow them again. Next year there's a possibility they will be even more variable but through careful breeding/selection and several years you might be able to stabilize the traits.
Rodney
Well, formally, mine were sugar snap, and not snow peas. I often consider them equivalent, but they really aren't. Sugar snaps are sweeter. Mine were Super Sugar Snap this year. Last year they were regular Sugar Snap. Both grew to 6-foot height, just like the seed catalogs said they would. But yes, it looks like real Snow Peas aren't supposed to get that tall.
it is probably voles. I found that, if you have raised beds, it is easy to find them. Their tunnels run parallel to the sides. If your soil is soft enough you can punch a hole with your finger, drop some warfarin laced stuff, and close.
To minimize all this, I keep a large pile of leaves at a distant place from my garden, and I try to minimize winter mulch. The con is that come June you are laboriously mulching around half-sized plants, but mulch attracts them specially in late Fall, when they are trying to establish a home for the winter.
Thanks everyone.
We live in the middle of woods, and are very familiar with them in the house. :( They love our crawl space and its a constant battle. We also discovered that they were getting in the tiny cracks in our exterior chimney. We had tons of them, until we patched that up and their numbers dropped almost to zero........but I had to wash everything in our kitchen....everything!
The ones in the garden are dark, and look like mice......but I'm not certain. We cleaned up the garden last Fall and I left the gate open.......to make it easier on cats to go in there if they wanted to. I haven't seen any yet this year.......but something bit off some of the snow peas at the bottom.
There's always somethin', right?
A few years ago I read an article in an old (20 plus years I think) Organic Gardening about cutting the tip of butternuts to keep the vine small; I belive this was before good bush varieties were developed.
I have trouble with squash bugs, so this technique increased the likelihood that I'd be able to patrol the plant, checking under every leaf. Since then, it's worked quite well. I wait until I have plenty of fruit set, then twice a week i patrol for eggs and pinch tips at the same time.
From the volume of bugs you have described then I'd say no you don't need nematodes. The cost of them is only justified with severe infestations and that isn't the case here.
As for the care while gone, I've never been able to reconcile vacations during spring garden time. MId to late summer works better but spring is just too active in the garden for it to be ignored for any length of time.
It just doesn't work unless one is willing accept the damage that will be done while you're gone. So for the best garden results, vacations are stay-at-home types. :)
Row covers over the bed will help some but they won't prevent all the damage. Just accept that it will happen and psych yourself up to deal with what you find when you get back.
Dave
Thanks Dave, that is good advice. I guess I will harvest what I can before I go and survey the damage when I get back. These bugs are crazy! I guess I should have expected this, but somehow it came as a surprise.
Last night I saw two beetles on my strawberry blossoms (squashed them) and discovered my parsley stems literally covered with tiny black aphids. Also a couple of green caterpillars on the parsley, but they didn't look like the black swallowtail caterpillars (which I would have welcomed). I picked them off but didn't squash them as I wasn't sure what they were. And no idea either what kind of beetles were on the strawerries. But they will be back, I am sure.
"It must be a serious project to keep plants from cross pollinating on a commercial scale
If you are producing seeds for sale, yes it is. Often they use row covers and hand pollination.
It's always a shock for novice gardeners who have saved some seeds for next year. They end up with mutts most of the time.
There have been many "mystery squash" posts here in the past and the answers are always the same. Because of hybrids and/or cross-pollination they could be anything. Here are just a few posts:
Not sure what type of squash this is....
Squash lovers: please identify
Mystery Squash
Unusual squash(?)
"squash would almost always cross-pollinate in uncontrolled environments?"
Yep. And there is no way to know what kind of strange things will happen as a result.
Rodney
This post was edited by theforgottenone1013 on Fri, Jun 13, 14 at 10:24
It could be the salt in the air. I am keeping a journal and complete list of my garden so I will not replant what has issues and doesn't do well. I did find an infestation of whitefly (but not on the German queen) and used un-adultered Ivory soap and water. Thankfully it rained later in the night so it saved me from washing the soap off in the morning so the hot sun wouldnt burn the leaves. I have found that even a weak solution of baking soda can cause burn with the hot sun. Will have to spray all shrubs this weekend with soap to help knock them out. Waiting on my blooming dill plants to fill up with ladybug larvae to help fight them.
Hard to tell without a picture, but if hard and black (don't know about holes) it sounds like scurf or scab, which is fine, just peel them.
Keep the pH of the soil low, around 5.0 - 5.2, and don't use a lot of OM. Rotation helps, so does watering but mostly what you can do to control scab is to plant resistant varieties.
http://vegetablemdonline.ppath.cornell.edu/factsheets/Potato_Scab.htm
Scurf is a little harder to deal with, I see store-bought potatoes with scurf all the time. Crop rotation helps, as does early harvesting (which you're already doing), but the best thing is to try to get certified disease-free seed potatoes, don't use store-bought potatoes or ones you save from this year. Fungicides don't seem to work.
http://vegetablemdonline.ppath.cornell.edu/factsheets/Potato_SilverScurf.htm
I don't really get the square foot garden mixture. I don't think peat moss and vermiculite offer much in the way of nutrients, and in high concentrations are going to dry out fast. I've been filling my beds with what a local quarry calls "veggie mix", which I think is a mix of top soil and compost and maybe something else. But a reputable quarry in your area is going to provide the best soil mixture for growing, IMO. I top my beds off with it every couple years. Alternate years, I throw in composted steer manure, and I continually turn it into the clay soil underneath to get the mixture deeper and deeper every year. Rarely do I fertilize during the growing season, I only water every few days, even when temps get up in the 90's, and I get good results.
When it comes time to top off your beds with new soil, I would really consider trying something different. You might find you don't have to water so much and will get better results.
I would suggest, plant a few more seeds out there.
I had worse problem this year. The cucs did not grow at all despite good temps. I planted some more seeds later. Those are now several feet while the original seedlings are still sitting at few inches. Same soil, same food, same water, same seed.
I saw more Little Leaf coming up today - about the size of seysonn's.
I'd say if yours are growing now they'll really take off once the weather warms up. You could start more seed in case of cucumber beetles, powdery mildew, etc. though.
I think I'm going to throw more cantaloupe seed out this weekend since I only had 1 pop up.
As mentioned by forgotten, the potatoes will regrow, which means that they will produce again. You can harvest the new crop in a couple months -- so you'll be eating new potatoes, not the old ones that overwintered.
The onions will go to seed, and the old bulb will rot. Are they usable now? Then I'd say eat them. Leave a few in to let them go to seed and self seed, and you'll get lots of volunteers.
Sorry, I should have explained better.
These are plants that overwintered this past year--I didn't know they'd be there but they are up and growing well. Glad to hear I can just harvest the potatoes like usual. The onions I don't think have much of a bulb so I will just let them re-seed.
Thank you!!!
I don't see bug at all, but either an immature mulberry or maybe a dropped catkin from some sort of tree?
very interesting, this is a picture I posted on FB and it came on here with someone else looking for what it is. I know it is my picture because of the Longwood Gardens background paper.
Anyways, the bug has been identified as the pupal stage of an European Rhinoceros Beetle. I got answers as well as found some pictures of it on the web.