23,948 Garden Web Discussions | Vegetable Gardening
I have an electric fence around my garden. One trick I use is to put a spark plug on one of the metal posts and attach a wire to the fence so that the spark plug sparks every time the fence clicks on. The spark makes a very audible pop. I don't know if it is the flash of light or the popping sound, but the deer avoid it like the plague. Raccoons ignore it so I put up a wire 6 inches off the ground to deter the masked bandits.
It must be the Game Cam!
I turned it off Sat. to take the card out to download the pics to my PC.
I got busy with other things and forgot to put the card back in and turn it back on.
Sunday morning I went out to turn it back on and check the garden. I found tracks all the way down a row of peas. The tops were nibbled on a lot of the plants.
When I checked this morning the tracks stopped at the edge. I guess they can hear the camera or the lights spook them.
No Dave, it doesn't have a flash, but it does have a little red LED light comes on when it is activated. It may make a noise, but I can't hear it.
I just went out to plant more tomatoes, looked at my beans and what do you know, the first leaves ARE heart-shaped!
Can I change my vote? ;-)
I understand the conflicting desires - my DD started some tomato plants from Burpee seed that was mislabeled I had left over from last year, her science fair partner took some plants but we still have 7 of them - 3 in 1 small yogurt cup that need to be separated since they were started on Mother's Day. Only ones left inside under lights - tried giving a couple to my parents who like "regular, red, beefsteak tomatoes" (which these are) and they wouldn't take them b/c they were small and not hardened off. I guess I'm going to have to find room for them somewhere...
We've just been having our first garden salads as well! Red freckled romaine, kale, arugula, snow peas and still getting the occasional few asparagus to chop up and add. Good stuff!. We've been living off strawberries as well. They have a great flavor but are a bit sour if not picked when just about to be too late. How about yours? Is there anything I could have added to my soil to help this?
I've also just planted some leaf lettuce in a shady area of the lawn in hopes of keeping it going longer. When the lettuce was dissapointing last year we switched to red Russian kale and it was delicious!
You have the three-lined potato beetle, not good news but probably manageable with spinosad if hand picking doesn't work. The extension pubs say they can be managed like Colorado potato beetles, and spinosad is the best organic control for CPB .
Have you or a neighbor grown tomatillo recently? I think that's their favorite nightshade.
Here is a link that might be useful: three lined potato beetle
I don't think anybody growing tomatillo around here. Most people have 5X5 slots where they grow very basic staff, mostly what I gave them form my leftovers, and I don't grow tomatillo. It is not a first year I have this beetle- only I thought they are cucumber beetles - I had those before I set up a screen house for my cucumbers. I don't think I will need any spray. Picking them at night from my 40 plants when all hard work already done and it is cool and pleasant gives me comforting feelings). Last year I didn't even collect their eggs, but there was no real damage. Thank you for identification!
I use cardboard a lot.
For efficiency, I don't think anything beats the old straight rows and the hoe, dirt mulch. Of course, it also tires ground out quickly, so fallowing is critical. The fallow is when weeds often take over, so the smart farmer plants the cover crops in rows as well and hoes, just like for the food crop.
Too bad I'm not that smart, or that energetic.
Oh dear. You could get an awful lot of seed potatoes for that price, and grow a nice crop. Next year, just plant potatoes, and you'll have much more chance of success!
There was a thread on here recently about the things that garden centers sell that make no sense -- like radish and carrot seedlings. Your garden center belongs on that thread as well!
Gardening is all a learning experience. This will be a story to tell :)
I'm suspecting that, if the potatoes were in 5 gallon pots, they were never intended for planting into a garden. That would certainly be a very unusual technique, as digdirt says. Possibly they were intended to be grown in the the container permanently just to provide a crop of new potatoes? If you Google potatoes in 5 gallon buckets there are lots of hits describing the technique. Maybe you should have just left them in the container, fed and watered them and waited until the foliage started to die down.
Yes, the leaves open and close and move around a lot. There are some interesting YouTube videos of their moves I looked at a few days ago. I'm trying peanuts for the first time this year, too. I don't expect them to do great since our summers are usually too short and too mild for them, but it will be fun to see some of how they grow.
Here is a link that might be useful: Peanut time lapse
We were in the city all day yesterday and came home to leaning plants all over the garden, all in the same direction. Winds were high, that's all. :) As long as nothing is broken, the tomatoes will correct themselves. The brassicas might need a little help, though. I'm going out today to nudge them back upright and mound the soil around them again. (I bury them quite a bit when I transplant, but if the top inch is a bit dry, young plants will still tilt a bit in high winds because the soil shifts instead of holds).
That's a healthy pumpkin plant. The flowers will sort themselves out eventually. It's normal for either males (usually) or females to show up without the other gender initially.
The vines will climb things if they are close and no, it's not a problem. No reason at all to chop it down. If a pumpkin does form on the vines that are climbing the fence you will need to make a sling to support the pumpkin to keep it from tearing the vines down. But if you don't want it climbing the fence, you can either snip the tendrils holding it to the fence so that it will lay back on the ground or just train the vine back down. If it were mine I'd leave it alone and let it do what it wants (unless it started growing into the neighbor's yard).
Rodney
O, ok. It's actually about 4-5 plants I think. They were sprouting in clumps in the compost pile (in the background of the photo above), and it was hard to thin them out initally. So I picked out 4-5 clumps and set them about 10-12 inches apart. So there's probably about 4-5 actual plants there. So excited, a few years ago I got a 22 lb pumpkin when the compost had pumpkin babies the first time ;) Hopefully I'll get a few this time around as well. I've never really fertilized, or learned the proper watering technique/amounts, besides watering the ground, and trying to keep the foliage dry. I have a feeling I water too often (once or every other day when it's over 80F).
My cat has been pooping in my beds for years. At first I totally freaked out (still do when the meany pants digs up fresh planted seeds) but I'm mostly over it. I remove it when I see it. She pees in there too, fit I. Font of me as I'm yelling and shooing her.
Anyway, I read they like the clear spaces of the garden, so I've been adding my grass clippings to the bar spots. So far it's working, hopefully long enough for the crops to fill in and keep her out.
worked for me with several stray cats destroying my lawn.
Scarecrow sprinkler
This post was edited by michelliot on Mon, Jun 9, 14 at 12:14