23,594 Garden Web Discussions | Vegetable Gardening
There are quick ripening red varieties like King Arthur ( use to be Fat'N Sassy) Ace, Bell Boy, Lady Bell, Merlin, La Bamba, Redknight. Still takes patience tho and temps in the 80's. At cool temps 50's- 60's none of them will ripen.
Like tomatoes there are green when ripe varieties. Not popular tho. some varieties are yellow or orange when ripe.
Bell peppers just don't ripen red as easily as other shapes of peppers, probably because of the thick walls. In Ohio, bell peppers are really lousy at ripening in the summer heat. Now in September with sunny warm days and cool (but not too cold) nights, the peppers ripen the best. Then it turns too cold in October.
This thread made me think about perched water table. If I understand it correctly, the perched water table theory will cause the water of the soggy soil under the beds to go up toward the surface of your raised beds. I assume that the height the water will go depend on your soil texture. The finer your soil texture, the higher the water will go nearer to the bed's surface. 12 inches should be enough to stay away from the soggy ground water for most kinds of sandy soil. If your soil is heavier then just build higher beds.
I've had success in a similar situation by planting in 6-8 inches of municipal compost over my somewhat soggy garden soil. I only have to water occasionally in August and the only overwatering problems I've noticed are enthusiastic growth of weeds and unfortunately tomato foliage diseases. I also have not had any success with mulching - too water retentive - other than with Kraft paper.
My corn does wonderfully, although I grow an open-pollinated variety. I've only really tried melons in this situation once and I grew a variety seemingly not noted for being super-sweet (Amish muskmelon). Nice flavor but could have been sweeter, and they had a tendency to split.
So maybe the corn in a shallower bed and the melons in a deeper one?
~emmers
Guess it's like wild raspberries or blueberries or any other native, wild edible... you can certainly eat them, even if you didn't intend on growing them... lots of info on edibility in the link below. Now I kind of wish I had one to try!
Here is a link that might be useful: Eat the Weeds - Radish, Mustard's Wild, Rough Cousin
Preemergents will not affect the germination of beans or peas or other legumes, onion sets, or members of the parsley family (carrots, dill, parsnip).
Also not effeced are wild relatives of these plants, like Queen Ann's lace, clover, crown vetch.
Even thou the package my say it is safe, do not put it around young melon plants (I never tried cucumbers or squash, I never got over the "meloncholy."
-Terry
Thanks for the clarification, Slimy_Okra! Common names can be tricky. What I was told are Cape Gooseberries are commonly called "Giant Ground Cherries".
I'm happy to grow either that I can find, although it sounds like I'd have better luck with Ground Cherries (vs. Cape Gooseberries)
wayne -- how funny, leave to me to go crazy trying to buy a "weed"! :)
Nothing says you have to fill the bucket full of mix. If the buckets are what you have to use, for shallow rooted plants, 1/2 full works fine.
But if you do fill it when planting shallow rooted plants you don't have to water it as often since the extra soil retains more water.
Dave
I just checked my basil from last year. The roots filled the tall #5 nursery pots. (5 gal buckets hold more soil than a #5 nursery container.) The longest root measured 17 inches.
The basil in smaller containers did not do as well as the basil in the #5's.
I water the containers every day in the heat of the summer and the smaller containers were difficult to keep up with. My location is warm to hot,dry and windy.
Zeuspaul
Thanks for the reply. Im in Orange County, Ca. The mulch cover is black. Since my City Pick planter is self watering, just like the Earthbox, I top it off every day. If there's too much it'll drain through the over flow then retain water. Soil im using is the Miracle Grow organic potting mix. I have yet to add in EB Stone organic vegetable food.
The last week temps have been around mid to high 80s. From the research I've read that the water evaporates from the plants cells causing the limp look. Once night comes around or early morning they look great again.
Might want to do some reading about the problems associated with using granular organic fertilizers in containers, especially small ones such as this. Since there is no soil food web, no beneficial bacteria or microorganisms to convert the supplements to a useable form for the plants, you need to either add the bacteria and other needed soil organisms or use liquid fertilizers and you have to feed them frequently. .
Gardening organically in a container is a very different ballgame than organic gardening in ground.
As for the black cover rather than remove it just spread some mulch on top of it to reduce the heat.
Dave
"I do not use chives a lot ..." Ah, but up until now you haven't had a good fresh supply at hand. You'll be adding them to all sorts of things soon. BTW don't ever cook them. Add them to cold foods or right before serving. They go with almost anything salady, eggy, mayonnaisey, tomatoey, cheesy, potatoey, pastaey, fishy ...... Don't wait until you find a recipe. Just chuck them in. Experiment.
Artichoke is something nobody mentioned. It can be added to landscape features and is very easy. Plus, I get 15-20 artichokes off of one good producer. Some of those are smaller but they are the best ones. Artichoke is very expensive so it's worth the space.
I love chard and always have it both in the flower beds and garden. There's only a couple of months that I can't grow it during Phoenix hot summer. I suspect you could grow it year around. And, a tiny bunch of chard is $1.99 in my store. The plant is long-lived ( I had one last 2 years!) and cut-come again. We can eat chard almost everyday, lightly stir fried with a tiny bit of EVOO, than used for a bed for poached eggs. I do the same with spinach, which I've had good luck with, even though it's only for a month or two.
Peppers and tomatoes have such variety. Peppers and eggplants grow very well for me, although I don't have great luck with tomatoes due to heat and spider mites. You might find peppers and eggplants will grow for years if you don't get freezing weather! I have a four year old pepper and my oldest eggplant lived three years before it froze!
Beets and carrots. A lot for little space.
Herbs-cilantro and parsley in winter and basil in summer. Rosemary, oregano and thyme are good all year. Mint always dies for me in August but we really enjoy mint chutney so I plant it every fall.
If you have room, consider pomegranate ,fig and citrus trees. Maybe mango,too. And guava, which can grow like a weed in the right climate.
How do you tell if a broccoli plant is buttoning? My Packman seedlings were about four weeks old and appeared healthy when I put them out on April 11. On April 15 we had an inch of snow and a night time low of 22. It was fairly warm before and after that, and I only saw some minor signs of stress for a day (a couple purple leaves). Now, two weeks after planting out, they appear to be forming heads although they are only about six inches in diameter. Is that buttoning? Or just the beginning of a real head?
The tomatos and peppers probably, because they like a deep bed but have fairly weak roots.
Okra has a humongous root system, but it's capable of going as deep as it needs because the roots are very vigorous. So it can use the shallow bed.
Summer squash have fairly shallow root systems - give them the shallow bed.
Plant herbs too - basil would love the area, as would oregano, sage and thyme.
Wow, thanks so much for the good advice!. I would not have guessed that the squash have relatively shallow root systems. Tomatoes and peppers shall get the royal treatment then. Ha - I will be able to bury those stems vertically!!!
Since the bed is deep with plenty of root space, I may try to cheat on the sfg spacing rules and sneak in an extra tomato, and encouraging it to trail over the side..
I'll definitely sneak a dill in somewhere! I have parsley, thymes, sages, rosemary and sweet bay growing elsewhere. I've 3 earthboxes to replant next, thanks for reminding me that one should be filled with basil!
If okra is such a vigorous root-space-hog, it may need to just fend for itself! Perhaps I should try amending the native soil downslope from the planter boxes and it can suck up any moisture that moves its way. We just had a deep rain (thank goodness) so the clay is very easy to work today. Hmmm....
The 2 cu yards of planters mix more than filled all 64 cu ft of planting bed space, though I know it will settle a bunch. They are full to the absolute brim, and the settling will be made up with mulch.
But, there's still enough to fill two 1x7 planter boxes. I'm going to put them right between the fence posts, there is no fence up now but I'll be putting up 2x4 welded wire, 5 ft tall. So eventually about 50 ft of back fence will really be a trellis.