23,594 Garden Web Discussions | Vegetable Gardening

I was just getting ready to build a tower. Guess I won't do that. I already have a couple of containers I could use, a half barrel planter and a raised bed which is about 1'x3' by 1.5' deep. I could build a different size container- what would be an ideal size for a potato container? About two tires high by as long and wide as you can make it? It sounds like it would be unproductive and a waste of resources to hill too many times. Do you usually have success with hilling 2 or 3 times a season?

Now, take this from someone who is not a potato farmer. I've only grown potatoes in containers for three seasons. My biggest container held 49 gallons and was about 2 feet high by 20 inches wide by 3 feet long. It isn't about how many times you hill, it's about when you do it and how how high you go. Following advice from a potato farmer on Garden web, I planted 10 seed potatoes in that container with about 4 inches of soil under them and 4 inches of soil on top of them. When they got to be 6 inches high, I "hilled" them, or covered them with four more inches of soil. Every time they got to 6 inches high, I did it again until the soil reached the top of the container. The soil will settle with watering, so I probably had to hill 4 or 5 times. Potatoes grow very fast, so I was hilling every 3-5 days toward the end.

When I use the word soil, I actually mean soilless potting mix. I used the 5-1-1 mix discussed in the container forum with extra peat moss (5-2-1, really). You want something that is fast draining. When I harvested there were a few potatoes about 6 inches from the top. Your goal is to keep any of them from getting exposed to the sun. They need steady moisture and heavy feeding, in my opinion. If you have a good year, you can get 10 pounds of potatoes for each pound you plant. If they are crowded, the potatoes will be small.

No as I said, the amount remains the same. You would never triple the amount of any fertilizer used within a defined area just because more plants are put there. Overloading an area with fertilizer is a good way to burn up crops. More is not always better.

Rather you may find you have to apply it more often. But that depends on many other variables like watering regimen, soil fertility other than the meal, etc.

Corn is normally planted in block squares, not long narrow rows, for very good reasons. That would be easy to do in your layout pictured above. So why try to force it away from the norm?

Dave

How would you apply the side dressing with the block planting? I normally use the hoe and make a small trench to the side of the planting row so I can apply the blood meal at knee high stage and again at tassle stage.

I'll have to search the forum to see how the corn block look like.

Jonathan29 - I've tried looking at your link several times and it just goes to a lot of undifferentiated YouTube videos, none of which seem particularly to do with Italian Gardening. What is the relevance to the current OP's question? If there is a video there about tomato blight could you link to that directly?

You could spray with Serenade. It is not harmful, and helped me to keep blight manageable till October last year. Normally end of August is the time tomatoes stop fighting blight in my area. Buy it concentrated( not ready to use spray) - it is much cheaper if you use it often, and you should do it every 10 days at least if not once a week.

Here is a link that might be useful: Where to by Serenade

You might try planting cucumbers at a different time. I usually put mine in late. I like seed catalogs like Johnny's - a quick look at cucumbers suggests Diva isn't bothered by cucumber beetles as much as other varieties. Look for help in catalog descriptions.

Last year I did not have hornworms. I thought I saw some poop but no worms. I don't know if something was getting the hornworms at night. I lot a lot of tomatoes to disease due to rain but the ones in my high tunnel (with sides rolled up) were healthy. Normally I go on hornworm patrol late in the day looking for evidence, usually chewed leaves. I usually don't find them until they are on top of the plants and huge. In the morning I check for squash bugs and potato beetle eggs.

I have left a weedy strip near the veggie garden to hopefully promote beneficials. I have flowers and shrubs to attract birds. I hope the swallows that sit on my pea trellis (and poop) are also eating bad bugs.

Good luck! I would try different varieties this year that might be more resistant.

Hm, I live inside a city as well (Baltimore to be exact) and it will be my first time urban gardening. I was thinking of getting a mason bee lodge to coax bees. Anything else you all can think of? Should I get some sort of bird feeder? Anything else I can buy to coax a nice ecosystem?

I just bought my house and there was a previous garden in the patio yard but I don't know how well it was taken care of before I bought the house so I don't know how well it's ecosystem is.

1) PVC is not that expensive to spend money and time to paint it in orde to, supposedly, extend its service life:

2) Grey color ( as used for electrical wiring) is supposed to be more tolerant of UV light.

3) You heard it first hand from Dan, in Tx, Heat zone 10 that even the white PVC is much tolerant of UV light.

I frankly never considered UV degradation when I made my trellising, but it looks like the importance of PVC UV degradation may be commonly misinterpreted. To the extent it's about surface degradation, it's probably a lot more important for thin-wall applications, like flexible hoses and hoop-construction. For thin-walled pipe, surface is all there is.

Now, although PVC is not structurally compromised by UV, I understand that the impact resistance may suffer. I'm not whacking my trellises with anything, so I think that's probably irrelevant.

But cosmetically, yes, I'd rather have dark colored PVC.

Thanks to all for your thoughts...I really didn't mean to stir a pot...I have really marginal soil and have been moving 10-20 wheel barrows a yr to amend and raise....its a 5 yr project and I am only beginning on year 3..and every year the weeds are over the top...was just hoping to find a way to get ahead of the curve...again Thanks!

I find fall tilling helpful to incorporate amendments. If I do till, it's never more than the top two inches. If weeds are such a problem, mulch your beds with shredded leaves, straw, grass clippings, whatever. At season,s end, rake up whatever hasn't broken down and compost it, or turn it under.

I planted lettuce, spinach and Kale in a cold frame in October. Some did well and some dried out because I could not go out and water often enough. ( too much snow)
Prior years I did much better. I was picking lots of spinach in March ( zone 6b)

Look for varieties that are more tolerant of winter weather. Look for the book -
Niki Jabbour - The Year Round Veggie Gardener
She lives in Nova Scotia --- good luck

Here is a link that might be useful: Garden Design Ideas

That's what I told DH - no need for cold frame now, I was afraid the greens would get too cold at night. And I'm not starting peppers and tomatoes in one - still have snow in the areas where I want to plant those even though it's melted off the garden area near the house where I plant things that need more water.

My plan is to just harden off the greens like I do nightshades, bring them out for a few hours, building up to full sun, when temps are in 40's and 50's, but put them back in basement at night until nights are above freezing, then start leaving them in the garage and eventually mid-April or so when ground warms up, transplant them. They are just starting to get true leaves. Cold nights put row cover on them.

Now if he wants to build some cold frames for the fall, I'd like to extend the season. Then I can sow directly in them for next spring.

In fact, I suspect that what he really wants to do that he's calling a "cold frame" is to put up some hoops over the lid to the septic tank and put some flats/pots there since he talked about doing that when it was the only bare spot in the lawn - he said we might as well take advantage of the heat. I think he just doesn't like me having racks of flats/pots in the house for 3 months ;-)

The picture is too blurry for me to name it a mole cricket with certainty though that is the first thing I thought of at first glance. It does appear to be an Orthoptera member.

Have you looked up images of mole crickets to see if there's a good match? Unless you can get a better picture, you are the only one who has seen this insect in person.

Mole crickets are very easily recognized and I've seen a million of them, but your image is simply too blurry, sorry.

If someone already suggested mole cricket then the first thing I would do is look them up and compare my bug with all the pictures of them available. I'd pay special attention to the front legs and see if yours has the digging claws characteristic of mole crickets.

If not then I agree that the Orthopteras are the first thing I thought of but there are tons of things in that order and Google will pull up tons of info on them as well as photos. But again, if there is no plant damage then you don't need to worry about it..

If it doesn't have wings then it could easily still be in nymph stage.

Dave

calbayarea - those look great! That's how it should look.

So you keep them out/under light 24 hours?

ltilton... yeah, today is the first day we've been above freezing in a week (last week we had one 'Spring' day with the rest of the week still holding onto winter). This is not a typical Spring so far and even if it were, I am in the same zone (6a) as wayne and the Farmer's Almanac lists March 21-April 4 as the starting indoors date for lettuce in my area.

Thanks for the advice all, I think I'm going to do the container outside in full sun and then transplant them into their partly shaded bed at transplant time (and then if winter rears its ugly head yet again, it will be easier to move them to shelter).

Think I should plant my broccoli and cauliflower out with the lettuce? Or start them inside with my warm plants like I had planned? Seems like temp fluctuations have a lot to do with poor head formation in brassicas, maybe I don't want to leave that up to mother nature considering how fickle she's been this Spring?

Thank you, everyone. I have one pepper plant and so had to laugh at the pictures posted. I'll put a cage over it.

Yes; when I switched to trellising my tomatoes I had a lot of cages that needed to go somewhere so I started caging my peppers and it works great.

Well, you could probably grow one broccoli plant successfully in a container that holds 5 gallons. (Nursery containers only hold .7 gallons for each gallon listed.) But, those Packman plants can get 2.5-3 feet wide, and they are top heavy. I imagine it might tip over if you put one in a 5-gallon paint bucket like they sell at the hardware store. I found a nice blog about growing broccoli in containers. This guy says he grew three in a 6.5 gallon container. Look at the pictures and note that the heads are smaller than mine. And the broccoli in the picture I posted was not fully grown yet. With container growing, the size of the pot makes a big difference in final yield

Here is a link that might be useful: Broccoli in a container

Last year I grew broccoli in 5, 15 and 25 gal nursery pots. The 15 and 25 had a variation of 511.

The broccoli in the five was very small, The 15 was ok. The broccoli in the 25 was huge.

I had three 25 containers of broccoli. One container had three plants. The other two had one each. From a distance you couldn't see a difference as the leaf mass was about the same with three plants vs one plant. The single plants produced slightly larger first heads. But the three slightly smaller first heads in the tripple container were overall more broccoli. Side shoot harvest was about the same.

The 5 was highly root bound...solid mass of roots throughout the container. I did not check the 15. The 25 was not rootbound.

The gallons in various size nursery pots is not consistant. The 15 gal black nursery pots I use hold about 12 gallons to the brim. The 25 gallon pots from the same manufacturer hold about 25 gallons.

Zeuspaul

Melon in container ? It could be challenging, I think.
Besides a good volume of soil, it has to be deep as well.
Then there is the question of vines. How do you manage it in a limited space ? Trellis, stake? cage?. UNLESS it is bush type.

I guess I should specify that I am growing vertically in a limited space. So, I was planning to prune the laterals off of the cucumbers all the way up and then let laterals grow across and train it to go back down.

It is your choice of course but while I don't think it is dumb to ask and I don't know the source of the information you have been given, I should point out and most gardeners grow their cukes vertically on some sort of trellis - myself included - rather than just let them run across the ground and develop rot.

But pruning the lateral vines sure isn't a common practice. They are naturally great climbers if left alone. It would weaken the primary vines, encourage vine breakage, stresses the plant, eliminate much of the pollination required by eliminating so much of the productive bloom area, reduce photosynthesis for the plant's energy, and reduces production.

Good luck with all your efforts.

Dave

Thanks seysonn... good to know... I am so excited I may pat it lightly anyway (I really thought the plant was a goner). 2 fruits already how cool!

Yeah, 2 fruits already, prachi.
I sowed the seeds on 12/15/13, over 3 months ago. I fished the seeds from an store bought eggplant and wanted to see if they are viable. Luckily it is a dwarf plant.

I start brassicas inside with the plan of settng them out the first of April, then turning the space over to the warm-season crops.

In theory, I'd do the same with lettuce, but the results are not as good.

I've seen people with lettuce flourishing in indoor setups, but it's not as easy as brassicas, in my own experience.

I never had success with lettuce and broccoli until I bought a light. I think a four foot one at lowe's is maybe ten bucks. It was worth it. And set it right over the seedlings. Having said that, I have gotten to where I don't find it that useful for lettuce, starting outside under plastic works pretty well. Broccoli is worthwhile for me because I have trouble with it getting too hot before I can get a decent crop. I start it right after Christmas so it's pretty good sized by the time it goes in the garden.