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dave_f1 SC, I took your "Maybe you can just eat your leftover tubers." as insulting. If I'm mistaken, I apologize and I can remove my post.
I just planted my purple sweet potato today. This is the one I have been talking about:
The slip has almost no root. The boots are actually at the tuber. So I cut a small piece of the tuber and planted the whole thing. I just want to attach the roots if the slip has no roots.
Here is a regular slip:
Field planted:
The front (left) are the slips with full roots (two with attached tubers). Most of the back row (right) are the rootless slips I chopped off the main slips. The rootless slips were housed inside for about a week and have grown roots about 1/2" to 1" long.
Thx for the "help"....
Last night I went to plant some more various garden beans (Burpee brand) and noticed that the soil in my beds was crawling with ants. Not your typical house ant but a bit lighter in color. So after planting my new beans I decided to apply DE to the entire area with my puffer applicator.
Still wondering why my Rocdors germinated just fine and not my 274s? The Rocdors were listed as being treated with Captan (don't know what that means) in the seed catalog meanwhile the 274s were untreated.
I just realized today that it may not have been the best idea to sow the new beans last night with the good amount of rain we may get between Sun and Tues.
My 201`5 attempt at growing artichokes in Northern Virginia is underway. I have planted some imperials (from 2014 seeds that were germinated under lights inside) and some globes(from 2013 seeds germinated inside). I started out with 22 plants that germinated from 25 seeds. I now have 5 planted in my raised garden and six planted among my landscaping plants. Some died from overwatering. I vernalized them starting on March 1, so that should have been enough to get fruit. Here are pictures at various stages. The last was taken today.
Maybe... But I just find that hard to believe... I just got soil test results that showed that all the nutrient levels were fine. And, the other cucurbits in the garden, including the large squash on the right are getting the same amount of water and are in the same soil and they're thriving. Add the spots on some of the leaves, and to me, it seemed like it must be disease. But, this morning suddenly the sick plant has begun to flower, so maybe it's not down for the count just yet.
We had similar damage to our tomato plants and thought it was my herbicide spraying in the lawn at first. But upon closer look, there were copious amounts of aphids on the backside sucking away the plant. If you don't have any bugs on the leaves, then it must be herbicide drift.
Our plants 2 years ago looked extremely similar. The leaves were curled, deformed and shriveled but it wasn't herbicide. Look very very closely at the leaves.
As Jean says, it could be either contaminated potting soil or compost, or herbicide drift. I'd set aside any amendments you used when potting up those guys, maybe plant some beans in the leftover soil and see if they crinkle up as they grow. If they grow fine, you can rule out aminopyralid or chlorpyrolid in the soil.
If you get this much, it's too late to panic...
Depends: If you add ground limestone (Calcium carbbonate) it does take time to react so you would not get immediate results. If you add slaked lime/hydrated lime ( Calcium Hydroxide) results will be very quick. Most vegetables do ok at pH 5.5 but there are a few like beets, limas etc that like pH 6.5 or more.
Well, I think it is solved. Saw some nice pepper seedlings at the nursery that looked a whole lot better than mine after 3 weeks so decided to just pull them out. Sure enough, they came out easily and the peat pot had only a couple thin roots that made it out, everything else was balled up inside. So replaced them with new peppers, but decided to try and see if I could save these as well. Peeled off the peat pot from each- was surprisingly not that interwoven with roots- and replanted. Probably a lot for some pretty sick peppers to endure but will see what happens. Thanks for the suggestions!
The scape can be edible if it's *really* young. If it is already big it's probably woody, as Peter mentioned. Leeks make beautiful flowers that attract lots of bees, so I'd vote for letting it go to flower/seed. When it drops the seeds, it'll plant you loads of new leeks, so you won't have to start any indoors next winter -- just dig these up and plant deeply to get good white parts.
And you don't even have to start it indoors. You can direct sow lettuce outside. Put a sheet of clear plastic or glass over the soil to warm it up for a earlier start. For those planters you could just sprinkle a small pinch of seed and and start getting cut and come again salad quite quickly.
Have you considered that the underlying cause of such an infestation is excessive use of nitrogen fertilizes of some type? Excess nitrogen attracts them in droves.
Never had such an infestation such as you describe as I only use very low dose N in small amounts. S o the water hose and just stripping them off with fingers works fine for me even with hundreds of plants. The lady bugs take care of the rest. Corn is the only crop I ever have any real issues with them because of all the high N feeding it requires. But both peppers and eggplants require minimal N.
I assume you know that Neem and Safer Soap can also kill ladybugs so could be reducing your natural controls?
Another effective way of controlling them is taped fingers (masking tape) rubbed up and down the stems lightly. Picks up hundreds at a time.
Then there is Surround, a kaolin clay dust used to control various sucking insects. Quite effective but messy to work with.
Otherwise about all you can do is bring out the big gun pesticides like malathion and permethrin which I never advocate doing. Do keep in mind that the majority of the damage done by aphids is appearance type and usually tolerated by the plants unless the infestation is quite severe.
You might use the search to pull up all the 100's of previous discussions about 'aphid control' on this forum for additional suggestions.
Dave
Older watermelon leaves may age some, but if the plants keep almost all healthy leaves, all likely is well.
What kind of camera did you take this shot with? Awesome closeness!