23,948 Garden Web Discussions | Vegetable Gardening
Well, that wouldn't be plain water then, it would have a broken plant stems leaking out lots of nutrients. And if you're trying to make a correlation to sprouts, you are not supposed to have them sitting in water either. It's part of what I like about my trays, good drainage.
I used black plastic for one season. It was 4ft wide black on one side white on the other. Got it on eBay just search plastic mulch on eBay. I didn't like how the weeds still came up in between the rows and it seemed to stop the water from getting at the plants. It was also a pain to clean up at the end of the season. You have to bury the edges of it so you get weeds in between the rows. The plastic I used it would of been impossible to use it another season. Definitely wont use it again.
This post was edited by hartford on Sat, Apr 5, 14 at 18:48
We switched last year. I built a beder to lay the plastic and drip tape. I don't expect we will go back the other way.
We still do all our cold season crops conventionally but all our warm season crops are done through plastic. The weeds that come up between rows is managed with a mower and mulch.
Well, success! The bed is in place and ready to work on the second bed tomorrow. We have the entire vegetable plot marked off with stakes and string and the rest of the beds will be assembled where they will end up. [g] It wasn't as bad as we were expecting. We didn't disassemble because the corners were glued. We discussed all the different ideas offered and we had four people and the bed was sitting up on wood blocks, so we tried just pushing the bed onto more blocks until we got it where it had to go. It moved quite easily on the blocks without any strain on anyone. It also didn't have to go far, maybe 5ft. Exciting to be making progress. Thanks for all the help!! Great ideas and I will remember them in many different situations where something needs to be moved.
We planted our first asparagus last spring and it did take a while to send up the first shoots. By the fall, it was a forest of ferns! I cut them all back and now that it is spring again, we have lots of little shoots. My dog helped harvest a few spears (dumb dog!) but mostly we are going to let it go this year and plan to harvest next year.
Fern, we must be neighbors because I'm also in the banana belt of Idaho. I put my 'gus in last year and it really didn't do anything until almost June, despite noting little white nubs of shoots on some of the crowns when I planted them. Just today I saw my first spear ready to break the surface when I went to pull a weed. You are good, just be patient and let them come up. Mine were very spindly last year, but the spear I saw today was much more robust.
Before I set my artichokes out into their permenent homes, I did the normal hardening process; Day 1 - placed them outside in the shade for a couple of hours; Day 2 - Placed them outside in the shade for 2 hlours and in indirect sunlight for a couple of hours; Day 3 - Placed them in indirect sunlight for 4-6 hours; Day 4 - Indirect sun for 6 hours, direct sun for 2 hours; Day 5 - Transplanted them into the garden. Exact times are unimportant. They did okay.
Just look at the seedling picture posted by Hudson. All seedling growers trim them without exception. It is just too inconvenient to handle them untrimmed and it is not necessary. A 4 t0 6" seeding will grow back readily.
Of course if you do grow your own seedlings you cay choose not to trim or trim very little, if you just take them out of your own greenhouse and plant out in the field. Onion family plants are very tough and resilient.
Here are my Spanish onion seedlings, planted late Feb. I have kept them trimmed to 5-6 in. rather than trimming them before planting. As some have mentioned already, this is just to get a sturdier plant. The roots will self-trim as the containers are only about 3in deep.
The space left between rows is so you have soil available for hilling them. If you want to do the hilling with soil and/or much brought from outside the bed then you can plant the rows much closer. So the plant spacing remains the same 12" but the row spacing is adjustable.
But with a 12x12 area you'd need to leave at least 1 path and probably 2 for yourself down the center so you can reach the plants to do the hilling/mulching.
Dave
Okay. I should note it's a raised bed and it's very deep. Last time I planted potatoes there I spaced them accordingly and when I was done hilling up there were trenches about 3 feet deep! lol The soil was slipping down the side. I mostly hilled that much up to support the stalks which kept getting snapped by some storms.
I know this much although I have straw I don't want to use it for hilling up. I tried that before and all I accomplished was building a nice home for slugs which devoured most of my potatoes in a 20x20 bed.
"Just be aware that IF an aphid manages to sneak in underneath, you will have an aphid population explosion underneath the covers."
That, unfortunately, has been a frequent occurrence for me when using Agribon 15. I use it as a cover for isolation cages, (when growing peppers for seed) and have had some serious infestations. Haven't figured out yet whether the aphids get on the plants during hardening off (in a small greenhouse) or whether they can find holes in the very loose weave of the AG 15.
Fortunately for me, I have a very robust population of predatory insects... the Agribon actually protects the aphids from them. All I have to do is leave the cover open, and within a week or two, lady bugs, syrphid fly larvae, and yellow jackets will eliminate the aphids.
I live in se wisconsin which I believe is zone 5b. This week has really been the first week above freezing temps and we still may get snow early next week. I know they are able to stand colder temps but even this young? Also I'm still trying to plan out how I will harden them off seeing as I work full time.
Isn't the no-till method designed to be used with strip farming and Round-Up? I haven't seen much written in journals or by real science organizations touting no-till organic. Maybe the Kerr Foundation has a little information.
I do mulch heavily but I like to incorporate last season's mulch to compost. I don't mulch much in winter because its hard with closely planted lettuce and greens. But, I add 6-12" of aged manure before every planting, along with carbon from straw,,pine straw, tree trimmings.
When the organic matter disappears into rich soil I don't consider that burning up.
Moving back to the original question, I prefer to till in both Fall and Spring. If I am able to do so, I usually have a great year... but if the soil gets wet early in the Fall, then I rely on a Spring tilling.
Most of my garden is heavily mulched (20-25 bales of marsh hay & grass clippings), to which I add leaves in the Fall. If I turn all of this under in the Fall, it will have mostly broken down in the Spring; tilling again helps further disperse this material throughout the root zone.
There is no way that I could plant 10,000 square feet of garden without tilling. Even if I planted from a balloon, so that no foot ever touched the ground, the heavy soil in my area would still get compacted by heavy summer rainfall. Furthermore, I might only have a planting window of several days between storms... if the soil was not already loose, I would never get the whole garden planted.
Note that I don't disagree with no-till gardening, nor square foot intensive gardening, nor raised beds, nor any other widely used garden technique. They all have both good and bad points, and a gardener should use the one(s) that best suit their lifestyle, their soil type, their climate, and the scale at which they garden.
But two points have been brought up that I would like to respond to. The first is that tilling "burns up" organic matter. I would lump that statement into the same category with "fat burning" commercials... it is meant not as a statement of fact, but to elicit an emotional response. I can firmly assure you, there is no smoke rising from the soil after I till. ;-)
What tilling does is to accelerate the decomposition of organic material deposited at the surface, by turning it under where conditions are more optimal for decay. Isn't that fundamentally what you do when you turn compost? That decomposition is what releases nutrients from the organic matter to be used by the plants being grown, and enriches the soil... so I wouldn't equate a constructive process of soil building through decay, with the negative term "burning".
The other point I would make about tilling is that it does more than just break up the soil. It also destroys insects & disease organisms that shelter themselves in garden debris. One of the best ways to prevent this year's minor insect or disease from becoming a major problem the following year, is to destroy all crop residue at the end of the season. Cleaning the garden & either destroying or composting garden debris accomplishes this. So does tilling... but only tilling can be accomplished on a large scale. Furthermore, only tilling will destroy insects which pupate in the soil - such as squash vine borer.
While I acknowledge that no-till methods work well under some circumstances, for me the insect harboring issue is a deal breaker.
This post was edited by zeedman on Sat, Apr 12, 14 at 1:57
I think I got the zone wrong, we're kind of 4.5 here and usually go with May 15th.
I have true leaves on 2/3 of the stuff (both peppers and tomatoes). The other 1/3 are just tomatoes and think they'll be 3 weeks this weekend so should be getting their second leaves any minute.
I move them into some NothrupKing 20 count flats (probably 3" X 3") and filled with some Happy Frog potting soil full of humic acid, guano, worm castings and more. This would seem pretty rich, would you start supplementing with anything else in the water? I did pick up some "Tomato Maker" product that I could dilute down to 1/10 or 1/20.
Since all of these flats could fit in a 5X5 or 6X6' area, I'm thinking I should probably get a fluorescent fixture. Would a 4 ft, 2 bulb T5 fixture do the job, and is it worth the extra money for the high ouput variety?
Sounds like I should run the heck out of the light, maybe 24/7. I like experiments so I'd be interested in putting some of them out in a homemade cold frame to compare results. Possibly I'd shade them from direct sun for a bit but I have no experience with hardening off combined with coldframing.
Got a 4 tier "greenhouse" a few years ago from TSC- paid about 19.99 on sale for it. Works great and has held up well. I think its size keeps things from cooking in the sun and I can carry it in/out of the garage and use a bungee cord to secure it to a clothes line pole to keep the wind from knocking it over.
Well there was an outdoor bug spray using the hose to disperace it. I usually do there entire outside of the house then spray the remaining over the yard but I took special care not go near garden or trees. Last fall my citrius trees had server N deficiency so I could only find a grass formula to increase n above the citrius avocado fert mix. I did the entire yard but that was fall, they seemed to be taking off.
I originally planted my seeds in peat pellets and then just stuck the pellets in the peat pots with jiffy.
This is new info and yes, it only compounds the water problems. Did you remove the netting from the pellets before putting them in the pots? Definitely need to do that.
Dave
Yes, cover them. Ground frost can occur at several degrees above freezing. Use hoops or other types of supports to keep covers from touching the plants.