23,948 Garden Web Discussions | Vegetable Gardening
Too early for squash even in zone 9 from what I have read from the other gardeners there. But maybe it will survive if the weather cooperates.
You will have to hand pollinate. There is a FAQ here with all the info on how to do it. Just click on the blue FAQ button right below the Forum Instructions at the top of the page.
As for shading, normally the plant leaves provide enough. In this case since there are so few leaves you may have to. But it is only going to make growing it this early more difficult. As the plant develops the later fruit should be protected enough.
Dave
Well, this depends on your garden plot and what your are growing.
in the summer i imagine it makes little difference. in the early spring or late fall the sun will be much farther to the south. folks with greenhouses or tunnels will often orient them east west so that they can take advantage of the south sun in the winter.
if you grow tall vegetables or grow vegetables vertically up a trellis then orienting your beds north south can create shade on the other beds for as much as half the day. in such cases, most would recommend an east west bed with the trellis on the north side of it. then your trellis or tall vegetables can shade the path on the north side of the bed.
in the summer i have sun from sunup to sundown so i don't mind my trellises shading my other beds for part of the day since they all get plenty of sun anyhow.
i don't think there is a clear cut answer to this. design your garden how it pleases you and just plant accordingly.
although i'd say that if you want to have a low tunnel or greenhouse to orient it east west for sure.
jon
Yes, that's what I was trying to figure out. I plan on having trellises for beans and large tomato cages for tomatoes. I wanted one long bed of each, and running them east to west, but one behind the other will still shade the one in back. So I thought I might put one east to west and then one north to south on one side of the plot. Maybe the west side, because with trees to my west, the sun sets about 3 or 4pm anyway.
I don't get full sun all day. I have trees and a house that shade things and the most I get is 6hrs tops. And in the fall I get less. So I won't be putting in a greenhouse or hoop house, just doesn't seem worth it.
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.
Homemade sprays when mixed or used incorrectly or as some sort of preventative when a problem doesn't even exist yet usually do more harm than good. And that is if they even work when there IS a problem. That is the case here.
Baking soda and dish soap solution are 2 separate solutions used for different problems and have to be very carefully mixed in exactly the right proportions to avoid plant damage. You don't give the recipe you used so who knows if it is correct or not.
Unfortunately too many folks think that because it is homemade it must be safe to use. Not true. And that if a little is good then a lot must be better. Also not true.
Leave it alone and it will outgrow the damage done.
Dave
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
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?
Hi, I'm in Arlington also. I'm working on improving my 2nd veggie garden. I love your seedling/light set up. Right now I am using a bedroom window. This bipolar weather has me starting really late as far as seeds or planting. Good luck with your ambitious garden. Soooo many plants.
Hi Syntria,
I also live in the DFW area and have a whole new garden this year. As for soil- what is this bulk compost place you speak of? I ordered 5 cubic yards of Premium Soil Mix from Silver Creek Materials in Fort Worth. The mixture is 40% sand and 60% compost. Everything planted so far is doing great. I added cotton burr compost, chicken manure, and cow manure to each of the beds with the new soil to boost nutrients/nitrogen. Anyways, that Premium Soil Mix is $25 per cubic yard, and they can have it delivered that day. If you haven't built your beds already, I encourage you to check them out.