23,948 Garden Web Discussions | Vegetable Gardening

There are no sweet storage onions. They are all sweet once cooked but hot when raw.

As I understand SULFUR is what makes onions strong. We also know that sulfur is a disinfectant and preservative.

So there is a trade of. as they say, You cannot have your cake and eat it too.

Thanks Jonfrum, this is why I ask questions early and not right before planting. I will keep looking.

Tish, I hadn't thought about frost protection. I have done it with more moderately sized plants, but never even considered it for such a sprawling type as winter squash. As far last frost, well, off the top of my head I was planting cucumbers and green beans in 70+ degrees at the beginning of April two years ago while last year, we were buried in feet of snow right up 'til May! I was planning on using plastic to warm the soil where the squash will go, and starting a few indoors a couple weeks before my *tentative* plant-out date in mid-May. Like you we are very lucky if we have any 60+ nights (our night average is in the 50's all summer). I've only ever grown the short season tender plants like cucumbers and summer squash, so I have never had any problem with direct sowing at the end of may and still getting a good harvest without any season extending methods. I do like the idea of using milk jugs though, probably would be helpful even if I transplant from indoors. Thanks!

If you grew them up like that you would have to hammock the larger squash because they are so heavy.

How cold has it gotten? Sweet potatoes are very sensitive to the cold. You should also check the size of the potatoes. It might be time to dig them up.

They would do better planted in late spring or early summer (around may or June), I think August is too late. They like warm weather. They should be harvested in the fall after the first frost or when the vines start to die. Don't forget to cure them before cooking with them.

That's good for transplants, but when you have a seed packet full of peas coming up, that strategy isn't going to be easy. That's a lot of tubes.

Sevin dust, Bt, Diatomaceous earth, or go out at night with a flashlight and hand-pick them. I've heard that cornmeal messes with their digestive system, though I've never tried that myself.

Although birds will sometimes clip off the stem of a young seedling, this typically occurs during the day. If it's at night, this is probably the cutworm, as others have already written.

Alan Chadwick had a technique for dealing with these larva which I have not seen mentioned here so far, so I'll briefly describe it.

In the morning, when you discover the severed plant lying on the ground, look carefully within a circle of about 6' from the stem. Most often you will discover a small hole in the surface of the soil (about 1/16' in diameter). Take a table knife (not sharp) and dig down abut an inch or two to the side of that little hole. Flip the soil up onto the surface and look for the cutworm. They are quite easy to catch that way.

As one or two of them can do a lot of damage, usually there aren't very many of them to worry about. Just be careful not to disturb the soil around the stricken plant, so that you can find the little hole.

Chadwick called these larva by the name used in England where he was trained: Leatherjackets. More information about his masterful gardening techniques can be found at the link below.

Here is a link that might be useful: Alan Chadwick garden techniques

I would put 9, each on a 16 inches square. The 45-54 spears then will come up over a long period, with only the first flush having a reasonable population. You will have to pick them, one or two at a time, and put them in the fridge until there is enough to dress pasta. This is why asparagus needs space. You are really in business at 35 plants or more. 100 would give you plenty, but still not enough to waste if you intend to use asparagus as your staple vegetable for a family over the 4 weeks harvest.

As noted above, a 4X4 bed is not nearly big enough for a reasonable amount of asparagus. Two or three such beds would be better.

The most you could put into a 4X4 bed would be 16 plants and that would be pushing it. I would only put in a dozen.

Have you checked with the hydro growers over on the Hydroponics forum here? While I have worked some with grodan it isn't something most vegetable gardeners would have any experience with. Personally I don't even like to work with the small 1" cubes for anything much less cut them down to a smaller size.

Dave

I didn't see a hydro forum. I'll try over there. Thank you. Sorry for posting it in the wrong forum category.

The other day I started some corn salad in my cold frames. I will start some lettuce when a get a nice day. With things like lettuce (Most cold crop) the difficult part is to get the seeds germinate. Once you do that (indoor or in cold frame) they cane be transplanted into garden. Better yet, under a plastic hoop.

I stuck some mummified, sprouting, red potatoes in a pot, near a sunny window. They most likely won't survive. But I've got something growing! They are kinda leggie! :)

The active ingredient in AzaGard is azadirachtin which comes from Neem Oil. There have been mixed reports about its effectiveness against stink bugs. It appears to be most effective against them in the nymph stage, but it needs to come into direct contact with them to kill. How many stink bug nymphs did you see in your garden? I didn't even see the bugs themselves, but I did see extensive damage on my tomatoes and peppers at harvest. If you can't find them, you can't kill them.

An organic insecticide that is supposed to be a little more effective against them is pyrethrin. There are also traps that work like Japanese beetle traps, but if you look at the reviews they get on Amazon.com, you can see that most people didn't think they were effective.

The problem is that contact insecticides are not effective because of the bugs have hard coats, and they feed by piercing the skin of the fruit or vegetable, so they avoid most of the insecticide on the surface. They feed on so many different kinds of plants that you would need to treat everything in your garden to begin to make a dent. It sounds like the most effective control for home gardeners is growing trap crops (like okra or amaranth), using row covers and, from what Dave says, using a kaolin clay product like Surround.

Thanks for all the input.

Dave, thanks for the Kaolin advice. I have a ton of the stuff and I've used it on cukes to stop the cucumber beetles. Will try it elsewhere and see what happens. Any idea of whether it inhibits corn pollination?

Last year I spent every evening killing 1000's of the two types of beetles.

Scott

I agree with digdirt. It doesn't look like it but it still MIGHT be pressure treated, but it's doubtful that any poisonous chemicals are in high enough concentration to be of danger. Keep in mind, even an apple has arsenic in them! :) Here's my suggestion: take one of the boards and put a bottomless pot on it (like say an empty milk carton with the bottom cut out, or even a styrofoam cup.) Plant a few seeds in the pot of cucumber and beans. They will be your canary-in-the-coal-mine testers. Cukes and beans are very sensitive to chemicals, so if they croak shortly after sprouting they are probably being poisoned. If they live ...the wood is okay to use.

The old PT wood/lumber had a greenish hue. But what they have now has redish color.
Your neighbor's old fence has been weathered for years and supposing that originally it had bad chemicals, it has leached out already. BUT, i would not use that stuff anyway. You spend time and energy to make a raised bed/planter and it falls apart the next year or so.
Both HD and Lowes in my area are selling cedar lumber (5/8" - 5 1/6" x 6') for about 2 bucks. They are perfect for planters and small raised beds. I have used a lot of them.

I've used hoop house to extend the end of the growing season, but this coming Spring will be my first attempt at extending the growing season from the early end using floating row covers for some crops and hoop houses for others, sometimes in combination with row covers on a particularly freezing cold night. So I'll have to get back to you on my results lol. But I don't see why it won't work, I've certainly read enough posts by others who have done so successfully.

Depending on what temp zone you're in you'll likely get some variance across the country in how much time you gain by using them. Soil temps, not necessarily air temps are really the deciding factor for a number of crops to get going in the Spring. I'll be happy with a month jump but if we don't have a particularly harsh finish to winter it could be possible to gain more than that, especially the ones used over raised beds. The use of the hoop house combined with the use of black plastic on the ground surface of the bed and possibly even wrapped around the outside of the bed structure itself will help warm the soil well in advance of any regular soil left to mother nature alone. That and the fact that my seeds are started with the use of a home made light rack and are grown in my greenhouse until it's time for them to be planted should help get them decent size before going in ground.

Well I have been doing a good job at keeping the plants alive. Yes the leaves have all but fallen, but there is actually new growth. There is one plant that is all dead and black/brown but there is new growth at the bottom of the trunk.