23,594 Garden Web Discussions | Vegetable Gardening
Hey Kevin, where did you get the lacewing eggs?
I did a ladybug release earlier and they did a great job on the aphids...until they flew off to greener pastures. It was fun having them.
I used to live in La Mesa and I am having a hard time with the coastal marine layer. I've been here 5 years now and it just throws me for a loop. I have one little rose bush in my front yard and I can't get the mildew under control. Yesterday I noticed the biggest mushrooms I've ever seen growing under the roses. I don't have any mulch down so I have no clue where they came from.
My cukes and zucchini are not faring so well either. I figure I'll just chalk it up for experience and next year will be better.
Will your cantaloupes fruit?
Jude:
You're going to have challenges with warm weather crops if you're on the coast. Not that you can't, just compared to East County, production will be limited. You might want to call the master gardener's extension and ask them what varieties do well there or call Walter Andersens's in Point Loma.
regarding the lacewings, I'm going to order online from rincon-vitova. I called City Farmer's Nursery(usually very helpful) and great organic product. And they said that they could order lacewings for me but then left me on hold so I just decided I'll get them online.
Also, I had problems with ladybugs taking off also until this year-- they came to me! I attribute this to creating an environment for the adults to propagate by planting beneficial attracting flowering plants that flower at different times of the year. Research IPM(Integrated Pest Management) and you'll learn loads. I'll attach a link of some general plants you may want to plant.
The cantaloupes -- a far amount is fruiting right now and have already picked about a half dozen. I just don't know if the plants are going to be able to hold out from the damage I exposed them to.
Good luck.
Kevin
Here is a link that might be useful: benefical list
This post was edited by woohooman on Sat, Jul 27, 13 at 18:08
You can order it now - for fall shipping - from several places online: Irish Eyes, Territorial, Johnny's, etc. just to name a few. Other vendors will likely start accepting orders within the next couple of weeks.
As to varieties I like German White for storing but there are literally hundreds of varieties that are good.
Best to learn the basics about the 5 basic types - hard neck, soft, neck, turban, etc. before choosing some to try and you can learn all the basics and read about many of the varieties at Gourmet Garlic Gardens. Great info and order site both.
Dave
Here is a link that might be useful: Gourmet Garlic
Yikes! I know how that feels! I was victim to a bad hailstorm in early June that pretty much shredded my plants. Golf ball sized too... I was devastated and thought it was the end of my gardening season. Thanks to the good folks here, I kept faith and plodded on.
Happy to report today that 85% of my toms survived and are now thriving and fruiting, my Zuke is pumping out fruit, and I've already harvested my cauliflowers.
Some plants are just stronger than we give them credit for.
And if they don't pick up, there's always time for the fall crop!
Good luck! :)
Sending you good gardening vibes! I know how hard your zone can be to garden in. I can have similar weather although probably not as extreme. Every year is interesting to see what will happen and what the weather will be. I am always hoping the weather and pests will leave my garden be. It has been a roller coaster as a newbie. Keeping my fingers crossed your garden recovers fully!
Nope, not in your location (assuming you aren't up in the mountains) you still have time to get seedlings in the ground by first week in Sept. and that gives you 90+ days. Use some short DTM varieties.
Alternative - if you have plants now use cuttings from them. All explained over on the Growing Tomatoes forum here.
Dave
pumpkin vines send out a lot of roots from the leaf nodes, as long as you let them grow on the ground and there is dirt underneath the vines. if so there are probably many additional roots that have formed, so they should be fine.
I've had many plants keep growing and produce even though they've been mostly cut off from the main stem (due to SVB damage)
Like any other veggies, cucumbers have also special requirements and tuning. The hardest part is getting them established. After that , they need regular watering. But cucumber leaves and vines are not very tolerant of mishandling while harvesting, trellising, .... The leaves can get injured easily.
But the GOOD part is that you do not have to wait for weeks and months to enjoy its fruit. The earliest tomato takes over 50 days from flower to ripe fruit. With cucumber it will take less than one week.
My cucumbers flourished until we had a heat wave (107 degrees - I thought the thermometer was broken and nor reading right, but that was the temp at the official recording stations). After that they were so bitter that they were inedible. Before that, they tasted better than any cuke I had ever eaten (not exaggerating here). Did some research on the A & M horticulture website - learned that once a fruit becomes bitter, all subsequent fruits are ruined (some kind of chemical messenger thing in the vine). Perhaps that really big cucumber you found sent out similar messages to the rest of the vine.
It depends a great deal on your location as to what works best. There is no "one size fits all".
In your zone protecting the crowns from frost and snow damage with a thick layer of mulch likely isn't required. In colder zones it surely would be. In your zone gus beetles could easily survive under the mulch and over-winter. In the colder zones they couldn't.
So the correlation isn't "mulch equals beetles" but more "no killing freeze equals beetles".
And of course some mulches work better than others. Compost or a layer of leaf mold would be much less hospitable to them than a layer of chopped leaves simply because leaf mold doesn't pack down like chopped leaves do.
Why not use your leaf chopper to make a big pile of chopped leaves to decay over the winter and have a big pile of leaf mold for next spring's garden instead.
The main thing is to get them fed.
Dave
Sorry, Dave, I'm not following!
Should I mulch the gus, or make better compost and feed it later?
I'm not quite understanding your post.
Also, should I spread composted chicken sh** (bagged) in the fall to feed the gus throughout the winter?
Nancy
A Follow up:
All the patients survived the emergency surgery. After I stomped on the worms, I covered the stems with leaf gro- a local awesome compost- as that is all I had on hand, and figured what the heck.
All of the plants are thriving and growing huge- and blooming- no squashes at all yet, however. I would have thought I would see some by now.
Thanks for the help.
I assume you have already explored much of the online resources on Mexico gardening and even tho Cozumel has a very different environment much it might still apply?
And that you know that since importing seeds and plants is going to be heavily restricted by customs you may be dependent on what seed crops you can find locally. Corn obviously, local varieties of dried beans, peppers, tomatoes, and squash.
I'd also suggest contacting the various universities that have agricultural programs for information on irrigation needs, fertilizers, planting dates, etc.
I did find one publication titled "VEGETABLE GARDENING IN
THE CARIBBEAN AREA" I linked below (although it is dated 1967). Be patient, it takes forever to load.
Good luck with your project.
Dave
Here is a link that might be useful: Vegetable Gardening in the Caribbean
If it is limestone, it is basically the same mother rock as Yucatan, so take a ferry and go look at the markets and buy seeds on the mainland. Not sure how close a seed store will be, the area is a tourist trap, but there are numerous villages on the road to Merida, you should not have to travel far. On top of what Dave suggests, chayote, malabar spinach, amaranth, eggplant, sweet potato, okra, watermelon and melon should all be available and easy, some in the rainy season, some in the dry season.
I use basic shop lights, as well. One alternative to hanging them from the ceiling is to mount them on an open shelving unit. I repurposed a set of 3' wide sturdy plastic shelves that I'd originally used to store kid toys by setting a 4' piece of 2x4 across the top and attaching hooks to the bottom of the 2x4. The 4' shop lights hang on a very short chain from the hooks so that the top surface of the lights is just under the top shelf. (Think of a sandwich - wood on top, top shelf in the middle, lights below. The shelves are an open weave so there is plenty of air-flow.)
With this set-up, I don't adjust the lights up and down as the plants grow -- I adjust the seedling trays up or down by stacking books, shoe boxes, etc., under them. As the seedlings grow, I remove a book from the stack to keep them a couple inches below the lights.
This isn't a high-volume operation; it's easy to run out of space in late spring when everything is getting big. But it's quite space-efficient. The shelves fit easily in a corner of my dining room. Add a small fan and a timer and it's pretty low maintenance.
Incidentally, you can buy smaller all-in-one set-ups like you describe online and they look very cool. But they are very expensive and you can't fit very many plants at one time. For comparison, mine was less than $50 -- a basic shop light fixture, one cool & one warm bulb (not fancy grow lights), a couple strong hooks, and a timer, plus scrap wood from my garage and existing shelves.
This post was edited by kathyb912_IN on Thu, Jul 25, 13 at 18:10
Nice little setup lilydude.
Uscjusto: I do it sort of like kathyb. I have some book shelves in an insulated room in the garage(not too cold or hot ambient temps). I bought a cheap fluoro unit and a couple "daylight" bulbs from Home depot for $30 or so. Attached the chains to the bottom of one shelf and I do the book "roulette" thing like kathyb does on another shelf below the top one. It's easier to do the book thing since not all veggies grow at the same height and rate.
Kevin
Never needed a 2nd crop of zucchini before. Usually had it coming out of our ears with 2-3 plants. This year had a dozen, but got SVB (and SB) for 1st time.
That really is a shame that your squash got hit. I would still try and start replacement plants. You have nothing to loose.
This is my first year growing Summer Squash and right away SVB.