23,594 Garden Web Discussions | Vegetable Gardening
No melon plant is going to produce anything in one month. You (and I) planted them about a month late this year. (Assuming your zone 5 is like my zone 5.)
I had snow on May 1, and still had last year's garden standing out there when I started prepping for this year.
I have replanted muskmelons a half dozen times to replace those broken off by wind. Now have some muskmelon vines about 6' long, and blooming. Watermelons are not doing anything. I guess I have disease problems, and should just give up on them.
"Zone 5" does not convey as much information as you may think it does. If you disclosed your location on your home page, you might have a neighbor give you some better information.
newyorkrita,
That looks great!! I garden exclusively in containers and raised beds. I cut down on the expense of potting mix by mixing 50% potting mix with pine bark fines and perlite. Dump it all in a cement mix bin and stir with a garden hoe. (well DH does the mixing)
I still need more space for extra containers but DH wants to keep his boxwood bushes.
DL
Radish for sure.
I also think it is winter/fall radish, since has white flowers. Red radishes normally have pink flowers. Right now I happened to have both of them in my garden. The white flowered one is from last winter's Chinese/ Korean radishes.
Another thing: When radishes bolt they grow quite tall an big.
ltilton, I looked up the tromboncino squash and you're right, it does look like my plant. Time will tell, as you said. I will find it very weird if that's what it turns out to be, as I have never heard of this variety, let alone planted it on purpose! I started all my plants from seeds and all I bought was regular old zucchini seeds, crookneck squash seeds and pumpkin seeds. If it is a tromboncino squash, it would have had to fallen into the wrong package on accident.
OHHH I just remembered that my daughter brought home from her kindergarten class what I was told was a pumpkin plant. This could very well be that plant. I don't remember where I planted it. So if this was a pumpkin, does anybody know which variety it may be? Now I can't wait for it to grow something so I can solve this mystery!
He he. Just talk to them. Play music for them. Calm them down. They're likely getting freaked by overindulgent caretakers.
But the word "stressed" is certainly a funny one for plants. That is, instead of saying that they are starved, drowned, baked, frozen, or poisoned. I guess we could go around to hospital emergency rooms and diagnose the problems we see there as "stress".
uscjusto - Is your variety perchance the Burpee SWEET Burpless Hybrid?
There are a whole lot of cukes on the Burpee site with "burpless" in their name, but I can't see one specificially called "burpee burpless hybrid." The SWEET burpless hybrid, otoh, is described as having mostly female flowers, ie it's at least semi-gynoecious.
All the rain is forcing earwigs upward this year, and I'm finding them in unlikely places. They hate soap spray, but so do some plants so be careful -- the spray can do more damage than earwigs, which make a mess but do minimal damage to plants. When I find a bunch of earwigs I call in the chickens. If I brush the earwigs to the ground, the chickens like to eat them.
weirdtrev, thats the perfect link. Thanx a lot! I'm going to try this for sure next year. I'll pay the extra money to get some cc seeds from a big 200+lb melon :)
planatus, I dont have a big farm or anything. I'll probably end up growing a dozen or so watermelon plants next year. I figured I'd try to basically make a carolina cross melon that has the m&s gene. Being dominant should make it easy to cross it back to carolina each year making it more and more pure carolina each year while retaining the cool gene. So I'm thinking that the variation should cut down very quickly to resemble an almost pure carolina with the spots. Basically, the uniformity should come on its own for the most part after a few years. It should be pretty easy even when I start getting only 50% seeds with the gene sense you can tell which ones have it so young. I'll just plant a bunch and only grow up the ones with the gene.
The only thing I still dont understand is how such a cool looking melon gene almost went extinct!! For anyone who doesn't know that reads this, apparently the variety was thought to be lost forever, and luckily years later it was found that someone had still been growing them, and they shared their seeds to get it out there again. That farmer rocks, whoever he/she is :)
planatus does bring up a good point about the round vs oblong varieties. It seems this melon has already been crossed to plenty of other stuff. Either of you know how that works genetically? cc definitely looks like the definition of oblong to me, which makes me think oblong is the way to go, but I also love variation and making new things. IF I were to put round m&s to cc, are the results going to remotely predictable? I was mostly planning to look for the heaviest weight I could sense thats the first thing I'll be going for. Maybe down the road I'll worry about mixing taste/resistance into it, but for the first step, I just want to make big cool melons. I cant find it, but I saw some seed someone developed that made the m&s look slightly pear shaped, and I thought that might have been from crossing round to oblong, but I thought round was typically an absolute trait as opposed to something line bred. maybe there are both. I wish I had bookmarked that page.
I really love the idea of making new things. Growing the same stuff as everybody else would never be good enough for my personality type. An example would be roaches. I breed them as feeders for my pet lizards. Was that good enough? NO. lol. I had to select the most colorful, and the biggest, and start side roach colonies to try and improve things. Its really ingrained in me for some reason, so as I get more and more into gardening, I'll definitely be spending my life trying to make new things and improvements every year :) I love the idea of open pollinated plants because of their variation, and am not fond of patented seeds. I'd rather be the guy making cool new things in a natural way and sharing them with others, as opposed to letting some scientist do it for me then telling me I cant play with it in future generations. Its really a big part of the fun to me, even if I have some crops fail once in awhile because of that unpredictability.
for whatever reason, I feel like this line should stay red fleshed. orange/yellow look nice, but not as yummy as red. I'll worry about colors down the road if I change my mind. I'm only 32, so i have plenty of time. If I grow a 200 lb melon with bright yellow moon and stars on it in the next decade, this will be a success. I have patients ;) Although realistically, it'll probably be done by someone in the south with my seeds which would still give me much satisfaction (I'm in MI so 200lb might be out of reach until I get south).
anyway, sorry about rambling on so much. I like talking plants :)
I have an F1 Armenian Slicer that did this all season, it is literally twice as tall as the rest which are 6 feet or more. I have had to run it to the fence and along the top and it is still going completely crazy. I was ready to pull it out any day now when I noticed in the last week it filled with cucumbers! A LOT of cucumbers at that, other plants produce 1 or 2 at a time for me, this one I am counting 10 or more and they are growing like wildfire.
Stick with it, it should produce well before season's end.
Too much nitrogen? Just a guess.
My lemons are producing lots of cucumbers on short vines. Maybe 3' long.
I'm picking 5 to 10 every day from 5 vines. That is about the only thing I'm getting out of my garden.
We have been having a monsoon here this summer and I figure that it is washing out most of the nitrogen. It may also be lack of sun for me. It has peeped out every once in a while for a few minutes at a time over the last two weeks.
I think they are in survival mode!
My merit corn is short and it's ready, but it is kind of bland tasting and not sweet at all. My tomatoes, beans, peppers, and everything else are short.
The link below will give you all the info you need - planting, caging, feeding and watering, and harvest.
Good luck.
Dave
Here is a link that might be useful: Step-by-step to growing tomatoes
Here we go, AL. Thanks for clarifying.
When I said it is an over grown zuke, I said it based on the appearance of the fruit and didn't pay attention to the vine. Now we know that there are vining squash too.
Zuccchini are bush plants. There are vining squash that are used as zucchini substitutes. The aformentioned English marrows for example ( rarely see one in North America tho) . Tatume/calabacita is a C.pepo vining squash that is used as zuke substitute. Trombocino (C. moshata) is a butternut type most often used as a zucchini substitute. All of these are winter squash which are used as summer squash. Another zucchini subtitute that is vining is Cucuzza which is a gourd (Lagenaria siceraria). Most winter squash includingthe pumpkin type can be used with varying degrees of acceptance as zucchini substitutes.