23,948 Garden Web Discussions | Vegetable Gardening

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.

I don't know if it is the rain. My local Coop. Ex. guy mentioned that the conditions over last winter were very favorable for their development, maybe your winter wasn't as good? We do have a ton of beetles of all sorts this year. On the other hand I have not seen too many stink bugs as yet.

In suburban Baltimore area of MD, I saw quite a few stink bugs in early spring, but have not seen many or really any since.
I measure by how many JBs gather on my back screen door at night. Only two last night but then it may be early for them.

I like those round yellow one, Mastero Farmerdill.

I do not have any specific example, but some taste too water with ver little flavor until they are pan fried. That is basically how I like them, pan fried.

We like the big ones sliced into thick rounds and grilled with a little oil and Italian seasonings.

I haven't grown anything but a few different varieties of green/black and haven't really noticed any difference in taste. Using up the last of my Raven seeds this year, noted last year they weren't as prolific as the "standard" (Fordhook?) green mottled one I bought as a start from greenhouse. I think my dad seeded Fordhook this year, I'll have to compare again and report back. Farmer up the road from me swears by Golden Rod.

Just to add, some problems related to watering can be from over watering or just uneven watering. If you let things dry out too much then water heavily you are still stressing the plants. If you really get no rain where you live, I would suggest drip irrigation. There are some great hose systems out there and then you can turn them on every other day for a short time. This will be more even and will prevent damage to the leaves from getting them wet when the sun is strong.

Marilyn,

Don't lose hope. Your garden looks good, and things will get better.

I'm a first-timer like you too and had a late start to the season as well (we closed in April, and I didn't get to work on the garden until well into May).

Similar to you, I couldn't afford too much and there have been times I have felt I have wasted money that my wife could have used to buy stuff around the house instead.

We ended up with two 5'x5' in-ground beds, tilled the soil 18" deep by hand, and all it cost us was back-breaking labor and bags of compost & vermiculite.

But now as I look at the garden every day with the tomatoes starting bear fruit, the squash and cucumber flowering and the lettuce getting ready to pick, I don't feel so bad at all.

Hang in there, you're on to a good thing!

My opinion: forget about a garden this year. Dig a little hole and see what the soil is like. Based on your photo, it looks like it should be pretty good. Let's say it's good soil. I'm going to assume you don't have time to hand-weed this plot. Cover the whole thing with black plastic, cardboard or something to cut off the light to the weeds and kill them. This will take several weeks. If you used Roundup, you could do it in a week. Warning: if you till without killing the weeds, you'll be sorry.

Then remove any fences and debris, and till or dig at least 6 inches deep. All of the dead grass and weeds now becomes an organic soil amendment. Find out from some local experts whether you need to add lime or phosphorus. If so, till them in. This is also a good time to till in some compost. Now make two raised beds about 4 feet wide, with a path in the middle. I just rake the soil into raised beds; I don't build support walls. But that's up to you. I like raised beds because they are easy on my back.

Now keep the soil surface uncovered and moist for a couple of weeks and let the weed seeds germinate. Any roots that you didn't kill may also resprout. After you've got a nice crop of weeds growing, cover with black plastic or cardboard again until the weeds are dead. If you had planted your veggies right away, these are the weeds that you would be pulling by hand, in the hottest part of the summer.

Now your soil is ready for its first crop, but it will be too late for this year. I like to cover the soil with black plastic over the winter, to keep the windblown weed seeds out, and to keep the soil in good workable condition, so that I can start planting early in spring. Minimize tilling from here on out, to avoid uncovering more weed seeds that are lurking underground. They will sprout as soon as they get some light.

This sounds complicated, but actually it takes very little labor to follow these steps. It just takes a lot of calendar time. A 10 x 20 piece of black plastic is a good investment. Find a few stones or bricks to hold the edges down.

I do something like Lilydude for new beds or extending existing beds. I weed whack the grass/weeds down to the dirt, cover the area with a couple of inches of compost, cover that with cardboard, soak it and top the card board with more compost, or manure, then let it sit all winter. The cardboard suppresses the weeds and attracts worms, and is completely gone by spring. You can just turn it all over and plant.

I got really sick of desodding new areas, and felt like I was losing to much of the best topsoil when doing it.

So, asparagus beetles only like the females? I didn't know that!
How do you tell the males from the females? Nancy

No they don't only like the females but it is the berries on the females that attract them to the patch and keep them there. The berries are what they feed on primarily.

All male plant beds have a much lower incidence of gus beetles.

Dave

Be aware...spinosad kills a lot of beneficial soil creatures.

Thanks for the responses. I think I will use it for the leafminers on my citrus trees,. I will alternate with Neem oil application every 15 to 30 days or so. Hopefully it should keep them in check!

Here is a link that might be useful: How to use Spinosad

Thanks Theforgottenone

suspect rats. About harvesting: you can do it at any stage. Cukes and squash need not to mature. Maturing result in hardening the seeds inside and less desirable.

When it's too much work, takes up too much space, isn't yielding enough, is plagued continually by pests/disease, gives me no pleasure.

There are so many plants to choose from, I don't bother with trouble.

Deleted duplicate post. Why does this always happen??

This post was edited by susanzone5 on Wed, Jul 10, 13 at 19:00