23,948 Garden Web Discussions | Vegetable Gardening

I'm in your zone - it's difficult to get lettuce to grow here during the summer. High temps cause lettuce to get bitter. I'm trying it under my tomatoes to see if some shade will help.

Last fall I planted mesclun mix and Swiss chard in September. We ate salad from the end of October through May! Best $2.00 investment I've ever made! Lol. I planted them across my 3 foot wide bed in 2 rows. Basically just 1/4 inch apart. Then I thinned them to every other plant or so. I wasn't too particular about it, just 1/2 to 1 inch. We picked them young, so they didn't need a ton of room. Pick them from the outside and they will keep producing for you.

The plant in your picture looks like Swiss chard. Mine bolted too once the weather got hot, along with the mesclun lettuces. Chard needs to be planted further apart - 4-6 inches is what I did. We cut those young and ate them in salad. If you let them get bigger you can cook them like collards. Very good!

Here is a picture at the end of the season. I pulled most of what was in this bed by the time this was taken. There was more chard and spinach in the middle. I'll be adding lots more mesclun this time around. That's it in the back.

This post was edited by lm13 on Sun, Jun 23, 13 at 17:26

I'm such a newbie at this, I even got my zone wrong. lol... I knew it was 8 (using a scale without a and b)... However, i thought it went to 7b... Nope, still 8, but 8b...

at any rate,, i do understand the difficulty in giving all permutations on one seed packet. However, getting past that, the in-row spacing seems to be too large as well... I used the 6 inches suggested, and I have a ton of space between my plants.. My next planting, I'm going for the very tight 1/2 - 1 inch and see how that works...

Of course, if i had any idea of what the mature version of what i am growing looked like then it would be a lot easier!! :-)

thanks for the replies

Thanks sunni! yep, def. Asiatic Garden Beetle,but also found 2 huge balls of Japanese beetles,like 4-6 stuck together doing whatever...around 11:00 pm on my eggplants ew, I was pretty sure I read somewhere that they come out at the sunniest time of the day...it was a surprise.

Thanks everyone for your input.
Earwigs are a problem here every year. I don't know why they are so prolific...but every year at this time there is a population explosion, then about a month later their numbers decrease.
I have decided to just deal with it, all my plants are past seedling stage so they are able to withstand some damage.

Yep. PM. As Seysonn mentioned, a milk solution or neem can help control it. There's also a baking soda solution -- google it.

In any case, you want to spray off(with a water hose/nozzle) as many of the spores as possible before applying the solution.

Also, try to keep from touching other plants AFTER you've touched affected plants to prevent the spread of spores.

Kevin

Or you could try an actual fungicide.

PM is one of those diseases that's easier to prevent than cure.

Adding absorbable Calcium with Vitamin D in the soil will do the job.

Apropos to NC's post, I think I over did it with wood ash on some of my bean plantings this spring, as some areas had very poor germination and failed seedlings.

Now that's impressive -- guitar or reading. You've reminded me that when a kid has resources within themselves, even isolation in the country doesn't need to send them always to video games and TV for entertainment. (I'm a suburban person moved to the country, so the isolation is new to me.)

And actually, I think it was the new electric tiller that made working in my garden so attractive to these boys.
Boys + power tools = good times :)

Enough strawberries for jam? Yum!

Oh, I've been making jam (only 5 jars per batch, I don't use pectin so 1/2 lb of berries per jar) every other day. Winding down now - I just came in from picking (didn't pick yesterday) and haven't weighed them but probably less than a lb. Finished making that batch started yesterday (it needs to sit a while both before and after cooking). Made 3 batches this week so 15 jars, sold 2 at market Wednesday and hope to sell a lot more next week.

I don't think DS watches TV at all - unless it's a rare time when I'm not watching The Voice so he may join DH for Antiques Roadshow. And my parents have satellite, will record nature shows, country music awards shows for the kids to watch when they visit but DS is too busy to visit them often.

I watch The Voice and Revolution when they're not reruns, but our antenna broke about 2 weeks ago so I had to catch the season finales online. Wouldn't you know it was just that one channel affected (though we never were able to pick up ABC so now we're down to CBS, PBS, FOX and some Spanish channels).

We went to my cousin's kids' birthday party (they live next door 1 mile down the road) yesterday, he was really bored the whole 4 hours (didn't take a book) since he and DD were the oldest ones there (she's 9, he's 14). He just went for the food. He didn't ask to go home though.

Does more frequent watering help? I like the book Square Foot Gardening that encourages people to plant a little more densely than the package does. Two rows of bush beans can be 6" apart. You can still easily harvest the plants. Three rows means the middle row is harder to reach. In a small patch, you could plant every seed 3-4" apart. One year I had a wonderful harvest from a 3x3' square bed.

One of the problems with weeds is that mother nature doesn't like bare soil. I've done things like plant cucumbers around young blueberrie bushes. I don't usually mulch but that might help. I think when you leave so much ground bare, you are just inviting weeds and wasting good growing space. The other thing is that I rarely see a decent hand weeder for sale in regular garden centers, only the more upscale ones. I have what was originally called a Cape Cod weeder. Only thing similar I have seen advertised is a Cobra head weeder. Mine is an "L" shaped blade I can scrape thru the top 1/2 inch or so of soil. This gets a lot of the little roots just pulling doesn't get. I also wear the rubber coated cheap gloves from the farm and feed store that gives me a better grip. I cover walkways with layers of newspaper covered with grass clippings. Sometimes I edge the beds this way too. With a larger, more open space between rows that you have, you might try a scuffle hoe. Good luck!

That's a heck of a lot of portulaca competing with your bean plants. I suggest you weed more than once a week so that you can get control of it.

Just an update - I was going to throw out the top of the pepper seedling I was trying to root in water, but it has 2 tiny roots now (weeks later!). So may be too late to plant in garden for you if you do this (maybe you've already composted the tops of your plants), but it does work, though they're much slower at it than tomatoes. I plan on putting this one in a pot and trying to keep it til next year.

Very sorry to hear about your hail storm. Last year we had one, nothing like yours, but big for here, and it severed the growth points of some of my tomatoes and watermelons. They all made it, but it took a little while for them to recover. Your tomatoes should come back strong.

The floods washed the nutrients from my broccoli bed and left it with purple, dying leaves. A couple doses of liquid fert brought it right around.

Whether the heads will be worthwhile or stunted is another question, but no more purple leaves.

Your squash needs feeding. Mine looked that way, I sprinkled a small handful of 13-13-13 on top of soil and watered it into the ground. You'll see it turn bright green in about a week.

squirrelwhispererpup,
I also suggest burying your vines, or mulching your plants heavily so that the main vines are covered up with dirt. That protects the main vine from SVB eggs, and also helps the plant send down more roots. That way you have less vine you have to inspect and inject.

This post was edited by ccabal on Thu, Jun 20, 13 at 12:04

Thanks ccabal. They are in large smart pots and their vines hang over the sides but I think I will see about adding soil to the pots to raise the level and cover at least the bases of the plants.

The okra issue looks physiological to me. I'd say it's sunburn in the first pic. Not sure about the second pic but could be an opportunistic fungus because the soil looks really soggy.

A few things I'd like to point out:
- the okra plants are too crowded. Okra can get huge if the weather cooperates. One per pot is sufficient.
- Don't use insecticides, particularly Sevin, unless you have a very good reason to use it, such as an uncontrollable infestation. Sevin should never be used as a preventative. It kills off beneficials, which sets you up for a future infestation.
-the tomato problem looks unrelated to the okra issue. I'd say that is blight but maybe a tomato expert could chime in.

This post was edited by Slimy_Okra on Sat, Jun 22, 13 at 19:16

Thank you! I had planned on thinning out tomorrow, but didn't know if my strongest plant had issues or not. Thank you for the feedback!

Beautiful! So much creativity.
What is planted next to the lettuce (?) - is that borage? I love not having to bend over for everything too. I just put mounds and mounds of compost around my many tomato and pepper plants this morning...a little stiff I am.

LKZZ - thank you - I assume you are referring to the bottom pic in the original post?

Thats actually not lettuce, it is napa cabbage, and purple cabbage in front of the peas. The blue flowers are lobelia, and there are petunias and zinnia squeezed in here and there. There are a few borage around the garden that seeded themselves from last years plants, but I didnt plant any this year because they got eaten up by bugs last year and looked pretty ratty.

The first week or two of gardening season I am always stiff and hurting. But its good hurt usually :)

I am in N. Florida and it has been raining a TON the last week, I haven't watered in over a week because of the rain. The soil is pretty wet. Not mud consistency but wet. There isn't much I can do about the rain though.

The plant is far from dying but it is stressed and as Ed said most likely from over-watering. The leaf roll is a classic sign of over-watering. So if it has been "raining a ton" that could be it. It always pays to have a rain gauge in the garden so you can keep track of exactly how much rain fall there has been.

Pepper plants don't like wet soil. They prefer to dry out between waterings - be that rain or gardener supplied water.

Dave

Bush beans don't need a trellis. They don't climb. Plant them close together and the plants support themselves.

It is late to plant beets unless you grow them just for leaves.

Dave

Dave, thanks for the info on the trellis. I planted the beets yesterday, should I just plant more beans over the beets and pull the beet seedlings out when they emerge? This way that whole bed will be bush beans, with a row of carrots and a row of dill on the perimeters of the bed.