23,594 Garden Web Discussions | Vegetable Gardening
No, don't put the soil and plants in the compost!
Unless you are a very hardcore composter and keep your pile VERY hot, the seeds and roots will survive and will invade areas where you spread the finished compost.
Weeds are why FSM created municipal composting. Big, hot piles. Or the landfill.
I hope it's not too late. I planted tomatoes and egg plants today. ;-)
I had planned to start a bit earlier, so as to have larger plants at transplanting time. But I think this is OK. It is surprising how quickly small plants catch up when they get into the ground.
Jim
Agreed-you aren't even past your last frost date.
Plant cool weather tolerant vege now, such as snow peas (will grow in containers as many as 1 seed per inch) or can be direct sewn into prepared soil.
Radishes-the small ones mature in 25 days.
Spinach, lettuces, etc put out starts now and pick outer leaves until it gets too hot.
In late may or June put in tomato and pepper starts-it probably is too late and not worth the effort to start from seeds yourself this year for those plants.
Squash White bush, yellow, zuchs, need warmer weather-direct sew them when you pull the snow peas and radishes.
What trees grow good in NJ?
That's a question for the Trees forum not the Vegetable Gardening forum.
What makes you think you have missed the planting season? Is your garden all ready for planting vegetables? If not then now is the time to get it ready but it is too early to plant much in the way of vegetables yet.
Dave
"I'd wash any tree fruit, especially (apples, peaches, etc)...and potatoes. They tend to see a lot of pesticide/herbicide action. Potatoes are generally harvested after using a chemical defoliant to kill the tops."
If they use a chemical defoliant on the potatoes, how do they get the next crop to grow. They couldn't even get a green manure crop to grow after that. I am just curious. Maybe I don't understand, but it would seem that way.
"If they use a chemical defoliant on the potatoes, how do they get the next crop to grow."
Many/most agriculture chemicals break down into ineffective or inert levels a lot quicker than some believe.
The defoliants are applied to make digging the potatoes easier for machinery.
The most commonly used potato defoliant...Carfentrazone...breaks down rather quickly even in residual/dead leaf litter (which is "tilled" in...kinda...when the potatoes are dug). It's "half life" is less than a week in ideal conditions (warmth and microbial action, mostly).
The only thing the farmers are trying to do is kill the tops...not long-term weed suppression.
This post was edited by nc-crn on Sun, Mar 31, 13 at 16:09
Some sort of cutworm, maybe Red-backed?
If they're eating the fruit then I would apply bacillus thuringiensis (BT) to my crop. Then till the soil at the beginning and end of each season, to help destroy the pupa that lie in the soil.
This is really a Growing from Seed forum question and comes up often there. There is a FAQ there about it.
But the basic answer is a brief 10 min. soak is sufficient. Even a good misting with a 10:1 water to bleach solution followed by a period of outside air drying is sufficient.
Dave
Yes, they are globe artichokes. this is there second year, they died back towards the end of the summer last year, and i thought they died but they emerged back a few months ago after a good winter.
I want to move them, because I made wrong calculation of distance, so they are kind of closer than they should (that's one reason) and i think this maybe a reason for their slow development... plus the old pine trees in my garden are invading my veggie patch with their roots.
I don't know if the following may help... I had moved my two year old artichoke because the location had too much sun and too close to a large ash tree. I dug it up, and the root felt like a huge potato about half size of a football. I moved it on October of 2011. After having it moved, it grew huge. In 2012 it was just one huge Artichoke plant and gave about 6 or 7 globes. This year, it has propagated to a much larger, about five different artichoke plants. I can't wait to see how many globes it will produce.
To start you'll have to get up early to do it for an hour in the morning or do it in the evenings after work. Say an hour at a time and monitored closely. If you do that for 5 days then by the weekend they should be ready for something like 2 hours out, 2 hours in, 2 hours out, etc. Come Monday they can probably stay out in a well shaded, wind protected area.
Dave
Lots of ways to cope with this. For example my house faces North. If I put the seedlings out in the lawn, but close to the house, they will be in shade at 10 am. but wait, I am worried about frost. The brick patio in the back is some 5 degrees warmer, and with my work bench is outside because I am starting all sorts of trees and vegetables, I can put seedlings behind the bench, they will get some sun around 10 am, then sun after 4pm. If I am really worried about cold, I will put them on top of two to four five gallons pails, full of water. There are week ends, as others have said. There is protection from prevailing winds. I can put them under the hammock for filtered sunlight. My problem are the squirrels looking to dig for acorns in my seedlings pots.
Early May is, IMO, enough time for a summer garden, if you're willing to buy some seedlings. In fact, I think that's when I got my first community garden plot, and I remember it as a pretty good year.
May is early enough to plant purchased seedlings of tomato, pepper, eggplant, and other hot-weather fruiting plants. And to plant bean seeds, and I think onion sets for scallions. (I suspect that you'd need to buy the sets now and put them in the fridge.) And basil from seed or seedling. And corn seeds, if your garden is that kind of big.
You can put in perennial herbs almost any time that the ground isn't frozen. Bare-root bramble berries may be gone from the stores by May, but you could get a few now and put them into one-gallon pots now, and plant them later.
I think that you could sow leek seedlings now in a pot, or buy some (it is a little late to sow) and grow them on until you have your garden. It's too late to plant garlic for bulbs, but you could grow it for garlic greens, rather like scallions from sets.
You could probably start lettuce now in tiny pots, get it in the ground in May, and juuust get some to eat before it's hot enough for it to be likely to bolt.
Plenty to do. And of course, once the summer garden is in you can start thinking about the fall and winter garden.
Did you say your last frost is in April? I am in zone 7 and last frost in zone 7 is MAY 5. In zone 6 the last frost should be late May. You have plenty of time to have summer garden. Remember when you plant vegetable and the soil temp is below 50 they don't grow and it makes no difference if you plant it in April or May. The root system works only if it senses the temp is ideal. I have all my vegetable in Jiffy pots inside the house and I will take it out in May . Honestly taking care of 60 plants inside is a pain in the A.
Abe
That product is designed to be used as a dust -- that is, dry.
Consider recycling the stuff in an appropriate hazardous waste collection, then purchasing a kind that's meant to be applied as a liquid.
In the meantime, start looking for green caterpillars. Look on both the top & lower surfaces of leaves. When one is found, flick into soapy water. Repeat daily!
This might help. Here's how I built my enclosure
http://forums.gardenweb.com/forums/load/grtlks/msg0622590923398.html?1
@ChicagoDeli37: None of the pictures in your post are showing up. I'm seeing the message Images have been moved or Deleted
@gardenlen: Regarding Aspect,please take a look at 
@ltilton This is what I had read about, the shed itself is offwhite so shouldn't be too bad but I thought reflecting more light would help. If it's going to cause damage and/or not be significantly better then def not worth it, especially since it'll look pretty weird :D
Also the layout itself looks ok? Basically I will only be able to walk in between the beds on one side due to the shed and face, would that be a big concern?
With the quality of your carpentry, this is a good idea.
Ah, within a couple years I would like to start selling produce to restaurants and at the same time doing consulting and garden support for their own growing. I have read a lot of stuff about chefs and so on trying to grow their own food supplies and not knowing what to do.