23,594 Garden Web Discussions | Vegetable Gardening
My favorite sweet peppers are the large, squat pimento types. They are beautiful, very thick flesh and very sweet. I live in the extremely hot and humid south and had TONS of them from my rather small garden. What we didn't eat fresh or give to neighbors I froze and used on pizzas and in soups and stir-fries all winter. Red ruffled pimento is very good. Seed Saver's Exchange has a couple of great ones. I've grown some of the thin-skinned ones, but for me --oven-roasting, fresh, soups etc.... I really prefer the pimento types. No disease problems and very few blemishes --they will get heavy if you fertilize, so some sort of support is good -- I used 3 sticks/poles (triangle around the plant) with string around. Most fun thing I grow. : )
Aconcagua is the best tasting pepper ever. Odessa Market is my favorite to grow.
Keep in mind these varieties are owned by Monsanto now:
Sweet Pepper: Baron, Bell Boy, Big Bertha PS, Biscayne, Blushing Beauty, Bounty, California Wonder 300, Camelot, Capistrano, Cherry Pick, Chocolate Beauty, Corno Verde, Cubanelle W, Dumpling brand of Pritavit, Early Sunsation, Flexum, Fooled You brand of Dulce, Giant Marconi, Gypsy, Jumper, Key West, King Arthur, North Star, Orange Blaze, Pimiento Elite, Red Knight, Satsuma, Socrates, Super Heavyweight, Sweet Spot
Definitely a clay type soil but looks good; lots of tiny pieces of organic "stuff". ;-)
How you amend the soil at the end of the season is just as important as at the beginning. In late October leaves are in wonderful abundance. Collecting autumn leaves, chopping and forking them into this soil will give you a richer and fluffier growing medium the following year. This means purchasing less amendments in spring.
If you don't want to mess with bird feed but still want to attract birds, add a couple of bird baths. Make sure that they are positioned in a location that makes keeping them cleaned and filled easy....near a hose.
Birds are very happy to have a source of clean, fresh water nearby.
You need much more light to grow healthy seedlings. That window might seem fine to you, but plants are used to direct sunlight and will grow tall and lanky looking for it.
Consider some fluorescent tubes on a timer just inches above the new sprouting plants. Either that or you need a much sunnier location.
-Mark
I had a similar situation - chopped out cement and put a raised bed in its place. At the time, I didn't do much research and just mixed extra dirt with Amend. I didn't till the existing soil, but just dumped stuff on top. Now that I know more, I put vermiculite, peat and compost mixed up on top. Every time I put in new plants, I add more compost. since the vegetables just grow in the top layer of soil, that's where you need the minerals.
Here is a link that might be useful: My raised bed garden
I believe that your different soil amendments should be mixed together to create a homogeneous mixture. The layering of different types and textures impedes the movement of water, but also roots.
Add whatever is required to create a decent soil and mix it thoroughly. After planting, top dress with compost in small layers and keep adding to it as needed.
If you have not put the soil in yet, I would go with cardboard instead of landscape fabric. It might kill the ground cover before it turns to compost. I had it in one of my beds and it caused way more problems than it helped with. If you have put the soil in, good luck. Some of them are very hard to get rid of.
lgteacher- is there any way to get rid of oxalis????????
It has INVADED me!
I don't mind the pretty stuff we saw all over Santa Cruz last week, but the kind I have is a very DENSE cover , low growing and getting worse! Nancy
I grow lettuce here in Houston. I've tried about 15 varieties over the past 3 years. I do my planting in October usually and harvest leaf by leaf until around April 1. You'll probably want to plant a little later down in South Texas (RGV?), and you'll probably finish sooner.
Anyhow, the varieties so far that have done the best for me are Black Seeded Simpson, Crisp Mint, Gentilina, and Mignonette Bronze. They seem to roll through the occasional winter heat wave without bolting or turning bitter. Even those don't last once it starts hitting the eighties for me, although at that point they're pretty old. I started a second round in January this year, so I'll find out how hot a younger head can take before it turns bitter... Crisp Mint I especially like, because in addition to staying sweet, it stays pretty crispy.
Water is crucial, as others have said...
Straw bale gardening is a small world all of its own so those sites that advocate it would be the best source of info. But I can't see why you couldn't plant follow-up crops just as you would if using dirt,
For example you normally wouldn't follow up squash with more squash in the same place, you'd plant something unrelated to it like say beans or salad greens.
Dave
Thanks im trying to give them a lot of space. I plan to fill that with soil all the way and try and get like 12 cuc plants. Can I do more in that space?
As the season goes on, and the cuc plant gets taller. The bottom leaves seem to start to die, possibly from getting less sun. Is this normal? Should I just clip them off so there is just the stem of the plant on the bottom
As a result of this thread, now I almost wish I had some current quackgrass or bindweed problem to experiment on -- till half and use other techniques on the other half! I am feeling awfully curious :).
I am also wondering if a project I did this winter on a bed with quackgrass counts as tilling. I never thought of it that way, but maybe it, like, totally does :).
What we had was a raised bed with huge perennials (rootballs 3 and 4 feet across), and quackgrass that was mostly eradicated... except for inside those root balls.
I got some strong friends and we removed the plants, took them out to the lawn (already full of quackgrass), hosed off their roots and picked out the grass rhizomes, then sifted through the remaining soil in the bed and removed the grass runners.
I guess I think of tilling as having a purpose of chopping up the weed roots, and we were doing the opposite -- keeping them whole so we could get all the bits. It did involve an enormous amount of shoveling, though, and inadvertent but real mixing of soil and disruption of soil layers. Tilling? Not tilling? Accidental tilling?
After replanting I added some compost on top, and covered the whole business with road fabric and then about 6" or more of leaves and other mulchy substances.
Weather has been sporadic, sunny yet windy, dry, now a cold snap.
Then you likely planted them too early and you are seeing weather damage in addition to the spraying issue. Squash is a summer, a warm weather crop. Young seedlings easily suffer from wind burn if not protected from the wind. And even larger plants will not tolerate cool soil and drastic changes in weather exposure without damage developing.
In too cool soil the roots cannot absorb nutrients and the leaves show the resulting damage. Damaged leaves quickly develop more damage when exposed to wind, rapid changes in air temps, and sprays.
Bring out the fungicides early with some plants but only when they are also planted out at the proper time in the proper soil temps etc. Pesticides come out of the garden shed only when there are actual pests doing actual damage. :)
If the weather cooperates, these plants might recover ok but if they don't you still have plenty of time to plant new ones once the warm weather stabilizes.
Dave
Go to Walmart. Go to the gardening section (usually this will be the area inside the store, not in the outside nursery section) with the other pots. Look for a dark green heavy plastic bag folded up into a clear plastic bag with a handle.
These are potato bags. I used them for the first time last year, and they worked great. They're heavy durable plastic, pre-punched and riveted drainage holes in the bottom, and a velcro flap on the side. Put dirt in it, put potatoes in it, forget about it until end of season when the plants start to die back. Harvest potatoes.
Its pretty much that easy. Potatoes are incredibly idiot proof plants.
Till it in; fork it in; turn it over. It's all good.