23,948 Garden Web Discussions | Vegetable Gardening

And don't forget to eat the ones you snip. They're delicious!

Cindy

For future reference, when using round containers row planting isn't the best use of the available space.

Planting in round circles follow the contours of the container and using the standard 2" spacing when planting allows for more plants in the same amount of space.

Dave

Thanks, Flora. I didn't read carefully enough.

Jim

Can you take a photo with your phone?

Cindy

If it's been in place for a year it will have a big taproot and transplanting will just hasten bolting. Eat whatever you can now and sow afresh. You could leave it to bolt and it might self sow. Mine does but my climate is very different, I imagine.

In z3 without protection? That seems very unlikely.

That was simple enough! Hate to kill all those potential transplants but I suppose it is better than a stunted crop.

In my limited experience - transplanted radish will not bulb up, the leaves may seem to do fine, but you wont get much radish. snip the extras and throw the snippings in a salad.

The lettuce should be transplantable if they are still quite small.

Yes, potatoes are relatives of tomatoes and peppers, any freeze will kill them.

Unlike tomatoes and peppers, a potato can completely regrow from a single root tuber, whereas the other two will simply die if the tops freeze. Potatoes will have a top die-off in cold weather, but as long as the tuber doesn't freeze, it will regenerate.

Don't be too worried about it growing a little bit. It should reach an inch or two and stop as long as its being kept in the cool and the dark.

But I agree, it would be much easier to simply use ones from your first harvest to kick off your second.

Potatoes overwinter here. Our soil gets down to 25F, but 27 is more common. So 27F yes, -4F no.

I have the onion sets in the garage so I'll go ahead and plant them this weekend. I dont have any garlic so that will just have to wait until the fall.

Thanks so much everyone - this forum has the best people!

Onion "SETS" are small onions bulbs as opposed to "SEEDLINGS" which are small plants that have not bulbed. Onions are photo sensitive and therefore will bulb dependent on the type regarding the amount of daylight. Here in Oregon, we have long daylight in the Summer and therefore I grow varieties for "long daylight" Your sets will probably not reach full maturity based on which variety they are and which daylight region of the country you live.

Here is a link that explains better than I can http://extension.oregonstate.edu/gardening/node/471

Here is a link that might be useful: Onions

Yes, grasp the stem near the base and just pull with a slight twist. It will come away. Same technique for fulling the stalks. Don't cut because that leaves a stub which will rot.

only thing to add is that not only are the leaves inedible, they are poisonous. They are fine to compost, though.

You're so lucky to have an established rhubarb plant! I've planted it twice, with no luck.

Did your plants survive the freeze?

Oh yes they are doing well, I have been putting buckets over them at night if there is a threat of freeze or hail. We had a light freeze last night (ice on my car), which is very unusual. We had snow flurries yesterday, which is the latest on record. It was mid 80's a few days ago, and the squash are growing fast. Hopefully the cold is over now.
Ron
Tulsa OK

If you don't get a good answer here, try the mushroom forum:

Here is a link that might be useful: Mushroom Forum

Ll, yours appears to be a new 'stinkhorn ' fungus. Post pictures in a day or so in order that we can see the progress.

another resource is a publication from the University of California.
" Natural Enemies Handbook"
publication # 3386

Available at your local bookseller or likely at the library or inter-library loan.

Wolverine, you are also welcome to post pictures here. Very few go unidentified, unless the image is terrible.

I looked at the box, and it's the "Bird and Butterfly" mix from American Seed. It contains:

sweet alyssum
columbine
cornflower
Siberian wallflower
Shasta daisy
Plains coreopsis
Larkspur
Sweet William
Coneflower
California poppy
Birds eyes
Globe candytuft
Moroccan toadflax
Scarlet flax
Blue flax
Corn poppy
Annual phlox
Upright prairie coneflower
Black eyed susan
Pink soapwort
Sweet William catchfly

Some are annuals and some perennials, I'm thinking I'll just do some in a planter box at one end of the garden, and maybe a row in one other place in the garden. I certainly don't want to deprive my veggies of nutrients they might sap from the soil.

Good call.

I do not prune any part of my tomatoes unless there has been damage (like limbs snapping outside of the cage due to a wind storm).

Generally speaking, the plant knows what it's doing better than we do, so let it do it's thing.

I don't know if there are new studies out, but the ones I read all had to do with the amount of perfect market sized tomatoes, from determinant varieties. That got twisted into things for home gardeners to do, IMO.

My own little experiments one year with twenty pairs of indeterminant heirloom varieties showed me that on unpruned plants over half of the fruit number develops on the main stem and its spits. If a plant is staked and sucker pruned to just the trunk and its splits it will develop slighty more total fruit than the trunk of an unpruned plant. But the fruit were not bigger on the staked plants. Suckers did produce smaller fruit, on average, than trunks for beefsteaks.

So fitting two pruned plants of eight total 'branches' in a cage produced noticably more than a single unpruned plant that had eight 'branches.'

I did not test brix or solids of the fruit, which might be commercially important, but the taste was the same to me, pruned vs. unpruned.

There is also the problem with disease (septoria and early blight) in a cage crammed full of leaves and suckers.

I top the plants and pinch buds starting six weeks before first frost because until a leaf is a certain size/maturity it does not furnish enough photosynthesis to support its growth rate so it is a drain on the plant or at best neutral. The baby leaves that are left on the plant when I top it will be almost full-sized when frost hits, all pumping energy into the fruit. Bud pinching also stops small fruit from developing that will never ripen so I end up with very few green tomatoes when frost hits, and the ones I do get are large and ripen inside nicely.

Finally, topping the plant stops it from falling over the top of my cages and off the top of my stakes.

So I will take two sucker pruned plants to one unpruned plant any day, as long as I can control for sunburn by planting a north south row instead of east-west.

The recommendations in the article may be useful when it comes to planning the garden, but they greatly oversimplify what is a very complex question. I agree with Dave that a more accurate method is to use nutritional guidelines to estimate each family member's caloric intake and then plant according to that. Perhaps an even better metric (when the issue is examined through the lens of comparing home-grown with store-bought) is to use US RDA vitamin requirements instead of calories. This would account for the fact that fresh home-grown fruits and vegetables are generally more nutritious that those which are bought from the supermarket. For example, pick vitamin C... As an adult male, my RDA of vitamin C is 90mg, or 32,850mg/year. Now estimate and add up the vitamin C present in all the fruits and veggies which I ate from my garden this year. Divide it by 32,850 and multiply by 100 and you will get a reasonable estimate of the percentage of nutrition I got from my garden.

This also doesn't account for changes in taste BECAUSE OF planting a garden. For instance, there are those of us who don't like the flavor of store-bought tomatoes, but will happily mow down home grown 'maters like candy. Similarly, you may have never even seen kohlrabi on a store shelf, but plant it on a lark one year and discover that you love it. Gardening changes how we eat.

I would also point out the obvious - that the article ignores meat, oils, condiments, etc.

I'm not criticizing the article - it is actually a good starting point for those wishing to become more self-sufficient. I would just make the point that it's an iterative process, whereby you make the decisions about what to plant based on your own family's eating habits.

(For those who may be interested, I grappled with this issue quite a bit in my book Garden Imperative. Link below.)

Here is a link that might be useful: Garden Imperative

I'm not saying this author did this but there are standard nutritional guidelines available for X number of calories per person per day for all the various age groups. That when combined with the 5 daily food groups (vegetables 2 1/2 cups per day) and the recommended ounces per serving of each gives you a good basic meal plan for x number of days.

Dave, I agree that would certainly be more precise, but I don't think it answers my particular question of how the number of types of veggies you grow and eat affects the calculations. Let me frame it a different way. Let's say I grow thirty kinds of vegetables in my garden. "A year's supply" of one veg would be different from a situation where I only grow ten kinds of vegetables, because in the latter situation I depend more heavily on each one. I'm curious about the assumptions about garden size and variety specifically.

Sorry to hijack your thread, wertach. Thanks for the link--it certainly got us talking!

Eric: I've read some of that about root spread/penetration in the past and was shocked. Now I've seen some of the Square Foot Gardening literature that claims 6" is plenty (and 4 potato plants to the square foot!) and was shocked again. What to believe? I know my crowded asparagus, in an 18" high raised bed, has roots that don't go down a foot. Some is very healthy; on the other hand some plants seem to be dying - ???

What experience do others have at both ends of the spectrum (excluding those plants - carrot, parsnip etc. - that obviously need deep soil anyway) ?

Just as a point of reference, I made my raised bed 18 inches I believe it was, but I also put potatoes in mine and those tend to plant deep and grow deep.

General rule of thumb when working with containers (and a raised bed is not dissimilar from a very large container) is that the container should be big enough to put on top of whatever you are growing. Or in other words, ideally the root systems of many plants are as large beneath the soil line as the stems and leaves are above it.

There are exceptions of course, but always better to have a little too much space than not enough.

It would help if they were more closer for planning fall plantings. I used to plan the whole years garden in the sping but now I wait till summer to plan the fall garden cause the summers harvests were not even close to what it said on the pkg.

Since we grow in containers things tend to grow a little faster than in the ground, and last year we found that the DTM for watermelons was very accurate. This is particularly helpful due to the difficulty in judging watermelon ripeness, especially when you only have a few and don't want to waste any "test" melons.