23,948 Garden Web Discussions | Vegetable Gardening

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.

Poke your finger in the soil to see if it's damp before you decide to water. Every day seems like too much unless you have it in an ultra light soil-less mix.

Part of the problem is over crowding. You have about thirty basil plants in the space where you should have one plant.

Separate the plants and repot. Then in a couple of weeks plant them in the garden.

Zeuspaul

John, got really busy with the build and got lost. Thank you for the idea on 1/2 block. I love your beds, those look amazing. I will have to go 3 high as well now :) Great idea on the onion and lettuces in those, now you have me thinking about basil, chives, and a ton of stuff that could go in there. I am actually honored you would post. I had not seen your stuff and watched all your videos. I love how you give it away to a food bank your a great guy.

Great idea NC about checking craigslist, I wouldn't be surprised to find some.

Hello! I just found this forum, and this thread... it's a little old, so I hope you don't mind if I jump in with some questions on the subject (or should I start a new thread?). I too am very impressed by John's beds! I'm planning on building two raised beds out of cinder blocks as well, one of them 2 feet high and the other 3 feet. The 2-foot-tall one will be 10x6 feet in size, a garden with a path in the middle of it that you can walk on. The 3-foot-tall one will be long (35 feet) but narrow (2 feet) and will serve as a border edge wall along the sidewalk, and will be planted with shrubs. Now, my questions are -

1. Can I get away with not pouring a concrete footing, but instead using just compacted gravel or sand? Will that be structurally sound?

2. Can I use the "skinny" cinder blocks instead of the standard ones? They're cheaper and lighter, but are they as structurally sound of a choice given the size of my beds?

3. Do I have to fill the cinder blocks' holes with anything for structural support? I was thinking of putting top caps on them so the holes don't collect water (as they'll be quite deep).

4. It's hard to find information on raised beds that are 3 feet tall; is there anything else I need to take into consideration at that height, other than general raised bed procedure? Like, do I have to fill the bottom with a layer of gravel for drainage? Etc.

I'm planning to drive rebar down the holes for extra support, and mortar the joints between the blocks. But given that one bed will be walked on, and the other one is tall, I'm worried about their structural soundness. I feel like the more I read the more confused I get... If anybody can answer my questions, I'd really appreciate it!
Thanks!
Didi

This post was edited by DidiH on Wed, May 1, 13 at 21:24

I just planted 4 rows of Country Gentleman heirloom seeds and the pkt said to allow 1 square foot per plant.

Uh oh...I use about 8" centers between plants. Past 3 years have had way more corn than I could eat or give away. But my garden is very, very nutrient rich (almost too much) as per soil sample sent in to the co-op, so that must be why I can get away with that.

The stalks get pretty crowded, but they sure don't seem to mind. The tough part is digging out the root clumps in the fall. Since they grow together it almost takes the bionic man to pry them up out of the ground.

Vanlsle_BC, thanks for the link. That's what I was seeing. Tomorrow they both go.

Hopefully my handpicking is coming to an end as I got notice today that my ladybugs have shipped and should be here the end of the week. Sure hope that they arrive hungry....

wolverine1012; please don't forget to post follow-ups on the effectiveness of the ladybugs.

thanks to you also Jon, :)

Straw is very good at holding in the moisture

I agree completely about the squash as sensors. They're the sensitive ones. When they wilt, I water them. Every other time, I water everything else.

But in general, when things wilt a little, put on water. They won't mind being thirsty briefly. The squash perk back up in an hour or two. You'll develop a keen eye for when things look like they're drooping a bit.

The inches/week also depends enormously on sunlight, temperature, and humidity. If I did one inch/week in a central Texas summer, everything would be dead.

DO NOT keep the top of the soil moist. That's fungus heaven.

Well unfortunately I don't have any squash right now lol. I did decide to mist all the seedlings that have sprouted (lettuce, kohlrabi, a few herbs and flowers) since it hit almost 90 today. But tonight it's supposed to start raining for several days straight so I'm hoping they all do ok.

I organized one pot of radishes
Think they were still to young but it worked

Nice rows

I've never been to Eden, but I did some lead-based paint inspections on some homes in Lake View & Lackawanna a few years ago.

To stay on topic, we're having a dreary day. I haven't checked the cucumber, or squash plants.

I know that this topic is a few years old. I just want to know if you can tell me what squashes you grow ended up beating the cucumber beetles? Thanks.