24,795 Garden Web Discussions | Vegetable Gardening

Nice.when did you plant them? The tops had died back already? Mine got planted late and are taking forever to die back. They are green and healthy and flowered already. No signs of being done anytime soon. I've heard of cutting off the vines and then letting the potatoes cure, but I always just wait for them to die back naturally. I would like to use the space for other things this year.


Lime alone in dust form is an old time remedy for fungus issues long before all the fungicides and such available today. I have memories of being sent out to the garden as a 10 year old to "dust" the plants and then we got to play in the sprinklers to wash off. Good times! :)
Dave

Well, I was just thinking of making up some Bordeaux someday instead of buying fungicide. Copper sulfate is dirt cheap. Lime is too. So cheap you can only get it in 50# bags. Now, to me, with alkaline soil, lime in quantity is an environmentally toxic substance. I wonder if anyone sells 1# bags of lime for a dime apiece. Ebay maybe? Actually, the copper fungicide concentrates on the market are fairly inexpensive. VASTLY cheaper per unit volume than the ready-to-use stuff. In general, ready-to-use stuff (insecticide, fungicide, etc.) is a real rip-off.
Bordeaux has lime in suspension, which means you need to shake it really hard to get the stuff suspended enough that it won't clog. Yes, I guess Bordeaux would be somewhat more harmless to humans and to the environment than the diammonium copper salts that are used in most fungicides. That's not really bad stuff, but somewhat more of an irritant.
I didn't know that lime was once dusted for fungicidal properties. I know that dusting with lime and soot was done routinely back in the day, but I thought it was to discourage insect pests.


Love that seating area you have! I am doing one myself now. So peaceful to sit in the garden with my morning coffee.
I do all raised beds. I find it far easier for weeding and many other issues. I also lay a 4" base of RCA on top of the grass to help further prevent voles/moles from getting nosy. If you have burrowing animals, I highly recommend stapling 1" hexagonal wire fencing to the bottom of the bed. It prevents the animals from getting through and allows the roots to grow deeper. They go right through the RCA base into the ground here.
Beautiful growth you have there, very nice pics!

They're looking for food and your corn tassles ain't it. Neem oil isn't very poisonous to ants. Many folks claim neem kills ants, but none of the manufacturers do unless it is done as a suffocating treatment. You have to wet the ants directly. Since there are gazillions of ants, that's hard to do.
They're opportunistic little darlin's but almost always harmless. Also, they don't live there but live off-site, so to speak. Look for a line of ants on the ground coming and going; usually the same single line.
Never spray ants and thus your food too, no matter how "harmless" they claim the poison to be. If you want them gone, spray a single line of the poison of your choice (not neem) across their trail. They will sicken and die before they get to the plant, and those on the plant, when they leave, won't be back.



And Pea varieties


I have to wonder how you prepared the garden in the first place. If you just mowed the weeds down or scraped them off the surface, they'll shoot right back up. The roots are still there. Of course, when you dug the bed up, all the meadow seeds laying on the surface got planted. The long term answer is puling weeds out by the roots and mulching. It may take a couple of seasons to get them under control, but eventually you should get there.

I know exactly what you mean by corn exceeding your expectations. This is my first year planting corn, growing Indian glass corn, and I also heard knee high by the 4th of July. Well at the fourth, my stalks were over 7 foot tall. I guess all that compost and May rains really helped!
I've also tried the three sisters method with pole beans and squash and I'll never do it again. It's just too much of a jumbled mess. I guess I prefer a tidier garden.

Jimmy56 -- Definitely NO hard feelings! I didn't take it that way at all. Gardeners and fishermen have reputations for exaggeration so I thought a photo or two would help. As for my husband helping in the garden... he likes to call it OUR garden, but I do all the prep work in spring, all the planting, all the weeding, all the harvesting, all the preserving. (I feel like the Little Red Hen.) Once in awhile, he walks through and says something along the lines of "We're going to need to do something about [fill in the blank.]" then strolls out again. Really, it's better that he doesn't help much because we never agree on how anything should be done anyway, and this way, I can just do what I like. ;-)









Two plants together in one hill. All I plant, not counting the late zuke, same variety that I will plant this week.
Laceyvail, I have had similar experience here in the scenic Hudson Valley of NY. Three butternuts, growing directly in the "old" compost pile, have been blooming for two full weeks -- all guys, with no gals in sight. I'm a patient person but this is ridiculous.