24,795 Garden Web Discussions | Vegetable Gardening

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. ;-)

We used to have a feral cat in the neighborhood. It was great. Then some overly zealous neighbor turned it in to animal control. Now our yards are over run with bunnies and most things we plant turn into a fresh salad bowl for the damn bunnies. And I keep finding mice in the basement.
I would gladly put up with cat poop and some dead half eaten bunnies at this point...

Never been a fan of pets but cats do have their perks.
Just to add, we've been eating the garlic greens and mint leaves direct from my own cat poop-amended backyard garden. I know because I started the garden last month, and tilling though I discovered at least one smelly clump down several inches. I just clean my herbs with a bit of ammonia and water, scrubbing and rinsing and no one's gotten sick yet.
Long live the feline species!

Purslane is the reason why it was discovered that pastured eggs have 30X the Omega-3 content of factory eggs, the tested eggs were harvested in Greece where purslane dominates as a weed. I think it is the best vegetable to mix in summer salads with tomatoes, but even a straight purslane salad is good.
But there is no justice. I am getting nearly none after the garden has grown in cool rainy weather. And I would eat it all.


rgreen -- that was great info about when to harvest. I've always heard harvest early, but then I think it'll be fresher if I harvest late. Now I know why to harvest early! It's usually so dew soaked in the a.m. I try not to touch the plants, but this year it is always wet, so I might as well get in there in the morning.
prairiemoon, most things travel very well with priority mail. I even mailed a carton of blackberries. My daughter sent me pictures of all the stuff she cooked with the produce, and my veggies even joined her in-law's home made sausage in one dish :)
Great thread -- learned more about the chemistry behind blanching than ever before. Though I tried freezing non-blanched bush beans one year and had to throw them all out. (probably because the freezer wasn't the greatest.)

Carrots, Mizuna, beets, and shelling peas (they are an experiment in a fall crop.) Ordering some scallion seeds for GH, and watching the storage cabbage, broccoli and cauliflower starts size up while cover crop breaks down. About to dig up first peas in GH they are done, and I will need space for scallions.







Just for the record, cucumbers and watermelons cannot cross pollinate.
No offence but I think your neighbor had 1 too many cold ones, I never had a problem.