23,594 Garden Web Discussions | Vegetable Gardening

Zzackey, I'll give it a try if I can find some. Nancy

S the New Zealand spinach compared to regular?

Peter - As I said before in a post I am in Northern VA. This year I started about 10 seeds from my 2013 globe seeds and bought some additional imperial artichoke seeds. I decided to transplant five of my chokes into my raised garden on March 30 and cover them at night. I believe that the exposure to 38-50 degree temps at night will vernalize them. I did not harden them off. So far, so good; the plants look okay. I still have 7 plants under lights and no space to plant them in.

Are the Red Romanesco chokes tasty? I lost my seeds in my move and didn't realize until it was too late to start artichokes this spring. Figure I'll buy a couple plants somewhere for now. Next year, I want to starts bunch of varieties. Will probably grow them I my small greenhouse all winter so they get a good start and some chilling.

I ordered sakatas and midget so far. I'd still love to hear from anyone else with recommendations

There is nothing tastier than Charentais.

Any organic matter helps - leaf mold, chopped straw or hay, cotton or coffee hulls, etc. Not as effective at compost but helps. Peat skews your soil pH so use depends on your pH. Sand, per all the discussions over on the Soil forum, doesn't help much and it takes a lot of it. Even unfinished compost works and it finishes composting in place. Did you fill the whole bed with only compost? Nothing else?

Your compost contains enough diverse components or just turf. Perhaps it needs more carbons added to decompose. Do you run an active hot compost pile or a stacked cold pile? What is available to you locally?

Dave

If you have soil that is heavily clay and tends to be slow to dry out, warm up, and tends to be cloddy, I think 3 inches of medium/ coarse sand can do wonders to loosen that soil up. For my silty clay loam I also add a good bit of peat moss. I love what this does for my soil. Just today I went out and tilled in the planting rows for a row of gladious and a half row of super sugar snap peas. How did the ground work up here in wetish Indiana?...like a sand box.

Not at all, first because not all the individual seeds will germinate. Especially with Golden as it has a natural low germination rate vs. the common reds.

Then the amount of thinning needed depends on how you space the seeds when you plant. Mechanical seeders (rather than hand seeding) insure that proper spacing for the most part.

Then , if they didn't plant a monogerm variety, they have methods for mechanical thinning. You can do it with a rake in the home garden if you know what you are doing.

You can't really compare commercial farming to home gardening in most cases. Totally different methods used.

Dave

Thanks, Dave. It's not that I mind the effort of thinning, my garden is small; it's that I am terrible at throwing away plants.

Cecile

Tall stuff goes on the north side. So if you're planting rows of stuff of very different sizes, the layout on the right is what you want. If everything is about the same height, it doesn't matter.

Thanks a lot Dave and Dan. The plots receive full sun all day, so thats not an issue.
Dave I will check out the website you linked, I will go with the one on the right layout.

Rhizo1 ; Thanks for correcting my radical spelling of radicle. I actually do know better, but I'm getting old .....

(Interestingly the gardenweb spellchecker is objecting to "radicle." I wonder if I actually had it right to begin with, but the software radicalised it. Anyway, GW should know better!)

A passing update to soaking seeds, I also purchased some Lupine flowers which I hear are infamous for not sprouting without a good soak and possibly even some husk scoring. I soaked the seeds for 24 hours, and got about 50% of them swell and crack the skins to their seeds right off. Inside was a classic green embryo, however the others had shown no signs of swelling. I scored the ones who had not swollen with a simple nail file, and of those about 85% caught up to their siblings within just a few hours.

I've planted all my seeds now and already a Lupine has pushed from the starting medium and is trying to push out two cotyledons after only 12 hours. I expect 100% success with the lupines. :)

I'm never a fan of planting only 1 of anything. It cuts your odds of having any success way down. 2 plants will double your odds, 3 will triple them. Especially when cross-pollination is required. And one doesn't normally only plant one melon plant per mound anyway, you plant 2 and often 3 to insure adequate male and female blooms at the same time.

So I would success you sort your seeds, and if you don't want to grow them as transplants but decide to direct seed instead then plant 5-6 seeds of each in separate hills next to each other, close enough that the vines will be able to intertwine for pollination, and then thin each hill to 3 plants once the plants are 3-4" tall.

Dave

Perfect. That's what I'll plan on doing then!

Hi Dave - thanks for the feedback. I do have asparagus in a bed all its own I have too many onions to put out in other places, and was thinking I might be able to use the room in the asparagus bed around the asparagus so it's not "wasted space" once the asparagus is growing to fern. Thanks for the quick feedback.

Neither onions nor asparagus tolerates competition, so if you do it be sure they have adequate spacing.

Cyn I'd do the same as you. I'd feel terrible to toss out tiny baby squashlings looking at me with those big puppy eyes... :)

Yes, it sucks, but slaving over seedlings that are going to languish sucks too... but all the power to you if you want to give them a try transplanting with protection. Hoping for some good weather for ya!

Thank you, guys! I decided to keep it for now. I am not sure about feeding though. They grow in the mix with slow release fertilizer with a normal planting rate for container plants... Should I still feed it with fast-acting food?

If your mix already has a little fertilizer in it, you're probably OK. You don't want to risk burning them. My eggplants were planted on March 14 and are still in their seed starting mix. I just gave them a very light feeding at 1/4 strength. In a week or so I will transplant to regular mix in 4-inch containers. They look a week behind the one you call your good one.

It is kinda funny about how some people plan their summer gardens on the basis of these hardiness zones.

Yes, although the hardiness zones are not necessarily indicative of frost-to-frost growing season, I guess they can be used that way. But formally, they aren't really all that useful for vegetable gardening. They're really mainly for shrubs and trees. The American Horticultural Society is specific about that, in reference to the hardiness zones -- "By using the map to find the zone in which you live, you will be able to determine what plants will 'winter over' in your garden and survive for many years."

Hey guys it matters!

Annuals will die earlier in different zones! I buy perennials and if it's hardiness is 20 degrees I won't buy it to high must be 0 or less TX weather is bi polar. I also determine hardiness by drought tollerence if it can dryout before watering and how long it will bloom here because plants bloom longer in different zones. Also lighting determines where I will place the plant as to what kinda of heat will be on the plant. TX heat and Sun time is a lot hotter...the suggestion for watering you can't follow here the same as other hot zones...Happy Planting

That's pretty cool beesneeds! I might have to drag out my dehydrator (and overplant cukes again--my husband will kill me!).

Tish, I tend to peel them because the peels can dry kind of not so tasty IMO, lol. But nope, I don't seed them.