23,594 Garden Web Discussions | Vegetable Gardening
I found that direct seeding did not work as well as starting seeds in plastic pots where I can control things. Out in the garden the flea beetles or something would half-way decimate the young seedlings.
I have already transplanted #2 planting of broccoli. I find them to have NO stress that way.
I have been growing sunflowers as a color-fence around my garden but I have finally learned that they do inhibit the growth of vegetables near them. I transplanted green and red pepper seedlings into garden ground near them in May 2014, and the pepper's growth just stalled out for over 6 weeks. I decided to dig up the peppers as a last ditch effort and to my surprise the peppers exploded with growth in their new pots almost overnight. It is early August and probably too late but I'll give the peppers a new start far away from the sunflowers. I plan to move the sunflowers back from the garden edge next year.
Easiest to prep in the fall. Do you want a raised bed so you can plant earlier or do you want to direct sow? Any chemicals thrown out under the shed? Are you going to trellis the cucumbers?
Do you have a good turning fork or garden fork. They are the easiest for me to work with.
Soil - Do you have access to horse manure (needs to hit 130F for three straight days to get rid of harmful bacteria), rabbit manure ready right from the get go, leaves - we have lots I run the lawn mower over them to mulch them up, breaks down easier. I have learned of a 40 horse barn that I'm accessing here in the South. I let the manure cook, add fall leaves and this year will be adding straw from my small area of straw bale garden. If you have no compost yet, straw bale gardening is a quick way to get lots of it by summers end. Worse thing about the horse manure - my dog thinks it's her personal playground and took livestock fencing out to get to it:)
Do you want to put some type of row covering over it so you can get earlier veggies? PVC or electrical conduit works fine. Have you started composting?
Yes, spinach is good. Also any kind of fast-growing Asian green like bok choy, tatsoi, gai lon. Other good choices are kale, cilantro, dill, radishes, chard, leaf lettuce. You may be able to pull off beets. Keep the soil moist and shaded to encourage germination.
So I emailed Ronnigers and got the reply that the Peanut fingerling can be an early or a late potato.
I'm going to enter that one in the Helpful Response contest.
In the meantime, I'm not going to order Ronniger's fingerlings, although I'd like nothing more than a 60 day fingerling.
I came across this information on facebook & thought it would be a great share here.
To make a Concoction (Egg Amino Acid)
Take 2 Organic eggs (without breaking it) in a glass container and soak them entirely with lemon juice. Seal it and keep it away from direct sunlight.
Open the Jar every 3 days to let the gases out.
At the end of 18 day period, you would notice all the calcium has dissolved and settled at the bottom.
You add 250gms of powdered jaggery, stir it (your eggs would have broken down during this period) and store it for a period of 10 days.
What you have is an effective concentrate. You would need to dilute in proportion and store the balance concentrate.
For spraying on vegetables - ratio of 2 ml to 1 lit of water
For pouring on soil - ratio of 100 ml to 3.5 lit of water.
Benefits:
Gives new Vigor to the plant, increasing flowering & gives good fruiting results.
Credit: Sourced from Mr Binuraj Purushothaman.
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This post was edited by ashok767 on Wed, Aug 13, 14 at 3:51
Most anything can be grown in a pot. But I think most any plant will be more vigorous grown in the ground.
Herbs are good ones for pots. I find pots are my best way to grow cilantro. But that's because I can bring it inside to try and delay bolting. I grow a lot of peppers in pots as well because I want to bring them inside over the winter without trying to dig them out of the ground. I also grow carrots because there are so many rocks around me that my options are either growing them in containers or building more raised beds than I can afford, or putting up with the consequences or rocky soil for carrots.
Angie
Make sure you have a layer of mulch on top of the pots.
Also, if you can put the pots inside other bigger pots, that will help. If not, maybe try to change the color to something lighter so it reflects the sun. Maybe wrap them in white towells??
You mention you have a smaller garden and only one zucchini plant this year. You need to have a male and female flower both blooming on the same day (and each flower only blooms for one day). Having more plants ups the chances that both kinds will be present on any given day. So yes, having only one plant could be part of the problem.
A bit more on the multiple plants for more flowers story:
Zucchini can be pollinated by any Cucurbita pepo varieties which include acorn squash, spaghetti squash, delicata squash, many pumpkins, and some other vining squashlike varieties. So while having only one C. pepo plant can limit flower availability, you could add more plants to help with pollination that would produce something themselves that would not be a zucchini. Your squashes/pumpkins/zucchini would all develop true to type....just don't save seed and expect to grow uncrossed varieties from them in later years.
If you are ordering in the spring next time, I bought that mix Peas/Oats/Vetch from FEDCO and have been very happy with it. I have a stand of it growing in a raised vegetable bed right now. Although the point of using this mix is so you get a lot of voluminous green matter to turn in, so they suggest you plant it in the spring and get a lot of bang for your buck. I planted mine the beginning of July though and as much growth as I get I get. I plan to turn it under in the fall.
In the past I've used just Vetch when it was this late in the season. I would plant in August and it would germinate and I'd let it stand over winter and turn it under in early spring. It worked very well for me. Advantages -- it was easy to turn under with a pitch fork in a raised bed and it didn't really come back after that. And could plant fairly quickly after turning it in bc it breaks down quickly.
I would definitely say it has helped the fertility in my beds. As a matter of fact, this year we built new beds and increased the size of the garden x 3 and didn't have enough soil from the old garden to fill all the new beds and had to purchase soil. So two beds had soil from the old garden and three beds had purchased soil. It has been a very noticeable difference and I've been so happy to see my soil perform so well with nothing more than a little alfalfa meal added in the spring before planting and some fish/seaweed emulsion liquid used a few times over the season.
And now I have the three beds with the new soil in them in cover crop for the rest of the season to get a good start on next year.
Sorry to hear about your groundhog problem. They are the worst! Had one one season and that was so frustrating.
My first year with the Trionfo Violetto beans. Got 10 seeds in a GW trade, all 10 germinated! The leaves are colored much like the almost mature beans; dark green with a strong purple tint. They produce well and look healthy, so I guess they're supposed to be that way.
Wayne, thatâÂÂs a good idea. I can plant the starts between the mature plants and pull them when they are in the way. Thanks!
And saving me money on fertilizer too. :-)
Oldmobie, oh good that the purple cast on the foliage is supposed to be there. I am really enjoy our vines this year. They are a good size bean and turn green when cooked and I love how easily they pull away from the vine when you are harvesting.
That's a nice cattle panel tunnel you have there too!
I would dig it up and look around for potatoes. Hopefully you will find some!
Welp, least there was something! I'll try potato again next year, this time without smothering pumpkin vines ;)