24,795 Garden Web Discussions | Vegetable Gardening







Here are some pictures of the garden. JerseyBoy and BrandyBoy are sure growing!





Zucchini have both male and female flowers and are polinated by many different kinds of bee and some wasps. Don't worry about pollination if you are in a normal area where there are flying insects; the bees will find the flowers. In the absence of honey bees, you should encourage solitary bees by building a solitary be house in the very early spring. It is easy and need not be fancy like you dind on the internet. Just use a non-treated 6X6 block of wood and drill 3/8th inch holes to a depth of 3-5 inches about an inch between them. Hang the block at least 3 feet high. Birds may eat the bees so it is best to cover the face of the block with hail wire about an inch in front of the holes. Did you know you can eat the male flowers? They are a delicacy. I usually leave one male flower for polination and harvest the rest. Look on the internet for recipes.

We get a lot of mosquitoes here - even if I'm super diligent about eliminating standing water in our yard, we can't control nearby neighbors'; rain gutters, plant saucers, etc. can harbor the little buggers & our yards are rather close together here.
I've had good results w/ this product - it kills on contact & repels:



2" are rather small for transplanting so you might need to add 10 days or so to the 57 DTM, mine are usually planted out at around 6" (5 weeks from seeding) with 5 or 6 leaves. My concern at this point would be the weather turning hot before they head up because you probably have another 3 weeks or so. When they do start heading keep a close eye on them for bolting because they can go south fast when it is hot. You also might try to shade them if possible. I have grown Green magic and like it and still grow it in the fall, but in the spring I always grow Early Dividend because it is only 48 DTM so I can get the harvest before hot weather sets in around here.


If you don't want to saturate your plants with chemicals, you can make a powdery mildew spray from milk and water, or from baking soda and water. There are many versions of this on the internet so it's easy to google and get the proportions. You have to make sure you also spray the undersides of the leaves, and do it fairly often until the problem is under control.



Thinking it may be a wild mustard - check this out...


Dave, thanks so much for your information. I do poke my fingers really deep into the soil to test. I'm going to twist the liners out with some pliers because the holes are plenty big enough to get most of it out. I'll just let it ride and see what happens this year for these buckets.


The clear bet is the sideways pics are from cell phones; some phones have wonky which-way-is-up info. If you are posting one of these, and you run it through pretty much any image application on your computer, that info will get rectified. If you are trying to look at someone else's sideways pic, try right clicking on the pic and choose the option that's something like "open image" or "view image in a new tab/window", whichever way your browser words it.
You could rotate your monitor...




> but after a few years of failed crops for various reasons I am trying to be extra vigilant this year.>
Vigilance is good but at some point we all have to accept that sometimes garden crops fail. It happens for lots of reasons and many of them are beyond our control. That's regardless of the size of the garden or how many years experience one may have. It is the very nature of gardening.
The perfect garden with a perfect harvest is an impossible dream. And focusing on that goal can quickly turn any of us into an obsessive-compulsive gardener inclined to panic and over-react. That not only takes all the fun out of gardening and defeats one of its primary purposes - relaxation and a sense of accomplishment - but it usually leads to actions that create more problems for us and for the garden.
Relax and enjoy your garden. Nature will take its course no matter how much you fight it.
Dave


Hi - the 'eggs' & ants are aphids plus ants could be feeding on the aphids' excrement (a.k.a. honeydew) - or on the plant's nectar. Okra has nectaries, I've learned, which are sort of pores on the plants that produce nectar. You can wash aphids & ants off w/ a hose. The aphids can do harm, since their feeding can damage/distort leaves & tissues, but ants by themselves won't harm okra by feeding on the nectar, in fact they may help as pollinators. I do not see ants in your photo, so they may be after the nectar & not the aphids' honeydew.
The holes in the okra leaves are definitely done by something else, but they look healed over to me, meaning the damage is old & pests are likely long gone. It could've been perpetrated by caterpillars, grasshoppers or slugs/snails, I think. The 'rule of thumb', BTW, is that plants can lose up to 1/3 of their foliage & still be OK.
It is hard to determine if that is upper or lower foliage on the tomatoes. I don't worry too much about damage on lower leaves, since they tend to get scraggly w/ age, but if it's on new growth @ the top, I think that may be cause for concern. I remove dead leaves regularly from my tomato plants.

