Posted on 08/21/2015 12:55:47 PM PDT by greeneyes
The Weekly Gardening Thread is a weekly gathering of folks that love soil, seeds and plants of all kinds. From complete newbies that are looking to start that first potted plant, to gardeners with some acreage, to Master Gardener level and beyond, we would love to hear from you. This thread is non-political, although you will find that most here are conservative folks.
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Shaping up to be a short season, so I am glad Hubby got so much planted this spring. This time of the year and especially this week is very busy for the organizations where I do volunteer work, so I have had no time for gardening this week.
Just a quick look and some watering and a promise to do better next week is all the poor little plants got this week.
I did find a ripe cantaloupe from the volunteer patch, that I am going to eat later with some chicken salad. Hope everyone is doing fine.
Prayers up for Johnny and Arrowhead. Have a great weekend, and God Bless.
Pinging the list.
Put in my order for fall seeds to HPS yesterday. Bulk granex onion seeds, hybrid cabbage, brussels sprouts, parsnips and other yummy stuff. Never shop seeds while hungry for Asian stirfry stuff.
Still dithering on my garlic order from Adaptive and Southern Exposure. Dither...dither...dither. I’ll have to dither less, last time the stuff I wanted was already sold out by the time I made up my mind.
LOL. That happens to me sometimes too. What does HPS stand for?
My melons did badly - the vines seem stunted and the leaves smaller and browner than they ought - some of the vines died outright.
They were in an irrigated raised bed in a community garden. Someone else there planted melons in ground he just broke and they’re doing so much better, even with weeds all over. I wonder why.
I picked the last three melons ahead of the community groundhog and I’m planning to pull the vines and put in some fall plantings - sugar peas, beets, kale, lettuce.
Someone on this thread told me last year that although beets like growing cool, they like germinating warm, so they’re easier in the fall than the spring. We shall see.
HPSSeed.com They’re a wholesale seed place. For things that I use a lot of usually, like onion seed, they’re cheaper even with the extra S&H fees (8.95 for all orders). I order the hybrid cabbage varieties I plant from them too and put the extras in a ziploc in the freezer and use on them for several years. WAY cheaper than buying packets of 35 seeds for $2.95
I got Golden Cross cabbage (says it makes a softball size head in ~40-50 days from HPS and other sites), a mesclun blend for salads, toy choy pak choi and some other stuff.
Now I’m hungry again. *sigh*
UGH!
Slugs!
I hates dem!
We have a wooden walkway that leads up to our front door.
At night, slugs come up through the cracks and are all over it.
Please help me get rid of them!
Escar-Go and Sluggo baits work wonders here. They’re iron phosphate and yeast pellets, non-toxic to dogs and children, and small enough not to be noticed by them anyway.
The yeast attracts the slugs, the iron kills them quickly.
Thanks!
Gosh, I hate those slimy things!
Any idea where they congregate there?
Wholesale - good thinking. Hungry- I was having trouble with that for a while. Felt like I was starving to death. Turns out all I needed to do was to reduce the carbs I was eating by quite a bit.
Now I eat what I want when I’m hungry as long as it is a very low carb item, and I no longer feel hungry very often, even though I’m eating less than I was - the power of the insulin hormone!
I learned that the old time remedy for anorexia was to inject them with insulin. They would get so hungry they would eat. Don’t know if they still do that or not.
I hope you’re right about the beets. I’ve got some I plan to plant for human and some mangels for my chickens. Maybe your melons had a soil disease? Maybe a different more resistant variety in the other plot?
I can’t WAIT for the fall veg to hit my kitchen. I stirfry most of that stuff.
Start with a piece or two of bacon, chopped into tiny pieces and sautee that.
Take it out of the pan when it’s little crispy bacon bits and add a quarter or half an onion (small dices) and/or shallot and/or some freshly grated garlic.
When that’s a little golden I add a couple chicken breasts cut into small chunks, some fresh grated ginger (so easy to grow as a houseplant and outside on a porch or patio in direct sun in the summer!) and cook with a little soy saucefor a bit then add shredded cabbage, snow peas, broccoli bits and maybe some kohlrabi shreds or dices, shredded carrots, jalapeno bits, etc & whatever else I have that sounds good in a stirfry. Cook till chicken is done and greens are how they suit you.
And the costs for the whole thing is just the single slice of bacon and the 2 chicken breasts. A deep cast iron chicken fryer full of this will feed myself and my husband for 2 or 3 meals. He likes to take it and roll it up in a wrap too. YMMV.
Sluggo Plus. I highly recommend it.
Reapply when it rains.
Beer is my remedy. I save my tuna cans(wash them or they stink LOL). Then I sink the cans into the ground and put beer in them.
Slugs love the stuff. Next morning you can dump the dead slugs- we have a burn barrel that we use for trash and such-you may have some other way to dispose of them.
I’ve low carbed mostly for the past 12 years. Nothing else has been effective in controlling my appetite. I did the low-fat (which means more carbs) diet for 2 decades and inevitably it failed and I yoyo’d with my weight. I could only stand starving after every meal for so long. Insulin is necessary but as my grandmother would say, ‘a little dab’ll do ya’.
I planted 4 kinds of melon and none of them looked healthy - I would guess maybe a problem with the soil in the bed, or maybe over-irrigation (I don’t have control of that.)
I had them in raised rows because I was concerned about the irrigation, and I noticed that they had very shallow surface roots all over the bed, which I think they would not have if the bed had dried out between waterings.
Possibly. And sometimes the irrigation in raised beds leaches the nutrients out as well. Maybe try some feeding next year if you do them similarly. I’ve had (and other freepers as well) stupendous luck and results from adding ‘Texas Tomato Food’ (on other stuff besides tomatoes) to my raised beds once a week or so *after* I do the soaker hose thingie.
I’m sorry your melons didn’t work out. I know how it is to have your mouth set for something and then some evil critter (or just bad circumstances) gets there before you do. Chipmunks and voles got my entire fall/winter crop last year. I have chicken wire underneath my raised beds now. Evil furry critters wiped the whole business out last year. Augh.
Wondering aloud if anyone south of Memphis/Dallas/Santa Fe has grown parsnips as a late summer/fall crop. Any tips/tricks with those? I hope to plant them next week and harvest late this fall or early winter after a couple really hard freezes.
I know of the beer remedy, but the walkway is almost flush with the ground.
There isn’t any way to get the cans under it, or between the wooden slats.
P.S. I have green eyes, too! ;0)
Oh, and HPS had something called ‘aspabroc’ which sounds delicious! I had to order that too :)
My garden went to hell in a handbasket this year, same for everyone in the neighborhood. None of us has figured it out, nothing grew well.
My tomatoes (Roma is all I grow) got wet looking spots and rotted before they ripened, and about half the size they should be, cantaloupes about the same, cabbage and broccoli didn’t survive the rabbits, carrots did ok but small and took a while, only got a half dozen ears of baby corn...Peppers did well that’s it. I only grow corn and carrots for baby ones. 3 inches is about all I let either grow, eat it raw, great stuff.
Peppers...love ‘em. I got 6 Tabasco plants. Turned out to be cayenne, and mild, and something else I can’t ID. 6 Habanero plants turned out to be Tabasco...one Habanero volunteered from last year. The peppers dropped a couple of weeks ago when I didn’t keep enough water on them. I’m still getting loads of Tabascos though. Looks like that’s all I get this year...
I usually have a very good garden. I use mulch and cow manure when I can get it, usually just leaf mulch does the trick. I grew a garden in this same spot for 12 years, excellent. Since I moved back, 1st 2 years did well, this year nothing. I usually get the best cantaloups you ever tasted. Not even one this year.
But everything looks that way this year, the only thing that did do well was peach and pear trees. Squirrels got them all just before they ripened...figs did very little, I got a few for my mother I hate the things.
I don’t know what’s going on this year, and it’s not just me or my garden patch, everyone around here says the same thing. One neighbor just mowed his over in early June...Sraggly foot tall sickly looking plants, not growing, and we had more rain this year than any time in the past 20 years. My plants grew fine. Tomatoes 5 feet tall, cantaloupes started out great, but stunted later on...
I’m usually pretty good with a garden and can grow about anything. This year I’m stumped...
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