WEEKLY GARDEN THREAD SEPT. 14, 2018

freerepublic | Sept 14 2018 | greeneyes

[greeneyes]

he 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. No matter what, you won’t be flamed and the only dumb question is the one that isn’t asked.

It is impossible to hijack the Weekly Gardening Thread. Planting, Harvest to Table(recipes)preserving, good living - there is no telling where it will go and... that is part of the fun and interest. Jump in and join us!

NOTE: This is a once a week ping list. We do post to the thread during the week. Links to related articles and discussions which might be of interest are welcomed any time-and don't have to be about gardening.

[greeneyes]

Great weather today in our corner of Missouri. Operation yard clean up and design continues.

Last Friday we spent most of the day in the Dr. Office in St. Louis, arrived home rather late to a big mess. Pipes to upstairs shower had busted/leaking all over, and into basement apartment-ceiling tile on the floor and several inches of water.

So that was our focus the rest of the weekend and this week. Today we go to Farmington for some additional tests, so I'm going to post early, since I don't know when we will back. I'll be leaving in a few minutes.

Have a great weekend. Prayers up for all. God Bless.

[greeneyes]

Pinging the list. I think that someone asked to be added to the thread, but lost my note. Please send a private FRmail if you wish to be added or deleted from the list. Thanks.

[Fai Mao]

This was/is clean-up week after typhoon Mangkhut.

All seven of the papaya plants blew over. The bananas are gone and it killed a bed of flowers.

At least it was a really mild typhoon.

[Black Agnes]

Prayers that your doctor visits will be nothing but good news.

Still picking cucumbers, okra, tomatoes and pumpkins/squash here. Due to dig sweet potatoes in a couple 2 or 3 weeks.

Rice also coming in. Hoping for 10-15lbs this year. Didn’t know what I was doing so happy with that number. Still need to net it so losing some to birds but it is what it is. It’s upland rice and I planted it SRI style.

Lime tree is absolutely loaded as is the calamondin tree. Though we’d lose the calamondin but I put some of the ‘great white’ probiotic stuff in distilled water and watered that dude with that for several weeks and it literally exploded with growth/blooms.

Neighbor gave us a 5gal bucket of pears and those spent a couple days in the crockpot making pear butter. Yum.

Will be cleaning frozen blueberries out of my freezer this week to make jelly and make room for frozen cooked pumpkin.

Love love love my Ball electric water canner. Boils faster than my waterbath canner on the stove and doesn’t take up an eye (or actually 2 or 3 because it’s so large) to do it.

Going to plant some late corn (yukon chief) today along with some succession lettuce and other greens.

We don’t usually get enough cold weather for winter wheat varieties to vernalize so I’m going to try putting some on a damp paper towel in a ziploc bag in a pan in the fridge for a couple months. Read something on a website at North Dakota ag or Iowa ag or somewhere that said as soon as the little wheat berries imbibed water the vernalization process started. Have a pound of those (red fife) and am going to give that a go. If that goes OK will plant those out end of November when our wheat planting date rolls around.

[Black Agnes]

Sorry you lost the bananas. Tree ripened bananas are the best. We usually don’t get those here in CONUS.

If I ever won the lottery one thing I’d do would be to build a conservatory with real banana trees :)

[left that other site]

Saying a prayer for folks on the East Coast.

[Celerity]

“one thing I’d do would be to build a conservatory with real banana trees :)”

You have no idea how important this is going to be soon.

I would start now. Just a greenhouse is a start. I’d love to do it and I will ASAP but for now I just got my 3rd hydroponics setup built.

Lets hope this one succeeds ! I’ve been shopping around for different hydroponics solutions to lead me through germ, and I’ve got some cheap plexiglass/plastic betta tanks that I’m going to try to drill, plumb and filter for post-bloom.

Wish me luck ! I’ll post up pics when I get a chance.

OH I’ve also tuned the lights this time.

[Psalm 73]

So sorry to hear about the water damage - the clean-up, repair, and mold mitigation can be a depressing routine - will pray for you guys.

Odd growing season in Konnecticut - peppers did GREAT, tomatoes were OK - but down from normal production. Another good year for eggplant, though.
Zuccinni, squash, cucumbers - all a very bad year.
Won't dig up potatoes for a while yet.

Our new chickens (Speckled Sussex) are just about ready to lay, so that's exciting. And old "Go, Go Goldie" is still cranking them out - she is a machine.

Thank you, greeneyes, for keeping the gardening thread going - will be praying for your health, also.

[Augie]

Sorry to hear about the busted pipe. That makes an awful mess when it happens.

We've gotten some rain over the past couple weeks here in Central Missouri. I wouldn't say that we're out of drought conditions, but we're in better shape than we were a month ago. The rainfall softened the clay in the bottom of my pond and made it much easier to dig. Right now it has the perfect amount of moisture for packing and I've been making steady progress on closing the cut in the dam. I'm going to stay on that hard over the weekend to get as much as possible done before we leave on vacation next Wednesday. I'll get some pics of the progress and post them later in the weekend.

Still getting tomatoes and green beans. Pepper plants are loaded. Okra is going insane. I've got a few more potatoes still to dig.

We got the pumpkins out last weekend.

[oldvirginian]

My little experiment of planting tomatoes in pots really panned out.

I used some 10 gallon pots I had picked up at the local dumpster and cleaned up. I was afraid that a 10 gallon pot would be too small but it hasn’t been a problem.

I planted 4 BeefMaster plants and have been supplying everyone with tomatoes.
The BeefMaster is an indeterminate variety and really grows.
I used some T posts and tried the Florida weave which worked great.
The plants overgrew the weave so I just let them grow.
I haven’t been able to care for them the last few weeks and hornworms have taken a toll.

I planted sweet peppers in an old 4×8 flower bed.
Green bell, yellow bell and sweet banana peppers.
I’m drowning in peppers!

First try with banana peppers and bought an unknown variety. The plants are 5 feet tall and still producing nice peppers.
I only had a few green peppers because just as they were getting to picking size they disappeared!
One of my neighbors is a known garden varmint.
He walks his dog between 3am and 4am and takes his pick of the local produce.

I’m wondering now if my plants will survive Florence.

[tubebender]

Our Prayers are with you greeneyes and so sorry to hear about the broken pipe and damage to your home. Our corn is done and plants will come out today or tomorrow. We still have no ripe tomatoes but cukes are producing thanks to unusually great weather for this area. Cinderella pumpkins are doing fine and blueberries are done for the year.

[Black Agnes]

Oh we know the importance of this. Money is a serious limitation right now. I haven’t been to a dentist in 3 years so conservatory is somewhat behind that LOL.

Do post pics, would love love love to see ideas for this!

I’m off to prune my lime tree & see if I can root the cuttings! I’ve done it before successfully though so maybe it will work this time?

[Diana in Wisconsin]

Sorry for your water woes - I’m sure you did it in solidarity for Hurricane Florence victims, and all of the flooding we’ve had in Wisconsin this late summer, too! *WINK*

Hope your Doctor has positive news for you!

I am winding down. Dug the last of the potatoes, yesterday, harvested three Crimson Sweet Watermelon - which were a total surprise. Beau took two others up to Bear Camp with him.

I have a few green tomatoes left that are ripening on the porch, and I have four more paste-type tomato plants to glean what I can and oven dry them...then, I’M DONE! Wa-HOO!

Can you tell I’m sick of canning? Well, I AM! :)

Waiting for this mini-heatwave to pass this weekend, then some garden bed clean up ahead of me, garlic to plant and some fall greens like lettuces, baby kale and spinach and arugula to pop in.

I dug up a few peppers to keep in the greenhouse to see how long I can keep them going, and a BIG greenhouse clean up is in order - got some storage crates to neaten things up in there.

Just a few Hummingbirds left; most have headed to Costa Rica for the winter...wish *I* were, too!

[TEXOKIE]

Hi greeneyes!

Checking in with a report on the HAY BALE EXPERIMENT.

As I reported earlier, I would consider the experiment to be a marginal success. In other words, it really mostly failed, but I learned from it! LOL!

I don’t think the bales I had were weathered enough. Also, Darlin pointed out, we are not 100% sure that they were pesticide/herbicide free.

I had tried fertilizing, but by the time I got to them with the groceries, the okra I was working with were way too stunted. In fact, one of them was diseased or had some kind of genetic deformity. That was the one I had belatedly transferred to a pot because it was bigger than the other two and I thought perhaps it might produce. No pods produced from it, except for one deformed one. When I repotted it, the abnormality was somewhat, but not readily apparent.

The two plants remaining in the bale continue to be alive, but also continue to be too stunted to produce pods.

The control okra plant which was originally placed in a pot with potting soil thrived. It produced quite a few pods. Since, while I love okra, my low carb regimen is making them expensive to eat right now, I let the plant go to seed, so it has placed its energy into the three remaining pods.

I still love the bale concept, as it does do a good job of raising the plant off the ground. It also is a great way to inhibit weeds which would choke out the plant you are cultivating. It holds water for the plant during the dry summer.

I would try this again.... but changes would be:
1. make 100% sure the hay/straw has not been contaminated with weed or pesticides

2. let the bales rot more than just over winter - that would provide more nutrients for the roots as they grow into the bale

3. I would excavate a deeper and wider depression into the bale for the plant (the book I read did not seem to indicate that as a necessity, but I could have missed it) Whether the book says it or not, that is still what I would do. For what I would do, it would require knippers to make a proper depression, not just separating the bale “wafers” slightly.

4. when planting the seeds/sprouts into the bale, I would make sure that a goodly amount of potting soil is introduced to the depression, and allow it to work into the bale - again the book did not seem to indicate this, but it is what I would do.

5. I would start fertilizing right away, per package instructions or other reliable directive - like advice from one of you guys!

[Celerity]

I don’t know about your area, but in the fall there are a few estate sales that sell those plastic bag greenhouse thingys. I get them every year for $1 and then throw them out after a few years. They hold up to the weather really well but I also use 30 stakes (Coat hangers) to anchor them vs the 4 they come with.

The racks can be reused when I throw the greenhouses out too.

This year was nothing but medical issues with my wife and I - So I did NOTHING in the garden this year but mow it over. Previous attempts to grow indoors yielded nothing. I had healthy plants that never bloomed or yielded.

This year I actually sat down and did one of the PVC pipe designs. Cost about $80 and took about 10 hours from start to finish.

But while it was my broken (Shattered, really) knee that took me down, my wife was diagnosed with severe, life-threatening Crohn’s. We also found out that our daughter is susceptible to the disease so we had to truly sit down and budget out some kind of fix, regardless of how hard it hit.

2019 is the year for Food security for me and my family.

[Black Agnes]

Oh no! I’m so sorry to hear all that. Our issue is strictly financial and the medical issues are just that obamacare has destroyed our finances :(

I’ve got some plastic tarp hubby scrounged somewhere and we use t-posts with cut off drink bottles over the end to ‘cushion’ the edge so things don’t tear and make our own low tunnels that way. I had bell peppers the week or maybe two weeks after thanksgiving here one year. fully a month and change after the first freeze.

Do please keep us updated on your experiments/etc. That’s definitely something we want to try to get a good supply of winter greens w/o having to worry about covering/uncovering a low tunnel.

[Celerity]

Hydroponic lettuce is actually really, really easy. And Tomatoes require a different technique so it’s either a different setup, or you can just get a tomato bag. That’s one of the best things ever.

Tomatoes are great.

To grow the hydroponic potatoes is like a bucket for 2 potatoes which is a tough thing to swallow cost wise.

Reminds me of my dad, who has 2 chickens. He calculates $3 per egg. That’s steep.

[Black Agnes]

LOL your dad.

Yeah, greens are the first thing we’ll try if we take the hydroponic plunge.

Right now my tomato plan involves the indeterminate dwarf varieties and 5gal buckets in the garage next to my standup freezer to keep them warm. with lights of course.

[mythenjoseph]

I wish I could say that I have done more than just the basic cxare of my yard down here in Louisiana but I can’t . I have been working flat out (gratefully so thank God!) even doing 3/4 days on Saturday’s . My yard look’s good though! Oh I have trimmed and revived a Rose bush and am looking forward to seeing some bud’s.

[Fai Mao]

“If I ever won the lottery one thing I’d do would be to build a conservatory with real banana trees :)”

Bananas are actually a rather hard plant to get to fruit, in my experience anyway. Plus the banana skipper butterflies that lay the leaf roller caterpillar eggs and they are a lot of trouble.

Papaya grows like weeds. As long as the plants don’t get the mosaic virus they produce enough to feed the world with just 4 or 5 plants