Posted on 04/18/2014 12:29:02 PM PDT by greeneyes
Have you ever tried this with tomatoes?
http://www.wikihow.com/Prune-Tomatoes
Anyone else try removing all suckers, and leaving about three leaves on the lateral branches? Removing all branches and suckers below first fruit cluster?
I’m kind of scared to try it. In Texas, it seems like the sun would burn the tomatoes up with so little leaf protection.
Ugh... One thing about being around the grandkids. I catch whatever they have. Won't be any gardening today. I hate being sick.
/johnny
We pull the whole head of garlic. The others left in the ground will multiply like flower bulbs each year....
Thanks for that about tomatoes - some of that I needed to know.
Hogs? They're bad news.
Hmmm. That is strange. I normally get 4-6 quarts of mulberrys from my tree every spring. Even the birds seem to ignore it. My stone fruit, loquat, and apple trees all need caging to keep the pests away.
Truthfully, a little shadecloth over the plants does wonders for them in our neck of the woods. That mid-day sun can be scorch plants quickly. I use a 30% shadecloth over my hoophouse.
To ALL: TALL UTAH CELERY:
I didn't expect to get celery to grow, especially in a container. I don't remember how I decided on Tall Utah Celery seed. I started the seed under the grow lamp and those seedlings were wispy, fragile and the cup was stuffed with them, needed to get them out of that tiny paper cup. I figured they would die when transplanted. They were so fragile, it was hard to even locate them in the 3 gal. container, wasn't sure some of them got any soil over the roots. I gave that up as a lost cause.
Those celery plants, there are five of them, in that 3 gallon bucket are 12 inches tall, numerous stalks on each, and hardy and green with not a blemish anywhere on them. I stuck a lot more than five seedlings in there but these five took hold. I couldn't ask for nicer, fuller, celery plants. I'll do at least one more pot of these next year.
If you want to plant celery seedlings grown from seed in a container, I know this Tall Utah Celery will grow very well.
I might have to cage my mulberries until they get big enough to start producing. Most of them are wild, some are bought, some are in-between (planted deliberately but from seed that I foraged).
Mulberries were the first wild food I ever harvested, so they hold a special place for me. When I was little, we lived in a townhouse in a rough neighborhood. Near the edge of the parking lot there was this mulberry tree growing in the fence. After I found out the berries were edible, I’d go pick a pan full of them, then sit at the kitchen table with a potato masher “making jam”. (I was VERY little at the time.)
Cheap fun from my parents’ perspective, albeit a little messy. And it got me hooked on wild fruits forever.
I sometimes wonder what we could have done if my family had known then all the stuff I’ve learned since then. That tree could have provided enough jars of real jam for PBJ sandwiches. We could have made pies, and cobblers, and syrups to go on ice cream or pancakes. My parents were struggling at the time, a little self-sufficiency would have gone a long way. But instead, I just mashed them up, ate some of the mush with a spoon, and the rest would disappear while I was in the next room washing up.
The more you pick the pea pods , they more they will try to replace the pods.
TO keep a pea pod plant active is to pick the pods, which will reult in more flowering, and thus and more pods !! until they are 'spent' (lack of fertilization) , or , poor growing conditions.
That is why many people have two seed sowing seasons , once in the spring , and , another in the fall .
Save the seed plants in the fall for sowing for next year !!
Seems that way to me, too, but since I have over 53 tomato plants, I put six of the mystery tomatoes under the knife. They look naked. Will see what happens to them compared to their fully leafed brethren.
socks on my mater’s I pull off about half the suckers as a compromise because here in Tx you know the summer sun and heat burn up some of the plant. Letting a few suckers remain allows the Fall recovery season to get them growing again if they survive. I used to pull off all the suckers back when I lived up in the northeast many a blue lunars ago.
Weatherbell /Bastardi weather report for the next few weeks :Spring. Especially near the 4:00 minute mark
Cool in North East/Great Lakes and Wash/Oregon area.
Texas , Oklahoma, Nebraska to be hot like a blowtorch;
invest in air codntioning , or go naked like Johnny.
"Weather Deniers" beware, as Bastardi tells it like it is and expains why , rather than tell you what you want to hear .
Plan or plant accordingly .
Thanks for posting. At the rate I’m going, I would have remembered about Wednesday.
Well, thank you! Yes, this has been a busy week, as my son just graduated from USMC boot camp the 11th. He is due back on base Tuesday.
Thanks for the update.
Black Agnes pinged an article related to the high cost of food. So far, I’ve been able to keep to my same pre 2007 budget for food, even while building up my supplies on hand a bit. Mainly due to my garden produce, and buying extra when really good sales are featured.
Probably won’t work forever, but it all helps. Thread for the article below.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3146675/posts
Thank you. I’ll do that too. We love garlic.
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