Posted on 06/25/2010 5:13:58 AM PDT by Red_Devil 232
Good morning gardeners. Here in East Central Mississippi the weather has been typical for the middle of June and the official start of summer. Temperatures have been in the mid nineties in the afternoons and high sixties to low seventies overnight with afternoon showers every other day or so. My garden is thriving in this weather and doing very well. I have not had to do any extensive additional watering which is good.
Also this past week I noticed quite a few honey bees up in the garden. I hope they decide to visit often. In the past years my main pollinators have been bumblebees and they are all over the garden also. Things are a buzzing!
I hope all of your gardens are doing well.
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Thanks, being from Missouri I was wondering about that.
Join the club...still 'potting up' tomatoes and peppers for a fall stay in the greenhouse...
It must be catching. Hubby is just finishing up my next sq ft gardens. One is 4x4 and the other is 2x4. I will use 15 squares to plant heirloom seeds that I ran out of room to try this year.
I plan to start 3 cherry tomatoes towards the end of summer to bring inside and put under the grow light, along with some herbs. I just can not stand supermarket tomatoes in the winter, and I do so long for vine ripe tomatoe all winter.
Your plants look great!!!
Eat cardboard...same flavor, and you'll save money.
Finally got out to the land yesterday, after not being able to for almost a month. My weedblock experiment worked a little too well. I was expecting a few weeds to grow up through the slits I’d cut for my seeds, instead nothing was growing through the holes, INCLUDING my seeds!!! Just one little pumpkin plant forced its way through.
Still, one pumpkin is more than I had last year. And, the weedblock is obviously working to smother the weeds and grass, which is itself a miracle given that this land has been wild for at least 10 years (possibly 20, but I can’t be sure beyond 10). Next year I’ll have some fabulous garden beds waiting for me, I’ll just have to cut the holes a bit bigger when I plant. Judging from the number of wild parsnips flowering, next year I’ll have plenty of parsnips to roast. I might take some wild seed and plant it in my garden beds, just because.
My backyard container garden is doing well. Last week I’d gotten frustrated that my tomato seeds never sprouted, but my indoor tomatoes were all vine and no fruit, so I’d taken cuttings from the indoor plants and planted them outside. Every one of those cuttings has taken root, and I think I saw the start of a flower bud on one already! I might do that next year and skip the seeds entirely, tomatoes are perennials unless killed by frost, so I can grow the vines indoors for years at a time.
My sweet peas are just about done already. I only had room for 8 plants, so that isn’t too surprising. There’s one pod growing too far down in the squirrel barrier for me to get to, so I think I’ll let it go to seed and see what happens next year. One of the pea plants has new buds on it, so I’m watching to see if I get a second flush. In all my years of gardening I’ve never grown sweet peas before (the rodents always ate them) so this is new to me.
The everbearing strawberries are flowering again, and the raspberries are ripe.
Wow, those peas growing so nicely at the same time tomatoes are ripening is a nice surprise. I thought it was an earlier pic at fist. Perhaps the placement is the secret to that.
Anyway, your garden looks amazing! I’d love to have a garden that big one day. We tried selling our house a while back to buy one with more land, but not the best time for the housing market. We may try again in a few years.
Glad your produce stand is doing well. I was wondering, at first, how big a family you have :)
Does anyone have any experience planting strawberries in the fall? I am in Zone 6.
Thanks for your comments I will definitely pick some up.
Any opinion on the organic version of their food or do you suggest a different food for the bins?
Hmmm, house raffles ... that’s an interesting idea. I’ve never heard of this, other than some I’ve seen for St. Jude’s or other charities. I’ll look into that. Thanks.
And if you are really salsafied, deep fry the habaneros in beer batter and then mush them into the mix. OMG.
Hmmmmm...
LOL. Thanks anyway. I just do without. Besides I need the cardboard it is very useful. Granny always used the big cardboard boxes for “rugs” in the cafe kitchen.
I use them too in the summer time. The small ones go into the compost pile. This fall, I am going to put some on the ground and see if I can attract red worms. Then I am going to try indoor compost and get rid of some of my old newspapers. Hope to have worm castings to use next summer.
Thank you muchly. My son told me I should be removing the suckers, but I wasn’t really sure what they are. Missouri pruning makes sense too
The only reason I mentioned the Honey Bees is because they have been very scarce around my garden the last couple of years. The only ones I have had vist in numbers have been Bumblebees and they were very busy and welcome to all the pollin they needed. Now I have both - well at least for now.
I have grown cherry tomatoes as well as other fairly standard ones, whose names i did not retain. The ones i have growing now are different types, which i started inside about the middle of April, and planted about a month later.
The plants are on a the roof of the 3 decker we live in, which is in a city with one of the highest population densities in the U.S. And as the sun has already peaked, and we are on the north side of a hill, altitude is helpful.
I use roofing rubber as a much, which keeps the heat in, and the roof itself is rubber, so that helps, as the night temps here are not consistently in the 60’s till almost mid June.
The soil is a mixture of top soil we got cheap from the store, and some local soil, and i did not use any fertilizer besides some stuff which i found which is for rose bushes and that type of plant.
As these are so close together and competing for nutriments, the plants do begin to get brown leaves faster after setting fruit, but i get a good yield of ripened tomatoes, and they tasted good.
I have a hose running from the basement to the roof, which i use to fill 5 gal buckets with and then portion out to the plants. One dry summer squirrels were coming up and eating part of the tomatoes. Someone suggested moth balls as a deterrent, and so i put them in little foil trays and left them. Afer a few days i checked them and almost all were gone, and it had not rained except lightly a very little bit. I think that the squirrels ate them because i saw very few the next year. Lots more this year, but i got the city to cut down the tree they climbed up on. No picture yet, but i will try to get some, thanks to be God.
Mothballs just naturally evaporate and will dissapear on their own. I would have to look it up to be sure but I think it is called sublimation(sp?) solid to a gas.
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