Posted on 08/19/2011 5:01:37 AM PDT by Red_Devil 232
Good morning gardeners. Weather has been great here in East Central Mississippi but my garden is basically done for the season. I do have some paste tomatoes coming along just fine and hope they produce before the first frost. They have a good chance to produce because the first frost around here is usually in late October or early November.
If you are a gardener or you are just starting out and are in need of advice or just encouragement please feel free to join in and enjoy the friendly discussion. Our Freeper community is full of gardeners, each with varying interests and skill levels from Master Gardener to novice.
I hope all your gardens are flourishing.
I’m very very newbie to gardening. This year is my 2nd ever garden. My first was 2 years ago and only had tomato plants and peppers.
But this year, we’ve gone a bit beyond the tomato and pepper plants with zukes, cukes, eggplant, corn, green beans, strawberries,watermelon,onion, tomatoes, several pepper varieties and two varieties of pumpkins and squash.
Everything is doing just “okay” and some of them better than I thought they’d do since we’ve not used any sort of soil amendments or fertilizers. ( sprayed 2 times so not really organic but... )
For those who may know, here are my questiona.... I noticed this a.m. when checking everything that there were many of the plants with ants on them. What damage can ants do to a plant ?
Second question is on my crook necked squash, I had one that was about 3 inches long and this am when I looked at it, it had a sort of black “hair” growing on it and was all brown and squishy rotten.
Any idea what that could be and how to stop it ?
TIA
In my area those lilies are called Naked Ladies. I remember some years back a member of the garden club was very offended by that name
Peeling and soaking the eggplant is how Alton Brown (tv show) showed to fix eggplant. The salt draws out the bitterness which Has something in it he said is not good for eating-
I have never had bitter cukes so I am totally at a loss there. Perhaps brining them would also improve them. Let us know how that works.
Many years ago my parents went deep sea fishing for salmon off the Oregon coast-near Bandon— you could take the salmon to a cannery - they would weigh yours, then for ten cents a can (many years ago) you would get the same amount by weight back—what someone else had brought in before you)
However my mother and her sis-in-law took their salmon home and canned it there. On their way home my parents stopped of course, and left us 7 pints of home caned salmon.
Absolutely out of this world. I had to ration it out to keep the kids from eating it all practically overnight.
It was so much better than store bought.
One of my sisters and her husband would come up here from Santa Cruz with their travel trailer and stayed in a campground. She would can the salmon he caught with her pressure cooker that she brought along. We smoked our salmon but we did can Albacore Tuna that we bought off the fishing boats at the dock. The boats have Blast Freezers that freeze the Tuna solid in short order which made it convenient for us as it gave us time to defrost a couple and can them while a couple more were defrosting...
Well hey- you know how to successfully attract wildlife to your yard. People write books about that- you are just naturally talented. LOL
Look for Aphids on the plants with the ants as they are attracted to the “honey dew” of the aphids...
I suspect it is a mouse as they live in the compost piles on the other side of the fence of the vines...
Re drinking pickle juice:
I also drink it, but a word of warning to any and all ladies: leave it to the men in your life, as I’ve found that it tends to move hair off the head, onto the chest.
The longer I’ve been drinking it, the worse the problem has become, but I can’t stop: it’s an addiction!
If it weren't for more heat days in summer (and this has been a bad one here but 90's rather than over 100 for days on end) I'd envy you because there are so many kinds of flowers, trees, and shrubs you can grow that we can't unless we treat them as annuals or do something extraordinary to save them in the winter.
Enjoy your good fortune and flowers.
My canning buddy and I have canned 65 quarts of tomatoes in the past 2 weeks.
I wish I had a walnut tree. I’m in the Texas Hill Country. The only things that grow naturally here are juniper, live oak, mountain laurel, and cactus.
“dry farming” tomatoes
Thank you for this info! I’m in eastern NM, with high heat, and drought, and a new raised garden with clay soil that needs a lot of work! started small this year with only 3 tomatoe plants that were dying. We moved them to Global Buckets, but the small plants just sat there and didn’t produce. Finally thought the heat was boiling the water in the lower bucket, so I moved them to partial shade. No improvement.
Upon reading your post, we just just removed the tomatoes from the G. B.’s. The plants are tiny, but the buckets are FULL of roots with huge pony tails growing down into the lower buckets!
So, we dug a long deep trench and set all three buckets full of planting soil down in the dirt.
Praise the Lord, we are starting to get rain, and cooler weather, and we should have enough summer left to get some tomatoes!
I see that neighbors who have planted their tomatoes in planters or in the ground have great looking plants!
It’s been a really tough year to keep things alive, much less thrive!
Thanks again, for your good post!
They’re called “naked ladies” because the blooms and the leaves come forth separately. The leaves follow the flowers (or perhaps it is the other way around.)
September’s issue of Better Homes and Gardens just came today and (for once) it is just PACKED with garden ideas — especially Fall containers that are designed around vegetables. I have been very disappointed in recent issues, but this one is a keeper for sure. Those who live in areas that are marginal for regular gardens (poor soil, no sun, bad climate, etc) might be really interested in this issue.
I did not know that! Thanks so much for the info; the next basil batch will reflect that. :)
I love the tenaciousness of Naked Ladies. They survive on long abandoned farms etc. They are also called Amaryllis...
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.