Posted on 07/19/2013 12:45:12 PM PDT by greeneyes
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I suggest visiting ‘tomatoville.com’, they have lots of suggestions for foliar diseases on tomatoes. Yellow leaves on MY maters usually means some form of early blight. Augh. Another learning experience I could very well have done without!
Here’s what I do:
Take 1 gallon water, exactly. Put it in a new (unusued for anything else) pump sprayer. Add 5oz exactly of the new Clorox bleach concentrate. Mix thoroughly. After sundown and the bees (if you’re lucky enough to have them this year) are gone home for the evening, spray the heck out of the tomato plants. They will look like hammered heck while every infected leaf goes ahead and dies. I follow up with a feeding of some sort. Any uninfected new growth will be fine. But this kills the fungus/whatever to prevent any NEW infection.
Try this with one tomato plant first.
Another thing that prevents transfer of soilborne diseases is to mulch with papers/hay or just hay. Anything to keep the soil from splashing up on the leaves when it rains.
New wells aren’t cheap either. We all gotta survive the best we can given our situation.
LOL. I took all that stuff from my dad’s last hospital visit, and washed it all in bleach, and packed it away in a banker’s box.
I figured it might come in handy sometime.LOL
Glad things are progressing well with you and yours.
Here’s a link that might be useful:
http://www.tomatoville.com/showthread.php?t=28509&highlight=bleach
This old guys solution kept me from losing 75+ tomato plants last year. And umpteen 5gal buckets of good little canning tomatoes.
You might be able to grow olives and black pepper corns in your climate, but salt-now that can be worth it’s weight in gold. I try to buy a box of pickling salt every other week, and on the off week, if I have the money I buy some table salt or sea salt.LOL
We were told a well at our place would be at least 300ft deep and cost $7-$8K.
*boggle*.
It’s on the ‘it would be nice to do but there’s a lot of other stuff on the list first’ list.
Wonderful description. Thank you! Do you have any pictures? The squash plant is so beautiful. This is just my 2nd year of vegetable gardening, and I’m very eager to learn. Thanks again.
I’ll see if I can get pics and someplace to post them this weekend. I’ll post pics of my Hmong Sticky Rice patch too. That smells just wonderful when the warm breeze blows. It smells like cooking jasmine rice.
My garden is small this year - just bought my house last July and I’ve been busy. I have grape and cherry tomatoes I’ve been picking for a week or so now and cucumbers doing great. My larger tomatoes are starting to ripen up so I’m thinking next week I’ll be picking quite a bit. Green beans, broccoli and cauliflower are doing well. Cauliflower are being blanched right now so they will be ready soon. I’ve been picking broccoli for a while now. I have canteloupe and watermelon but haven’t seen any fruit yet - I did get them started late after my lettuce bolted.
Hot here - we should be getting rain soon but have been watering this last week.
Have a great week of gardening!!
Terri- St. Louis
I can't grow black pepper corns here. Salt, I can get locally, if required. It's a pain to leach it out, but it can be done. I have plenty on hand, though. I think I've still got a 50 lb salt lick out in the shop. ;)
johnny
I think I’m green with envy. How much property are you on (for gardening)?
The first year I gardened, several of the NE companies had plants that developed blight. Unfortunately, I had some of those. I managed to get a decent yield, but I could have waited to learn about blight-it would not have hurt my feelings ya know?
Anyway, mulch with hay or newspapers does indeed help. I’ll have to try that bleach thing sometime-haven’t heard of it before.
A salt lick like is used for livestock? Never heard of using that for cooking????
A salt lick like is used for livestock? Never heard of using that for cooking????
I’m not sure if seminole pumpkin would be an appropriate squash for you as it’s kind of long season and likes a lot of heat units. I see you’re in Illinois?
My favorite squash overall isn’t actually an OP one. It’s a hybrid (boo hiss LOL). Rumbo. I get the seeds from Jungs. It’s a dessert squash. You don’t really need to put the cooked squash in a blender when you’re done. It’s almost like pumpkin jelly when it’s cooked. I usually cook it and scoop it out directly into my pancakes or casserole. No strings at all.
Another you might consider is a mixed variety I’ve had good luck with called ‘Tetsukabuto’. It’s a small squash that’s a mix of c. maxima and c. moschata. You’ll need to grow another of either of those varieties for pollination. I got those seeds from Pinetree seed but I think Kitazawa seeds has them too. I haven’t lost one of these (yet) to SVB’s either.
At the end of squash season there are usually unripe squash on the vine when our first frost is predicted. Hubby has taken some dogwire fencing, cut it into 5ft sections and bent those into a sort of flattened out ‘U’ shape. I put those over the (rooted along the vine) section of vine that has the unripe squash, sometimes 2 overlapping to get enough vine (4 or 5ft continuous vine if you can). On top of that I put plastic sheeting, or crop cover. That will extend your season enough depending on your frost dates to get those last squash ripe on the vine. They last so much longer and are more useful (for us anyways) for their intended winter squash purpose.
Hi neighbor. I’m just about 75 miles SW of St. Louis. Close to Farmington.
Glad your garden is doing well this season.
LOL. Right. It’s on my I hope I never have to do it again list!
We’ve got about 1.5 acres that we can use for gardening and food production. Some of that is apple/pear trees and various blueberries, raspberries, blackberries and strawberries.
My goal this summer (and I’m working on it, really!) is to create a front yard ‘landscaping’ bed with strawberries for groundcover, dwarf fig trees for ‘shrubs’ and the occasional blueberry bush as well. With enough space between to plant some annual flowers and ‘ornamentals’ like eggplants, zucchinis, and pepper plants. I will probably take the easy way out and use the black landscaping stuff for that and cover with normal landscaping mulch of some sort.
I am the kind that will grow corn in the front yard before it’s all over, though. ;)
After several days in the 90s & low 100s, the peas are done; long live the peas! They paid for all of our seed & fertilizer this year, as well as put a dent in the cost of new perennials & trees. Also learned a few lessons to apply next year.
Started picking green beans this week, and the dry beans are coming along nicely as well. Carrots are finally getting some size to them, and the second planting has now emerged for fall picking. Squash & cukes are flowering well, and setting some fruit; even got our first zuke this week. Corn is growing, with the Painted Hill tasseling already; the others got in late & was just to get rid of old seed, so we’ll just have to wait & see if that does anything.
Should be harvesting wheat & barley next week. Also, the sweet cherries should be ready in the net few days, too.
I’m almost afraid the German Butterball potato plants have a nitrogen overdose, because they are so huge; and now, NEW shoots are emerging from the bottom to middle sides of the hilling, even though they are in full flower. They got some compost & a light scattering of 10-10-10 tilled in deeply; then the furrow was dug, and triple-superphosphate (0-45-0) placed in the bottom of the trench, covered with an inch or so of soil before planting. OTOH, the Goldrush, planted in the adjacent row, got the same pre-planting treatment, and look a lot more like I’m used to seeing, so it may just be a varietal difference. From seed piece level to the tops of the plants is about 4 feet.
Also this week, I “harvested” 3 meals worth of smallmouth bass & bluegill.
Later, I’ll post a picture of the peppers.
I’m going to luvvv your pictures....
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