Posted on 09/06/2013 11:58:59 AM PDT by greeneyes
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Ditto on that from me. They are a welcome, and helpful sanctuary for me.
You are too kind. Thanks for the encouragement.
TSP-That’s it. Thanks for helping my memory out.LOL
You are welcome. Thanks for the pictures. That surely is a healthy looking Tomato plant. Mine are always scraggly this time of the year. And they get that yellow leaf with spots thing. I thinks it’s blight. Whatever.
I always just cut off all the bad leaves and burn them, and then the tomatoes perk up and produce some more.
Thanks. I know what you mean. I have trouble getting all the produce done, and we don’t even have that much.
Okay, since it’s in the 80’s here today, and it’s plant by the moon day for above ground crops, I planted wa wa tsai (miniature chinese cabbage), and toy choi (miniature pak choy) today. I also put up a second cattle panel for my hoop house/texas prepper’s green house.
So, I now have an eight by eight cattle panel hoop...It didn’t seem to be as heavy and back breaking as the first one I put up over a month ago..
I am guessing it’s not that I am stronger, but that the temperature isn’t in the high 90’s. Also, it’s overcast, and the sun wasn’t beating down on me like it was with the first one.
Oh, and last night we had a nice shower. My rain barrel is full. And the free nitrogen greens up things nicely.
I picked a bunch of peppers and some tomatoes yesterday in the heat, and dug a few spuds, and trimmed yellow leaves off the tomatoes.
Was going to get out early this AM to do some more of the same, and water everything, but we had showers, so I have an excuse to stay in and let mother nature do her thing.LOL
Are you getting any of the wet stuff there? I hope it lasts all week.
Since it’s just me, I use paper plates, seldom use the dishwasher.
I have to admit, since the dish washer went kaput. I have used more than my share of paper plates too. LOL
First, Mr. Stevia just looks great - the new leaves on the end of every stem are getting bigger and look healthy. That whole plant has such small and delicate limbs, it doesn't look strong at all but the green leaves look fine.
The big “T” Italian squash in the tomato barrel (on the rolling plant caddy rightly made for me) is almost three feet tall and more new growth will be out by tomorrow. It is perfect. I say a prayer nothing gets it. If this one is successful, I expect all of you to grow/eat this squash for spring/summer/ and leave some for winter squash like Butternut squash. Why would anyone grow any other squash if this one resists those moths/borers? I'll wait until it actually has squash without being killed before victory will be declared.
All the Mortgage Lifter tomato plants are getting tall and the body of the plants are larger and look healthy - I think there are eight out there, 3 in the big tomato container, and the rest, each in a five gallon grow bag.
The sweet potato plants look fine in the ten gallon grow bag. The plant stems and leaves flow out of the bag onto the deck.
The bush green beans I transplanted out of the paper cups, two each in five gallon grow bags, are growing taller faster, maybe 8 inches tall now.
The 25 strawberry plants are lush, and I have to get them out of the tiny cups and plant them in something soon. I think I'll look for a square planter of some kind to put them in. I'll take a look at what my Walmart and Lowes has on line that is actually in my stores. Bags are not going to work as they need more surface area to spread out but they are not the kind with runners.
I also need to plant the turnips and some more of the veggies growing out of the paper cups and transplant that other “T” Italian squash - don't know where it is going. I guess I have to fill the other big tomato planter and that takes a number of bags of potting soil mix. It can go in there with other veggies.
Yes, rightly, I need more potting soil mix - have to get that when I get something for the strawberries.
greeneyes, I may kill the strawberries because the instructions call for all that hay and crap and later all that mulching stuff. Mine will be in potting soil mix and I'm not mulching in containers. I can keep them from freezing easily if it were to get that cold here like once or twice this winter. Maybe I should get square containers that are not huge so I can move them around easier. Not sure what I'm going to do with them in that case but I can keep them from freezing.
The three flowering plants I bought and transplanted into larger plastic pots, haven't wilted - they look fine sitting out in the dirt garden and that's after I cut their roots to pieces like the lady said and figured they would die from that mistreatment.
I'll check the mixture of flower seed tomorrow that I spread on the ground when I planted the walking onions. I'll take a look in the bed of walking onions but don't expect to see anything. Tomorrow the dirt in that area will be dryer because it's wet now.
I still don't trust the squirrels to not eat my plants during the night or early morning. I'm putting row cover over the plants on the deck that are not tomatoes every evening. I pull netting over the tomatoes every evening. The point of this long post is this:
NO PLANT AT THIS TIME IS GETTING MURDERED BY SQUIRRELS OR BIRDS OR INSECTS! ALL THE PLANTS ARE BEAUTIFUL!
LOL. Your thumb is getting greener by the hour! Hubby doesn’t do much with the berries. He gets a good soil mix. Plants them in the pyramid planters, and pinches the blossums off the first year, so the plants efforts will go into strong establishment of the plant.
Just before the first frost, he covers them with a mound of hay, which he takes off when danger of frost is past. Most of the crop is done by end of June, though with everbearing we sometimes get a small fall crop too.
The storm at one time was large eoough to stretch from southern WY & NB to southern MT & ND; 100 miles to the west of us to about 25 miles east of us. It is actually bigger; this is just what the Rapid City radar can capture.
These Chandler strawberries are for the south and they are only annuals - according to Texas A&M, they are perfect for the south and the perennials do very poorly here and are not recommended to grow. Do you know if there is such a thing as strawberry seed to get from strawberries to plant the next year? I don’t have a clue if that can be done.
Not to intrude, but I discovered quite by accident that the seeds on the strawberry will germinate. Some years back, before I started my own strawberry patch, I tossed the stems I had just cleaned in a flower pot. The next year I had a flower pot full of strawberry plants.
So I still dump my stems in flower pots just to have continuous supply of new plants, because there are always some seeds from the process of stemming.
The thing is, they are round, 13 inches in diameter and 6 1/2 inches deep. That should be perfect for strawberries, lots of surface area and not really deep. I think maybe 4 plants would be okay in that large 13 inch round container. Could change my mind about that when I see them, maybe 3 would be better. Customer comments are they are strong with doubled walls and are very light. Would be easy for me to move them under the roof and cover them if we had freezing temps.
I ordered some pepper seed today but they also sell the plants and think I will do that for the others I want when their plants are ready to sell in the early spring. Those are container pepper plants. The only seed I haven't found yet is the Fool Me jalapenos - where do you order yours from?
“I discovered quite by accident that the seeds on the strawberry will germinate. Some years back, before I started my own strawberry patch, I tossed the stems I had just cleaned in a flower pot. The next year I had a flower pot full of strawberry plants.”
What? You mean when you cut a stem off the plant and took the strawberry off the stem, you put the stem in a flower pot with dirt in it? Do I have that right?
The stem will not grow. But when a stem is cut off the berry most usually a seed or two gets cut off the strawberry. It is the seed not the stem that will germinate.
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