Posted on 09/27/2013 12:37:17 PM PDT by greeneyes
The Weekly Gardening Thread is a weekly gathering of folks that love soil, seeds and plants of all kinds. From complete newbies that are looking to start that first potted plant, to gardeners with some acreage, to Master Gardener level and beyond, we would love to hear from you.
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Those are some really pretty nifty pictures. Thanks.
We have a little in our barrels from the rains this week, but they are far from full.
You are very industrious with your soil improvement project.
Can you grow cocoa beans? I read that there as been a pretty wide spread crop failure, and the price of chocolate is predicted to rise.
Rain is good news, especially for your area. Last year, when the drought finally ended, I really identified with that song, “Singing in the Rain”- What a glorious feeling I’m happy again. LOL
I generally keep track of my efforts. However, my left thumb and right shoulder have become so sore I can hardly use either from all the gardening/canning. I stopped counting the salsa count at 120 pints. Green beans canned count nearing 50, not counting what I just picked.
Old injuries are feeling the weather war of summer to autumn so I am beginning to 'feel' like a mama bear wanting to find a soft place to hibernate for a time.
I plant all my left over garlic from the store around Sept. October each year, and cover it with a row cover that lets in 80% or more sunlight and rain. Most of it grows fine that way(very slow during winter). I do cover it more when it gets to freezing, and take the cover off entirely when there is the occasional nice sun shiny day.
I usually plant them in the space where I grew my tomatoes. When they mature in May to 1st of June, I harvest them and plant bush beans in that space.
I also grow some garlic that I order for fall delivery. Garlic is pretty simple. Plant about 2” deep and 16 clove per sq. foot. My soil prep is a good dose of compost, and some bone meal (follow package directions)for the phosphorus.
I don’t grow a lot of garlic, since I have limited space, but it’s so easy, I have thought about growing it to sell.LOL
LOL. Hibernation sounds really good this time of the year, but after a few weeks of winter, cabin fever strikes and dreams of spring planting dance in my wee little brain.LOL
I'm going to work on the soil here until I die. It will be my legacy. One square yard at a time.
/johnny
Walking onions: You said, “Should all the green remain?”
Unless there is a green, a new onion doesn’t grow. If you have gobs of greens, then it doesn’t matter to eat some, however, if you are just starting and have only a few greens, leave them to grow more onions.
I have ten of them up now and four have greens about six inches tall. I won’t touch the greens or eat any onions from that patch until next year when they have had a chance to “walk” and produce more onions.
See how abitious you are: one sq yard at a time. Me, I work on 1/2 sq foot at a time every 2 - 4 weeks. If I exceed that, I have no energy for anything else.
Dang, I thought that Texans might be able to grow their own coffee beans and cocoa beans.
JRF—We have rain coming this weekend also. This month I recorded our rainfall, it wasn’t too hard, it only rained 3 times but we had 11in at our place, Marcella hay have been a lot different being 9mi away. On one rainy day, I had 5in she had only about 1 1/2. Our local average for this area is 4.46 measured about 3mi from here.
ALL—I re-potted my ghost peppers last weekend and they are looking OK, but the existing peppers have not ripened, I guess they will. I dried and de-seeded my first batch of 14 and flaked them. Gunna have kids out at Christmas, SIL likes hot, so I am gunna fix him up, plus send him home with some seedlings.
The mater cuttings that we took a short time back were re-potted last weekend and the root systems looked good. The only problem is they are vine type heirlooms. I wonder if I can prune them regularly to contain them while indoors over the winter and still get maters from them.
The wild ones we have are small, but a powerhouse in nutrition. It’s hard to describe their taste, it is good, but a little goes a long way.
When ripe they feel like a little bag of jelly. They have rather big seeds, which I have read can be roasted and used as a coffee substitute.
But man, if you get one that is not ripe. Oh wow! Talk about pucker power. The sourest dill pickle you ever ate, can not hold a candle to the pucker you get from an unripe persimmon.
It’s truly God’s gift-we didn’t plant the tree, it just sprang up and grew. It’s a native plant. It produces fruit year after year. We don’t mess with it at all. Afraid we’ll screw it up.LOL
Thank you all for your garlic planting tips. A little more garlic in the diet is good for the lowering a bit of high BP. As for the breath—well, not so much.. (’
Lots of other health benefits from garlic too not just blood pressure, and it has anti bacterial properties.
It is also a component of home made bug spray. Kills within seconds.
Excellent, thank you, that’s what I figured, but wasn’t sure; I was impatient, and snipped some. I’ll leave them alone now.
Thx, for the lovely rose. Sadly, the ones in my garden didn’t look that good..
You could stick 2 or 3 poles in the pots, and let them grow up those and pinch back when they get to the top. I have done that with regular tomatoes grown in buckets on the patio, but they weren’t the vining types.
It might work. You can try it and see. I’d probably give it a whirl.
Excellent point— I too use a garlic/soap/hot pepper solution as a bug spray. Seems to help keep the ants away from the pepper blooms. Works on the lettuce leaves too—heck it seems like its a pre-picking marinade of sorts as a foliage spray. Not too heavy on the soap though....I’m also using blackboard white chalk powder on the bottom stems so the ants have a barrier they wont crossover and upwards.
Well, the "T" squash is a good six feet tall and growing out in the air now since it is taller than the plastic support. It has started dropping due to gravity and the longer it gets the more it's going to head straight down, so it will be hanging from the top of the support down to the ground if it doesn't stop growing before then. No sign of a blossom.
The baby T squash is a foot high now. It's in a pot and the vine will just have to grow on the deck instead of in the air since I don't have another one of those barrels with the stand in it.
Nine walking onions are up. The Sesame flowers, there are two in the big pot, now each have six pods growing and more are forming.
Bush beans are flowering, lettuce, cucumbers, broccoli, are growing in a long container, grow bag with baby carrots is growing. All these plants are too young yet for blossoms.
All the strawberries are alive and growing in those kind of flat pots I got for a bargain price.
I HAVE EIGHT TOMATO PLANTS AND NOT A SINGLE BLOSSOM - I'M GOING TO KILL MYSELF!
I met an architect from a town just north of me and tomorrow, I'm going to see the house he built of his own design. This man has more talent than I have seen in one person. Name it and he does it.
He appears to have double green thumbs. A son of his in Galveston has a fig tree. Architect guy got a cutting of that fig tree. So, he did the root grow stuff and planted that "stick". However, a leaf fell off and he treated the leaf and planted it - that tree from that leaf is five feet tall! He spoke to an Ag guy and that man said he had never heard of that happening.
Architect guy also got seeds from A&M of the Jalapeno seed they developed which has barely any heat, and he has those growing.
This morning he sent me this link that someone sent him - it's titled "The Beauty of Pollination". Well, I couldn't get that link to paste. I'll try it on a separate post.
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