Posted on 06/20/2014 12:30:26 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. This thread is non-political, although you will find that most here are conservative folks.
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My maple tree is not looking good this year. I thought my neighbor might have hit it accidentally with Roundup over spray and wounded it and/or maybe it's suffering from some bugs or disease.
I'm not a better living through chemicals kinda guy and don't want chemical warfare in my yard, but neem oil might be exactly what I'm looking for.
Also, have you ever used AzaSol? From a web search: "AzaSol is the water soluble powder azadirachtin extracted from the Neem seed."
Now I just need to find a cheap sprayer that can shoot 20' or more to hit the upper leaves.
I feel the same way. I ordered a quart of neem oil from Amazon three years ago for $16 and I’m still using it! I’ve not tried the other stuff, but if you do tell us what you think!
Picked first zucchini of the season-—yee ha! Green tomatoes respectable. A few bell peppers. Life is good!
Well, we had some casualties (grr sea grape & allamanda are gone) but even the marigolds (in flower pots) in the garden made it. Tomatoes, green beans, & okra are doing great! I don’t know what happened with the turnips & beets. Turnips were great last year & none of them made it. Beets failed last year & looking good this year. I pulled one up (they should be ready), but the bulbs are just shriveled up. Not enough water?
I’m going to pull the carrots before we go back. The tops look ready, so we’ll see.
The grass is about a foot high.
God Bless everyone & have a great week!
Grrrrr! Seas has been so retarded that I will just finally be able to plant a few zuke seeds and my corn this weekend.
Then in 2-3 weeks, the basketball-sized hail will hit, the way this season’s weather has been going.
HEY! It is IMPOSSIBLE to UNpleasantly surprise a pessimist: any surprises/outcomes are better than expected, and a cause for celebration!
Thanks. Putting that on the grocery list but will need to look out of town since ours hasn’t carried that since I don’t remember when. I had to get a little bottle of borax at the hardware store last time and that was years ago.
Hmm. Dunno. Looking a pics of chile petins, some look oval and others look like a regular, though small, elongated pepper so don’t know if all the pics are correctly identified. My mystery plant is a vine rather than a upright plant, though that might be because it was under some weeds. The fruit looks just like banana peppers (which I have planted) but are miniature. Normally, I’m not afraid to willy nilly taste something unknown but this I kinda am.
I just discovered something. Not only have the fonts changed on Freerepublic, but I’ve also discovered that now I seem to be unable to open two windows of FR at a time. I was in the middle of a post and needed to find a reference on another thread, and when I pulled it up, I discovered that my page with my post went poof. Just a heads up for others with swiss cheese memory like mine!
Congrats on your garden, Silentgypsy!
My garden is doing OK. I’d been wondering why things weren’t getting larger, and I had a couple of “DUH!” moments this past week.
My tomatoes and squash family plants, and peppers have all been experiencing blossom drop. Darlin said I needed to get some blossom drop hormone. It was difficult to find but we did finally get some. It does seem to help make the blossoms stronger, and now that I have some more tomato flowers, and we’ll see if it works!
I was in a side discussion about blossom drop with another thread participant when I found these links which I thought others might find helpful:
http://www.gardeners.com/buy/vegetable-blossom-set-spray/34-444.html
http://forums.gardenweb.com/forums/load/tomato/msg0313545916543.html
http://www.planetnatural.com/product/tomato-blossom-set-spray/
The other DUH moment was when the lady with whom I shared some of my t-squash, okra, and sunflower seedlings was waxing about how wonderful her plants are developing, that she is so pleased with them, and appreciates my gift to her. [She is amazing... 80 years old, gardener/nurse/chef...] The T squash of hers was taking off and taking over the back fence. Mine is about a food high. I asked what she was doing. She looked at me with her little angelic face, and said, “oh I just put a little Miracle gro on it!”
I was GOBSMACKED! DUH!!!” with all the rain and distraction of some other projects, I had forgotten to feed them! Poor starving creatures! I guess I had shied away subconsciously from it because, as those who may recall my disaster from last year, I thought then if a little bit of fertilizer would be good, then a LOT would be better. To my sorrow I discovered this was not in any way true! So now this year you see me go to the other extreme!
So I fertilized a few days ago. The squash seems to be blooming, and we’re hoping they don’t drop. The cucumber plant has a tiny baby started. (Last year I had a lot of that, but the little ones didn’t always develop.) I had been wondering why the Asian trellis beans have beans longer than the plant was tall. Yesterday I found that it had finally put out some climbing tendrils. Sunflowers are as tall as me, okra and potatoes are green and thriving. Legumes are blossoming and podding. The emmer has not headed, but it may have been stressed with being in too small a pot.
I hope everyone’s garden is growing, fecund, and abundantly green!
The problem with garlic is it kills pretty much everything. When I’m going after aphids, like I did yesterday on the squash, I use a tea made from tomato leaves. The tomato tea doesn’t kill the lady bugs, which eat aphids.
My drip hoses are controlled via my sprinkler system, so the rain sensor protects against over watering automatically.
Of course, my soil is so sandy I don’t think overwatering is possible.
When I venture back out into the heat again, I will try to get a picture of my Chilitepins so you can look at the leaves and immature peppers. Somewhere, I got the idea that they are round and English pea sized, But I wouldn’t bet the farm on it.
My wife uses a granule type fert that work when they get rained on or watered, that could help you out some. We use MG on the veggies since we have landscape fabric over the garden.
The good news is, my gardens are loving this weather! My sweet peas have jumped 2 feet in the last week, they are now taller than I am! And, after replanting 5 times, my cucumbers and melons are finally growing. I got some egyptian walking onions from my grandfather and got them planted in a barrel. The potatoes are tall enough I was able to mulch them, and my black raspberry patch is just covered in little green berries.
Although, after what happened with my strawberry patch, I'm tempted to post an armed guard at the raspberries. Dad waited until the first couple of strawberries had ripened, then ripped out half the patch and sprayed poisons on the other half. This is the 5th year in a row that he has destroyed large parts of the patch just as they started to ripen, but the poisons are a new trick. Well, actually, maybe not such a new trick, he did that once right after I served a wild salad from the back yard. I swear he does this deliberately! I have GOT to get out of this house!!!
Oh, look, the rain just started!
Yesterday I was taking a walk on my lunch break and found some mulberry trees just laden with fruit. I managed to pick about a cup of them before the mosquitoes chased me away. Monday I'm packing bug spray. I love mulberries. Mulberries are good. I'm trying to get a whole grove of them established on my land.
Things at work are going both very well and very badly. I like my job, I'm a QA person at a call center. All I have to do is listen to calls and grade people on how well they followed the rules. For that, I'm getting paid pretty well. In some ways it's the easiest job on the floor, but it does require being immune to bribes, pouting, begging, and other forms of coercion. Lots of people trying to get me to change their scores lately. Fortunately, when someone tries to take it up with upper management, they back me up. It's nice having a boss who trusts my judgement.
However, I know how to read a financial statement and I've studied how and why businesses fail. My employer will be bankrupt within 3 to 5 years because the CFO is doing a pump-and-dump, but there's no one I can tell who would be able to change it. So, I'm starting to look for another job. Getting my voice back gives me more options than I had before, so that alone is a relief.
Speaking of my employer, we got hit by the storm Wednesday morning. Part of the wall of the women's bathroom on my floor was scattered across the roof of the cafeteria. I'd post pictures but I can't seem to get them off my phone and onto the PC. It was surreal working that day!
I did check the guy out. He's ok. No need for a shovel or tarp or anything.
I managed to foist off... er.. dump.... er she took two of my aloe vera plants. That's more room on the porch. ;)
/johnny
Thx for the update. I guess that means she didn't go home to check on her plants today.
Glad she is enjoying herself. I guess the closest I'll get to that giddy, heart racing feeling is if I ever get some Cucuzza squash on my vines.
/johnny
Moose got one of my apple trees; those things can do some damage. I will need stronger fencing. Eating arugula and bokchoy right now. Kale and spinach are next.
Peas and pole beans are growing well. Tomatoes still have walls of water around them, nights still in the low 40’s.
Tough to garden in Montana but we do what we can in large raised beds, fenced 6ft high.
"That tingly feeling you get when you fall in love is common sense leaving your body".
/johnny
OH yes! For the first shot of MG, I used the amount for regular-feeding indoor plants, since mine are outside pots.
Then I remembered the stash of Osmocote I had, and spread that around a bit a couple of days later.
I bought some landscape fabric, but have not put it into place yet. I was thinking to put it around the rose bushes since we have a lot of grass/weeds there, and Darlin’ is reluctant to edge too close to them!
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