Two weeks of growth on the second garden of the year. Everything is growing well in the cooler temps, and the little rain we recently helped. The apple trees are slated to go in the ground in December/January when they are dormant.
Posted on 09/23/2011 7:28:24 AM PDT by Red_Devil 232
Good morning gardeners. I am getting a late start posting the thread this morning. Cleaned up my garden plot and will be tilling in some of my compost and wheat straw when the soil dries out a little more. I put a bail of straw around the base of my Fig trees in the hopes the straw will help them through the winter.
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 did well this year.
Thank you. I’ll do that next okra season. Ours are gone for this year.
South FL UPDATE: I got the holes replanted, Going well. I found a catapiller of the chile peppers and used the 2 board-2 brick method of pest control.. Spiders and catapllers must be related, They are both green inside! :-}
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Enjoy
You’re very welcome.
Things we’ll do differently this year:
Start earlier with the mulching/paper/hay thing. We’re going to cover a 150+ftX150+ft plot with 1-2sheets newspaper and 3-4” of hay *before* the grass starts growing. We live in the country, have a pretty good sized yard (several acres) yard and this year the choice (THANKS PRES__ENT!) was between gas for the car so hubby could get to work and gas for the mower. With a good deal of our ‘yard’ out of comission for the growing of grass (NO HOA!) we’re going to focus on food. I’m planning on starting the ‘mulch the squashkin patch’ project sometime in January. It’s ‘mild’ here in the winter (no snow or freeze hardened ground) and it’s WAY easier to work in 45-55 degrees than 95 degrees. That way the grass and weeds won’t have a chance to grow and I’ll be absolutely certain the paper is broken down. In mid Feb I’m going to take the largest peat pots I can find and start my squashkins. I plan on setting them out in the first week of March with a covering of some sort to protect them from frost/freezes.
I found that given a month or 6w or so the paper has, in my area, broken mostly down or at least broken down enough for me to poke a hole in that with a bulb planter thingie and set stuff out.
I think another reason we’ve gotten so many pumpkins from the Rumbo this year is the early start. They’re, IIRC, a ~90day variety. They had their first batch sometime around the last week or so of July. Once we picked those the vines started running again and a couple weeks later they set pumpkins again. (I cheated and treated the vine source and running vines with dilute algoflash) We picked those a couple weeks ago and they’re running/setting again right now. Our growing season doesn’t end really until the end of October or early November. Last year I had a few stragglers I just covered with plastic on the nights it was lower than about 40 in my garden patch. I covered the pumpkin/squashes and 5ft of vine or so in either direction.
I also put a small (less than recommended amount on the package) scoopful of osmocote in the hole when I transplant the squashkins, that probably doesn’t hurt, either. IIRC I also sprinkled some along the growing vines once or twice. We don’t use anything ‘stronger’ than osmocote out of concern about ‘burning’ things. Exception is the dilute algoflash. We’ve got an acre under till this year and we’ve used 2 bottles, total, for the entire garden for the entire year.
Using plastic and frost cloth I’ve been able to extend my growing season by at least 4w, probably could do a great deal more if I were more organized and on the ball with stuff.
Good luck with your pumpkin patch. Start saving your (and all your friends!) newspapers right now. Also, cereal boxes work (they take about 2 times longer to break down) as long as they don’t have that ‘shiny’ coating on them. Ditto other grocery boxes (MacNCheese, granola bars, ritz, etc). We like to make sure the boxes are stuff that’s from this country. Toy boxes aren’t allowed in my garden or compost pile, they’re all from China. Pretty sure they have stuff in/on them I do *not* want in my garden!
Those little cream cheese boxes and stuff that size I use to mulch my strawberry bed. Put pinestraw on top of those.
YMMV
—ba, the opinionated
All this talk about Okra led me to order a Sizzling Cajun Shrimp and Steak platter at Applebee’s last night anticipating the Okra the menu mentioned. What a flop as there were exactly two (2) slices and the steak was over done...
WoW! My okra are just starting to produce.
He has all of his garden plots in raised beds. The okra plants are all over 6’ tall, and he has to bend them down to pick the top.
Stay safe! I heard that your town was being swallowed by black holes on the last episode!!!!!
[OK, I'll crawl back in my closet now.......... ;)]
Two weeks of growth on the second garden of the year. Everything is growing well in the cooler temps, and the little rain we recently helped. The apple trees are slated to go in the ground in December/January when they are dormant.
Two weeks of growth on the second garden of the year. Peppers, tomato, cabbage, and lettuce are growing well in the cooler temps, and the little rain we recently had helped. The apple trees are slated to go in the ground in December/January when they are dormant.
Great pictures, and what a nice tidy garden. My garden season is winding down. It has been a roller coaster ride this season. Too wet in the spring to plant, then the month of July was a blast furnace and no rain. August got too much rain and wind at one time. Now it has cooled off but need rain. I keep watching the night time temps to know when I have to pull the sweet potato vines out so they won’t freeze. I have 6 rows of Purple Queen beans just starting to bloom and I am concerned they will not mature before the first freeze.
Now that I have started typing I could go on and on about the winding down of gardening season 2011.
I just shipped off 2 boxes of slugs and snails to your address. Need any other pest or disease?
AH tubebender there’s nothing worse than an over done steak.
We had a nice storm roll through north of us last night. It brought wind and about 1/4 inch of rain in our area, but it dumped over the aquifier recharge zone.
I pulled a hornworm off of one of my tomato plants yesterday. The chickens seemed to know that I had a treat in my hand from 30ft away. They started to surround me, so I tossed the hornworm and ran. They always remind me of the velociraptors on Jurassic Park.
Just sitting down to a home-made pizza stacked high with fresh garden tomatoes and jalapenos...washed down with a ice-cold Pilsner Urquell...makes it all worth while.
I’ll take your word for it as I was born a little after the Jurassic period. I was a Ace in locating Hornworms in our tomato patch when we owned some property east of Benderville where 110 degrees days was not unusual...
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