Will post pictures soon. Last week i planted 30 tomatoe plants 9 cherry toms, 10 egg plant, 20 zuks, 10 yellow squash,15 green bell peppers, 15 yellow bell, 10 hot peppers. 10 watermelon plants 5 yellow, 5 red crimson sweet. Planted potatoes and leeks in another garden.
Had trouble due to sun scald any tips, a lot of my tomatoes were damaged. Some permanently others look like they might come back.
Anyone got any gardening experiences good and bad?
Also planted 50 strawberry plants and
20 sun gold raspberries.
UPDATE 8/2/07
It has been a long time i know! Tomatoes came back full strength starting to pop them out like crazy. watermelons got eaten by various animals, peppers are doing pretty well. Zuks came strong and hard until they got a wilt which decimated them however i harvested in two weeks almost 90 pounds of zuks and froze them. Yellow squash still pumping. Cherry tomatoes doing pretty well just now starting to go full force. I promise by weeks end i will get pictures. I Harvested potatoes two weeks ago pulled 50 pounds.
Hows everyone else doing?
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I do have some tomatos in pots and they're starting to ripen up. Have already pulled off a few cherries and one or two patios. I also have a couple of hot pepper plants.
Have no idea what "scald" is. Care to elucidate?
I started a few tomatoes when i started maple season i just picked my first tomato.
What does everyone fertilize with?
dropping by to check on you. When school got out I headed out to help with care of some older members of my family, then did a fast run to NC, just got back down to Mississippi and heading out again tomorrow.
We are very short on rain down here and the ground is cracking open and the only gardens looking ok, are the ones folks are watering. I lost one new tree and spend most of today putting water and bark around my other little trees.
Hope things are ok up north with you.
The eggplants did awesome for me last year. They did take a little longer then I expected to start pumping out but once they did they grew big very fast.
The squash and zukes did very well also. Just got to watch the vines mine had a thing for wanting to grow wild to stangle and kill other plants next to them. Something that worked well for me with these and other vines that have ground laying veggies is to lay a piece of tin foil under it once it starts growing. It keeps them rather dirt free and works to speed in the growth and quicker ripening of the veggie.
I had great success with hot peppers last year, to many to know what to do with. The bell peppers have been rather dissapointing in both my previous years. I've tried the red, green, and purple bells, and all three grew peppers, but they only got as big as golf balls, and then started to dry up and rot rather quickly. I've heard the same form quite a few people in the area, so I assume the size has something to do with the peppers perfering a warmer growing climate.
50 strawberries.. WOW. hope you have enough room for them next year. I got 4 of them last year and planted them in a small corner of my spice garden and so far this year those 4 plants have spread about 10 feet from where I first planted them. I've already got a few berries ready to be picked at the end of this week.
I'll probably do a garden blog with pictures sometime soon, so i'll drop you a line.
Good luck
What do you plan on doing with all those tomatoes? Hope you have lots of friends and neighbors!
Also, what type of fertilizer do you use? I would strongly encourage you to grow organically.
In response to your question...
Fortunately I live on an alpaca farm, so I get to reap the benefits of their compost. On the far side of the farm are several piles of manure that have been composting for 10 years, maybe more, so it's basically very rich dirt now. This stuff is black in color. You're from around the area so I'm sure you've driven through Pine Island. I would compare this dirt to that of Pine Island's.
This gets mixed into the existing soil. For fertilizer I use Espoma. They make a wonderful line of organic fertilizers.
Also try Gardens alive. Another great company in organics. They have a mail order catalouge with an extensive product line.
My extra tomatoes go to sauces that i can up and i dry tons of them as snacks. Even still i have extras and i give them to those that don't have gardens. I tried to plant them at different times so they don't come all at once, saddly last year that didn't work very well so this year they were started 4 weeks apart instead of 2.
Thanks for the ideas on fertilizer.
The scald has been grown through and plants are starting to take off going to take pictures today and start weeding again. Zuks have little zuks on them but i picked them because they aren't quite big enough to handle them yet.
In my family, we use the deep frez all the time with vegs when we dont use the fresh vegs. Nobody cans anymore. The only problem we have run into is when we lose power to due storms. The hurricane took a lot of folks down so things work better when we get an ice storm!
catch you all later!
Last year I tried to keep my tomato harvest low by only planting six plants, three roma, three big boy. In the end I still had over 100 pounds of tomatoes from throughout the year. This year I put in over 30 plants.
-8 beefsteak
-15 roma
-2 big boy
-2 better boy
-6 sweet 100
-2 early girl
-2 lemon boy
I'm guessing this year I'll have enough to sell at harvest fest at Bethel Woods.
Have lots of summer squash this year also.
-13 zuchinni of 3 different types
-4 yellow squash
10 different Winter squash.
5 different cucumbers.
Many greens, broccoli, leek, onion, beans, beets, lettuce, carrot, parsnip...just about everything.
Have you been to Adam's Fairacre Farms? They always have an extensive selection of seeds. I try to get everything from seed from them. They have it all.
Mines a bit smaller as about all of it has to be in post being we have FL sand & if it's touching the ground fire ants will eat it. Pretty much keep it going year round. Right now harvesting the last of the Karobi & brussel sprouts~ collards won't stop, tomatos are kickin as are the early squash, okra & swiss chard~ which is like i think a poor man's spinach, real easy & quick to grow & the family can't tell the difference. The strawberrys I think want moved in a shadier part for the summer. Real excited about the watermelons should have the 1st one ripe in a week or 2. Went with a small sweet variety, they're on the fence, latus & playing in the okra patch.
I plant about everything but some herbs in straight horse compost, rotate the buckets a few times between crops then dump & refill. Have 8' tomato plants at times & never fertilize. Beans & a few things I have to mix in a little lime.
Sullivan, sounds like you're going to have a ton of tomatoes as am i. I have over 30 in the ground right now that i started from seed. When i got the burn on the leaves i got worried and went and bought back ups to the tune of about 16 plants from adams. Since the tomatoes have come back i have those plants to find space for. so when its all done i'll probably have about 50 plants which will be down right ridiculous.
I grow mainly determinate plants as they are best for me.
swiss chard is my fav. i love the taste sauteed up and used as greens in a wrap especially a spicy pulled pork wrap.
Next year or maybe for a fall harvest i'm going to mix a nice sandy mixture of soil in a small box for some carrots and beets.
Its almost time for me to start mound the soil up on my potatoes again they just started to flower. Leeks are doing well, zuks are going crazy egg plant needs some time but is getting there
Eggplant is always tough. I get very large eggplant reliably, but just about every insect seems to love eggplant. I'm out there at least 5 times a day picking them off and killing them. There's at least 3 kinds of bugs that just seem to spontaniously come into existance, just to eat eggplant leaves. A tiny little black bug that jumps like a locust, a striped beetle, yellow and black. And a gray bug with a soft body. Then the occasional visitors, a beetle that looks like a sunflower seed and a bug that looks like a shred of a oyster shell.
I have a good recipie for greens that I kind of made up.
Take a tablespoon of butter, 10oz of greens - chopped, 1 large portabella mushroom and 3oz of fontina cheese.
Sautee the greens and mushrooms with the butter, when the greens reduce put in the cheese cut into slices so they melt faster. After they melt combine everything so it comes out looking like creamed spinach. Use a wooden spoon, they work best.
This should serve 2 people, so if you're planning of serving more just double the ingredients.
You should consider growing just a couple of indeterminate plants to give a more balanced harvest. It would certainly help with trying to space out the planting. You just end up with hundreds of tommatoes.
So you do go to Adams! They do have a nice store. They're about a 90 minute drive from my house now (Bethel, NY) so I try to make it down there just once a year. The local Agway in Monticello carries a great selection of plants, but it's still nothing like Adams.
I think my biggest problem with melons here is that i have about 3" of soil and then ledge under. I have this year tried mounding soil up into about 2ft mounds for the watermelon tap roots. If this doesn't work i'm breaking out the backhoe with the jack hammer attachment and digging down 4 ft and filling it with a nice nutrient rich soil and then putting a wood frame around it and filling the soil to a final depth of 4'8" which should suffice enough for the tap root.
I feel i'm already my fix of tomatoes because i started two plants the same time i started maple syruping which was 3/6/07 and i picked my first tomato 5/31/07 and have been eating toms about 3 per day since. not quite as good as garden but sooo much better than the store.
Got into the garden today and got all of the huge weeds out and left the little ones til they are big enough to grab. It looks so much better now. Some toms have started green ones, picked a few small strawberries, zuks have little ones and chard is about 8-10" tall
ABOUT your bugs - I saw a trick done by one person down here in Mississippi. She took a large white screen cloth/net ... like what is used to fight off Mosquitos when you sleep,... She wrapped the whole area with it. She staked the bottom to the different areas of the box and around the plants, Yes, she was growing a small garden. She used the the tall bean poles hold it up. She never wrapped till she saw the fruit starting to grow.
With this wrapping of the net around and under the plants, the bugs could not get to the food and it kept some of the birds from eating her tomatoes.. The clever mocking bird however would search out areas where the net was very close to the tomatoes, and pushed the netting close to peck thr the net.
She had the most problems with the yellow squash being attacked by the critters. I guess with the bigger gardens you could make smaller netting bags to slip over your fruit. I saw somebody do something like that but they also created a frame within the netting to hold it off the fruit. They used plastic straws and string to hold the netting clear of the fruit.
Anyway.. just two cents tossed your way...
email me if you want more details...
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