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signseeker
04-25-2011, 01:08 PM
Well, I got the snap peas in - yay! :001_sdrool:

I also got the stepping-stone walkway back in to the chicken pen (we take it up for tilling). Going to get stepping stones around the one garden plot.

I plan to plant lettuces, spinach, brussel sprouts (I know, yuk, but the seeds were free), broccoli, cauliflower, bunching onions, beets and carrots this week. And start some garlic chives and cilantro in pots.

The lettuces, spinach, garlic and onions are coming up from last year that I let go to seed.

We are thinking of building a greenhouse. :svengo: This video has some great ideas for growing fish in greenhouses, too! Talk about broadening your horizons! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qZPwBPAqks

arbilad
04-25-2011, 01:11 PM
I have peas and radishes planted so far. I planned to plant carrots, lettuce, cabbage, mustard, and caroway last week, but it kept raining so I held off. Hopefully the rain will slack off by tomorrow and I'll be able to get those seeds in.
I don't mind rain. I like it a lot. But it's no fun to plant seeds in the rain (or snow, as was the case Saturday).
I have my jalapenos started indoors.

Julie
04-25-2011, 03:41 PM
My squash has baby squash on them. Only some of my green beans came up and I had to replant them - same with my cucumbers. The tomatoes I started are struggling so I bought some at the store and they seem to be doing fine. Had some potatoes come up volunteer and they have been replanted to a planter area and are doing well.
We have been putting flagstone down in the yard and along side the house. - getting ready for a backyard reception and open house. This year my focus is FLOWERS. I'll be glad when June is over with.

jackmormon
04-25-2011, 10:20 PM
I have nothing planted outside, but I have a bunch of seeds started--tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, crook-neck squash, brussels sprouts (I love them, and will eat yours if you don't want them), pumpkin, canteloupe, watermelon, etc. One thing I have been unable to locate is banana squash, I can't find seeds or started plants anywhere, although I haven't looked online...

prairiemom
04-25-2011, 10:32 PM
It's at least another 5 wks before we can plant tender plants. We'll do peas, lettuce and potatoes next week. I got my greenhouse up today. The perennial herbs are growing back, except for possibly the skullcap and lavender (which technically only grow in Zone 5 or warmer. We're in Zone 4. I got them through the last 2 winters but wasn't able to get them mulched this fall before the snow fell.)

jackmormon
04-25-2011, 10:46 PM
I forgot to mention, I'm going to try to grow one of these this year, so when you guys all get tired of eating cracked wheat from your food storage, come on over for some baked pumpkin.

Earthling
04-25-2011, 11:39 PM
I planted the cool season crops several weeks ago but then it has rained & rained and even snowed. Some things came up but some will need to be replanted as the seeds probably rotted.

My tomatoes I planted from seed inside are doing so well that they would like to be put outdoors. I wonder how early I dare do that with walls o'water?

With the upcoming wedding of Bugnite/Christy and my grandson's visit - this summer will be busy so I hope I have time to take care of and harvest my garden.

mgriffith
04-26-2011, 11:48 PM
Just put in some cucumbers and tomato plants. The apple and peach trees have tiny fruit on them now. I planted some bush cherries a couple years ago (don't know exactly what they are....someone gave them to me) and they have lots of little fruit on the. I presume they are cherries, I guess we'll find out in a few months.

Ordered some heirloom bush beans and dent corn seeds, which should be arriving soon. Getting ready to turn over the ground once it stops raining. It's been raining for weeks now.

Mark

threepercent
05-06-2011, 06:49 AM
ok, my tomato plants made it through all the snow and hard freezes. so I have 7 different heirloom varieties outside already, and of each of those I have about 10 more plants each. I saved my sugar pumpkin seeds from last years experiment and those are good, as I have 3 "starts" I planted to check the seeds.


I will be canning tomatoes, carrots, and beets this year. I will also be trying to make sugar from beets.

today will be a big garden prep day!

Julie
05-06-2011, 07:18 AM
Well, my flagstone is almost done- yeah! So far this is my best garden yet. Hopefully it stays that way when the heat hits. I bought a bush goliath tomato and it is an early giant tomato and I have 3 tomatoes on it and the rest of the tomatoes are blooming like crazy. We have been eating lettuce, spinach, and radishes. My green beans and cucumbers finally came up. I put out some snail and slug bait and it has made all the difference. My plants are now coming up without being eaten on.
I have been putting a little nitrogen on my plants when I have transplanted them and I have not had transplant shock. I got some calcium nitrate and that is what I used.

signseeker
05-06-2011, 08:03 AM
I left my tomato and pepper babies outside last night by mistake. Checked them this morning and they're fine. Wheeeew! I've got about 10 heirloom varieties of each. What's weird is that two of the tomato varieties (Rutgers Select and Eva Purple Ball) I planted seeds from both '09 and '10. The '09 seeds sprouted faster on both counts. They've basically all caught up now, but I thought it was kinda' weird. I wonder if they got too dried out last year or something...? Makes me want to have a "reserve" of seeds from more than one year just to protect against unknown things like this.

We're getting salad and garlic chives so far.

arbilad
05-06-2011, 12:30 PM
I have my peas, radishes, caraway, carrots, strawberries, onions, lettuce, and cabbage planted outside in my garden. I need to do potatoes soon. I have my jalapenos sprouted and started indoors. I need to start putting them outside soon during the day to acclimate. I have my tomato seeds planted. I'm going to plant pumpkins when the soil is warmer.

phylm
05-06-2011, 06:16 PM
ok, my tomato plants made it through all the snow and hard freezes. so I have 7 different heirloom varieties outside already, and of each of those I have about 10 more plants each. I saved my sugar pumpkin seeds from last years experiment and those are good, as I have 3 "starts" I planted to check the seeds.


I will be canning tomatoes, carrots, and beets this year. I will also be trying to make sugar from beets.

today will be a big garden prep day!

Have you made sugar from beets before? That's something I want to try this year, along with some sorghum syrup.

phylm
05-06-2011, 06:20 PM
Here, in the sunny sunny South, we're picking English peas, have some 3 inch potatoes, swiss chard and green beans almost ready to pick. and a 4 inch summer squash. Gotta be getting the canner out soon.

signseeker
05-06-2011, 07:16 PM
Yeah, I want to hear about the sugar from beets, too. :yesnod:

Earthling
05-07-2011, 10:16 PM
We got more of the garden rototilled today. My son dug it by hand (so we could go deeper than the tiller), added mulch & tilled. Then we planted potatoes. I also got my raspberries pruned this week and the yard weeded & picked up from winter.

Now here comes the rain so no more work days outside until midweek.

signseeker
05-08-2011, 01:40 PM
Got some more seeds in - cabbage, broccoli, etc. just in time for the rain. Yay!

mgriffith
07-01-2011, 10:55 AM
By garden is going strong. This year I planted:

Dent corn for grinding into corn meal
Navy beans. We use these in a lot of dishes
Pickle cucumbers
Green and red peppers (these are $1.99 EACH at Wal-Mart)
Winter squash

Doing more experimenting with growing long term storage crops. Tried to upload some pictures but by new phone takes 5MP shots which I guess are too large for GLO (2Mb each).

Mark

signseeker
07-01-2011, 12:46 PM
My peppers aren't doing as well as I hoped they would. :glare:

Babbi-Dan
07-01-2011, 09:41 PM
My little 4 inch high tomato plants started from seeds drowned recently. I was growing them in a 5 gallon container on our deck. It rained. Then it rained some more . . . and more. I got busy doing other things, and when I saw them today they were deceased. Good thing my life's not depending on me growing tomatoes. Now, do I try to plant new seeds? Or do I buy plants already growing from Walmart? Either way, my husband's tomato plants are almost as tall as I am. I feel disgraced just thinking about it. (Sniff, sniff...)

4evermama
07-01-2011, 09:53 PM
Almost everything has drowned or dropped its fruit due to a late freeze at the end of May. Blueberries and Apples are about all that I have left.

Starting over with tomatoes- I feel like an idiot, putting starts in the ground the first week of July. At this point, I'm just going to put down a bunch of hearty greens that will take me into the winter. Don't know what else to due but pray for an Indian summer minus the frost.

Even the bulk orders that I made with growers are min. 3 weeks behind.
I'm starting to get REALLY suspicious that perhaps the Lord is just giving me a kick to the head, so that when everything finally comes in, I don't just mess around......I better go find more jars.

Does anybody here grow gardens indoor? I've been thinking A LOT about managing an indoor system. Is it worth the attempt?

prairiemom
07-01-2011, 11:48 PM
This is my year for experimenting. Test 1: Wall-o-Water (or a cheaper knock-off) Planted 5 tomatoes 2 wks ahead of the others and protected them with Wall-o-Water. One month later they are twice as big as the ones planted later and w/o WoW, so I moved the WoW's from the bigger plants to the smaller plants. 10 days later most of them have caught up to their siblings.

I'm trying 2 new kinds of cages. Cages have always been a dilemma for me--finding cages that are strong and tall enough for our 6' tall plants. So far this is what I have:
http://i58.photobucket.com/albums/g275/prairie_chuck/P6200009.jpg

Regular cages (cost about $7 at the hardware store), red ladders, about 5 1/2' tall, (about $10) and square cages, 5' tall. (they fold flat and cost about $12) We'll see how they perform.

Also I'm growing pole beans for the first time. Added Jerusalem artichoke to my perennial garden.

Squash, cukes, beans, peas, beets, lettuce all doing well. Brassicas all doing well. The cat is keeping the voles at bay, I haven't lost a single plant to them this year. (Some years I've lost over 1/2 of all my plants, including peppers)

I'm discovering chamomile reseeded in other flower beds hundreds of feet from the herb bed. New herbs: golden oregano, French Taragon, English thyme (all Zone 5 plants but I've been able to keep Zone 5 lavender going for 4 yrs with mulching, so I hope these will survive as well.) Also rue, orris root, pleurisy root, and sage. The angelica is taking off like wildfire--I really need to start using it more.

The asparagus performed beautifully this year. We added another 10' of bed (5 plants) The 5 that we planted last year are doing well. Also there are 2-3 new "volunteer" plants--not all of the "all male" plants were actually male, which I'm glad for. With the seeds that the females are producing we should have a huge bed in a few years.

The worm composting is doing well, though they are not processing the food as quickly as I'd hoped. Maybe because the basement temps were around 55 °-60°. They prefer 70°. It did cut down the kitchen waste during the winter by about 1/2.

Earthling
07-02-2011, 09:06 PM
Now, do I try to plant new seeds? Or do I buy plants already growing from Walmart? Either way, my husband's tomato plants are almost as tall as I am.

The Kenny Rodgers song comes to mind "You got to know when to hold em, know when to fold em, know when to walk away, know when to run". I think it is time to "fold em & walk away" - especially if your husband's plants are doing fine. I assume he will share the tomatoes? :yummie:

prairiemom
07-02-2011, 10:43 PM
I just finished mulching about 1/3 of the garden. The farmers have cut all the grass along the roads, so we just went and raked up the grass, filled the pickup bed with it. Then laid down newspaper and grass on top of that. Today was one of those rare, almost windless days, so I got it done pretty quickly. It's so worth it because it means almost zero weeding the rest of the summer.

mgriffith
07-03-2011, 07:25 PM
I have a hard time growing tomatoes around here. Seems like there is something the black walnut trees put into the ground that prevents them from growing. So last year I bought a tomato planter that hold about 4 gallons of water in the base had has a built-in cage. I got about 5 pounds of tomatoes from two plants I put in there. Not much, but better than I have been able to do before.

This year, I used the same planter, and planted the same type of tomatoes in it. But, this year I put about four tablespoons of Miracle Grow tomato food in the base at two week intervals. The attached picture is what I got. There are tomatoes and flowers all over this thing and I'm not sure how I will keep it under control as the summer progresses.

Mark

mgriffith
07-03-2011, 07:32 PM
I figured out how to compress these huge jpeg images so I can upload them.

My garden this year, take a week ago. Late planting because of all the spring rains. These beds have dent corn, navy beans, green and red peppers, and pickle cucumbers. Not seen yet is the winter squash.

Julie
07-06-2011, 09:24 AM
I grew my first pumpkin this year. The problem is that it got ripe in July:confused (3): It is about 15 inches tall and weighs at least 30 lbs. This is supposed to happen in October so I would have a nice pumpkin to carve.

signseeker
07-06-2011, 09:30 AM
I have some dark-colored bottomless plastic pots which I placed over some of the tomatoes when I transplanted them outside. Others I just put in their cages. The ones with the "pots" are quite a bit larger. I'm going to try to make some more of these for next year. I'll try them on the peppers, too. It kept them from the wind which was especially frequent this spring.

Julie- maybe by October your pumpkin will be a giant!! :w00t:

Julie
07-06-2011, 10:47 AM
Julie- maybe by October your pumpkin will be a giant!!
Too late. It would of rotted on the vine by then. I'm hoping that now I picked it I can get another one to grow. My son laughed at me and said I planted it too soon. Next year I will plant my pumpkin in July:001_unsure:

signseeker
07-06-2011, 01:29 PM
Yeah, I bet you'll get another one. We've never tried pumpkins.

prairiemom
07-12-2011, 09:33 AM
Pumpkins and all the winter squash are a great crop--they produce a LOT of food in a little space (provided you trellis the vines up the garden fence like I do.) Last year out of 4 vines (2 kinds of Pumpkin--pie and carving size--spaghetti and hubbard) I got 46 fruit. They stored in the basement and we had fresh squash all through Jan and into Feb. Then I cooked up what was left before it started to spoil and froze it. We're not crazy about squash, but when we have a plant that produces so well and stores so long we've found lots of creative and tasty ways to eat it.

mgriffith
08-13-2011, 05:39 PM
Attached is a photo taken today. The dent corn is about 9 feet tall (or more), and the beans are spreading out OK. Peppers are doing well, and the butternut squash is just getting going.

Notice that I have a lot of unused space under the corn, so next year I'm going to put the corn in all the beds, and plant the beans in the same beds one the core is going. Like the Indians, this will make better use of the ground I have, and also the beans will put nitrogen back into the soil the corn takes out. I tried the "three sisters" method last year, and it didn't do as well. But with this super tall dent corn, and bush type beans, I think it will work better.

The squash is in a different bed, and is just getting going as the cucumber vines die off so the squash will take over that space and hopefully grow up the decorative windmill.

Too bad you only get one chance a year to experiment, but I think I have a good idea how to grow a food supply now.

Mark

Julie
08-13-2011, 08:52 PM
I just planted my fall garden today. I had a good crop of carrots, beets, and onions. I planted cucumbers, bush beans, lettuce, beets, spinach. I'll plant some more carrots and some summer squash next week.
I've been doing about 2 batches of tomatoes a week. Tonight, I'm going to freeze some whole tomatoes. My neighbor does this and claims they taste better.