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Re: Gardening: Lessons Learned

By: capt_nemo in 6TH POPE | Recommend this post (0)
Wed, 05 Aug 20 9:18 PM | 23 view(s)
Boardmark this board | 6th Edition Pope Board 		Msg. 04275 of 60014
(This msg. is a reply to 04272 by Decomposed)
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• For whatever reason, my peas are doing well but my green beans are not. They're both trellis plants so I'm not sure what to think except that maybe the green beans have to be planted earlier.

,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, I have the weirdest beans ever. The plants never got over a foot high, and they have so many beans the plants keep falling over. I have the climbing string for them to go up but they keep falling over...




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The above is a reply to the following message:
Gardening: Lessons Learned
By: Decomposed in 6TH POPE
Wed, 05 Aug 20 8:17 PM 		Msg. 04272 of 60014

I enjoy gardening - which is fortunate because there are infinite ways to screw a garden up. I treat them as "Lessons Learned." Hopefully, I learn from them. They certainly qualify as "lessons."

This year, I have my large lower garden and last year's upper garden, near the street. Once the frost was gone, I hurriedly tilled the upper garden, added Urea fertilizer, stuck about 25 tomatoes in the ground and set up a sprinkler so it'd get its daily water. I walked away and only returned over the next few days to extract volunteer tomato plants for transplantation to the lower garden - as spots for them gradually became available. Then I truly didn't return to the upper garden for several weeks. I turn on its sprinklers from the house. More on that later.

The lower garden is new. I work on it at least a little every day, even if only to move the sprinklers. The plants are mostly thriving and the biggest are now interfering with the sprinklers, preventing them from watering sections that used to be reachable. What I *should* do is to put in soaker hoses that water right at the base of plants but not anywhere else. I have no experience with soaker hoses but I do know I'd have to set them up and remove them every year which seems like a lot of work.

The lower garden is doing quite well, but there still have been numerous lessons:

• Pulling weeds is critical, especially when the soil is enriched with manure bought from the neighbor lady instead of Home Depot. Home Depot, it seems, hires several million migrant workers whose sole job is to pluck seeds from its steer manure before putting it in a bag. Manure that hasn't been sterilized by seed pluckers still has those seeds and the seeds do quite well when they're being lovingly watered each day. I'm pulling weeds every time I go to the garden ( a few times every day), yet to look at it you'd almost think I wasn't.

I have a bumper crop of stinging nettles that would win ribbons if the county fair was awarding any this year.

• When weeding, it is not enough to pull the weeds from the ground. Weeds, it seems, don't really care whether they're actually in the ground or lying on their sides against the ground. As long as they're getting water, they're happy... and growing. A few days after being pulled, my weeds were in the ground AGAIN. %#@$!

• While getting weeds out of the garden after they've been pulled is essential, mindlessly throwing them is a big mistake. My tomato cages are 5-foot-tall monsters that I made from steel mesh intended for concrete work, and I've placed them all over the place - some to support tomatoes, others being used as trellises for peas or beans. Hitting them while tossing a weed HURTS.

• Lettuce and cabbage seeds put in the ground in mid-June don't ever sprout. I wasted a month waiting for them, then threw in the towel and tried growing them inside in the same little six-pack cartons you'd find at any nursery. They're available on Amazon, CHEAP. Three days after planting in these pots, I had seedlings galore. Lettuce and cabbage seeds, it seems, don't like warm weather.

• But they also eventually tire of being inside. My little lettuce and cabbage plants grew tall and spindly and then couldn't even support their own weight. What I read is that plants NEED light. Who'd have figured? Without light, they seek it - growing tall but never producing the carbohydrates they need to build thick stalks. So the trick, it seems, is to keep cabbage and lettuce SEEDS indoors, but to put the pots outside in the light as soon as the plants have sprouted. That lesson cost me most of the month of August.

• Once six-pack lettuce and cabbage plants are an inch or so high, they pretty much stop growing. They want to be in the ground. My plants were starting to look sickly again when I figured that out and test-planted several this week. To my surprise, they had improved by the very next day. Okay, so the lesson learned for these vegetables is that I have to plant seeds in pots indoors until they germinate, then keep them on the deck until they are an inch high and have four little leaves, THEN get them in the ground.

I didn't have to do any of that when I grew lettuce two years ago. I just planted lettuce seeds directly and they did great until a groundhog ate them. But I planted those seeds in May instead of June, and I think that makes a world of difference.

• Speaking of groundhogs, my lower garden has no fence. I'm sure the varmints will respect all my hard work and leave my plants alone, though...

• For whatever reason, my peas are doing well but my green beans are not. They're both trellis plants so I'm not sure what to think except that maybe the green beans have to be planted earlier.

Now for the best story:

• We had a wind storm yesterday. I think winds must have topped 40 mph because they almost toppled the tent-garage we have in the front yard and failed to secure (Lesson, lesson, lesson). Only after a lot of frantic activity by the two of us, when the winds had begun to die down and we'd tied the garage to our tractor and car, did I check with weather.com and find that winds were still 34 mph. So they'd been much higher earlier...

Today I figured that our zucchini and squash plants would probably be devastated. They have gigantic leaves coming off of a fairly weak trunk, after all. Surprisingly, they were okay. Four of my "monster" tomato cages had toppled, though. I was bummed by that, especially since I'd thought about strapping the cages together to give them additional support but only did it with a single cage. That cage stayed upright. My biggest plant, though, was lying horizontally. Three others were well on the way, but I righted their cages. If I'm lucky, the setback to their growth won't be too extreme.

Then I decided to check the upper garden. I hadn't been up there for three weeks, but I had little hope for them and they met my expectations. The weeds were horrible and the tomato plants were puny. The first plant, though, was the attention getter. It had NO LEAVES. LOL. And its single green tomato was three-quarters gone. I had a pretty good idea what that meant, so I checked the plant's branches and found the largest tomato hornworm I've ever seen. This sucker was FIVE INCHES long, and it had eaten the entire plant!

Unbelievable. But... lesson, lesson, lesson, lesson, lesson. Gardens need tending, and even if one section is doing fine, another might be on the dinner menu for worms.

Some photos follow:

Yellow zucchini, including a big one that I'm letting go to seed. The cages you see are in front of the zucchini plant, not around it. These cages are store-bought, sturdy but far smaller than the ones I make, and house some pathetic golden wax beans.Summer Squash Peter Pan hybrid. Not fruit-bearing yet, but they were planted well after the zucchini so maybe in a week or two. I'm just happy they survived the storm.

The upper garden, totally overtaken by weeds.There's a huge difference between the upper garden's plants and the lower garden's.
Fee Fi Foe Furm! I smell the blood of a tomato worm! But where could the culprit be hiding??Oh.
For every problem there's a solution...It might involve getting your hands a little dirty... or green, as the case may be.

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