Garden thread.

[PEG688]

  PEG -- you are too humorous. 

I thought it was pretty good  I do what I can here

BTW I don't have any drip irrigation system I water with a hose , I like doing it  So I really don't know much about setting up or using that type system.

I also live in the PNW where it rains every day , almost

[glenn kangiser]

Here we likely won't have rain until October except for another day or two through the summer-- maybe tomorrow night is all that shows now. 

Since I contract out of town, Sassy works out of town it is for sure we will miss enough to toast it in the Summer.  So for a garden it's timers and drip.

[Homegrown Tomatoes]

Well, basil and carrots are up in containers.  So is the spinach, but I hope it doesn't burn up before we get to eat some of it.  Tomatoes are putting on blooms now, as are the peppers, all in containers.  Some are the conventional containers and some of the knock-off earth box type things we made.  Seems to be working well.  Looking every day for sprouts from the cukes and melons.

[benevolance]

Well I am away a week or two at a time from the ranch so without some kind of watering system everything will surely die... We used to get a fair amount of rain here... last year we got nothing...something like 16 inches below expected rainfall

My wife did water the Tomatoes and the fruit trees last year and they lived....But planting more stuff is not going to jive well with her... The drip system is needed...

Gonna go to home depot later this week and see what I can make work...

[considerations]

last weekend's weather....my hummer buddies thought it was a little unusual as well.

[benevolance]

peg

I think you had more fun as a youth than I did... if you know about the drip...

I practically saved myself for marriage...

[benevolance]

another question...

This one is related to rows size of rows and expected crop yield...

Okay I have a patch planted thus far that is 12 x 12... and my tomatoes and peppers are in planters along the house...

Just wondering if there is some math tools we can find and use to equate food grown from square footage... (Don)

I did try to do some online searching for this type of info... found university studies that do not apply to me... and a bunch of documents to download...

I was hoping for some basic rules of thumb or a calculator... you know so many pounds of food per square foot of garden...

I found a really neat way to grow my potatoes in some old car tires...I will gear that up this week...Get a half dozen planta growing in tires

I am afraid that 12 x12 is not large enough and that I will need to clear off a second 12 x 12 patch

[Homegrown Tomatoes]

Benevolence, it more than likely depends on what you're growing and how you're going about it.  In our first home, our garden was 1425 sq. ft.  I canned 100 quarts of tomatoes from it.  We had enough veggies and fruit for our family all summer and winter (of course, at that time it was just the two of us) and to give away/sell quite a bit.  Some of it was canned, some was dried, some was frozen.  We ate the black-eye peas from that garden for the next two years, there were so many.  A lot has to do with your growing season, as well.  In WI, we had three raised beds  (3' by 12" each) plus a quarter-round flower bed and another small garden bed, and we barely grew enough to keep us in salads for the summer.  In my experience, growing intensively in a raised bed yields more per square foot than typical row planting, but as I said before the yield was always better in OK than in WI no matter WHAT I did.  I would think a 12 by 12' plot should keep y'all in fresh veggies, but I wouldn't plan on necessarily having a lot to put away for the winter.  If you're in a mild enough area, you probably can grow quite a bit over winter, too.  In OK, in a raised bed that I covered when the temps got too low I grew plenty of produce to eat fresh veggies all through the winter... planted again in October and grew spinach, kale, chard, garlic, endives, burdock, salsify, lettuce, parsnips, carrots, radishes, and onions.   

[benevolance]

I can grow in the winter if I cover plants on the occasional frost...

I might get some more used tires I have 4 potato plants in now...I think I need about 10 or 12...

And my wife and I will get a few more tomato plants too.. we bought the kind that do well in clay pots so we are not putting them in the garden...

Peppers and onions are the key... my wife makes salsa all the time we cook with it a lot! and I use onion and peppers whenever we barbeque or throw a chicken or roast in the oven... We have gotten into making stews and soups more in the crock pot and peppers and onions are used all the time.

I am not the biggest tomato eater out there... potatoes corn onions peppers I cannot get enough of...

We have the warm climate here...I am in Zone 8! if that makes any sense to you.... And there is only a few light frosts each winter so I can grow late potatoes carrots and onions if I feel ambitious enough

One good thing about keeping the garden smallish is that a regular tarp can be used to cover the garden if there is a frost warning....

One thing I would like to know is how many pounds of potatoes can one expect from one large plant... 5 pounds, 10?

I did some mulching over the winter and I mixed in all my woodstove ashes... I even bought a little lime and some miracle grow potting soil to mix in....So the plants should be decently nourished...

As much of a pain in the butt as it was to shake all the soil out of the sod... I kind of enjoyed turning useless space on the side lawn into a garden.....I am no farmer... or gardener...I have a foot of soil worked...I wonder if that is enough...I dug with the pick and then hoed it over and over picking out any grubs or roots.

Pretty cool yesterday after supper I was out there turning a little sod and a mockingbird landed about 2 feet away from me and started to eat a grub I had exposed...The bird did not even seem to notice I was there...

I might go out tonight after supper and turn a little more ground and make the garden 12 x 16... We live alone and I do not know any of the neighbors so there is nobody to give vegetables away to...

I will be asking about ways to preserve veggies in the fall I am sure....especially corn...I remember my grandmother blanching the corn (spelling?) and then freezing it so we would have it to  eat in the winter....I would love to have a deep freeze full of corn blueberries and strawberries (which we also grow here against the house)

It kills me to pay 3 and 4 dollars a dozen for corn in the winter... Got some local strawberries the other day for $2 bucks a quart which is a decent price.. local farmer selling them at the end of his driveway so they were fresh and local... In the winter here a quart costs like 8 or 10 bucks!

I cannot make myself pay those outrageous prices for fruit and vegetables.

[considerations]

Benevolance asks: One thing I would like to know is how many pounds of potatoes can one expect from one large plant... 5 pounds, 10?

Depends on the soil and the kind of potato and how long you leave them in the ground. 

All spuds:  In clay, the poor things have a hard time finding room to grow, so maybe 3  or 4  smaller than a tennis ball, larger than a golf ball.

In soil called "loamy", (soft, with lots of organic material), then, after the tops fall over and turn yellow, 3 or 4 bigger than a tennis ball, and several about the size of a golf ball.  The weight adds up fast.

I plant about 5 pounds of cut up seed spuds, each a foot apart and in triple rows, and keep my mother and myself and sometimes the neighbors in potatos almost all year. 

Sandy soil: I have never had any experience with this soil type.

Red potato:  (New potato, salad potato) first harvest a few weeks after the plant flowers, if you are careful, you can gently harvest the little reds that we see in the stores often.  If the plant is not too disturbed by this, and you only take one or two from each plant, then you can harvest again when the tops fall over and dry. Dig up all around the whole plant and get bigger, but just as good, reds.

Benenevolance said: I will be asking about ways to preserve veggies in the fall

All spuds: If you dont have a root cellar, or just don't want to get into fabricating long term storage options, you can harvest (once the tops have fallen over and dried out) potatoes as you need them almost all winter, they just keep growing. Late in winter you start finding some with little bubbles full of liquid (called water spots) inside, or maybe some critters have chewed on them.  Then it is pretty much time to cover the whole area with mulch until spring.  It is just a bonus if the ones you didn't harvest sprout and make new plants the following year.  I'm on my 3rd year of volunteers like this, and the other veggies I planted over them don't seem to mind them poking through here and there.

Some folks with hard clay soil just plant the seed potato chunks on top of the clay, then cover the whole area with 8 inches to 12" of straw.  The straw shelters the spuds, keeps them moist, and discourages all but the most persistent weeds.  I only had to turn on the soaker hoses under the mulch a couple days throughout the entire summer.  Straw mulch also allows easier incremental harvesting...but depending on your ground critter situation, also provides shelter for little furry and slimy things that like potatoes as well.  However, leaving the straw on all winter, covering it with black plastic to enhance it's breakdown, and then in the spring, removing the plastic and tilling the straw into the clay does wonders for the soil....amending in the direction of the loam that grows all veggies so well. 

In my garden there are many burrowing furry creatures, so spuds are in the ground, but I had to first dig trenches, line them with hardware cloth and then put the dirt back in...I don't share well.

As far as using tires, I know that the extra heat and continued stacking encourages growth and production, but I'm squeamish about what might leech out of the tire into the growing medium, so I've never tried it.

There are also probably a million good ways to grow spuds, these are just the ones that have worked for me in Western Oregon and Washington.

'nuff said

[benevolance]

well I am not worried about the tire contaminating anything... My dad has about 10,000 piled up at his junk yard... some of them have been there close to 35 years and the government takes water and soil samples... and they have not arrested any of us yet or even stopped us from drinking the well water that is on site... We collect all the oil antifreeze and recycle the batteries...the tires are not creating any pollution...

They are indestructable as far as being biodegradable ....last for hundreds of years easily... there are people that made tire fences over a 100 years ago and the tires are exactly as they were when they were put into the sand

I read about the straw method for potatoes a couple of times... but that scares me...So I am going the tire method...I like the red new potatoes... my wife likes the russets... you can guess what kind we have in the ground

[Homegrown Tomatoes]

One other note on the potato thing... I used the lightweight plastic mesh garden fencing around a small plot in my garden last year and planted the potatoes just under the soil surface.  Then  I  piled compost and leaves and grass clippings and old potting soil all on top  and added more as the potato plants outgrew it.  Got it about 2' deep.  The potato spot was probably only about 3' by 3', but produced at least 20-30 lbs. of potatoes.  The vines kind of grew out and over the top and we didn't harvest until late summer. 

I don't know if you like sweet potatoes or not, but they're incredibly easy.  One year, I put a few out where the shade of the pecan tree had begun to overshadow my garden (sweets will tolerate more shade than a lot of garden plants).  I only planted a few slips from one sweet potato... late that fall I remembered them and thought I'd go see if we had anything.  We had just over 40 lbs. of sweet potatoes from those few plants!  I couldn't believe it!  It kept us in sweet potatoes until late the next spring.  They don't do as well in northern climates as here in OK, but I grew quite a few small ones in WI, too, and even if they hadn't produced much, they're so pretty I don't mind.

[benevolance]

sweet potatoes are the wifes absolute favorite...

How did you say to grow them...

I need to stop taking on more projects though...Already running me rampant... I do like to dig in the garden and it is very rewarding eating food that you have grown yourself.

So it is all good... 16 x 12 is going to have to be big enough for the garden though...I do not have it in me to plant any more than that..Not this year

[mvk]

Hi I used to have a big garden don't anymore because I have no sun.

I used tires mostly for melons: Honeydew, Cantaloupes, Crenshaws, I'm up North so we needed all the help we could get. When I first gardened I got cold weather seeds for warm weather crops. They tasted so bad I said why bother so I got the ones that had the long growing season and helped them out and tires helped. I would dig a deep hole say 2' and put in a layer of hot manure (fresh) cover that with 6" or so of soil and put my plants in with a couple of tires over it. the hot manure heated the soil underneath, the tires heated the plants on top and also kept the wind off. I could also cover the tires at night if it was cold night.  Lot of work but you could walk by my house and smell the melons, best I every had

I did potatoes like this I would run over some oak leaves and pine needles, (they like acid soil ) with the mower,  I would pile them in a ring of wire fencing and cut them up good, then I would scratch these into the ground a little just to mix up a little dirt with them and get out the weeds. this was about 4" thick layer, plant my cut up spuds on top and cover with about 4-6" inches of leaves and needles and add a little bit as it sunk down. Want a thick layer. This makes it easy to gather a few new potatoes when you want them also keeps them real clean. I would then pile on another foot or so on top in the fall to keep them right there and wouldn't have to pick them all right away, I heard you could leave them out all winter but I never tried just till maybe Christmas.

I used to mulch greens, beets, carrots, parsnips like that just cover them over about 1'-18".

I garden very intensive, everything in beds. I would plant maybe 2 packs of carrots or beets in 3x3' area and thin them to eat as they grew. I used to make manure teas and feed that way I think that really helps when you plant a lot togeather.  Of course as soon as the ground froze and before snow I would have 16 yards of chicken manure dumped in a big pile let it sit all winter and then rake it out in the spring.

I can't wait to garden again, hopefully sooner rather then later. I love greens my favorite are beet but they have to be small and fresh can't ever find them. If you have never tried these do so just pull the whole plant when they are 5-6" inches tall and eat everthing, if you mulch this will keep the rain splashed soil of them, not so much grit, I have to wash all the greens around here my wife refuses. Had some mustard for supper but they are store bought 

Good luck all you gardeners

Mike

 

[glenn kangiser]

Good info, Mike.

Peter, if you are jut having a small garden just get the jhose timer and don't worry about the drip -- just put a reciprocating sprinkler on it.  Elevate it if necessary.

I didn't get to read everything well -- was worknig out of town -- welder blew up -- gotta go back tomorrow.  Sorry if my reply missed anything.

[benevolance]

welder....I am sidetracked... what kind of welder...

Glenn I bought some hardline... going to dig a little trench and pipe it across the yard... the garden is a couple hundred feet from the outside spigot... So a tee on the spigot needs to go on and pipe the hardline to the garden... That way I can still have the 100 foot garden hose for the plants and beds around the house...

the automated timer sprinkler does sound like a good idea though

[Homegrown Tomatoes]

sweet potatoes are the wifes absolute favorite...

How did you say to grow them...

I need to stop taking on more projects though...Already running me rampant... I do like to dig in the garden and it is very rewarding eating food that you have grown yourself.

So it is all good... 16 x 12 is going to have to be big enough for the garden though...I do not have it in me to plant any more than that..Not this year

You just plant the sprouts off a sweet potato.  You can even throw the whole sweet potato in the ground, if you don't feel like waiting for sprouts to grow on it, and you're pretty near guaranteed to get something off it.  The vines make pretty ground cover if you have a bare spot, and nothing really seems to bother them very much.  In WI, we had these beetles that ate nearly everything green, but for whatever reason, they left the sweet potato vines alone.  Wait until after the first few frosts in the fall and dig them up...a fork works well kind of sift them out of the soil, but a shovel will do, too.  You're supposed to "cure" them if you want to store them for long periods of time, which includes leaving them for a period in a warm, dry place before storing them in a cool dry place long term.  In our case, we had a small pantry under the stairs and behind the heater, and we chunked them in a box there and they kept fine all winter.  I know that's not technically the way you're "supposed" to do it, but it worked for us.

[benevolance]

i do not have any sprouts...I wonder if there are seeds to buy at the store... My wife loves the sweet potatoes and if I plant some she will be pleased... I might be able to stay off divorce for a few more months

[Homegrown Tomatoes]

Benevolence, yesterday I had to go to the garden center to replace the pepper plants the dog killed, and they had a little 6-pack container of sweet potato vines... be sure to get the one from the vegetable garden area instead of the ones put in with ornamentals because they produce bigger and better sweet potatoes than the ornamental vines, anyway, and besides, sweet potatoes of any variety are pretty growing, so why not get the ones that'll feed you more. 

[benevolance]

thanks for the tip....Did not know sweet potatoes were vines above ground...If they are pleasant to look at then I will plant them in the yard where we can see them and not in the garden which is across the creek on the other side of the yard... we have been desperately trying to make the yard look better....Mowing trimming bushes...I planted all kinds of perennial flowers this year... how they do is another question... to early to tell as it takes 3 weeks for them to come up... I planted multi coloured poppies... coloured daises black eyed susans, delphiniums, galliardias, Sunflowers, maiden pinks and shasta daises. We already had lots of azaleas pink and purple...and a couple wild roses to go with a huge snowball bush and half a dozen massive camelias red white and pink...I am going to cut at least one down I think...along with a massive sweet gum and a medium dogwood...So we can plant more of what we want in the yard... and truthfully...The sweetgum is a gorgeous tree...I hate the sticker balls and they annoy me to death..I am forever sweeping them up...And now that I have resurfaced the cement driveway...I cannot stand for it to look all dirty and when it is covered with stickerballs it makes me want to drop four letter words mostly the one that starts with F...i will not elaborate more than that

there has to be a couple cord of wood at least in the Sweetgum...So I will have some fine burning wood for the fireplace in the fall... Sweetgum is hard to split... but it is off the charts for heat value...the tree is straight as an arrow and 60 feet or more I wonder if there is any value in it for furniture...maybe peg can chime in on the usefullness of sweetgum for furniture wood

[Homegrown Tomatoes]

Aw, I'd hate to chop down a sweetgum.  For all they're a mess, they're sure pretty trees, and the color in fall is gorgeous.  As to the sweet potatoes, I planted them in the flower beds around our front and back porches in Wisconsin because we didn't have a lot in there.  They covered the bare spots with lots of pretty heart-shaped leaves, and they're kind of a limey green color, so they stood out from the dark green hostas and the bleeding hearts, etc. we had in there.  And, all that and we got a few meals of baked sweet potatoes to boot.  The front yard there was pretty shady, but they still did just fine.  In the back yard, they filled in under the zinnias and dill, etc., and looked really pretty there, too. 

[Redoverfarm]

Today I guess you could call it the annual garden day.  Drove to a large nursery about 60 miles away and picked up 4 flats of flowers for the porch boxes and the like. Made a quick trip home after "Long John Silvers" to get them planted.  Knew the rest of the week would be hectic to try to get them done working on the cabin. Just in time as the rain started about 1/2 hour after we finished.  Yes I got tomato plants and will be holding my breath that it is not too early. 

Tried a little trick the last couple years with tomatos.  One year I planted them and the next day cut worms had gotten to two of them.  Didn't have the time to go to town for chemicals.  I had some large coffee cans.  I cut the bottoms out then drove them in the soil around the plants about 1" or so.  Never bothered with cut worms again. They stay all year like that. Actually it is easy watering and holds the moisture next to the plant.  Has worked out well for me.

[Ndrmyr]

I've been using the coffee cans for years.  Helps to protect seedlings from a variety of things.  Now that my coffee is coming in plastic, I don't know what I'll do when my assortment of cans rust away.  The plastic seems like it will blow away easier.  The good thing is the plastic is red and tomatoes seem to really like red.  There are companies that make red feeder trays and red plastic weed fabric. Supposed to increase tomato yield, something to do with red end of the light spectrum.  The second tip is to use concrete reinforcing wire (re-mesh) to make tomato cages.   The wire is 5' tall, and the holes are larger than woven wire fencing which allow one to extract a boomer of a tomato clenched in your eager fist and still make it through the hole.  The plants grow up and out the top like a chimney, no ground rot and can till the rows until late in the season.  Works very very well. Better than commercial in every way. Still far too wet to plant in N. ILL. but, hoping things dry out soon.

[benevolance]

well i planted my tomatoes in pots the size of 3 gallon buckets...I hope that they do well in them... miracle grow potting soil mixed with some mulch and whatever the sand soil in my yard is... i will fertilize them with miracle grow in their water if they need more nourishment

[Homegrown Tomatoes]

Did you ever find you any sweet potatoes?  You can put them out pretty much through the end of May or early June and still get a harvest.