What Did You Do In The Garden?

Beekissed said:

Just gorgeous, Journey!!!! So good to see someone out there with a great garden in WV....I've been seeing all the familiar gardens across the state that I love to pass and envy looking much like my own...nonproductive in all ways. Just lovely to see that lush jungle of food and flowers...you have a beautiful place!!!

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Thanks! This is the second year I have been late putting mine in, by about 3 weeks. This seems to be working out pretty well. I did have a lot of cucumber beetles, but I think on most things this helped me miss most of the bad bugs. The few I did see I almost sprayed, but I held out because I have a lot of toads, spiders and praying mantises and I didn't want to hurt them. They did eventually balance everything out. I squashed all I could catch too. I think it also helped with the timing on all the rain. I'm thankful we get plenty of rain, but it can be too much of a good thing too. It was supposed to be a bumper crop year for wild mushrooms. I've not had time to get out there yet though. I've struggled to find time to do my canning too. Been burning the midnight oil a lot!

Seems like this has been a bumper year for gardening. Everything looks great -- although overrun with weeds. I took some of the harvest in to work today at the food pantry. Hard to push the beets, but most of the other veggies were taken. Think I'll be picking some pears for next week. Fruit and fresh veggies seem to be much in demand there. Probably because there is so little of it. By the time the stores take it off the shelves, it's not really fit for people.

Worked from 10:00 until 1:00. This old lady is whooped! But I did get my walking in.

Smart Red said:

Seems like this has been a bumper year for gardening. Everything looks great -- although overrun with weeds. I took some of the harvest in to work today at the food pantry. Hard to push the beets, but most of the other veggies were taken. Think I'll be picking some pears for next week. Fruit and fresh veggies seem to be much in demand there. Probably because there is so little of it. By the time the stores take it off the shelves, it's not really fit for people.

Worked from 10:00 until 1:00. This old lady is whooped! But I did get my walking in.

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Good for you @Smart Red . Last week I took several bags of zucchini and cucumbers to the food pantry. I need to take more soon. The garden is producing too well! Much more than we can eat or more than we should try to save! Looks like surplus tomatoes on the horizon!

Haven't much of a garden in this year but I did get some Ozette fingerling potatoes in they gave us a good harvest. The few tomatoes I planted aren't doing much , Charlie Brown must be lurking around.
The surprising thing is the cucumber seeds I planted have gone crazy, we've got cucs coming out the ying yang, the neighbors are starting to pull their shades when they see us coming. It's the variety 'Diva' I picked some plants up by mistake a couple of years ago, was bummed about that at the time but they turned out to be a favorite, it's the only variety I plant now.
Beans... not much this year, one I'm growing just for seed 'Bob and Mary', a few 'Cherokee Trail of Tears', 'Emilia's Italian' and some 'Aeron Purple Stars' to eat. Hope springs eternal for next year.

Annette

Diva is an open pollinated type?

seedcorn said:

Diva is an open pollinated type?

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I don't know, the first time I grew them I bought plant starts. Of course because we really liked them I couldn't find starts the next year so we bought seed and have ever since. This year I planted the whole pkt. of seed, big mistake, it seems like we're harvesting 5 or 6 cucs every day now. Cucumber sandwiches, cucumber/shrimp/feta cheese salad, Green salads with of course cucumber. Cut into fingers and dipped as snacks, sliced cucumber on a cold plate with cheddar cheese, cold meat deviled eggs and potato salad, haven't tried slices on my eyes yet. If I had more energy right now I'd be making relish.

Right now there's a bag of 6-8 sitting on the kitchen counter, just in case we can snare some unsuspecting passerby into taking them. Hmmm maybe I can con our daughter into taking another bag full, surely they've eaten the last lot she took home last week. Yep, they sure are prolific.
Annette

And, that wasn't my experience with Diva about 5 years ago, @aftermidnight . It was a bad cucumber year, however. Probably, there were too many chilly nights. Diva did poorly but I thought that those Beit Alpha type were just great tasting, what few we had.

So, I grew Muncher, another Beit Alpha. It's open pollinated. Wonderful! However, we haven't really had a bad cucumber year, recently.

My garden work has mostly had to do with the harvest. Did get the first planting of sweet corn cut down so that the cilantro can get some sun. Now, they may burn up but sowing cilantro seed in the sweet corn did work fairly well in 2016 for salsa when there are ripe tomatoes.

Tied up some very tall zinnias with more string and hosed down dahlias. The neighbor lady has little granddaughters playing in her yard all the time and I don't feel comfortable spraying the plants in my front yard. I might be able to kill the spider mites out there with organic spray but don't really want to explain that either to the neighbors.

Really, a strong jet of water works pretty darn well for mites! I blast them from every direction. A systemic after drying would be yet more effective but, oh well.

Steve

Beekissed said:

Playing catch up, but the garden has been the worst we've ever grown in our lives, despite better soils, plenty of rain, good spacing, good seed, etc. Seems all the gardens I pass across this state seem the same way, so it's not just us.

Was away for a couple of weeks, so the weeds took over, the tomatoes grew wild~not producing much anyway, so not much of a loss, but still, and everything else started growing fungus.

The chickens and dogs took half my spud crop, located in compost rings inside the dog's boundary, but was able to salvage the lower two rings of spuds. Not much but still a good return on the little sack of spuds planted...if the whole harvest had been obtained, it would have been a pretty good crop for the number planted.

The onions didn't make....again. Golf ball size and no more.

Suffice to say, the garden was a bust this year except a few good growth items~sugar snap peas were show quality, got some pretty rhubarb here and there but one plant up and died and the other is struggling, still have one producing. The Fortex beans put on a good show despite horrible JB infestation problems. The tomatoes are too leggy, the blooms too sparse and not producing despite many, many pollinators, the fruit is quarter the size it should be and slow to ripen. The lettuce and bok choy under the low tunnel did exceptionally well, but I've been unable to replant any tunnels since then, so will try again this week so as to get a winter harvest if I can.

Didn't get a single yellow squash and only three cukes, despite many plants planted...this is so rare as to have never happened to us before in all our lives. Squash beetle infestations killed everything resembling squash or cukes and I tried everything in my natural arsenal to stop it, but there were just too, too many. Same thing happened in my son's garden.

The flowers grew beautifully this year, though they are infected with fungus right now and have been half the summer....just too much rain, too hot of weather.

So, that's the garden review for this year....worst garden we've ever had in the history of this family. Will get a very small crop of tomatoes but we'll be gone when that happens, so hoping the housesitter will pick them and put them in the freezer.

Disappointing, to say the least, but truly beyond my control, so I won't beat myself up about it.

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DON't beat yourself up!!!
Regarding the weeds, look at them before you pull. If you know that a particular weed won't get out of control too big to pull out AND you see that the bugs are eating on it, it is Helping your vegetables by taking the heat of the insects.
Regarding squash, I don't ever plant mine before July. Don't know where the squash bugs and vine borers came from bc I didn't have any the first garden I had here, but I won't give them anything to eat and feed the next generation. Also, I have heard that when you buy from the cheaper grocery store/hardware store garden centers---we ALL do it!--you can bring in eggs from many kinds of insects, so I may have brought on my own infestation. No matter. Unless my neighbors, who are several acres away from me, have them, I may be able to eradicate them at some point. I have tried chemicals, but they didn't work, and I only use syringes on my horses, NOT trying to save a squash!
I planted my cucumbers late, but I have flowers on the 20 some that came up. I have 4 zucchini and they are sprouting flowers, too, and my watermelon and pumpkins are looking great. I may get the latter, glad I planted them to keep down weeds, but I know that I WILL get cucumbers and zucchini bc they will start setting fruit in a few weeks. My tomatoes are VERY late, but I know I'll be harvesting through October, even though they will not be in until after Labor Day. No matter!! I will can what I get and we'll cook with them this winter. Freezing is great, too!
Salvage what you can, weeding does help, get some Preen for next year, which I found still works a year later, and clean up. Kicking myself for not buying some Preen at WM last February, when it almost 1/2 price. Bought in the Spring at full price, but it REALLY works, but only for about 3 months, so you need to re treat the same area in one gardening season.
The reason to clean up is to prevent ANY vegetable diseases to harbor in the soil for next year. I burn mine, but you can pile up with grass clippings OR buy some straw that goes on clearance after Halloween. I cleaned up some straw from my loft before my first load of hay, left it in a wheelbarrow. It got rained on and I was amazed how hot it got after getting wet. You can use just one bale on top of your Fall garden cleanup to heat it all up and kill the diseases in any of your dead vegetable stalks and vines.
We ALL get failures every year!! We all get great vegetable garden years, too.

Oh happy day! I got the first figs ever from my Brown Turkey, about a dozen. DH and I shared them, gone before they ever made it to the house.

Thought I'd add a pix of a weed to Bay.