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Finding God in the garden

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Beekissed said:
I've never used grow lamps. I just use a sunny spot in the house, then later put them out on a table with mini tunnel on top. I find tomato seeds to be among some of the easiest to germinate and peppers the hardest.

Here's what you need for your potatoes!

Click to expand...

The only problem with finding a sunny spot in the house is my wife isn’t a big fan of having dirt in the house with 2 toddlers running around. I might be able to find something high up to put the starts on though.
 
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Finding God in the garden

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flowerbug said:
we are not much into growing potatoes, but i would cut a plant out at the first sign of that disease if i had not seen it before just to keep it from spreading. to me the best line of defense against fungal diseases is plenty of space between plants and making sure to water carefully in the early morning so that the leaves can dry off ASAP.

encourage your worm population because worms are little bacteria factories (they also have fungi in their guts but i don't see any signs that those fungi are harmful to plants) and bacteria are the natural balance to fungi (woodland plants and perennials usually do ok with woody mulches and detritus - garden vegetables can sometimes have mixed responses to too much organic material especially if they are warmer season plants and the soil has not warmed up enough).

if you have way too much organic material on the surface of the soil you may want to bury that at the end of the season and let the sun bake the surface for a while before replanting anything. you can also try the plastic sheet solarize bake the heck out of it treatment but i've never done that here.

the recommendation is to not plant any other host plants for that disease for three years but in some locations it may need to go longer.
Click to expand...

My work schedule is such that during the early half of spring I can’t usually check things for 4 days each week so it’s difficult to catch that first plant. Plus this disease starts on the underside of the leaves, so in order to catch the first one Is probably have to search every leaf every other day. I’m sure everyone can relate to how hard it is to make that decision to completely cut a plant out but another difficulty is just figuring that out, whether to try to trim diseased limbs off or cut the whole thing out. I suspect I may not be aggressive enough at removing whole plants and end up sacrificing all of them by the end.

Last year I used wood mulch for the potatoes. This year I used wheat straw with about 1/3 of the plants getting some wood mulch on top of that. The ones that received the wood chips were among the first to get the disease but they were also among the first to get invaded by CPB. Im not sure which one was attacking first though or whether it had to do with varietal resistance or the wood chips or something else entirely. There also appear to be some infected weeds called Carolina Horsenettles that I can’t seem to completely get rid of either. They seem to be host plants for CPB and maybe early blight or brown spot as well.

Yes that is why I created a new bed this year for the potatoes. This is only my 2nd year gardening so I don’t have a real large area to choose from. I only used 1/2 my new bed for potatoes this year but I’m skeptical about using the other half next year even given the circumstances.
 
flowerbug

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Finding God in the garden said:
My work schedule is such that during the early half of spring I can’t usually check things for 4 days each week so it’s difficult to catch that first plant. Plus this disease starts on the underside of the leaves, so in order to catch the first one Is probably have to search every leaf every other day. I’m sure everyone can relate to how hard it is to make that decision to completely cut a plant out but another difficulty is just figuring that out, whether to try to trim diseased limbs off or cut the whole thing out. I suspect I may not be aggressive enough at removing whole plants and end up sacrificing all of them by the end.

Last year I used wood mulch for the potatoes. This year I used wheat straw with about 1/3 of the plants getting some wood mulch on top of that. The ones that received the wood chips were among the first to get the disease but they were also among the first to get invaded by CPB. Im not sure which one was attacking first though or whether it had to do with varietal resistance or the wood chips or something else entirely. There also appear to be some infected weeds called Carolina Horsenettles that I can’t seem to completely get rid of either. They seem to be host plants for CPB and maybe early blight or brown spot as well.

Yes that is why I created a new bed this year for the potatoes. This is only my 2nd year gardening so I don’t have a real large area to choose from. I only used 1/2 my new bed for potatoes this year but I’m skeptical about using the other half next year even given the circumstances.
Click to expand...

oh, that all sounds very tough to do for sure.

on the off-chance and as an aside...

do you like sweet potatoes? :)
 
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Finding God in the garden

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I’m quite discouraged with the outcome of my spring garden. I had hundreds of little volunteer seedlings from the cherry tomato plant I had last year and I’ve pulled up almost all of them. I had one that grew pretty well but kept having blighted leaves and eventually I had to cut to ground level. I have one more that I’m hoping will work for the rest of the summer but it seems to be getting blight from the foggy/dewy mornings and high humidity. The tomatoes seem to be developing so slowly and have cracking on almost all of them.

I’m thinking I’ll try to plant fall annual vegetables and some strawberries and blueberry plants and then the next year or two just focus on soil building and more fruit trees. Maybe if my soil is improved the plants will do better against all the bad fungus I’ve got around here.
 
Beekissed

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No worries....my garden started out lovely too, but the repeated rains and hot weather turned it all into a fungal rot place. Lovely rhubarb~the biggest I've ever seen, let alone grew~all dead and dying now, tomatoes are lush in foliage, some fruit...but it rots before it ever ripens and the rest is slow to ripen~all across the state it looks the same. The corn fell over in the storms and took the beans with it, squash all got fungus and have died one by one, onions made nothing, peppers all have fungal rot and very few even bloomed, none of the sweet peppers bloomed at all.

Spuds did poorly too....looked great all season, but I dug a hill the other day and found a few small spuds.

This garden was a total bust this year...so much so that I'm thinking of taking a year off gardening next year. May just plant some spuds and pumpkins next season.

Sunflowers look great, so do the zinnias. That's about it.
 
Beekissed

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Did find some spuds under those vines....harvested some really big, very healthy looking taters from that one small row. Got a 5 gal. bucket full, which is less than I had wanted but more than I expected after this gardening season. No bug or fungal damage noted.
 
flowerbug

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Beekissed said:
Did find some spuds under those vines....harvested some really big, very healthy looking taters from that one small row. Got a 5 gal. bucket full, which is less than I had wanted but more than I expected after this gardening season. No bug or fungal damage noted.
Click to expand...

i'm glad they were better than your first impression. :)

this happens to me some seasons with the strawberries and this year was like that. i didn't think there would be much of a crop at first with all the rains and lack of sunshine but they did better than my first impression and the flavor was good throughout the picking season - i thought for sure with all the rain that they'd be watery, a few were, but most were just what they should have been.
 
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@Beekissed I've been thinking of you. So sorry your garden didn't do well. You've worked so hard improving the soil and we had high hopes for it. But weather is something we can't control.

Are you ready for this? I couldn't grow a zucchini plant worth a darn! Who does that? The first plant kept being dug up by something. I've never had anything bother it before. The second just wouldn't grow so I pulled it out and planted a third plant. That one gave me a couple of male flowers and that was about it. It's too late in the season and I'm about to pull it out.

My soil is pretty amended so I don't know why it didn't grow. Then I planted one that was labeled Patty Pan from Home Depot and it turned out a round green pumpkin. This was in a pot and I was so frustrated that I pulled it out! So no squash this year.

But on a good note, I planted Petit Gris de Rennes french melon and it was sweet and delicious! The first one did over ripen cause I didn't know they stayed pretty green with some slight yellowing. First time I've been able to grow melons here where weather is cool.
 
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