2018 garden thread!

[EatenByLimestone]

Feed the soil not the plants. You will be surprised at how well it will respond once the organic and carbon contents are brought up.

Here's a great story of the restoration of Texas soil at one ranch. It also brought back water to the property!
https://bambergerranch.org/our-story

Feeding the soil helps the beneficial fungi and predators take hold too. Less pests taking hold works for me

 

[DuaeGuttae]

Feed the soil not the plants. You will be surprised at how well it will respond once the organic and carbon contents are brought up.

Here's a great story of the restoration of Texas soil at one ranch. It also brought back water to the property!
https://bambergerranch.org/our-story

Yes, David Bamberger is a name I ran across early on in my research. We would like to visit Selah one day.

We are working on helping the land come back. I’ve been trying to identify all the plants so that we can get rid invasives appropriately. We’re creating mulch from our clearing and using it, but it’s definitely a multi-year project. Our compost tumbler was actually the first piece of “furniture” we set up when we moved in.

I could probably make a whole different thread if people wanted to engage with me about Ashe Juniper and White horehound as well as Nandina and Ligustrum. On this one I wanted to talk about cucumbers and peach trees.

 

[EatenByLimestone]

I'm at the northern end of peach cultivation. There are a few apple orchards with peaches within 5 miles, but go any further than that, and the blossoms are killed. Some years I don't get peaches on my trees.

 

[begreen]

Peaches grow well in our climate, but they can be plagued with peach leaf curl due to our damp autumn weather. The solution is to build a cover over the tree. Frost peach is the most leaf curl resistant and fortunately quite tasty. This was a harvest during a bumper year from one tree. Unfortunately we lost the tree a few years later due to an pest moving up from California. I have new trees planted now. Two are dwarves that will be easy to keep under cover once the leaves drop.



As for cucumbers, fortunately there are a lot of great varieties to choose from. We have settled on Sweet Success. It performs well in the greenhouse and in the garden. This allows us to have cukes from April thru November and sometimes into December. Our greenhouse Sweet Success is now about 20" tall. I've plucked off the first cukes already so that the plant's energy is focussed on strong roots and growth. The next ones will be allowed to fruit.

 

[EatenByLimestone]

My cukes are about an inch tall. Mid April I'll put them in the ground with a cover. The local garden centers won't sell them until late may.

 

[DuaeGuttae]

My cukes are about an inch tall. Mid April I'll put them in the ground with a cover. The local garden centers won't sell them until late may.

I read this just after reading about Begreen’s plucking the fruit off his greenhouse cucumber, and my mind immediately went to your having one inch long fruit already. My brain clicked in, and then I understood.

I’ve enjoyed growing Alibi Hybrid cucumbers a few times. Because of limited space in former homes we have grown them vertically and pruned them to a single stem. Ours are probably about an inch or two but in the garden. I plan to go vertically again, but we need to figure out how to put up our trellis. We used to pound rebar into the ground and slip a frame over it. We have the frames built and netted, but we can’t put rebar in the ground here without an impact drill. We may just hang the frames from our cube.

My mother had an orchard when I was growing up, but I never really learned about the care of the trees from her. The previous owners of this house planted a number of fruit trees, but the trees haven’t been pruned properly and are all growing into each other. There is a very large peach tree, and I’ll need to learn from you what I should do to care for it. Probably get the live oak that’s growing over it trimmed back. Now is not a good time to prune oak in our area, though.

There is also one place in the yard where a cherry tree, loquat tree, and pomegranate tree are all growing into one another. I have other trees I have yet to identify still.

 

[EatenByLimestone]

I have pretty hard clay soil here too. I've found best luck by covering it. Leaves, wood chips, whatever is natural and cheap. Let nature fix it! It'll happen fairly fast.

As far as pruning goes, I learn more about it every year. I suppose the first thing to learn is to learn how the tree in question produces fruit. For peaches, it's last year's growth.

I was trained on apples, so my tree looks like an open vase, with a small central leader, lol. It works. Purists would probably have a cow though. My pruning tools are a handsaw and a pruner. I don't like loppers. They can be a bit awkward due to their size.

Use your trees as the trellis. I had cucumbers growing up my peach tree last year. I'm going to grow tomatoes up it this year.

Have fun with it! If you're having fun it'll never get old.

 

[begreen]

We grow our greenhouse Sweet Success cuke on a single vine too, though as it matures it often branches out so I put up a high scaffold for it to sprawl on. Last year it grew to about 6ft. tall and about 8' wide at the top on the scaffold. I just transferred the starter cukes to 4" pots along with the tomato starts.

 

[Dobish]

i got around to moving my garden out back... haven't put dirt in it yet. the old dirt is still sitting there in a square with 1 piece of kale growing out of it! Can't wait for the new garden!

 

[EatenByLimestone]

I stopped in to Lowe's today to pick up some seeds. They had some plantlets in, and on sale. A pot of oregano followed me home. Supposedly it's perennial in zone 5. I hope it is! 3 whole dollars were invested into it!

 

[DuaeGuttae]

I stopped in to Lowe's today to pick up some seeds. They had some plantlets in, and on sale. A pot of oregano followed me home. Supposedly it's perennial in zone 5. I hope it is! 3 whole dollars were invested into it!

Yum. I love the smell of fresh oregano. I don’t know its cold hardiness, but what are your plans to keep it from following all the rest of your garden plants into their homes? It’s already shown itself to be quite the stalker in following you home.

 

[begreen]

Oregano is pretty tough. We've never lost any. Just be sure it's greek oregano (Origanum heracleoticum) and not the similar but weaker marjoram.

 

[EatenByLimestone]

It's Italian oregano. Supposedly more cold tolerant than Greek. We shall see. I plan to put it in a warmer microclimate of the garden. Its my leafy green bed and I want to get some perennial roots in that area. The whole mycorrizal symbiotic relationship is facinating to me. Anything I can do to help it flourish I want to. Planting perennials around the garden to ensure healthy populations seems like a no brainer.

My broccoli and other brassica won't benefit from the fungi themselves, but the change they make to the soil structure should be beneficial. I was thinking of putting a couple strawberry plants in with them.

 

[Chimney Smoke]

My brocolli seeds have sprouted on the counter, that's a start...

 

[begreen]

It's Italian oregano. Supposedly more cold tolerant than Greek. We shall see. I plan to put it in a warmer microclimate of the garden. Its my leafy green bed and I want to get some perennial roots in that area. The whole mycorrizal symbiotic relationship is facinating to me. Anything I can do to help it flourish I want to. Planting perennials around the garden to ensure healthy populations seems like a no brainer.

My broccoli and other brassica won't benefit from the fungi themselves, but the change they make to the soil structure should be beneficial. I was thinking of putting a couple strawberry plants in with them.

I think 'Italian" oregano is marjoram ((Origanum x majoricum) It is a very tough plant and can really spread. I started some years ago and now have to hack it back a few times a year. The flavor is much milder than greek oregano, but it'll do in a pinch.

We are learning agriculture anew and the focus now is on feeding the soil, not the plant. A local professor and his wife have written a series of books on the soil and the mycorrhizal environment. He's lectured locally several times.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0393353370/?tag=hearthamazon-20
Also local is the foremost mycologist, Paul Stamets. He was a prof when I was in college.
http://www.fungi.com/about-paul-stamets.html

I've been managing a local test garden where we are exploring the effect of adding carbon via compost and biochar on plant growth. The garden started out as really poor clay fill soil that would only grow deep rooted, tough weeds. We're in the 3d year now and the turnaround has been fantastic, better than expected.

 

[DuaeGuttae]

I think 'Italian" oregano is marjoram ((Origanum x majoricum) It is a very tough plant and can really spread. I started some years ago and now have to hack it back a few times a year. The flavor is much milder than greek oregano, but it'll do in a pinch.

We are learning agriculture anew and the focus now is on feeding the soil, not the plant. A local professor and his wife have written a series of books on the soil and the mycorrhizal environment. He's lectured locally several times.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0393353370/?tag=hearthamazon-20
Also local is the foremost mycologist, Paul Stamets. He was a prof when I was in college.
http://www.fungi.com/about-paul-stamets.html

I've been managing a local test garden where we are exploring the effect of adding carbon via compost and biochar on plant growth. The garden started out as really poor clay fill soil that would only grow deep rooted, tough weeds. We're in the 3d year now and the turnaround has been fantastic, better than expected.

That reminds me of the reading I was doing about Hugelkultur last year. I was moving a lot of decayed splitter scraps to the garden, and we had some good success.

I have dreams of making a large Hugelkultur bed up in our garden area. I’m just not sure that I should realistically try that this season with all the other work the property needs, but we’ll see what I manage. I think watermelon would be fun. (I also think it would be fun to build a lattice to shade the air conditioning units that are located on the southern side of the house and to grow passionfruit vines on them.)

The temperature is actually supposed to drop to 39 tonight after being in the 80’s today. I don’t think the okra will die, but I don’t think it will be happy either. I’m hoping for a good crop now that I’m in the Deep South.

 

[begreen]

Tried hugelkultur but found it much less effective than other methods. Maybe I wasn't doing things right. Best results so far for improving deficient soil so far have been adding good compost and worm castings. I did an experiment with bokashi and that was interesting. We had huge fat earthworms in that bed the next year. That might be worth exploring for jump starting microbial activity.

 

[firefighterjake]

I'm at the northern end of peach cultivation. There are a few apple orchards with peaches within 5 miles, but go any further than that, and the blossoms are killed. Some years I don't get peaches on my trees.

There is a guy the next town over from me that grows and sells peaches . . . from what I've read he just happens to be in the right place for it -- something about being up high or down in a valley that causes a micro-climate that allows his orchard to survive.

 

[Chimney Smoke]

Started my tomato seeds today. So far I have brocolli under the lights, waiting on hot and sweet peppers to germinate and then go under the lights. Hopefully the tomatoes will be sprouted by the end of the week.

 

[DuaeGuttae]

Started my tomato seeds today. So far I have brocolli under the lights, waiting on hot and sweet peppers to germinate and then go under the lights. Hopefully the tomatoes will be sprouted by the end of the week.

I just looked up Frost dates in Maine. When do you aim to put peppers and tomatoes in the ground?

This is our first year gardening in Texas. Supposedly we should have started tomatoes indoors at the end of January. I didn’t manage it at the proper time, so I just sowed seeds in the soil a couple weeks ago. I’ve got a bunch of seedlings up. This whole year is something of a “try it and see what happens” for us in this new zone.

My eight-year-old son mentioned to me yesterday that he had seen rhubarb growing on the property. I explained to him that it wasn’t likely and asked him to describe what he’d seen. Big green leaves on reddish stalks growing in a clump. Pokeweed.

 

[DuaeGuttae]

Tried hugelkultur but found it much less effective than other methods. Maybe I wasn't doing things right. Best results so far for improving deficient soil so far have been adding good compost and worm castings. I did an experiment with bokashi and that was interesting. We had huge fat earthworms in that bed the next year. That might be worth exploring for jump starting microbial activity.

I’ve never done official hugelkultur, just used decayed splitter scraps and sawdust in beds and containers. We used to have the best worms in the wood processing section of the yard. We had a huge stump from a tree that died that we allowed to decay for years, and we used to plant things from time to time. I had some hydrangeas that got too much heat from a neighbor’s fence that I moved to that spot. They loved it. My nine-year-old daughter did the rest of the bed and surrounded it with the quartz she had dug up in the yard over the years.



We’ve been in our new home in Texas for almost seven months and have pretty much finished filling our eighty gallon compost tumbler. We just topped it up with a huge amount of oak leaves and catkins that fall on the non-ground areas of the back yard. We need to start on the second tumbler and let the first one cook. I’m pretty excited as a woman at our church who makes coffee every week is willing to let me have the grounds. We don’t brew coffee at home, so this will be an exciting addition. Yep, I get very excited about compost.

 

[Chimney Smoke]

I'm in southern Maine and I usually start planting late April to early May. This year is looking more like early May for my early stuff (brocolli, chard, lettuce) and probably mid to late May for tomatoes. My peppers go out the same time as tomatoes but I do those in buckets instead of in ground. I don't have full sun in my yard so I can move my peppers into the maximum daylight areas I have.

 

[EatenByLimestone]

My garden is usually well in by April 15th. Last frost date is May 8. We're still in the mid 20s at night. It's been brutal on vegetables!

 

[Chimney Smoke]

My garden has only been free of snow for about a week now, still frozen about 3 inches under the surface.

 

[DuaeGuttae]

My garden is usually well in by April 15th. Last frost date is May 8. We're still in the mid 20s at night. It's been brutal on vegetables!

Microclimates are so interesting. I grew up in Virginia, and the frost date in that part is May 10. My mother is a great gardener and record keeper, and she can tell me what years she lost plants to frosts that occurred after that.

We just had a 37 degree night in our area (I don’t actually have a working outdoor thermometer at the moment), and my cucumber seed leaves turned brown. The true leaves are visible but still pretty small. Our frost date passed in mid March. The corn and okra seedlings are doing well from all appearances.