Gardening Gardening

Slips?

 

Yep, any tips?

 

Make a row, plant about 18" apart or so, on top of the ridge. Needs a good hill. The vines run pretty good. Should be ready this fall.

 

Depends on the variety, Ga Jets were fast growers, others took longer.

 

Probably about 2 hours. Took a little longer this year because I made a new headline All the old stuff had been used and reused the last 10 years or so and was leaking to much.

 

Got out yesterday for a little weeding and side dressing with compost between showers.

 

Did some planting this morning. Took your advice and made two mounds for the sweet taters.


Little digging and worms everywhere.


2 melons.


Head lettuce.


2 warm/hot peppers.


Happy mater.


Pretty much done planting. The center area will be for the watermelon vine.

 

That looks great. Really good dirt when you see worms like that. Happy gardening.

 

A trip back down memory lane....
When we had a big garden in 2015
The yellow squash were just beginning to make...late May...

June the tomatoes were growing good, sweet corn was hassling, squash vines were huge...
Butterfly on an okra bloom
Our oldest granddaughter, about 4 1/2 at the time, loved to help her Meme wash the veggies. Buckets of squash and cucumbers...
July saw some huge tomatoes on some sammiches...1 slice was all it took.
Sadly, that area got invaded with nematodes and nutgrass. It is now part of the woodyard, where we store the logs until processing...

 

My broccoli plants are looking good but no heads yet. That's a great garden Chvymn99 !!

T.Jeff Veal if I can get my garden to look a quarter as good as yours did, I will be happy happy.

 

Well, hmmm. So I planned to have a garden this year, then I backed off due to the amount of gypsy moth caterpillar eggs I was finding, but now that it is mid-May and (knock on wood) no caterpillars yet, I am contemplating planting a garden anyway. If the caterpillars do show up, then, well, so be it. With frosts the last couple nights, I have been covering my lettuce and radishes (only thing planted so far) and bringing in a bunch of plants I have in pots waiting to be go in the ground (apple and peach trees, rhodendron, juniper, lilac, boxwood). Still too cold for any of the veggie plants so they have been living inside anyway.

The "hmmmm" is that now I am dealing with an invasive species that has somehow migrated into my raised garden beds. I didn't plant a garden last year, due to the caterpillars, however the beds had a ton of weeds grow up during the course of the summer. Some were what I thought were milkweed, however I learned last week that they were Japanese knotweed, which is a hard-to-control invasive species. I have no idea where it came from, and I had none in the garden beds the previous year. I have been pulling the small buggers out of the bed where I have the lettuce and radishes however it is growing like crazy in two other beds. Now I have to decide if I want to pull each and every weed (some roots are already almost 6"), or cull the top layer of soil and dispose of it (recommended by UNH to dispose of all knotweed in black trash bags to the landfill). Reading up on the knotweed, once it gets a foothold it is very difficult to eradicate. I have also found it now growing around some of my fruit trees.

That is all knotweed in the pic below.

 

Probably have the first salad greens harvest tomorrow.

 

Hey Sarge,
I don’t know what this stuff is but you lucked out because it’s not Japanese knotweed. I have the same stuff in my beds every year and I just pull it as needed. Left alone it grows into a droopy grass type plant. Some straw after a weeding session seems to keep it from getting too established.

 

Potatoes, onions, spinach, lettuce, cilantro, and radishes are taking off.


These two patches of lettuce came up on their own this spring, after letting the fall crop go to seed last year. I’ve been trimming it and feeding the rabbit and chickens with it. This weekend I’m going to clear out the two larger beds and plant the tomatoes, peppers and a couple squash varieties.

This will probably be my last year of letting this small patch of asparagus bolt, rather than harvesting any. I planted these crowns in 2020 so I’m hoping that’s been enough time. This small bed also has lettuce that came up by itself, and a bunch of young garlic shoots that self-seeded when I tossed in handfuls of scapes last August.

 

Early season weeds suck to identify, that's for sure. When the woman from UNH was here two weeks ago to take a look at my caterpillar devastated oaks, she positively identified the weeds in the garden as knotweed. I did have some knotweed growing in the same garden bed last year, and still had some of the dried-up stalks in a decomp pile in the woods, which helped with the identification. There are several weeds that appear similar, however based on what grew there last year (knotweed), her confirmation, and that the weeds I am pulling look exactly like the ones on the UNH info site for young knotweed (pic below), I have to go with that determination and deal with it accordingly.

I hope you end up being right, but so far it is looking like knotweed is the winning answer (I also had someone say it is redshank weed based on the earlier picture).

 

First cutting of greens complete. Prepping salad now.