When are you supposed to pick cantaloupe? When it looks like it does in the store (all brown) or before - and let it ripen indoors?
If watering in the early AM is out…and watering in the early evening is out…can I water my plants in the dark? Is watering in the dark (when, supposedly, mold will grow) better than not watering at all?
HOW exactly do I water my new plantings in the flower bed? I’ve only got enough patience to water for like 20 seconds a plant then come back once more and do 20 seconds again. People tell me I have to water for MINUTES. Blah.
How much water is too much water in a flower bed? My bed has mulch.
I have some really huge fruit trees. 20-30’, pear and apple trees. How can I take care of them, or at least one of them, in the least painful way?
Consider tilling it and amending the soil now so it’s had time to rest and turn sweet if it’s soured. In other words get the micro organisims going now by incorperating some oxygen into it. Sow some annual winter rye on it now and till it into the ground this fall.
Get a soil test done also. You can send it out or buy a $20 kit at a garden center.
I recently purchased a property (yeah me!) that has an established asparagus patch. I love asparagus but I have no idea what I need to do for upkeep on it. DO I mow it down in the fall? Leave it alone?
Also there is a ton of stinging nettle in what used to be a perrenial garden. The nettle is almost 8 foot tall. Is there anything short of a goat that will get rid of this stuff?
Thanks!
Barrels
I don’t garden much, don’t have time. So, I “wisely” created perennial beds. Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to mulch and they’ve gotten overgrown with grass. I cleaned them out this Spring, but the grass is growning through my plants. Is there any way to get rid of the grass and keep my flowers?
I found that a couple ground cherry plants for about twenty foot of potatoes left the potatoes free of Potato Bugs. They all stripped the ground cherries.
Marigolds reduce the quantity of soil nematodes, which cause club root and stunted growth on plants, yellowing, and fruit drop.
You can cover companion planting, where at least one plant benefits from the other. You can look at the book Carrots Love Tomatoes if it’s a subject you’d like to look into.
Many of what you used as examples of myth, was studied in the seventies by Organic Gardening magazine on their test plots, and readers home plots. Some things were proven true and others false. The magazine also covered companion planting and intensive gardening, which is the way to go if space is valuable in your garden. Raised beds were found to heat up faster in the spring and germinate seeds a couple weeks earlier.
I had a plastic, wire, and block cold frame that I grew lettuce in, during the winter in central Wisconsin. I seeded it in the fall, and they sprouted and grew until they had a few leaves each. The leaf lettuce didn’t grow in December or January, but it didn’t die. In February it started to grow again, and by the end of that month I could pick it. By mid March I could have given away about a two gallon container filled with lettuce per week.
Printing results of reader trials, and plans for construction were always popular.
A contest for biggest and weirdest is always popular also.
Don’t mow of the asparagus untill it dies off or is at least yellow ready to die. You can add a little compost over the top of the bed. don’t add more than an inch. Bone meal applied now would be good. Don’t use nitrogen on it in the fall.
Something that gets rid of nettle, but is short of a goat? Try a bunny rabbit. The long it grows the more it spreads. It sends up shoots from underground runners every couple inches, so get the runners when digging it out. I would let those plants die off this winter and attack the mess in spring when the sprout. Remember not to burn something like nettle or poison shumack. The oily irratant can travel in the smoke and cause a reaction in your lungs or your skin. Always wash it off with soap and water right away. Anything that desolves oil can be used right away when soap and water are not available. Normaly it grows in moist area’s so you can rub some mud on it as a last resort alternative to leaving it on until it blisters. May twickster can have a section for what to do when something happens on a hike or camping. She can be The Happy Camper.
Cantaloupe, and melons have tendrals by the leaf near the stem. They are ripe when the tendrals die. Cantaloupe and muskmelon develope a strong oder that you can smell in the field when they’re ripe. Give it a sniff. The skin visable between the ribing will turn a darker yellow or orange instead of a light yellow or green. Lastly is the thumping test. A rap on the skin will produce a deep fleshy thud as opposed to the harder feel and higher pitched noise you get on an unripe melon. You can watch where the hornets go also, because they have no problem finding the ripest ones. They may beat you to it and eat into the melon. sometimes they eat to the middle and the inside has them running around.
The plants will quickly die without water, the fungus takes time to kill them. to reduce fungus growth when watering at night, use a soaker hose or water head by the roots, so the leaves stay dry.
Tell you what–if it doesn’t come back you can have some of my volunteer maple trees! I have huge specimen in the back yard that sends out a billion helicopters a year, and so many germinate and root that I literally have to use the lawn mower to mow down the baby maple forests all over the yard. My bonsai loving friends all have itty bitty maple trees, and I kept a neat specimen of three babies braided together going for several years until the dog knocked the pot over and destroyed them. I have to uproot or just clip off larger specimens that sprout up between the tool shed and the fence, and there’s one that I’ve let go from inertia at its inaccessible location that has to be gone after with bigass loppers now that it’s starting to deform the chain link it grew through–get the picture? I have a hard time believing anyone pays cash money for maple saplings any more!
I keep slugs and snails away by using Epsom salts in the garden–it shrivels them up like salt does but the plants love it.
So my question is why, when I live only a couple hundred miles from Hermiston OR, the yummy watermelon capital of the WORLD, can I not grow a watermelon to save my life? They just will NOT grow or flourish, the vines won’t even get longer than a couple of feet at best, yet the darned punkins go insane and have to be kept in check with a machete?
I have star nosed moles AND gophers digging giant hills all over the yard, how in heck do I get rid of the pesky things? The dog gets a few but she can’t dig that fast in general.
Why does my compost pile refuse to take off? I layer green and brown matter, I put in horse manure from the neighbor’s pony, I use various sizes of material, I have it in a location that stays moist, I turn it pretty often, but it just doesn’t want to really get brewing. What am I doing wrong here?
Why did my Corsican creeping mint turn black and crunchy? Could it have been cat pee?
Depending on the variety, they’ll never get very big. Some of the varieties used for wine here in Spain would be considered “runts” in storebought grapes.
When the grapes start developing, cut off about half of them. Leave one, cut one, leave one, cut one… I don’t remember the technical term for this, but a friend of mine did his PhD in Agro Eng on “crop prediction”. Among other things, he studied whether a lot of techniques used by farmers but never “scientifically proven” were right or not; this one either lead to the same weight (with less fruit, so bigger fruit) or to more weight, depending on the plant.
Black plastic doesn’t breath. I like the mesh stuff for parts of the yard where runoff is an issue, I use it mostly as an errosion barrier rather than a weedstop (like against a fence line), although it does a great job of letting water through and stopping weeds.
Q;
I’m having trouble with my fruits (pears and apples), they seem to have healthy leaves but the fruits all have little brown holes in them, with an occasional worm. Most of the fruit are just disfigured and don’t have any evidence of infestation. What’s the typical cause for this?
When I lived in Indianapolis, I planted three horseradish roots, and they took off very quickly. Every fall, I’d dig out the new roots, and in the process break them off. Each one of the remaining root stems became a new plant, and after 3 years, I had horseradish plants coming out of my gardening ass.
What can I use to kill off some of the plants? Will Roundup do it? Considering that greenbriers and English Ivy laugh at it, I’m skeptical about Roundup killing anything but grasses and dandelions…
