[Food] Production – Gardening, General pt 2

[PeakOiler]

Watermelon, canteloupe, green bean, and sunflower seeds have recently sprouted. Except for some of the green beans, all the seeds were at least second-generation from this location.

The tomato plants in the garden are flowering. Carrots and garlic looking good. Picked a few more more radish recently.

A few potato plants are doing nicely.

Most of the grape vines are putting out new growth.

The bell pepper, yellow banana pepper, and jalapeno plants are getting bigger.

Time to harvest some thyme. The plant is flowering and getting out of control and taking up too much space in the garden. Too much thyme on my hands. lol

[Ludi]

Overwintered fava beans are setting pods. I planted zucchini today. Been harvesting asparagus for a few weeks.

[JJ]

looks like the snails ate the bitter melon that had just come up. Hope that a bunch more seeds come up...

planted twelve tomatoes and another fig tree yesterday (scored a bunch of fig tree cuttings last fall when my neighbor trimmed her tree because it was blocking her drive...)
the Burnet Middle School greenhouse has their annual garden sale, bedding plants 2.00 a flat. Better than the 98 cents each i charge at our local grocery store...

noted the white fleshed nectarine is covered with fruit also....

[PeakOiler]

This weekend I need to transplant more tomato sprouts, harvest thyme and oregano, thin some of the peaches, and cover a couple more of the peach trees with bird netting.

More of the corn, canteloupe, green bean and watermelon seed are sprouting.

[JJ]

yellow squash

tomatoes

long beans


snails ate my moon and stars watermelon and my bittermelon.

planting bittermelon and orangeglo watermelon in cups this time.

[dinopello]

Kind of a helter skelter garden so far - planted cabbage, onions, brussel sprouts and brocolli and some strawberries. Also a new blueberry bush. I have my doubts about the strawberries. Actually all these are new to me.

Going to plant a new area on the side of the house with my more traditional tomatoes and peppers in a week or so.

Oh, also cleared out the grape vine, hoping to get it more air to reduce the rust/mildew problem. So far, its looking good !

[JimG]

Bromius - that's a sweet seed lighting set-up - I like the drilled wood so you can raise it as the seeds get bigger. Forward thinking!

Frankthetank - I agree - if you are burning 12 hrs. of lights, well, this is consuming quite a bit of energy. I'm usually turning the lights on for 6-7 hours at night ( while I sleep) and then I turn the lights off before I go to work. I pick my battles on this, because my wife uses a hair dryer for her and the kids - which seriously, sucks more juice than I can imagine.

Getting back on topic - I'm stocking up on more of those 9 cell black plastic seed trays, typically they are 6 trays for $1.99...so maybe Ill get 6 -10 more packs. I seem to lose 2-3 a year as I give seed starts away to friends. McClendon's hardware has them. Fred Meyer and Lowes and HD seem to only carry those crummy peat pots, which I think are totally lame.

Spinach is in. Carrots and lettuce are in. Corn and tomatoes are going in their bed on Sunday.

[PeakOiler]

Shown below are just a few of the tomatoes as seen today. I think I'm going to have a LOT of tomatoes this year!

[frankthetank]

I've put in about 50 onions and 25 tomato plants. This year i've chosed to go with paste tomatoes and head straight for the sauce. Other then that all the trees have small fruit and the strawberries are flowering. My garlic looks EXCELLENT. I'm really proud of that. I bought organic locally grown cloves last fall and pulled them apart and planted them. They grew some last fall and now have taken off this spring.

Started from seed...been in the greenhouse now for about 2 months. Getting really tall.


pear/cherry trees and apples in the back...you can see the garlic in front.


tulips and garlic on top and there are about 20 onions in there too, and hopefully they can takeover from the tulips soon.

[frankthetank]

One of my tomatoes now has flowers! and its in a 1gallon pot. Better do something with these soon.

[JimG]

Fill up a 5 gallon pail with water. Let it sit overnight and all the next day. When you get home from work, feel the temp...mine was 80 degrees in the sun. I then watered my garden (selectly) from this sun-warmed pail. I took forever. But plants don't like shock.

Tomorrow I hook up a few free rain barrels and fill up two buckets w/ water...and place in direct sunshine : )

[PeakOiler]

Gotta love homegrown tomatoes:



I picked them a little early, but they're ripening just fine indoors.

[PeakOiler]

Those tomatoes shown above are already a deeper shade of red.

Weighed a big one today, nearly 3/4 lb! :



Harvested two more this morning and perhaps a few more this evening. Next week the ripened tomatoes get cooked in the SunOven.

Edit: I harvested and weighed three more tomatoes this afternoon, and versus the retail price at $1.98/lb, I have now surpassed the cost of the sprouts and seeds. And there's more to harvest. It's profit time now...

[jdmartin]

PO, I live vicariously through your food posts :D

I've got quite a few tomatoes growing on 4 plants, all heirlooms so I can save the seed and do it again next year. Summer squash is going apeshit, it looks prehistoric. Grew pickling cucumbers this year, as my regular cucumbers didn't store well as canned pickles over the winter - they got soft and mushy. I've got probably 100 blooms on that thing right now. Cantaloupe and watermelon all has blooms. One of my Catawba grapevines has 14 bunches of grapes on it alone, just a year after I planted it.

I need to take some pictures...

[PeakOiler]

PO, I live vicariously through your food posts :D

I've got quite a few tomatoes growing on 4 plants, all heirlooms so I can save the seed and do it again next year. Summer squash is going apeshit, it looks prehistoric. Grew pickling cucumbers this year, as my regular cucumbers didn't store well as canned pickles over the winter - they got soft and mushy. I've got probably 100 blooms on that thing right now. Cantaloupe and watermelon all has blooms. One of my Catawba grapevines has 14 bunches of grapes on it alone, just a year after I planted it.

I need to take some pictures...

Glad to read your garden is kicking in.

My cucumbers are still barely past sprouts. I spotted the first blossom on a cantaloupe plant today.

I harvested some small russet potatoes today and re-planted the "seeders". Two more tomatoes, a bell pepper, and a banana pepper were picked today.

My grapes were a bust this year. Too many aphids, not enough ladybugs.

We need more rain. I checked the Texas, US Drought Monitor map today and learned that we are back in D1 conditions...

[jdmartin]

OK, as promised, some pictures of my budding garden:

Basil plants.
Blackberries - kind of small but only going this is their 2nd season...
Chives - these things seem real easy to grow. Sometimes I grab a leaf and chew on it while I'm out here.
cucumbers - this year I got pickling kind..
Catawba grapes - these are my pride & joy so far, they're doing great. I just planted these early last summer. You can see in the next picture I'm not even finished with the upper part of the trellis and they're already nearing the top.

watermelon & cantaloupe going wild.
tomatoes in half 55 gallon food grade drums. I had to move them this year, they were in the spot where the melons were but late blight got them bad so I wanted to take them to some other dirt.
Squash, these things are insane! I'll have far more than I can eat - how do you store this stuff?
the few peaches I've got on my tree, just planted last year as a 1 yo tree.
Better shot of the whole tree, you can see my 2 apple trees in the background as well as all kinds of perennial flowers I planted around them to attract pollinators.
Oregano
Can you tell I like the spices? Hey, that stuff is gettin' expensive.
A close up of my grapes - I'm so proud of them :D

I post all this up mostly for encouragement for other neophytes. Last year was the first time I ever grew anything in the ground besides grass and shrubs, certainly the first time I ever grew anything you could eat. All I know about this stuff is what I've read on here, in a couple of books I bought, from talking to a couple of home farmers, and trying stuff out last year and this. That's it.

I can't believe, really, how easy it is to grow stuff. Maybe not easy to grow enough to serve all your food needs, but certainly a lot of them, and you really don't need much space. I have less than an acre, and I've probably dedicated less than 1/10 of an acre to everything total. And I've got 100 feet of grapes, 50 feet of blueberries/blackberries, 3 fruit trees, plus the little vegetable garden. Within 3 years I plan to have several more raised beds - that's the only way to do it where I live IMO. I can control the soil, no tilling necessary, weeds are easy to pick, and pests seem severely limited. I should mention that I am completely organic, and try to use nothing at all (with the idea that if TSHTF, there won't be any running down to Lowe's for pesticides). It seems to me that if you provide good soil and enough water and light, the plants almost take care of themselves.

[frankthetank]

JD-

Any updates? I;m about ready to pick some eggplant.

[jdmartin]

Frank, I completely forgot about this thread!

So far I've gotten about a dozen squashes with a few more growing. They actually take up a lot of space for the amount of fruit you get off of them, so I will probably skip them next year. I'm not a big squash fan anyway, I grew it mostly for my wife.

Tomatoes: the ones in the food grade buckets haven't done as well as I had hoped. I've pulled some tomatoes from them but nothing like last year, and two of the 4 plants got blossom end rot which ended up relegating those tomatoes to just cutting the bad spot off and eating fresh. On the other hand, I've got a bunch of volunteers that came up where the tomatoes were planted last year, and they've set fruit, so I might be able to salvage some tomatoes, probably not enough for canning.

Watermelon: I've got about a dozen watermelon, six or seven are probably 2-3 weeks from being picked. They look excellent!

Cantaloupe: About a dozen good sized ones so far, three or four are maybe a week from picking. They're also doing awesome!

Pickling cukes: picked probably 100 of these so far, maybe more. With the heat wave they're starting to peter out, don't think I'll get more than another dozen or two at most. Still, I pickled about 5 or 6 gallons of pickles, so I can't complain!

Grapes: Still doing well, maybe 25-30 total bunches hanging out there right now. All still green, but the Catawbas don't seem to turn until late summer.

Peaches: Growing, but not all that big. Still, they're still on the tree and look good.

Blackberries: Just a few this year. The birds picked some clean on me as well. Next year they're moving to a very deep, wide raised bed. I think the soil is just too poor where they're at right now.

Blueberries: Gave up on these in the ground. Put them all in pots and have subsequently gotten a few blueberries off the plants, as well as some new growth. So apparently they're responding well to the pots. One small one looks like it's going to die, but it was about to die before it went into the pot anyway.

This year was kind of a test run for me to learn how to grow some other stuff. Next year I'll do the melons again, but I'll probably grow them on a trellis and sling the fruit because the vines go absolutely everywhere. I'm also going to start growing more calorie-heavy foods; I like pickles, but they're not going to keep me alive should I ever really need the food source. So next year I'm going to aim for potatoes, corn, carrots, peas, green beans, and maybe some beans for drying and storing. This is in addition to the tomatoes, melons, cukes, and my spices, plus a couple of things for my wife (broccoli, spinach, eggplant, etc).

EDIT: Good looking eggplant, btw frank!

[PrestonSturges]

Next year I'm going to grow all my peppers in pots and save the garden for melons or squash.

[frankthetank]

You are right about the melon vines going everywhere. I've grown them in the past and up here its tough to get them to ripen fast enough. Right now i have a few melon vines and they've escaped into the lawn and into the flower bed. Mowing will be impossible soon!!! oh well

Squash? I have one pumpkin vine that is growing like nuts. One thing i've noticed is cucumber beetles like to gather in pumpkin flowers and have huge orgies with multiple partners. It must suck when i show up and squish everyone Just growing them because i like pumpkin pie.

I stopped growing cucumbers a few years ago. I like pickles, but like you said, there really isn't anything to them. I should put at least a plant in just to have some cucumber for sandwiches.

Some things just work well in pots. The key is pot size. I think anything less then 5 gallons is almost too small for most things.

I have carrots and potatoes...but not many of each. For some reason a few have gone to flower??? Its weird... Potatoes must be near being done. Tomatoes are a jungle... i thought i spaced them enough... not looking that way.

Need to keep an eye out for voles...