let's see your veggie garden {pics}

[Brown Thumb]

Time to plant Garlic, Bob forgot to remind me.

Some music and German white hardnecks

 

[deluxestogie]

That's a lot of garlic. Are you going to plant it all?

I usually put in the garlic in early November.

Bob

 

[Brown Thumb]

That's a lot of garlic. Are you going to plant it all?

I usually put in the garlic in early November.

Bob

yup,
it is colder up here, I hope to get it all in on Sunday.

 

[OldDinosaurWesH]

Bob:

Do you prune your cane-berries in the fall or the spring? I've always pruned mine in the spring. My logic has always been that the old canes will have a chance to dry down by spring and then you can cut them out and prune and re-truss the newer canes for the upcoming growing season. When they are all dried out the old canes are a lot easier to find in the thicket of existing canes. But I'm no expert on raspberries. I just like to eat them.

Wes H.

 

[deluxestogie]

When I'm conscientious, I remove the 2 year old canes after first frost, and prune the 1 year canes to about 5'. (I've found that I can easily identify the 1 year canes from the 2 year canes by first frost.) When I'm lazy, I mow them all down, and just wait for a crop in late summer on the new year's canes. When I'm even lazier, I ignore them.

There are two downsides of ignoring them.

• it looks pretty rank
• I get more thorn pricks in the new season, since there are all these dead canes in there

Bob

 

[OldDinosaurWesH]

My ever-bears are nearly thornless. My seasonals are thornless. My Marion Berries are painful! And very tart. I might have to dig that one up and start over. Too much blackberry ancestry there.

I'm kind of like you, I prune my canes when I get around to it. That's usually in the spring just before the trees start to leaf.

Thanks

Wes H.

 

[deluxestogie]

I once discovered thornless blackberries growing at the top of Roan Mountain, in North Carolina's high Appalachians. It turns out that when root cuttings of these were transplanted to a lower elevation, they produced thorns.

My favorite raspberry, which eventually died out in my garden, was Fall Gold. They are an everbearing, yellow raspberry. The flavor is milder than the either the reds or the blacks, but is delightful. I had those and Heritage red. The bugs chewed them mercilessly for 3 consecutive years.

Bob

EDIT: The true thornless blackberries that I'm aware of are the trailing kind, and need to be trussed. My Prime Jim are upright. The area has a metal post at each corner, and is strung about with a wire half-way up, and a second wire around the top. My goal is to keep all the standing canes within that perimeter.

 

[ChinaVoodoo]

I once discovered thornless blackberries growing at the top of Roan Mountain, in North Carolina's high Appalachians. It turns out that when root cuttings of these were transplanted to a lower elevation, they produced thorns.


Bob
.

That's odd. Any idea why that would happen?

 

[deluxestogie]

That's odd. Any idea why that would happen?

I have no specific explanation. Similarly, Machu Picchu Havana was recorded by GRIN as "White Flower". I possess a copy of Stadelman's hand drawn note (he collected the seed on Machu Picchu in the 1930s) from his letter back to the USDA, that shows that this is not a GRIN paperwork error. So it definitely had white flowers when grown in the high Andes. But when I grow it, it produces ordinary pink blossoms.

Apparently altitude influences gene expression for some traits. ["Freak flowers" just show up from time to time on various varieties that I've grown, and is probably caused by a proximate environmental injury to the developing flower bud, rather than an altitude effect. I've never seen odd blossoms in Machu Picchu Havana.] The red flower variety is a separate GRIN accession.

Bob

EDIT: My wild guess is that expression of certain genes is sensitive to the pO[sub]2[/sub].

 

[ChinaVoodoo]

The Glendale tea estate in the Nilgiri mountains is spread over a great variation in altitude. The best teas, and I concur because I tasted them, come from the higher altitudes. I always thought it had something to do with the difference in climate. The best teas come from altitudes where it gets cold enough for the plants to experience a seasonal dormancy. I'm super curious now if air pressure and oxygen concentration also play a role. Otherwise, why grow higher up when you could simply grow further north instead?

I went to this conservatory we have here, once, and they had a section that demonstrated how pH affected flower colors in certain species. I can't imagine it would affect thorns in blackberries, but maybe pH affects the color of tobacco flowers too.

 

[deluxestogie]

There are so many variables.

Bob

 

[OldDinosaurWesH]

Speaking of varying growing conditions, this reminds me of a tobacco related story.

From the time that the British colonials started growing tobacco, approximately 1620, 'till George Washington's time ca. 1780, American tobacco went from the finest in the world to basically unmarketable. Tobacco had always been the big cash crop that the southern planters relied upon to remain profitable. George Washington was said to have bemoaned the fact that they couldn't grow tobacco at Mt. Vernon, because they couldn't produce the quality of leaf that the international market demanded. At the time of his death in 1799, Washington had the largest single whiskey distilling operation in the newly founded United States. They couldn't compete in the international tobacco market, so they were trying to make a buck some other way.

Why then, would American tobacco go from first to last in that time frame?

The answer is globalism. Sound familiar? In the 150 or so years between the time that the colonials started growing tobacco and George Washington's time, tobacco had spread all over the world. Other locations were able to breed and produce their own lines of tobacco that were either superior or cheaper than the American product. Thereby pushing the Americans out of the global market.

A little slice of history.

Wes H.

 

[deluxestogie]

Perhaps this subject can be continued in a more appropriate thread. I would simply point out that American Colonial international tobacco trade abruptly collapsed during the years of the American Revolution, due to all American exports being subject to military blockade, and tobacco export was unable to regain that lost market after the war. It was not a quality or productivity issue.

Bob

 

[ChinaVoodoo]

I suppose I should pick the cabbage.

Kinda pointless though. No heads, hardly. Tons of leaf. I wonder what I'm doing wrong.

 

[deluxestogie]

No heads, hardly. Tons of leaf.

Too much nitrogen?

Bob

 

[ChinaVoodoo]

Too much nitrogen?

Bob

I'll have to get a soil test. Makes sense, though.

 

[ChinaVoodoo]

This oddly shaped pumpkini was the only one that particular plant produced. Opened it up yesterday. It didn't have any seeds.

 

[Gavroche]

F1 ?

 

[ChinaVoodoo]

F1 ?

I'm not certain how the nomenclature for hybrids works. This is the fruit of a plant grown from seed which came from the initial hybrid. The hybrid had a zucchini mother and pumpkin father. I got seed from an oval one on a different plant. I still need to open one from the third plant which has elliptical fruit.

 

[deluxestogie]

So, it's really looking like an interspecies hybrid--a mule pumpkini.

Genetics Mini-Lesson
If I call myself P[sub]1[/sub] ("parental"), then my children are F[sub]1[/sub] ("filial"), and my grandchildren are F[sub]2[/sub] (but only if "self-fertilized"--ick!). They are just ordinary F[sub]1[/sub] and F[sub]2[/sub] generations (in reference to me).

If my wife were Asian (same species, different variety), then the kids and grandkids would be F[sub]1[/sub] hybrids and F[sub]2[/sub] hybrids. And as we all know, the seed of F[sub]1[/sub] hybrids may not be true to type. My F[sub]2[/sub] generation might look Caucasian, Asian or somewhere in between.

When you succeed in an interspecies hybrid, there is always a high likelihood of sterility.

Bob