let's see your veggie garden {pics}

[ProfessorPangloss]

Can anyone comment on the susceptibility of tobacco to waterborne disease from having wet foliage? In commercial nursery settings, we would take the sprinkler heads off the water wands and try to water the soil in the pots directly, because some plants (geraniums, begonias, and zinnias in particular) will rot if they keep wet foliage. On the flipside of that, we would purposely wet the petunias, millionbells, ferns, and some others with fertilizer every week or so, provided it was early in the morning and they would dry off before nightfall. I've always thought that tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants would become diseased if kept wet, and since they and tobacco are all nightshades...

So in my own vegetable and ornamental gardening, I've never used sprinklers, due to evaporative loss (which accounts for a ridiculous amount of water) and disease concerns. I'm a fan of soaker hoses deployed under the mulch, or a water wand with the head taken off to apply the water right to the base of the plants. How do those practices work for tobacco?

 

[deluxestogie]

Some tobacco varieties are particularly susceptible to blue mold, especially if the weather is wet and cloud cover is prolonged. In general, tobacco plants are fairly efficient at channeling water toward the base of each leaf, and from there to the base of the stalk. In a light rain, the base of the stalk gets a soaking, while the leaves quickly dry.

Given that Nicotiana tabacum evolved on the wet, eastern slopes of the Andes, it seems to flourish in wet conditions, so long as the soil drains well.

I have had excellent tobacco growing in one bed, while the nearby tomato bed was suffering from mildew, early blight, etc.

Last season, I had CT Broadleaf in one bed (partially shaded by an ancient maple tree) develop mold spots that did not spread to any of the other tobacco. Whether or not it was blue mold or downy mildew is not clear.

Bob

 

[Chicken]

well im extremelly disappointed with my tomatoe crop this year,

allthough i got 82 plants going. of 4 different varities, none of them are the '' big''' tomatoe i like.

i did plant a smaller variety of maters this year. but i thought they would get a '' little '' bigger than they are.

i like to cut up a green mater and fry it up.. and 95% of what i got is to small..

lesson learned, '' if you like green maters '' then make sure a couple of your plants are the big mater's.

 

[ProfessorPangloss]

well im extremelly disappointed with my tomatoe crop this year,

allthough i got 82 plants going. of 4 different varities, none of them are the '' big''' tomatoe i like.

i did plant a smaller variety of maters this year. but i thought they would get a '' little '' bigger than they are.

i like to cut up a green mater and fry it up.. and 95% of what i got is to small..

lesson learned, '' if you like green maters '' then make sure a couple of your plants are the big mater's.

have you you got any Radiator Charlie's Mortgage Lifter or pink Brandywine? they're my go-to big tomatoes. Or a Big Boy.

 

[deluxestogie]

Ah, nuts! Okra and Garlic.

This is the second season that my two American Hazels have borne nuts. They went crazy. The burden of immature nuts is so heavy that it has bent all the branches nearly to the ground.

The nuts will be ready to harvest when darker, rust-colored spots begin to appear on the husks--about 3 or 4 more weeks.

A couple of days ago, I dug my garlic. With zero effort since planting the cloves in late fall, it's an easy crop. It just needs to be carefully dug up in June, then hung to dry for a month or so in my shed. After that, I'll peel off the dirty layers, then braid them together to spend the rest of the year hanging in my kitchen.

The now empty garlic bed has been seeded with Swiss Chard. It's a relatively flavorless plant that can be eaten raw in a salad, or cooked as greens. BUT, now is the moment to plant them for a fall harvest. It's food--of a sort.

My little okra plants at the corner of my front porch have begun to blossom, and now have a few tiny okra babies.

Bob

 

[deluxestogie]

Grazing Deer

A powerful thunderstorm went through last night. This morning, as I walked out to the garden, the first thing I noticed was that, overnight, the leaves had been stripped from my dwarf North Star Cherry. I looked around at more vulnerable plants: pea vines, grape vines, tomato plants. Nothing else seemed to have endured the apparent ravages of the wind. Then I noticed the asparagus, which I am allowing to go to seed now.

Clearly something had been grazing in my garden. The tops of a few bean plants were also munched, but really nothing else. The rain-softened soil captured the footprint of a medium-size deer.

Bob

 

[Chicken]

them must be some heavy nuts to lean that tree over like that.

 

[deluxestogie]

them must be some heavy nuts to lean that tree over like that.

They are small, but there are gobs of them.

Bob

 

[ProfessorPangloss]

Well, my water problems are solved for several days, but now much of my corn and sunflowers are laid over from the wind we just had.

 

[deluxestogie]

Over the years, I've grown dozens of varieties of squash. Now, I'm pretty much settled on yellow crook-neck or yellow straight-neck or yellow zucchini, as far as summer squash go. It all cooks up the same, but the yellow squash makes it much easier to avoid a stealth mega-squash. My luck with winter squash the past few years has not be good. I enjoy having butternut or acorn squash to store into the winter, but they seem to be invariably afflicted with downy mildew, and just won't keep, once they're harvested.

I harvested 6 bratwurst-size squash today. First ones for 2015.

Bob

 

[Chicken]

I know exactly what your saying..a green zuchinni squash is hard to spot...and may be very. Huge by the time you see it..

The variety you settled is the type I grow..I like the straight neck...the neck of a crooked neck always gets cut off and discarded.in my kitchen.

 

[Brown Thumb]

A couple of Double Barrel zucchini. I Just bought a big dehydrator so I am going to make some chips out of them tomorrow. Last weekend I made Stuffed grilled cukes and the kids and wife actually liked them.

 

[deluxestogie]

No Sweat

A tiny sweat bee pollinates the even tinier blossoms of peppermint.

Bob

 

[SmokesAhoy]

I grow a variety of pie pumpkin called Nantucket long pie that looks like zucchini is extremely prolific and sends out long vines. I grew it to maturity last year and had more than I could even give away. Decided I could only make so much pie and wasted maybe 40 or 50 of them.

I grew it again this year because it's basically a zucchini vine if harvested early and I can never get enough zucchini. I'm dehydrating zucchini too, I can only eat so much fresh, and after reading Buffalo Bird woman's book I decided to try dehydrating like they did for the winter, they didn't like their squash ripe either apparently.

This years garden is basically what my wife calls a zombie garden, ie lot of staples in it. Flint corn, doing real well but I want to try wapsie valley next year, in the university extension trial grows it produced favorably, 150bu vs the hybrid control at 225, but op seed. The flint I'm growing now is no producer, thin cobs and if you get 10 rows you're lucky. Some tsc feed bag corn also growing but might be too long of a season for me. Then some soldier beans growing south of the corn.

I also spread a handful of sunflower seeds into the squash bed and have a bunch of those coming up with no help from me.

Did the same thing with amaranth seed and it is dominating the plot as expected. I eat it as greens though so I'm always out there harvesting for dinner and freezing the extra so it doesn't crowd everything else out. A delicious potherb that is also a noxious weed is kind of a good problem to have, I haven't bought produce since April.

I kept being given tomato plants this year, every single one is a beefsteak. Eating fried green tomatoes to keep them in check, but at like 25 plants eventually I will get overrun I know. I'm missing some stuff like winter squash and other things but this post is getting long and my swipe finger getting tired

 

[deluxestogie]

The nuclear option for a tomato threat is to harvest every tiny green tomato. Cut in half or quarters, and pickle them.

What do you do with the flint corn? Make your own tortilla flour?

Bob

 

[SmokesAhoy]

A lot. First I make nixtamal, from there I can dry it or freeze it, or use it right away, normally I make so much at a time (it's a pita) I will use some right away and freeze the rest. Run some wet through a corona once with a looser plate and cook with a bit more water and it's like rice, tighten the plate and run through twice and it's ready for tortillas or grits. Pressure cook the kernels and they swell a bunch and kind of cauliflower and go great in soup. Really a lot of ways to eat grain corn, I'm not a huge fan of sweet corn though.

 

[Muskrat]

I like to let my tomatos and serrano chiles get really red ripe on the vine, then dry them and store in zip lock bags.

Put either into a blender or coffee grinder and turn it to powder. Put it into a salt shaker and use it to season your sunny side up eggs, or chicken, or beef, or fish, or . . .

 

[deluxestogie]

American Hazelnut

Last summer was the first season that my two American Hazelnut trees/shrubs produced nuts. This summer, the burden of nuts was so great that both of the shrubs were bent to the ground. Today, I harvested them.

The photo above is the yield from only one of the two trees. The nuts (still in their husks, of course) from the second tree came to an equal weight. So, two trees gave me 12 pounds of nuts in the husk.

I will let the two boxes of nuts rest on the back porch, until the husks are crispy brown, then separate the nuts from their husks.

How a Deer Eats Grapes

When I eat grapes, I pluck them individually from the stem, slowly chew a single grape, then carefully spit out the seeds. Deer don't do it that way.

Last week, I harvested about 5 pounds of green Ontario grapes. The purple Buffalo grapes were still ripening, and as of last night, were almost ready to be harvested. Well, a deer apparently agreed with that assessment. This morning, there was a single, fairly inaccessible bunch of Buffalo grapes hanging on the vine. There was not a trace of the rest of the bunches--not a stem or stalk. It's as though the deer came prepared with a pair of pruning shears, and cleanly harvested every other bunch, then ate them, stems, seeds and all. (I suppose that an alternative explanation is that a half-dozen rabbits stood on shoulders, end to end, and passed each bunch down to the ground, from which point they were carried off by other team members to the rabbit wine press. They did seem to be sleeping late today.)

Bob

 

[Knucklehead]

How old are the Hazelnut trees/shrubs? I was looking at them in the Burgess catalog and was wondering how long it will take them to go nuts.

 

[deluxestogie]

They were both planted in March of 2011. They began to produce in the third season (2014). As I recall, they were about 12" tall whips, when planted. I bought the cheapies from Burgess: http://www.eburgess.com/detail.asp?pid=6273

They want to grow like a shrub, but with aggressive and regular pruning, they can be trained into a 12' tree. These are wild types, and require two, for cross-pollination.

Bob