Vegetable Gardening

[BleeckerSt_Girl]

Froze about 5 lbs of green beans today.

Did you blanch them first? Good harvest!

The squash refuses to grow anything- just maybe doesnt like containers but I was trying it out.

I don't know myself, but do squash maybe need more than one plant to pollinate each other's flowers?

[OakLeaf]

Insecticidal soap will kill any and all adult insects - including the beneficials, but I've been known to "nuke" plants that are seriously infested. A tablespoon of Dr. Bronner's in a quart of water.

Bt (Thuricide) is considered organic caterpillar control. Hand picking is best, although I know how hard it is to see the hornworms when they're small (sometimes even when they're big!).

Have you got female blossoms on your squash? If you don't have a lot of bees you may need to pollinate them by hand. Easy enough with a small kid's paintbrush.

Yep, blanched my beans.

[smilingcat]

I love Lisa's garden. You so lucky. Everything is so green. Around here its brown borwn brown.

Spokewench, your place looks like its up in the mountains with all those pine trees. Lovely place. Its just matter of water... Oh do keep the pine needles away from the garden. I was told that pine trees release an herbicide of sorts. And that is why ground underneath the pine tree is barren. Its their way of survival of the fittest keep the competition down.

Oh we ended up pulling one of our tomato plants out. Second one will be yanked this weekend. We've been battling with aphid problem. All thanks to the june gloom fog during the last month. We've also had some 2 legged varieties, who are helping themselves to not quite ripe tomatoes. We had to install a pad lock to our gate!! And we are installing a green colored chicken wire mesh around some plants.

I HATE CALIFORNIA!!

[BleeckerSt_Girl]

I love Lisa's garden. You so lucky. Everything is so green. Around here its brown borwn brown....
Oh we ended up pulling one of our tomato plants out. Second one will be yanked this weekend. We've been battling with aphid problem. All thanks to the june gloom fog during the last month. We've also had some 2 legged varieties, who are helping themselves to not quite ripe tomatoes. We had to install a pad lock to our gate!! And we are installing a green colored chicken wire mesh around some plants.

I HATE CALIFORNIA!!

Wow, I never heard of anyone who hated living in California before!
I've never been on the west coast, so what do i know.
Brown brown brown...are you being prohibited from watering plants because of drought conditions there?
2 legged?- you mean people are going into your garden and taking tomatoes??
Maybe it's kids- I actually did that once with a kid pal when we didn't think very logically about 'private property'. We were so ashamed and mortified when the grownups called us on it!

We've had the weirdest summer....SO SO much rain and of course that means way less heat and sun. That meant (aside from way less bicycling ) a great lettuce crop, but not so great for tomatoes. A lot of people are now having mildew/mold blight problems in their veggie plants around here.
Though my lettuce is still going great, I can see lots of it is starting to want to bolt, which means many of the larger lettuce plants will soon need to be pulled and composted. Bolted lettuce can look pretty and lush, but often tastes bitter. We are due for some hot dry weather soon, and my lettuce will definitely hate that, along with my spinach seedlings. I'll just keep planting a little lettuce and spinach seed every week or so in the new garden, so that when things start to cool down at the end of summer the babies will be ready to quickly spring into action.

Our giant garden fence is DONE...next comes the finishing phase of filling in all the garden paths and the perimeter with mulch and cleaning up and reseeding the lawn that was torn up with all the work going on.
I'll try to take some pix of the fence later today. It's quite impressive!

[arielmoon]

I don't know myself, but do squash maybe need more than one plant to pollinate each other's flowers?

Oh interesting, I figured I barely had enough room for one plant in the pot, let alone 2... however there have been two itty bitty growths that just never developed into anything. They got about 3 inches long before shriveling up. So maybe I have some bees!

[OakLeaf]

A squash plant can pollinate its own flowers. But they're definitely pollinated by bees and not by wind. Next female flower you get, take a little paintbrush, grab some pollen off the anther of a male flower, and gently brush it onto the stigma of the female flower.

If you plan to save seeds, then you need to isolate the female flower before it opens, with a little cheesecloth or screen or whatever; and hand pollinate it from the same species of squash with a clean brush.

[arielmoon]

omg! performing sex acts on my plants! LOL

ok next silly question... how do I know if the flower is male or female?

[OakLeaf]

Yep, squash sex.

The female flowers are the ones with the ovary (proto-squash) on the stem end, and the big sticky stigma in the middle. The male flowers have a single anther that's covered with pollen.

If your female flowers are shriveling before they even start to grow into squash, that's a pretty sure sign they're not getting pollinated.

[GLC1968]

If you plan to save seeds, then you need to isolate the female flower before it opens, with a little cheesecloth or screen or whatever; and hand pollinate it from the same species of squash with a clean brush.

I just read somewhere that if you get to the flowers first thing in the morning (before even the Mason bees are active), hand pollinate them, and then use a piece of string or yarn to tie the flower shut, you can get pure seeds. I haven't tried it yet, but I plan to eventually!

[OakLeaf]

Do you know whether beans will cross-pollinate? I've got green beans and cannellini this year - is it worth saving any seed if I don't isolate the flowers?

[BleeckerSt_Girl]

I took a few first pictures of our completed new big garden fence, here:
http://strumelia.blogspot.com/2009/0...nce-is-in.html
The edges and paths are not all mulched in yet, it should look a bit more finished when that's all done next week.
But I love it so! For me, it's a dream garden. No grand landscaped grounds with curved beds and stone walls... but rather a wonderful ultra simple and sturdy 'utilitarian' food garden. It's SO good to not have to worry at all anymore about the varmints devastating everything!
Best garden I ever had...I'm so happy!

[smilingcat]

Do you know whether beans will cross-pollinate? I've got green beans and cannellini this year - is it worth saving any seed if I don't isolate the flowers?

They can, I believe... but did they flower at the same time? and I'm not sure about between cannelloni and green. Only way to find is save the seeds and plant next year. If the seed doesn't look quite right then it might be better to start fresh.

while at it, unabashed self promo. from my yard. First is a zucchini called 8 ball. second is a Japanese cucumber that turned into a club. They are supposed to be only 8 inches long. not the 3 pound club. The last picture is our haul for yesterday and today. For tomatoes we have Isabella's golden globe, Azyocha (yellow), Cherokee purple, green zebra, ?? red variety, zucchini name escapes me, and two Acorn squash. zucchini had turned into a monster... all of the tomatoes are heirloom with exception of the mystery red tomato, zucchini is a heirloom variety, Acorn is not an heirloom variety.

It's been really exciting this year as we finally managed to get our act together. So we are growing most of the veggies we need. We made salsa the other day. And it was so gratifying that almost all the ingredients came from our yard.

Lemon: Meyer lemon and yes from our yard,
tomato: yes
cucumber: yes
cilantro: yes
garlic: yes
serrano chilli: yes

only two items were bought at farmers market: yellow onion and avocado. Hopefully, we'll have our own avocado in about two years. We are going to remove a magnolia tree and replaced with Haas avocado.

[BleeckerSt_Girl]

SmilingCat, those are wonderful! All that variety in shapes and colors.
I like your artfully arranged photos and backdrops.

With all the rain we are getting dumped with this 'summer', it's a wonder we have as much vegetables as we do. Yesterday alone we had 4.4 inches of rain in one day! Yikes.
Yet the lettuce and stringbeans and chard etc are still bravely producing.

I'm having a weird gardening summer even aside from the rain, since I'm slowly transitioning to my new garden. Next Spring things will be a bit more normal when I start Spring plantings right from the logical beginning of the year. But of course I am so thrilled with having my new space to plant in.

[spokewench]

Bleeker and Smiling Cat:

Bleeker: I absolutely love your new garden and fence! Oh, how I wish I had that much space to plant; I could actually can some! Oh what wishful thinking!

Smiling Cat: The produce looks absolutely wonderful. I'm just smacking my lips for the flavor of those wonderful tomatoes

I've been getting nice chard and zucchinis, but not much of anything else yet. We are too high 7,000 feet and too cold late to get an early crop. Most people and magazines that I hear about or read about are all getting their big bumper crops in June and July and I barely have anything to show for my garden yet. I do have several bell peppers that are pretty good size, some eggplant too; but they are by no means ready to harvest yet. I've had a few small tomatoes, but we never have great big ones or heirlooms. The larger tomatoes with the great acidic flavor just won't turn red here in our short season climate. I'm pretty happy so far with the garden this year. The plants out front in the pots are really doing well. I'll send another picture soon.

[OakLeaf]

Darn it, I've got my first ball bat of the season... a zucchini that was hiding under a big leaf when I looked yesterday.

Spent the morning trying to stay ahead of the squash bugs and vine borers.