2017 Gardening Thread

Everything is planted in the vegetable garden except watermelon, cantaloupe, and my Asian melon. Got just about everything mulched... and best of all...its raining!!!! Even my sh2 sweet corn is up. I may be able to put in a couple more rows of something.

 

I have a confession to make. Up until this thread, I have been confusing compost with mulch. Mulch sounds like belch and retch and slush, and it just stands to reason that anything called mulch would be wet, nasty, and nutritious for plants. Then someone made a reference to mulching with pine straw and/or plastic and I sez to myself, sez I: Houston, we have a problem.

In fairness to myself, where in the world did that word come from?

 

And today I made my own compost bin. I took a plastic barrel that had contained DE for my pool. I cleaned it out, drilled holes top bottom and side, and threw in watermelon and cantaloupe remains, some eggs and lettuce, and a little potting soil. It's cylindrical so I'll be able to roll it around. I think I need a starter, and I see some online recipes that involve beer, soda, water and ammonia. Will brew that up tomorrow.

How proud I am of myself. Ah, it's great to be great!

 

Good luck with your compost project but be careful you don't end up with a smelly, rotten mess. When I compost I like a hot pile. A hot pile has to be big in order to heat properly. But you don't need a starter. Just put some dirt in your composter. There are more bacteria in a handful of dirt than there are people on earth. But if you have to buy something get some rid x for septic tanks. But you might try drunken compost.

 

Do you grow Swiss Chard?

 

Either paint them black or wrap them in aluminum foil. Light gets through and the roots avoid it or die back if you don't protect them.

 

Irrigation is cheap.

 

Thanks, but I don't really know how to be careful with it. It all sounds pretty hit or miss. And I am surprised that any compost pile with fruit and vegetables doesn't end up a stinking mess. I'll add some straw later in the week. I already have soil in there but can add more.

 

Ok here's a problem and if anyone has deal with it successfully, I'd love to hear about the solution.

I've been gardening fir 30 years, starting with 400 sf and then after I moved to 2 acres in the country, my garden is 1000 sf. I've grown carrots, potatoes, kale, chard, spinach, corn, butternut squash, green beans, tomatoes, and onions.

Onions are the problem. They are always flattened. I cannot get a decent globe out of them! I've tried yellow, red, and white. I've grown them from sets and seed. I've planted them shallow, and deep. I've watered then lightly and I've watered then heavily. And they're always flat. Twenty five years of flat onions! IOW a "good" one will typically be maybe 3.5 inches across and 1.5 inches high on the bulb. Of course to greens are much higher.

BTW I'm planting in raised beds with excellent compost soil and good NPK balance. I've also planted in clay with minimal conditioning and good fertilizer. Flat.

The only thing I haven't tried is plants. You know, they come with little teeny bulbs with roots and about 4 or 5 inches of greens on top. They come in bunches. But I can't find any offered locally.

 

I like flat onions. They're classy. I'm serious.

 

And irrigation is useless when they restrict water use.

 

Throw some shredded newspaper in it and a few worms and call it a worm bin

I start with leaves every fall, add in whatever scraps/green things I get after that, and shredded newspaper, and just jeep turning it ever few weeks at least some, raking it in from the edges, etc. The spot where I do it probably has the best soil I have got under it because I keep doing it in that same spot every year. Most of my leaves go into the big garden though and get mowed up and tilled under in the spring. I put maybe 4 large tarp fulls in the compost area. By late summer, that is down to a couple wheelbarrows full which I then toss into one of the gardens in order to start over again.

Some people do compost in the heavier plastic bags like garden soil, etc come in though because it allows them to get the temperature higher to kill off weed seeds.

 

I have done compost piles and they can be a great benefit to your garden. But once again I am a lazy gardener. All of our food scraps go to the chicken or to the goats. They do a fantastic job of turning waste into fertilizer. The goat manure can be used directly on the garden but in a raised bed I use it under my clay and cover it with my garden clay soil and plant in that. It is a good filler and it has hay mixed in. The worms to the turning. Since my garden is always mulched the compost is made in the garden. The chicken manure builds up on the bottom of the chicken pen and I just move the chickens. This also grows good pasture grass and very good corn. When I compost I make big piles. At least 3 ft. high and 3 or 4 ft. wide. The bigger the better. I also try to get the right mix of greens and browns. I will probably build a pile this fall to be ready to use by next spring. I like a hot pile.

 

Compost is decomposed....mulch is not.

 

Mulch does a good job at keeping weeds down. With mulch. And without mulch. My garden would soon be out of control and a solid mass of weeds. Weeding the garden would take many hours. And the mulch keeps the soil at an even temperature and conserves water. And the weed roots get tangled into the crops and weeding causes more damage.

 

Thanks, yes I'm straight on the difference now. I wonder about using newspaper. That black ink can not be good for plants. Also I nortice most sites talk 2:1, 3:1, even 30:1 brown to green material in compost. We are going to fill up my ten gallon barrel pretty fast with kitchen scraps, and all the dead leaves have already been removed. I can start eating more pizza and use the boxes. We have a gourmet pizza place near by with brown boxes and almost no ink. That should be good. Still, I don't think my kitchen scraps will fit, and even if they did, there'd not be enough room for brown material!

 

I haven't thought about this in 40 years, but my neurotic father used to drive around LOOKING for flat onions, no joke. He hated spherical onions. As I recall , the reason was that he liked big slices of onion on his burgers, and you get more burger-sized slices from a flat onion. I think I also recall him thinking they tasted better. We're talking red onions here, btw.

 

I'll have to hunt for pine straw. I grew up near the Kisatchie National Forest in Louisiana, and it was everywhere. Here in Texas, not so much, though I do notice it in some private gardens around rose bushes and such. I may need to get out my burglar outfit, grow a stubble of beard, and "redistribute" the neighbor's straw. Why should he have so much and I so little?

Power to the People!! (This is a political forum, after all.)

 

I still can't believe that plastic sheets and pine straw are called "mulch."

But I'm in a foul mood. I got my raised cedar bed built and put in 4 bags of potting soil. Then I lovingly sunk 4 yellow straight necked squash seeds into the soil and went to sleep, trusting in the Almighty to work his wonders.

Well ... Another of God's creatures, probably a mouse or roof rat, not only dug up my four seeds, he sucked out the pulp and spit out the shell, like some barbarian hick in the cheap seats of Rangers game. Am I annoyed? Why, no. Rats have to eat, too.

I re-seeded this morning in one of those Jiffy Pack starter kits, with the little 1 inch cylinders of burlap-wrapped potting soil. I'll transplant the sprouts in a couple of weeks. It's odd that rodents will dig up seeds but leave a sprout of the same seed unmolested. I guess I prefer roasted peanuts in the shell to peanut sprouts myself.

 

I'm glad my daughter didn't see this picture. "Daddy, can we get a goat?"

 

If you guys will allow it, I propose to just take the plastic compost bags I have, turn them inside out, and arrange them around my vegetables in the garden. I don't want to waste the material and getting pine needles at this point will be a pain.

The hay straw I bought for mulch was apparently full of seeds, and so the hay layer I put down has not done much of anything good that I can see. Wait, you know what? I remember scraping away a that hay before putting my seeds in. I thought the hay lying there for six weeks no would kill the weeds. Obviously that didn't happen.

 

I hope you didn't think I was trying to tell you how to do things. What I wright are just suggestions based on experience and mistakes that have been made in the past. What I have done in the past is lay down a sheet of black plastic on an area I want to garden and let it sit a season. It somthers the grass and weeds underneath and come spring I have a clear place to plant. But the plastic will become brittle over time and a mess to clean up. So I pulled the plastic up to plant. Then the weed seeds go crazy...cutting a hole in the mulch and planting also caused problems...with heat....and the soil compacting and drying out under the " mulch". You can use just about anything organic as a mulch...sawdust (must be stirred now and then) leaves ( better shredded)... straw ( wheat seeds) ... hay (weed seeds) ... But one must remember. A garden that won't grow weeds won't grow anything. We named the goat Shirley Temple.

 

I used to use newspaper all the time. bugs don't like ink.

 

I think most newspaper ink is soy based. I don't have a problem with it....except it tends to blow away. I make seed tapes with it sometimes.....rub your finger across the ink...if it smudges on you hand it may be petroleum based. Soy ink is also darker and crisper.

 

I had pine trees so I put down newspaper and covered it with straw.