Garden 2021

Homesteading & Country Living Forum

Help Support Homesteading & Country Living Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.
@lilmissy thank you...i just ordered that this past winter from hoss tool to try out.i ordered a 100ft section and a 50 ft section for small garden. i like it so far well enough. i will say this..the rabbits that were eating my beans off also cut up a bit of trellis down low for whatever reason as well...varmints ! if you go to hosstool on youtube you can see the type loads it carries for them. i wont know till later for myself.
 
Checked out a muscadine vine this afternoon, looking good. It's been a few years since we had a good crop.

Muscadine b (1)a.JPG
Muscadine b (2)a.JPG
Muscadine b (3)a.JPG
 
Tonight I got the lights re-arranged on 1 shelf of 1 growing table, it still took forever. I now have 160 Watts of LED grow lights on a 2'X4' shelf, twice what I was growing with before, the lights are set with 2 banks of 4-20 watt light bars. The thinking is for 4 hours in the morning blue light bars light up, 4 hours in the afternoon the red and for 4 hours in the middle of the day they are both on, like the sun passing overhead in your garden. This is double the light that the plants were growing under before. Thinking about it 4,4,4 (12 hours might not be long enough) might need to be increased to 5,5,5.

1623472633318.png


Anyway I have the first set installed.
 
Got the first picking of the tart cherries done this morning. We're had a lot of rain so far this year and its making them crack. I have to clean through these yet. I only rinsed them off.

Crazy Catbird was fussing at me because I was picking its tree lol It thinks I planted it for them years back I guess :rolleyes: Crazy critter

I'll be dehydrating these when I get them pitted. Next batch I'll freeze for this winter

garden2021 001.JPG
 
My brother-in-law was kind enough to give some seeds today. Cucumber, carrot, onion, watermelon and aubergine. And he told me of a place - whose name I already forgot - where I can find seedling trays. So I'm excited about that!
 
Harvested the first squash today, it looked very nice. High winds really did a number on the plant and it looks pretty sad, I hope I can save it as there is a lot of fruit on it and I don't have a lot of back-up plants for that one in the garden...

The cucumbers are now loaded with 2" cucumbers. My wife's nurse was here today and she saw my tomatoes out the windows, she had never seen 7' tall tomatoes before... then she asked the wife what's in the high baskets, when the wife told her cucumbers the poor gal almost lost it....

I did read about topping the tomatoes. I may have to start topping or start training the best plants to grow horizontal next to the cucumbers.
 
My tomatoes are short and wide, but am finally getting green tomatoes on them. I'm terrible with tomatoes, I may stake them a bit, but don't really care if they bush out. Planted early girl (hybrid), a cherry (heirloom), and a rutgers (heirloom). I think I planted about 50 last count, and 3 didn't make it so oh well. Today was picking more elephant kale and chopping up that for the freezer. Am out of freezer space, so alot will be going in the dehydrator. Picked a couple more yellow squash, and a small bowl of snap peas. Managed to scrounge some lettuce for our salad tonight. It's in the 90's here.
 
That's a bummer, elkhound.
In New Mexico, we planted wheat grass all around our garden that the rabbits would eat, get full enough, and lay off the garden. Here, birds were eating my strawberries, so I hung a suet feeder, and a seed feeder, and they've laid off. I had some luck baiting the metal box traps outside in the chicken runs. But if you open them, the mice jump out...unless you submerge the whole trap in a bucket of water first
 
Last night a storm came through, lots of thunder, I was pooped and went back to sleep. This morning everything was watered. The squash plant bounced back a little, I'm glad, wife loves those things.

I think I am going to have to feed the hanging cucumber plants, one plant has 8 little cucumbers hanging down, that has got to take a lot nutrients.

I have been fighting weeds in my walking areas, those itchy vines are included, so last night I gave them a shower with ground clear, because my plants don't make contact I'm not too worried about be Environmentally Friendly....
 
I have been fighting the white butterflys and the little green caterpillars, I have decided that I want to make hoops for netting to keep them off my plants completely, the the hoops seem to be a little expensive..... Then I got to thinking about brake line, cost about $17 for 25 feet, can be bent easily and cut to my needed length. has a hole so you could stick it on pins (nails with the heads cut off) I figure if I went with 8'4" lengths I could get 3 tall hoops which would cover about an 8'X3' raised bed. I know I must be missing something... so I'm throwing this out so you can rain on my parade.... hopefully before I order another roll of brake line (I think I have half a roll left from when I put the engine in my truck, I know what do brakes have to do with the engine... don't get me started).
 
winds-of-change said:
Okay, don’t laugh at this question. I have a bulb of elephant garlic. If I plant a few cloves, will I get elephant garlic or is it a sort of hybrid that won’t produce the same thing. 😔
Click to expand...
Not laughing. Plant a clove and get a bulb of garlic. It can also seed which are little pea sized things that are sorta attached to the bulbs of garlic. If you leave those or plant them, they will grow garlic also.
 
UrbanHunter said:
I have been fighting the white butterflys and the little green caterpillars, I have decided that I want to make hoops for netting to keep them off my plants completely, the the hoops seem to be a little expensive..... Then I got to thinking about brake line, cost about $17 for 25 feet, can be bent easily and cut to my needed length. has a hole so you could stick it on pins (nails with the heads cut off) I figure if I went with 8'4" lengths I could get 3 tall hoops which would cover about an 8'X3' raised bed. I know I must be missing something... so I'm throwing this out so you can rain on my parade.... hopefully before I order another roll of brake line (I think I have half a roll left from when I put the engine in my truck, I know what do brakes have to do with the engine... don't get me started).
Click to expand...
We have a friend who will see those little moths and say "There goes your garden. Might as well put it to bed." He said they are that awful to try to deal with.
 
Just so you know God does have a sense of humor. I mentioned above that I had to replant about half the pole beans. Ben suggested that the birds will eat the bean so I put up that catchy netting stuff that I always end up snagging. I've been watching and thought I saw them trying to pop up through the ground. Next day, they weren't there. I thought "great, it's probably mice or something." I came in and got more beans soaking. The next morning I put them in little starter cells figuring I will get them going inside then replant them. That evening I went out and watered, checked again. Low and behold the beans reappeared. Now if these sprout, I will have lots! of pole beans.
 
UrbanHunter said:
I have been fighting the white butterflys and the little green caterpillars, I have decided that I want to make hoops for netting to keep them off my plants completely, the the hoops seem to be a little expensive..... Then I got to thinking about brake line, cost about $17 for 25 feet, can be bent easily and cut to my needed length. has a hole so you could stick it on pins (nails with the heads cut off) I figure if I went with 8'4" lengths I could get 3 tall hoops which would cover about an 8'X3' raised bed. I know I must be missing something... so I'm throwing this out so you can rain on my parade.... hopefully before I order another roll of brake line (I think I have half a roll left from when I put the engine in my truck, I know what do brakes have to do with the engine... don't get me started).
Click to expand...

We used pieces of rebar and old PEX and irrigation pipe.
IMG_20210517_134040948_PORTRAIT.jpg
 
LadyLocust said:
We had tons of ladybugs up the mountain. There are so many sprays here, I'm not sure I've seen one since moving here.
Click to expand...

We bought 2 batches last year and have one coming in a few days. I haven't seen any up here so we just ordered them. We have lots of horned toads this year though!
 
UrbanHunter said:
I have been fighting the white butterflys and the little green caterpillars, I have
Click to expand...

A few summers ago I had 30+ plants on my porch, medicinal/kitchen herbs and 8-10 pepper plants. Something started eating all of them. Puzzled me, normal things didn't work, like DE (so I thought). Turns out it was 100's of really small black moths and their offspring.

Anyway, I happened to open a storage box looking for??? I saw some tea candles I'd bought. I thought "moth to a flame" why not? Nothing else worked.

So just before bed I lit several tea candles and set them around a few pots on the porch, turned off all the lights and went to bed. The next morning every candle container was filled with dead moths, so many they had extinguished the flame of a couple.

I promptly ordered 2 cases of tea candles off amerzit, overnight delivery . That night I set the last 15 or so candles and killed at least 80 moths. That afternoon my candles arrived. By the 4th morning damage had almost stopped. I was lighting 20 or so candles every night.

By the 6th night I kept checking with the porch light on, not a single moth flying around and no more damage to my plants.

Edit to add... I'd leave the porch light on until about 11pm, bait all those moths to come to the light. Then I'd lite a bunch of candles and turn off the porch light. Each candle killed 3-6 moths, how many were maimed and died elsewhere I don't know. But I put a hurtin' on some moths, killed hundreds of them. I keep a box of tea candles in case they ever come back. Also, the DE was killing the moth larva, so between the two I wiped them out completely.

Tea Candles (5)a.JPG
 
Last edited:
winds-of-change said:
Okay, don’t laugh at this question. I have a bulb of elephant garlic. If I plant a few cloves, will I get elephant garlic or is it a sort of hybrid that won’t produce the same thing. 😔
Click to expand...
Elephant garlic is bigger & milder than regular/ true garlic, it is in the leek family, not a true garlic. EG splits in 24 months, not nine months like true garlic.
So after the first year your EG will be a bulb & have little brown bulblets in the ground, some true garlic has bulblets on the flower stalk, not in the ground. I eat fresh Elephant garlic on Monday, May 31. 2021, it was a bulb with a few little brown bulblets, which I replanted.
My bulblets take more than 24 months to split to cloves, but after you have a few year to accumulate these you will have clove every year.
" Similar to true garlic, there are two sub-species of elephant garlic, hardneck and softneck varieties. However, both of these varieties belong to the same cultivar, as there is no difference in the bulb produced. "
My brother- in law sells the first years Elephant garlic green & customers chop up the green stalks like chives. He sale out every year & never let the cloves develop the 2nd year. I got my elephant garlic from him & am going to grow it two years.
 
Late last week the beets peaked through the soil.

I was worried about the parsley. I thought it would do that before the beets. But I may have burried them a little too deep. Just this morning however, I saw green!

The plan this Saturday is to get more pots for the seeds my brother-in-law gifted me.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Latest posts

Back
Top