Garden Geeks thread

[leswp1]

Re: Garden Geeks thread

Planting this weekend. Haven't really thought about what, besides cucumbers, basil and dill. Strawberries are looking good so far - I might actually get berries.

The chipmunks eat all my strawberries.

Planting this weekend. Nightmare. Need to plant tomatoes in tubs d/t blight. Have cukes, Jukes and summer squash to put in but trying to figure out how to outwit the squash bugs. Lettuce is up. Arugula up. THe spinach is just not coming along. Grr.

[walrus]

Re: Garden Geeks thread

Have cukes, Jukes and summer squash to put in but trying to figure out how to outwit the squash bugs..

Cover the plants with reemay, its a thin polyester material, lets in sun and keeps bugs out. It will give your squash a chance to get going. Sooner or later they will out grow the reemay but by then they are stronger and can take some munching from the beetles

[FreshFish]

Re: Garden Geeks thread

The chipmunks eat all my strawberries.

We put together a nice little enclosure around our strawberries and it is working really well. We found thess 3-corner joiner thingees in some garden supply catalog and made a frame out of bamboo. Attached chicken wire around the outside, then put bird netting over the top. It's real easy to lift the netting to pick and then set it down again, meanwhile the frame construction keeps critters from forcing their way in.


For some reason your travails this year remind me of that scene in Phenomenon where the John Travolta character can't figure out how the rabbit keeps getting into his garden....

[leswp1]

Re: Garden Geeks thread

Cover the plants with reemay, its a thin polyester material, lets in sun and keeps bugs out. It will give your squash a chance to get going. Sooner or later they will out grow the reemay but by then they are stronger and can take some munching from the beetles

THey get really large, start to produce and then an ARMY of those squash bugs that looked like armored cars attack and overwhelm them. Usually when we are on vacation.

[walrus]

Re: Garden Geeks thread

THey get really large, start to produce and then an ARMY of those squash bugs that looked like armored cars attack and overwhelm them. Usually when we are on vacation.

I wonder if you could vac them up. I tried it with potato beetles one year when I had been gone for awhile, took a shop vac out in the garden, didn't work very well but I did suck up quite a few beetles. Rotenone is the other thing you could try?

[leswp1]

Re: Garden Geeks thread

I wonder if you could vac them up. I tried it with potato beetles one year when I had been gone for awhile, took a shop vac out in the garden, didn't work very well but I did suck up quite a few beetles. Rotenone is the other thing you could try?

Hmm. Vacuuming is ian interesting idea. Truly, you can have no concept of how much of an infestation it is. It looks like an ant farm on every plant.

[leswp1]

Re: Garden Geeks thread

10 tomatoes in 20 inch pots with some basil. 4 cukes in the earth box. deck planters done. The rest of the weekend to do S Squash, Zuke, beans, various other seeds.

[walrus]

Re: Garden Geeks thread

Hmm. Vacuuming is ian interesting idea. Truly, you can have no concept of how much of an infestation it is. It looks like an ant farm on every plant.

They have tractor mounted vacs in large organic operations so it does work. You aren't the only one with cucumber beetles up the wazoo. The problem you have is stuff gets planted in the same area every year. As much as it might suck you might be better off not having squash for a year or 2. I'm moving my squashes down the hill this year, totally different garden, been fallow for many years.

Too hot to transplant stuff today, seeds going in tomorrow, beans, carrots lettuce spinach, carrots etc. Monday supposed to be cloudy so transplants will go in

[leswp1]

Re: Garden Geeks thread

They have tractor mounted vacs in large organic operations so it does work. You aren't the only one with cucumber beetles up the wazoo. The problem you have is stuff gets planted in the same area every year. As much as it might suck you might be better off not having squash for a year or 2. I'm moving my squashes down the hill this year, totally different garden, been fallow for many years.

Too hot to transplant stuff today, seeds going in tomorrow, beans, carrots lettuce spinach, carrots etc. Monday supposed to be cloudy so transplants will go in

I moved my squash to pots, across the yard last yr, using new pots and dirt from the store. No go. they found it.

[walrus]

Re: Garden Geeks thread

I moved my squash to pots, across the yard last yr, using new pots and dirt from the store. No go. they found it.

Not much else you can do besides poison. I'd still do reemay to get them going.

[leswp1]

Re: Garden Geeks thread

Not much else you can do besides poison. I'd still do reemay to get them going.

I think I am going to go in search of some.

[walrus]

Re: Garden Geeks thread

Planted a bunch of stuff yesterday but decided to wait till today to transplant as it was supposed to be cloudy. That worked out well. tomatoes, Peppers, broccoli and Cauliflower got done today. Still have squash left to go, maybe next weekend, they are still kind of small

[jen]

Re: Garden Geeks thread

Planted over the weekend - cucumbers, leeks, jalapenos, basil, lavender, dahlias, impatiens and some other flowers that I can't remember. Didn't put up my gutter garden on the patio fence yet - I'm thinking I'll start small, probably with a couple rows of flowers. Just painted my patio fence last weekend (10 hours of painting!) after getting a new patio installed, so some brightly colored annuals would look great on it.

There's a dill sprig coming up in my garden. I think I planted dill in that spot 2 years ago (I read somewhere it's biennial?), but it never really grew there, so I was surprised to see it come back.

I have berries on my strawberry plants!!!

[Carter]

Re: Garden Geeks thread

I have berries on my strawberry plants!!!

So do we, but we've yet to see a ripe one. As soon as they're near ripe, something's scarfing them up. Bunnies, birds, I dunno. If I need to buy yet another roll of chicken wire and some top netting, I might as well go ahead and declare bankruptcy.

[FreshFish]

Re: Garden Geeks thread

So do we, but we've yet to see a ripe one. As soon as they're near ripe, something's scarfing them up. Bunnies, birds, I dunno. If I need to buy yet another roll of chicken wire and some top netting, I might as well go ahead and declare bankruptcy.

It took us years to get where we are now with our strawberries, hopefully a brief history of our travails will help you see it through too....so far this year we've harvested over a quart and there awaits right now another two quarts of one kind and a pint of the tart mini-strawberries from a second bed.


When we first put in our strawberries, I thought it was a total waste of time and space, since we harvested about two berries from the whole patch, slugs got most of them and some other critters got the rest.

So that winter after the ground had frozen*, we actually laid about 4" of straw across the top of the bed, and enclosed it in chicken wire. We got a decent increase in berries, it was better than before but still a lot of work and space for not much reward**. The next year we draped bird netting across the top, which helped increase berry harvest when we went out to harvest but harvesting itself was a pain.

Finally, I built a frame using bamboo rods and corner connectors around the top of the chicken wire enclosure and used wire to fasten the chicken wire to the frame. Then I wrapped each end of the bird netting around another piece of bamboo rod, laid it over the top, then fastened one more bamboo rod across the middle to the frame on either side. Now, when we want to harvest, we just lift the bamboo rod from one side, harvest, replace and lift from the other side. We are having a fantastic harvest so far.





* weird winter this year, the ground never froze, and we had more snow on Halloween -- that one autumn day alone -- than we had cumulatively throughout the entire winter.



** We get a phenomenal harvest from bush beans and some other plants and not much space overall, so that if it doesn't yield above a certain level I don't want to devote any space to it....though on the other hand, the year we grew zucchini, we had so much of it that we were challenged to give it away fast enough. Our neighbors would see us coming and yell "no more zucchini please"