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Murder Most Foul Hath Been Committed! Was headed to work yesterday morning and noticed that something looked amiss.. Weren't there three broccoli plants the previous day?  Looking around, I discovered what was missing:  A shame..  I'm pretty sure that it was a raccoon, there wasn't any evidence of a bite or cut, so the most likely explanation is a fat-butt 'coon trying to squeeze between the plants (which are all too big to squeeze through for anything larger than a small cat, atm.) Not a massive loss as it was only one plant and I've got a couple more, but going from  to  in a split-second while looking at my garden was kind of startling. Also, I like broccoli.
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Nov 4, 2009 18:25
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coyo7e posted:Murder Most Foul Hath Been Committed! That was one hell of a nice looking broc plant, too. 
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Nov 4, 2009 18:32
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If I hadn't of been feeling lousy yesterday morning, I might've tried grafting it back together.. I only just now thought of it, but I was always good at grafting plants when I was a kid. The other broccoli and cauliflowers etc are also hella nice plants, thanks. It's just way too late to really put anything into the ground in that spot, now. My biggest  over the whole thing is that they broke off the wrong plant, since everything grew way bigger than I expected it to perform this season, things are a touch crowded.. If one of the center plant had been broken off, then the rest would have had more elbow room! ..Oh yeah, I also noticed this morning that the potted azalea I rescued is blooming. 
coyo7e fucked around with this message at 19:11 on Nov 4, 2009 |
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Nov 4, 2009 19:08
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Woo-wooo. Thanks DIY & Hobbies for helping me impress a group of uni students with my wares, from knitting to pumpkins. For your efforts you get this decidedly unsexy myspace shot of the pumpkin and I.
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Nov 4, 2009 22:23
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I gave up on my cantaloupe plants. We've been having really unpredictable weather in California (100 degrees one day, 65 the next) and it's been months since I planted them. I also work really long hours and don't really have the time to tender to them every day. But I kept watering them anyway because the thought of them dying broke my heart. This morning:  
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Nov 5, 2009 10:09
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Nice! My eggplant did that recently. I gave up on it and a week later it had two little purple eggplants and lots of flowers. This odd California weather makes plants do funny things.
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Nov 6, 2009 03:30
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Hobo Camp posted:I gave up on my cantaloupe plants. We've been having really unpredictable weather in California (100 degrees one day, 65 the next) and it's been months since I planted them. I also work really long hours and don't really have the time to tender to them every day. But I kept watering them anyway because the thought of them dying broke my heart. Canteloupes are a lot hardier than you'd think. I had a pair that went rotten on me, so I just dug a hole in the backyard and dropped them in(I'm in Orlando, for reference. We don't have soil, just white sand essentially), a couple weeks later there were canteloupe sprouts which did surprisingly well. Fast forward, we're in a vicious drought and they don't get watered for over 2 months, plus being baked in full sun and 100 degree temps daily. The first rainstorm of the summer hits, and the next morning I have nearly every leaf fuzzy, fat, and looking like they'd been watered regularly all summer. Melons are some tough bastards. To contribute, I've jumped on the bandwagon with congo birdseye peppers and some zambian variety given to me by a friend, and some basil from Target that took all of 2 days to sprout and another one to toss up the first leaves. I grew it from seed in these little foil packs with a sphagnum puck in them and had just about every seed sprout; currently I've had to dedicate an entire windowbox to just half of the seedlings by now, so I think a lot of caprese salads are in my future this summer. I had to skip a bit of the thread to catch up, has anybody tried growing tropicals at all? I have some sugar apple seeds from a particularly tasty fruit and evidently sugar apples are able to grow here, they are just sensitive to cold temperatures the first year or two. So, I figure I can just keep it potted until that mark has passed, then plant it somewhere or look into making a pruned mini version that still bears fruit. I'd like to try planting some native fruits but haven't really found too many that aren't tree-based and take time. I can definitely do alligator apple, but that will require a large tub to keep it underwater since it's a marsh and canal plant. e: maybe some passionfruits, beautiful flowers and delicious fruit. I know they can deal with the climate, all the construction sites back home used to be swarming with them during springtime from workers spitting out seeds in fall. Kilersquirrel fucked around with this message at 22:15 on Nov 9, 2009 |
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Nov 9, 2009 22:12
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I miss home (Puerto Rico) because of all the delicious tropical fruits. Especially mangoes. I miss Puerto Rican mangoes. Mexican mangoes just aren't the same. They're green :/ I tried growing indoors and then transplanting and I totally failed at it. They were just too sensitive. Everything I've successfully grown, I've started outdoors. It's kinda like raising kids. You coddle them and dote on them all the time, and then they grow into wimps. You give them more room and let them fend for themselves, and they do fine. I'm worried because I'm going home on December 17th til January 7th and I get the feeling my cantaloupes will be ready to harvest during those 3 weeks. So all this waiting and watering and fretting for nothing I hope they harvest before I leave or after I come back. 
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Nov 11, 2009 07:55
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coyo7e posted:Murder Most Foul Hath Been Committed! Eat the leaves though, they are tasty
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Nov 14, 2009 05:39
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What are your guys' recommendations for a rooting medium without peat moss
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Nov 15, 2009 22:06
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I had some space between my driveway and my neighbor's fence that was filled with a berry producing bush. It didn't look very good and it spread like a weed so I'd have to go over to the neighbor's every week and prune it out(neighbor is like 97). So we decided to get rid of the brush and do something useful with the area and build a series of 3 garden boxes with benches between for enjoying the yard. I just finished the first and was wondering should I go ahead and put roofing paper in the bottom of the box to isolate it from the rest of the yard or will it just turn my box into soup after the first hurricane? The box is 2ft by 2ft by 8ft. Each box has increasingly more shade going from full sun to mostly full shade. Edit for another question. I'm thinking about building in an irrigation system before I fill the boxes. Would drip irrigation be a better solution than a normal sprinkler head? I am considering that mainly because I don't want to water my neighbor's yard and my aphalt driveway what with 8ft being the smallest radius I could find for a normal sprinkler head. I am going to be growing a relatively normal garden with peppers, green onions, tomatos, garlic, herbs etc. Will I run into any issues with plants when I only water the root system instead of the entire plant? El Bano fucked around with this message at 03:41 on Nov 16, 2009 |
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Nov 16, 2009 03:22
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El Bano posted:I had some space between my driveway and my neighbor's fence that was filled with a berry producing bush. It didn't look very good and it spread like a weed so I'd have to go over to the neighbor's every week and prune it out(neighbor is like 97). So we decided to get rid of the brush and do something useful with the area and build a series of 3 garden boxes with benches between for enjoying the yard. Is there a good reason why you would need to isolate the beds you are building from the rest of the yard (like tree roots)? If so I would invest in some good landscape fabric that lets water through, and doesn't contain tar. If you don't have a reason to separate the soil, then I wouldn't put anything. Depending on the material you are making the boxes out of, it might not be a bad idea to put something on the SIDES of the box, otherwise your moist rich soil will cause the wood you are making them out of to rot surprisingly fast.
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Nov 16, 2009 03:41
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Zeta Taskforce posted:Is there a good reason why you would need to isolate the beds you are building from the rest of the yard (like tree roots)? If so I would invest in some good landscape fabric that lets water through, and doesn't contain tar. If you don't have a reason to separate the soil, then I wouldn't put anything. Depending on the material you are making the boxes out of, it might not be a bad idea to put something on the SIDES of the box, otherwise your moist rich soil will cause the wood you are making them out of to rot surprisingly fast. Using pressure treated wood put together with treated screws, so I am not expecting much rot anytime in the near future. There are no nearby trees or significant vegetation, however I am building these on top of the berry bush site without removing the roots. I assume with a 20 inch soil depth, the bushes won't come back up though.
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Nov 16, 2009 03:44
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dwoloz posted:What are your guys' recommendations for a rooting medium without peat moss Rooting hormone, perlite and water. El Bano posted:Using pressure treated wood put together with treated screws, so I am not expecting much rot anytime in the near future. There are no nearby trees or significant vegetation, however I am building these on top of the berry bush site without removing the roots. I assume with a 20 inch soil depth, the bushes won't come back up though. Don't assume, I've seen rose bushes do that quite well. kid sinister fucked around with this message at 05:53 on Nov 16, 2009 |
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Nov 16, 2009 05:50
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El Bano posted:Using pressure treated wood put together with treated screws, so I am not expecting much rot anytime in the near future. There are no nearby trees or significant vegetation, however I am building these on top of the berry bush site without removing the roots. I assume with a 20 inch soil depth, the bushes won't come back up though. If I were you, since this is going to be a semi-permanent part of the landscape, since you are doing a fair amount of carpentry, I would take the time to remove the bushes before you put your raised beds over them. At the recommendation of someone here who recommended a pick-ax to cut through roots for my much larger project this past spring, I think you should get or borrow one, use it to slice through the soil. Use pruning loppers to cut through roots as you expose them. Kid Sinister is right. Bushes can grow through 2 feet of soil, but if you destroy the crown and the majority of the taproot, they won’t. Plus whatever you put in there will have access to the entire soil column and it will drain better. You can look at page 9 to see the roots I was dealing with in my vegetable garden, as well as the trees the previous owners let grow inches from the foundation. One of them was six inches in diameter and you can tell that for years they just chopped it down every time the shoots it sent up got too big.
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Nov 16, 2009 14:55
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dwoloz posted:What are your guys' recommendations for a rooting medium without peat moss Answering my own question for a peat moss substitute: coconut coir
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Nov 16, 2009 22:36
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dwoloz posted:Answering my own question for a peat moss substitute: coconut coir Just curious, why no peat moss?
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Nov 17, 2009 00:18
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Richard Noggin posted:Just curious, why no peat moss? Gathering the peat is environmentally destructive and done in a non renewable way. Would just make me feel better not being a part of that and it seems like coir is a perfect substitute
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Nov 17, 2009 07:47
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El Bano posted:Using pressure treated wood put together with treated screws, so I am not expecting much rot anytime in the near future. There are no nearby trees or significant vegetation, however I am building these on top of the berry bush site without removing the roots. I assume with a 20 inch soil depth, the bushes won't come back up though.
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Nov 18, 2009 21:15
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coyo7e posted:It may still be prudent to paint the insides of the box, pressure-treated wood can rot pretty quickly when it's exposed to dirt and water 24/7. Also, pressure-treated wood splinters suck and tend to fester, so a nice layer of paint could protect you from catching splinters, which is easy to do with pressure-treated. Pressure treated lumber that's rated for ground contact will last a very long time. Even the stuff that isn't won't rot that quickly. Hell, I made a set of raised beds out of rough-sawn 2x10 hemlock (untreated), and those lasted ten years. Also, paint isn't going to last very long when it's underground.
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Nov 19, 2009 15:08
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Just be careful what kind of pressure-treated wood you use in a vegetable garden; some of the treatments use arsenic compounds that make them unfit for holding stuff you're going to be growing to eat.
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Nov 24, 2009 03:57
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Marchegiana posted:Just be careful what kind of pressure-treated wood you use in a vegetable garden; some of the treatments use arsenic compounds that make them unfit for holding stuff you're going to be growing to eat. Contrary to what you've heard, this is untrue. Even the old stuff treated with CCA won't make you ill, unless you're making splinter salads. It hasn't been around for residential construction for years, and even if you were to use recycled PT that containted CCA, most of it will have already leached out. http://www.finegardening.com/design/articles/pressure-treated-wood-in-beds.aspx
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Nov 24, 2009 15:16
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Richard Noggin posted:Contrary to what you've heard, this is untrue. Even the old stuff treated with CCA won't make you ill, unless you're making splinter salads. It hasn't been around for residential construction for years, and even if you were to use recycled PT that containted CCA, most of it will have already leached out. Looks like the CCA treatment was banned in 2003. I tend to doubt that they had a 6 years worth of stock in the warehouse, so I'm pretty sure my stuff is the ACQ-D which does not contain arsenic, but does apparently eat through the galvanized fastenings I used fairly quickly. Ah well. Any opinions on drip irrigation vs popup sprayers? I'm going to fill the boxes shortly and want to do the plumbing before I do. I went with the advice above and used landscaping material for the ground cover instead of the roofing paper.
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Nov 24, 2009 22:11
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Drip. I'm guessing you're going to use emitters?
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Nov 24, 2009 22:54
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Marchegiana posted:Just be careful what kind of pressure-treated wood you use in a vegetable garden; some of the treatments use arsenic compounds that make them unfit for holding stuff you're going to be growing to eat. It's hard to find the stuff that still uses arsenic anymore. It's only used in pressure-treated woods for marine and industrial use nowadays. Lumber yards that only cater to residential and commercial customers won't carry it.
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Nov 24, 2009 23:34
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My little balcony veggie patch is coming along quite nicely despite my doubts at first. However, these little guys have eaten ALL of my mint, and have started on my cucumbers and zucchinis. I'm on the second floor of an apartment building, how are they getting here?? There's a massive gum tree nearby, could they be jumping off from that?   Does anyone know how to get rid of them? I've just been plucking them off the leaves when I see them. However, I can't watch for them all day every day!
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Nov 28, 2009 02:14
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That could be a cabbage looper, but I thought they had white bands. Regardless, diatomaceous earth will take care of them and has the benefit of being organic.
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Dec 1, 2009 15:33
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Richard Noggin posted:That could be a cabbage looper, but I thought they had white bands. Regardless, diatomaceous earth will take care of them and has the benefit of being organic. Great! Thanks so much for this. I was worried that I’d have to resort to something non-organic. Going organic was the reason I started my own little garden, because buying it from the super market is way too expensive.
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Dec 1, 2009 22:59
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So I've got a couple of rose bushes in the yard where I'm at, and as this morning was goddamned cold I was sitting in the front room looking out at the car thawing out, and realized I hadn't trimmed back the rose bushes for winter.. I realized then, that I know fuckall about roses, except how to prune them when they're in bloom. one of the roses has small, pink blooms, and the other has larger blooms but it wasn't very productive last year (it had been pruned back severely and then left unwatered through a nasty summer,) and I don't recall the blooms outside of them being pretty large.. I assume it wouldn't hurt to top-off the old dead flowerbuds, but one rose is a good 40"+ tall and I don't want it out of control but I don't want to cut it back too late in the season.. The other one is looking better than when I moved in, but I won't really be able to tell how well it's doing until next year I'm sure.. So yeah, anyone know something about roses? Also, loving squirrels keep tearing up my beds, I think they're probably responsible for 1/4 of my garlic not sprouting.
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Dec 4, 2009 17:19
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I don't know jack about roses, but could offer tips on pellet guns.
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Dec 4, 2009 18:17
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Coyo7e: How far north are you? You definitely need to nuke the blossoms if it's near freezing already. A little cone of mulch around the graft is also recommended if it's below zero.
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Dec 4, 2009 21:06
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Soooo... onions and carrots planted over the fall in Greensboro, NC. Are they harvested before or after winter? I wasn't paying attention when I planted them. 
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Dec 4, 2009 22:33
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comets! fucked around with this message at 23:56 on Mar 28, 2012 |
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Dec 5, 2009 00:35
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Did you thoroughly wet the Promix before potting? That stuff can hold a lot of water, and if it wasn't properly moistened, it may have pulled the moisture right out of the roots. That, coupled with the loss of foliar moisture from the flat tops would be the prime causes I think. I grow my tomatoes in straight Promix, and fertilize with very diluted fish emulsion, and have never had any problems.
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Dec 5, 2009 04:51
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comets! fucked around with this message at 23:56 on Mar 28, 2012 |
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Dec 5, 2009 17:15
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comets! posted:Thanks for the reply, that makes a lot of sense. I poured a ton of water on the promix but I don't think I fully saturated it because I was worried about over watering! I'll give them a lot today. Misting won't do much, but you can get some small clear trash bags (bathroom size) and put those over the pots and tape them. It should help them recover. With Promix, what I do is dump it out of the bag into a large tub - those big storage bins work well - and water thoroughly while mixing gently. You obviously don't want to compact the mix. You know you have enough water when you squeeze a ball of it in your hands and it holds its form without dripping water. "Damp sponge" is the phrase I heard. The tub makes it easy to pot things up, just use the pot as a scoop. I'm sure you know as well that you should water before transplanting, as the water helps the soil cling to the roots and prevents them from drying out.
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Dec 5, 2009 20:01
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comets! fucked around with this message at 23:56 on Mar 28, 2012 |
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Dec 5, 2009 21:41
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I use this stuff called Squanto's Secret. It's 2-4-2, and the normal application is 1 oz per gallon of water. I fertilize once every two or three weeks as seedlings, and then again with a liberal amount of Pro-Gro (5-3-4) when planting. After that, I don't fertilize.
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Dec 5, 2009 21:58
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My office is on a big green kick lately and wants to start collecting compost from the kitchens. We produce an awful lot of coffee grounds and other material and I would love to collect that and set it to work. Problem is, those blue bins kinda suck for collecting that poo poo. Bags are no good (wasteful, plastic sucks, pain to clean if you want to re-use them) so I'd like to have a smooth-lined plastic bin, enameled bucket, or a stainless steel bin with a lid that I could collect it all in. I'm having trouble finding one big enough to handle the waste, small enough to carry by myself every night after work, and sturdy enough to last for a few years. I've seen those little 4 litre kitchen ones which is the same theme as what I'd like, just bigger. Wheeled stainless bins would be ok too, but I can't find those anywhere. Do you guys have any suggestions?
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Dec 10, 2009 01:12
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Richard Noggin posted:Contrary to what you've heard, this is untrue. Even the old stuff treated with CCA won't make you ill, unless you're making splinter salads. It hasn't been around for residential construction for years, and even if you were to use recycled PT that containted CCA, most of it will have already leached out.
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Dec 10, 2009 02:43
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