Garden thread

mtaratoot wrote: »

My silly pumpkin plant is flowering again.



I wish it would send its energy into ripening the second fruit. The first one is good-to-go. I scratched up the second one for display purposes, but it's still hunter green.

[snip]

It varies by squash plant, but for butternut squash anyway, after a certain point in the growing season, we prune the vines past the set fruit.

https://www.thespruce.com/can-you-prune-winter-squash-plants-4125561

...Winter squash needs a certain amount of vine to support and feed the developing fruits, but you don't have to let the vines grow forever. Most varieties will not set more than four or five fruits per plant. Once your vines have set that amount, you can begin to prune them back and keep them in check. While you are waiting for the fruits to set, it's okay to gently move the vines out of the way to make room for yourself or other plants.

It hasn't been cold enough to kill Mom's Malabar spinach, a tropical plant (as opposed to normal spinach, which is a cool annual.) This is from 4 seeds. (It takes a really long time to get going - needs summer heat before it explodes.)

Those chiles with the vertical fruit can go either way depending on variety, can be as mild as a bell pepper or SUPER hot!

The weather prognosticators are saying it is going to be 22 or 23 degrees F overnight. Kind of unseasonable. Not totally - we're right around the time of average first frost. We've already had a couple light frosts, but no hard freezes.

Hoses are drained and coiled. Hose bibs are insulated for winter. I harvested the last of the jalapenos and eggplant. I put a 30-gallon garbage can over the Poinsettia pepper to see if I can get it through tonight so the last fruits can ripen. I put a 5-gallon bucket over the celery plant. I'm going to consider putting a blanket over the bed of greens. The beets should be fine.

I cut out the spent canes from the marionberrry and strung up the new canes for next year's fruit. I cut back all the peonies to the ground. Tonight will be the first time for the year I bring the hummingbird feeders in for the night. I'm thinking that today is the last day they'll be able to harvest nectar from the fuchsia and honeysuckle. They'll be eating small insects and drinking sugar water for a while. At least the darkness isn't quite as long as it will be in a couple months. That's when I really try to make sure to leave the feeders out until dark (not a problem) and get them back up as soon as possible in the morning so they have some fuel as soon as they come out of their nightly torpor. I can't imagine what they go through. They either shiver all night to stay warm (burning up their energy stores) or go into a state of torpor to awake with the sun and go get some fuel.

Any figs left on the trees will freeze and fall off. Soon I'll prune the trees back.

Have you put some of your garden to bed for the season? Or if you are in the southern latitudes, what do you have starting up?

@mtaratoot, that Paulownia is a strange critter, at least as it grows here. (I gather it can be invasive where it sets seed: It doesn't, here . . . yet, anyway.) Gorgeous flowers.

I don't have one, but used to volunteer in a botanical garden that did. Here, it was quite fragile (broke often, in Winter ice/wind especially), but would send up a new trunk that grew much, much faster than more common trees. In the garden, they would cut it periodically to keep it the size they needed, and the cut stump would have the widest growth rings I've ever seen - like 3-4 years' growth, 3-4 rings, would be a trunk close to the max size I could encircle with my two (non petite!) hands, thumb/fingertips of right touching left.

@mtaratoot You have a lot going on. I'm in the southern hemisphere and I only have a sliver of a garden left at this point due to mice destroying my tomato plants. Jalapeno peppers and Bell Peppers are thriving and appears my sweet potatoes are doing well. I have a raised garden and I'm buying myself pots and more soil and I'm going to be working on growing my garden this week, a birthday present to myself.

I'll post pictures soon but I'm going to get some rosemary, mint, lavender, more Bell Peppers and sweet potatoes going (I grew the slips and now I just need to plant them). I think I'm going to order a variety of peppers off of Etsy since it really seems to be the only thing I'm having luck with.

WildColonialGirl wrote: »

We just had a container garden this year with herbs and salad greens. We’re planning raised beds for next year with tomatoes, bell peppers, cucumbers, green beans, salad greens and herbs. Going to keep the catnip separate haha.

I'm going the container garden route. I can move and protect from rhodent's favorites that way.

We've had snow the past couple of days, but nothing has stuck yet, and my chard and carrots still seem okay. Last year we had a bunch of snow on Halloween, so interested to see if that happens this year -- it's not normal.

carakirkey wrote: »

We went from gardens and flowers growing to a big and very early snow fall. I had a fall garden planted of peas, greens and carrots and parsnips were still in. I'll see what I can recover once this snow melts!

That snow could be a good thing if it gets cold - it's a natural insulator.

We had more cold weather last night - colder than expected. The one remaining chile plant sustained some damage, but I think it made it. No more freezing temperatures in the immediate future. Some damp and some sun; maybe I'll still get some to ripen.

Leaves are frost damaged on the fig trees, but they didn't all fall off like the Paulonia. They will soon. The figs will also start falling, rotten, onto the ground.

My husband and I started a garden a few years ago. It has been a learn by experience adventure but I love it. Not only do I get excercise but I love eating fresh veg that I have grown with love and sweat !

Growing your own will save you a ton of money! Marijuana, while legal and readily available here in Nevada, is prohibitively expensive.

Three sweet potato slips in the ground today and going to pot another. I have so much room left in my garden now that the tomato plants are gone. My dog killed a mouse today. She's an indoor dog but I let her out and she was on it.

70's today and high 70's after tomorrow, sweet potatoes will be happy!

This year's garden added 5 lbs. of wild black raspberries and 6 lb.s of green beans to my freezer. I have 70 green tomatoes wrapped in the cool cellar - so I expect to be eating garden tomatoes well into December. Lots of dried chives, lemon balm, mint, rosemary and basil stocked in the spice cabinet for winter.

Next year, I want to add butternut squash, chard and zucchini. In the past, critters usually get anything in the squash family well before I do, but I'll give it a go.