Summer garden produce

[JeffinNZ]

Took this snap of the kitchen bench the other evening whilst I was preparing for dinner. All from my garden. L to R. Courgettes, salad greens, corn (too sweet to mention), tomatoes both Beefsteak and Cherry, cumcumbers both Apple and Lebanese, carrots of unusal shapes and sizes. Love my garden and hot house.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v505/JeffinNZ/Other%20stuff/IMG_20130209_173346_zps44ece743.jpg

[P.K.]

Nice! I'm still only half way through the pickles we made up this year. Nice lookin maters!

[Ramar]

Jeff, you do any canning?

[x101airborne]

Excellent. Like you, my family are mostly subsistence farmers. We grow about 90% of the family veggies not only for us, but for my dad and mom and for my sisters family also. When you couple that with the amount of game we eat and beef we raise along with chickens, quail, phesants, hogs, etc, our imprint on our local food stores is very minimal. That is a great harvest and you did well.

[dale2242]

It`s still winter here in SW Oregon, Jeff.
I did make an order for seeds for this spring. The weather has been reasonably good here for a few days and it`s giving me spring fever.
Nice pic. Makes more positive about spring...dale

[snuffy]

Jeff, that's just not fair!!!:roll:[smilie=1:

I'm about to order seeds for this summer's planting season, that should help with the cabin fever I have. I'll be planting some of the seeds around the 1st of March. The rest on April first. I do a lot of container gardening, five gallon pails are mobile, and you can plant seeds directly into them.

http://photos.imageevent.com/jptowns/general/websize/garden%202012%20013.jpg

These are from the garden patch .com called the grow box.
http://www.agardenpatch.com/?gclid=CPKH3unOrrUCFe4-MgodUlYAdQ

http://photos.imageevent.com/jptowns/general/websize/garden%202012%20011.jpg

http://photos.imageevent.com/jptowns/general/websize/garden%202012%20015.jpg

I had a great harvest from them last summer, I'll be getting another 3 boxes----soon!

[KCSO]

Man we have used up most of our winter stash and it will be another 4 months before I can eat a REAL tomato again. This is torture.

[snuffy]

Man we have used up most of our winter stash and it will be another 4 months before I can eat a REAL tomato again. This is torture.

Man, do I ever relate to that statement! I ONLY eat tomatoes that I have grown. That means only from July to first frost, then what I could save that have some color that ripen on the table.

Those so-called tomatoes in the store just have no taste at all, and the texture is like biting a chunk off a carrot! Besides the insane cost.

[farmerjim]

That picture makes me hungry. Onions planted about 6 weeks ago, potatoes planted last week. I will be planting my first tomatoes in the ground in about 4 days. Other plantings to follow weekly. My small greenhouse is full with about 1,000 tomato and 600 each pepper and eggplant. Other plants to follow.

[texassako]

Y'all are making me envious since I am slowly adding to my garden plot each year. Planting our spring veggies this week after our predicted gully washer tomorrow. I opened the last jars of okra pickles and strawberry jam this weekend; so I will be missing the flavors of summer for a while.

[JeffinNZ]

Jeff, you do any canning?

Not canning but I do bottle pears and make jam.


Excellent. Like you, my family are mostly subsistence farmers. We grow about 90% of the family veggies not only for us, but for my dad and mom and for my sisters family also. When you couple that with the amount of game we eat and beef we raise along with chickens, quail, phesants, hogs, etc, our imprint on our local food stores is very minimal. That is a great harvest and you did well.

We are hardly in your league but do enjoy the garden. It's a fair sized patch for the city. Vege gardening is 'fashionable' right now so lots of folks doing it again. I wasn't aware it had gone OUT of fashion and could care less about such. Just happy people are doing it. I want my girls to know how to grow their own.

SNUFFY: I like your buckets. That's how I do my hot house.

[L1A1Rocker]

That's great. I don't have a green house yet, though I do have plans for one that will include a pond for tilipia fish. I did set up a little grow room to get my seeds off to an early start though. I put my seeds in on 1-24 and everything has sprouted so far. Some of the plants are getting too tall though. The purple hull peas are about 7 inches tall now and the tomatoes are only a couple inches without their real leaves yet. Tomorrow I'm going to do something to raise up all the short stuff to the same level as the tall stuff and raise up my 600w MH light a bit.

I'm determined to get some veggies this year early. Last year I was a bit late and it got too hot for anything to set. I had to wait until the fall before I could get any decent veggies. And it was a brutal effort to keep the plants alive during the summer heat. I was going out once and twice a day misting down the plants trying to keep them alive.

Oh, and those grow boxes are GREAT! I made my own (called an earth tainer) from 30 gallon totes. My indeterminate tomatoes get to almost 10 feet tall before breaking over and drooping down - but they keep growing, just downward. And, my egg plants make it to 5 feet tall using the earth tainers. They really do work!

[kodiak1]

Jeff we still have 3 feet of snow here and it won't be gone for a couple months yet. That does make my mouth water though with anticipation.

Ken

[Marvin S]

Just ordered four new fruit trees to add to my orchard. Should be plantin onions and such in about five weeks here. Going to use my last onion tomorrow in a pot of beans.

[xs11jack]

Snuff, do the grow boxes measure up to the advertizing? The wife and have looked at the ads several times and finally said maybe next year.
Jack

[snuffy]

Snuff, do the grow boxes measure up to the advertizing? The wife and have looked at the ads several times and finally said maybe next year.
Jack

The two that are sorta orange, (they call it terra cotta), are 2 years old, the green ones I got last year. So far, they are holding up just fine. As to how they work, that too is just fine. The bottom ¼ of the box is actually a tank/well that hold about 2-3 gallons of water. The bottom of the upper dirt chamber is a mesh, or perforated plastic, the same material as the main box. On each end of the perf. bottom is a hole that allows a small amount of the soil to go all the way to the bottom of the tank. It wicks water up into the rest of the soil.

With the tank filled,(through the side, see the lip), and some water applied directly to the soil, you can go 3 days, in the hottest weather, without watering. Okay, our hottest last summer was slightly over 100, so you texicans and those from NM, may not get 3 days!?[smilie=1:

Serrano hot peppers;
http://photos.imageevent.com/jptowns/cannont2ifolder/websize/44%20mold%20008.jpg

Hot Hungarians,(hot wax).
http://photos.imageevent.com/jptowns/cannont2ifolder/websize/44%20mold%20010.jpg

No pics of the tomatoes when bearing, but here's how they looked about the middle of June.
http://photos.imageevent.com/jptowns/general/websize/garden%202012%20007.jpg

[snuffy]

I forgot to add that the "cages" are also sold by garden patch. The ones you see in the pics are powder coated steel, with plastic snap on corners/ends.

They're making updated fiberglass rods now with metal corners and elastic cords inside. Should be a better system. Can't complain about mine, they worked well.

[L1A1Rocker]

Snuff, do the grow boxes measure up to the advertizing? The wife and have looked at the ads several times and finally said maybe next year.
Jack

Last years Earthtainer stuff:
This is my mother and the plants going down the line in the taniers are: 2 egg plants; 1 grape tomato 1 roma tomato; green beans with a 10 foot trellis; and the last tainer way down there has 1 brandy boy and 1 beef stake. That last one you can see has already bent over the double hight tomato cages.
http://i79.photobucket.com/albums/j154/L1A1Rocker/HPIM0948.jpg

This pic is of mother standing under the brandy boy that has dropped over:
http://i79.photobucket.com/albums/j154/L1A1Rocker/HPIM0949.jpg
Lots of flowers but at this point it is too hot for anything to set.

Here's a pic with them all bundled up before the first freeze of fall:
http://i79.photobucket.com/albums/j154/L1A1Rocker/HPIM0989.jpg

[L1A1Rocker]

I forgot to add that the "cages" are also sold by garden patch. The ones you see in the pics are powder coated steel, with plastic snap on corners/ends.

They're making updated fiberglass rods now with metal corners and elastic cords inside. Should be a better system. Can't complain about mine, they worked well.

Snuffy, I REALLY like that set up with the earthboxes up off the ground like that. I've got a neibore down the street with some earthboxes that she's never used. I'm going to try and talk one or two out of her this year so I don't have to make another earthtainer this year. I really like these self watering containers. It is amazing how well they work. My brother was here this last fall and actually asked me if the tomato plants were some kind of special hybrid that grew "that tall". It's kinda fun to explain to people that any indeterminate has the potential to get that big, you just have to feed them right and the SWC is THE way to go for that.

[Olevern]

Excellent. Like you, my family are mostly subsistence farmers. We grow about 90% of the family veggies not only for us, but for my dad and mom and for my sisters family also. When you couple that with the amount of game we eat and beef we raise along with chickens, quail, phesants, hogs, etc, our imprint on our local food stores is very minimal. That is a great harvest and you did well.

Trey,
How in the world do you keep them hogs out of the garden? Must be some fence.

[snuffy]

One thing I want to add, something I figured out that seems to work. Doing a search on the net for how-to on container gardening, I found that everybody recommends that you make holes in the BOTTOM of any pail. My thoughts went something like this; why the heck let the excess water drain through??¿

I reasoned that if i could could trap a bit of that to create a "well" in the bottom, that would give the plant roots something to reach for. So instead of holes in the bottom, I drilled 1/8" holes up about 1.5-2 inches up from the bottom. Then when watering, I would watch for water to appear coming out of those holes. It works!:-D

Now it's widely known that tomatoes don't like "wet feet". Meaning the roots should have plenty of room to have water drain away. The 5 gal. pails give them plenty of room for this to happen. Saturating the soil, then letting it get away to end up in the bottom, allows that well to form. If the roots reach for that, then it's like the design of the grow boxes from garden way.

One last check on that will be this spring when I'm planting back in those pails that had tomatoes in them last summer. I'm going to try to remove the whole chunk of soil from the bucket, to see if the roots penetrated to the well.

As for the soil, I used a ½ X ½ mix of potting soil and plain garden soil. Potting soil is not dense enough, too fluffy. Straight garden soil is too dense. The half and half mix is just right.