re: 2019 Garden Thread

I used peroxide pretty heavily early on this spring for some seed starts that had been getting beaten up by fungus gnats. I'll buy sterile mix next time, but it worked great.

I've been pretty steadily picking squash and zucchini this week. Last week, I clipped some of the bigger, lower peppers off my corno di toro, carmen, and marconi plants to try to encourage some more upward growth of the plant. Seems to be working well. I've also got a few cherry tomatoes on my sweet million plant starting to turn. Looks like that'll be the first tomato.

I have zero bees. I've been trying to pollinate my squash and zucchini with a paintbrush, which has been a PITA but effective.

We just poured a stamped patio in our yard. This weekend we built beds around it and my girlfriend was able to get six 7 gallon very established gardenias and one hibiscus, along with a shoal creek vitex that should bloom this year. Also picked up an Owari Satsuma and a Meyer Lemon. Filled the beds with agapanthus too, so hopefully all that together will help with my lack of bees.

Pillage hopefully none of your neighbors sprayed roundup. That shite will destroy a colony. Saw a pic of a guys nuc box in Luling and he had over a 1,000 dead bees in the ground due to roundup. If the queen survives they will rebound. Hopefully that didn’t happen in your area

My tomato plants are doing well. Lots of blossoms and some small fruit already. Cuces are still slowly growing. My pepper plants are doing well. Haven’t topped them yet. My merleton vine is doing well and halfway up the trellis. My garlic is maturing nicely and some bulbs are the size of my fist. My yellow onions are getting big but not producing big bulbs. I may have gotten a wrong type for south Louisiana. Have to do more research for replanting in the fall. Everything else is doing fine. Oh and found my first caterpillars on my tom plants. Time for thuricide.

Nice! Yeah it works really well. Once you see a cluster of blossoms and you hit them with the brush and you see pollen, guaranteed they will set fruit. Only problem with doing this I was having too many blossoms set fruit and the plant was producing smaller tomatoes due to so many tomatoes on a plant. It’s a nice problem to have.

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You make those triangular bean towers?

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Nah, got them from my FIL. I have 5 total. No idea where he got them.

I kinda just hit the flowers with the bristles. More than one way to skin a cat I'm sure.

Thanks. This is actually what I did this morning and I saw pollen coming out.

When are you baws gonna plant okra? I have a few seeds laying around and not sure if I should wait or let them get started.

I use the toothbrush method and it's awesome but when I was too lazy to change the batteries and just thumped the clusters a few times and everything on them set fruit. All you're doing is knocking the tiniest bit of pollen loose so that it hits the pistil. Toothbrush just makes it 100 times faster and removes the anxiety that you might thump too hard and knock a flower loose. Truth be told wind does it just as well, I just like to be sure with the tomatoes. I never pollinate my tabasco peppers by hand and every blossom sets. Squash are another animal, those suckers are the pandas of vegetables and between lack of pollination and borers I've just about given up on them. Somehow my cucumbers make like crazy all by themselves and the borers leave them alone.

I’ve always heard wait until it’s balls hot to plant okra, but I figure we’re close. Maybe I’ll put them in the ground this weekend.