re: 2020 Garden Thread

No joke. I've already started harvesting jalapenos and it won't be long before my belles are ready. I think I will be passing out tabasco peppers all summer too.

Tomato plants have been doing well since I hit them with some fertilizer like you suggested a few pages back. I ended up going with a hose attachment but its a little hard to figure out when I've applied enough. I haven't burned them yet though.

I also added chickens recently so I have been busy building that coop. The run will be next to the bed so it should help some what with any pests that pop up. Poop will be thrown into a compost pile that will be great for next year throwing into the garden.

quote:

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Someone did his homework.

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I think have a bee problem or lack thereof, last fall for my first garden a lot of cucumbers never got fertilized, never saw any bees. So I did all the research lol

Nah, it just needed some plain fert. They were scrawny and in poor health plant wise. Since then I hit it with some all around miracle gro fert and they have recovered nicely. I thought I would have had more time before I needed to fertilize in that bed but I guess they were hungry. I also had tomato there in the fall and never fertilized so I guess they sapped everything up.

But speaking of that, I just got in some Earth Juice Bloom that I will test out on a couple of plants. I'll report back how it goes. The entire line from this company has great reviews.

The hose attachment I got had the plant food already in it so I have been using that. They probably really needed the extra nitrogen too.

I also bought the tomato food to use after the plant food was all done. I'll use it on everything except the tomato plants for now until they get larger.

I'll use the Earth Juice on 3 of my tomato plants and see if I notice a difference between them and the others.

Mine are about the same size, a little over chest high. I wouldn't think they need to be much bigger. Even if you go with some kind of bloom fert, they will still grow somewhat taller, just not as fast.

I guess if you wanted to, you could always let them get about a foot taller than the cage then top them. It probably wouldn't take long.

If you have caterpillars, might as well get ahead of them. Spray your plants with Spinosad. Kills anything that eats foliage.

Hard to tell, but it looks like cabbage worms.

Either Thuricide or Spinosad will take care of them.

I started picking jalapeños. The cucumbers are having a turf war with the jalapeños and I’ve had to prune them off twice in the last week.

Ever since I started pruning suckers off the tomatoes, they have been doing much better and have my first couple of those.

My eight ball zucchini had been dropping fruit early but I went today and found it with some massive balls so I’ll be harvesting that soon.

So interesting note to future me and anyone else interested in topping peppers. Out of the 2 Tabasco plants I topped, there was one I thought I cut too early and one I thought was perfect. The “perfect” one developed more spaced out but bigger branches and the other was much smaller for a long time and bushier. Well the “perfect” on is slowly dying because of all the strong winds almost ripping the plant apart and the bushier one while slower to recover from the initial pruning, has blown up in the last few weeks and looks much better. I guess earlier topping is better?