re: 2020 Garden Thread

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I am going to do a full soil test for next year.

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Why wait? I do one every year. In fact, I just went pick up one of the LSU ag test kits this morning.

What I found out growing heirlooms is that if you plant tomato plants in the same spot you grew them last year they are more prone to disease. You should rotate them to other spots.

Conveniently enough, I was doing some research on onions a few days ago and bookmarked this link. LINK

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1. As soon as you see them develop flower heads you should either snip off the flower at the top of the stalk or, if the stalk is quite thick, snip the whole thing off about 1 inch above the bulb (but not the leaves). Doing this stops the plant from wasting energy on making seeds.

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Yes, that is the info I read as well. That's why I'm going to clip the heads and see what happens. I may pull a couple to use early as well since some have gotten quite thick.

I may try Lastrapes in Opelousas. They aren’t far. Triple 13 is what I normally use and usually works fine.

I did. Didn’t find it made that big of a difference.

I’ve had really good success with it. Also very easy to measure/convenient.

Looks great. What kind of dirt do you use for your bed?

I'm going to have to supplement mine here shortly. I need to pull my broccoli plants and I need to loosen the soil up a good bit. I'm thinking that I'm just going to add some vermiculite and peat moss, and amend the planting holes with compost. In the past, I've just amended the soil as a whole with compost. I think this had made it heavier than I'd like.

Assuming you're talking about the fall, I'll echo that. My fall tomatoes were pretty much a flop. I only harvested a few. Took me forever to get them going, then once they finally got to producing size, I caught hell with some kind of leaf spot. I fought it pretty well, but it would just keep coming back. I don't think the plants were ever able to really focus their energy on producing fruit. They finally started producing in November, then that random freeze right before Thanksgiving killed them all. It's a shame too, because I'm pretty sure if that freeze wouldn't have happened, they'd have survived into January.

I have a question for those of you that start with seed indoors. What are you fertilizing your starts with? I read that you should start feeding when the first set of true leaves develop. I have about half of my seedlings getting to that point now.
As a side note, I love to tinker so I am running a few experiments after I get my first starts done and in the ground.
I bought three sets of lights.
One 4' 2 Bulb T8 florescent fixture with 6500k 2800 lumen bulbs.
One 4' 2 bulb LED Hyper Tough 5000k 5000 lumen fixture from Wallyworld.
One full spectrum 75w LED fixture with white red and blue light. The light from the fixture is more white than red or blue and around 3500k. This one is about 10"x 10".
All are around the same cost per fixture. I am going to see how they each do with some extra pepper seeds that I have. I'm not looking for power savings or anything, just how they look after about 6-8 weeks and how much I had to fiddle with the lights, watering, and such. I MAY try doing them in Hydroponic grow tubs to take the feeding variable out. That and the DWC or Kratky Method sounds like a rabbit hole I could get lost in for a few months or years.

Anyone doing hydroponics or aquaponics these days?