Nyan's 2020 garden

[Nyan]

Got enough time off work to post my first of the year... Hope you all are doing well!

Cabbage in a new bed if filled with about 6 inches of chopped up blackberry stems, then covered with compost and soil. We'll see how that works out...

The Cauliflower plant I posted about previously. Planted in March 2019, got a head off it in June, another on January 1st, and it looks I might get two off it this spring if all goes well.

The Pawpaw seeds planted in fall 2018 that will need to be transplanted this fall. I'm hoping the Pecan tree planter pots will contain the tap roots until I can pull them and separate them... Pulling them up should be quite the tug...

Maybe I'll get motivated to post some more in the next few days, but it not, I'll update during vacation in a couple of weeks.

Much more planting to do!

[SQWIB]

Looks great

[TomatoNut95]

Nice cabbage! What variety? Cauliflower never did for me, my last was frostbitten.

[Nyan]

Dutch Flat I think. I just grabbed a 6 pack at the local feed and seed when I had an infrequent day off and didn't pay much attention to the variety.
Luckily for the Cauliflower I bought a big old roll of floating row cover (75% sun I think - the white stuff next to the plant...) and I cover it through the winter, and again at the first sign of spring critters. I've had very good success using that over the last few years. The cover protected the plant down to 22 degrees this last winter with very little damage.
I'll post a pic of this years cauli in the next day or so. Those plants are a fair bit larger than the cabbage, because they are planted in the area where I made the compost pile last year.

[TomatoNut95]

Have you ever attempted growing cabbage or other brassicas from seed? I normally just do what you did and grab a six-pack of cabbage, because when I attempt from seed, it's just shameful.

You mentioned concrete beds under my garden thread. Now why would you say they were a haphazard? My raised beds aren't too perfect either. They are constructed out of PVC boarding. I HAVE to have raised beds full of bagged soils in order to grow anything since my own natural dirt is rubbish. Red clay to be exact. Concrete when dry and sticky when wet. I have many insults for it, lol! What type of soil is your natural soil? In my area the dirt is spotty. It can be sand over there and clay over here. I'm resting on a clay spot. All my new 2020 raised beds are filled with sand brought in from down the road, amended with bone meal, Espoma slow release and a bit of this and that.

[imafan26]

Very nice.

[Nyan]

Have you ever attempted growing cabbage or other brassicas from seed? I normally just do what you did and grab a six-pack of cabbage, because when I attempt from seed, it's just shameful.

I used to grow quite a lot of different stuff from seed, but it's more effort than I want to put in for a half dozen or so per variety. I also learned that getting 50-75 pounds of food per day out of the garden was a touch more than I could eat or even give away. And I've started planning for old age which means more shrubs and trees and less digging and kneeling!

You mentioned concrete beds under my garden thread. Now why would you say they were a haphazard? My raised beds aren't too perfect either. They are constructed out of PVC boarding. I HAVE to have raised beds full of bagged soils in order to grow anything since my own natural dirt is rubbish. Red clay to be exact. Concrete when dry and sticky when wet. I have many insults for it, lol! What type of soil is your natural soil? In my area the dirt is spotty. It can be sand over there and clay over here. I'm resting on a clay spot. All my new 2020 raised beds are filled with sand brought in from down the road, amended with bone meal, Espoma slow release and a bit of this and that.

Yep my concrete beds often don't have a long life as I keep pulling them apart and trying different layouts or soil mixtures. My greatest failure was making a Hugelkulture bed with a Santa Rosa plum tree as the buried wood part, and having the whole thing ringed with 6 ft tall trees that came up from the limbs that I thought were dead. I've found that pulling a bed apart and starting a pecan tree in it works GREAT, as the last pecan I did that way is the same size as some twice their age planted on flat ground.

Our soil is good for some things and bad for some plants. The area is at the southernmost foothills of the Appalachians and the parent material is granite based. This means it doesn't soak up the rain as well as most soils, compacts very hard when dry, and doesn't build a good porous soil structure. We add lots of organic material and bust down a good ways into the soil to get the compaction loosened up, and it becomes pretty good stuff. We also get about 58 inches of rain a year which is pretty nice.

[Nyan]

Just a quick and somewhat out of focus pic of the baby pawpaws on one of the trees planted in a retired raised bed.

With good weather that tree will be loaded, as I counted around 60 little babies on one side of the tree, with more up too high to see...

[applestar]

Ooooh so that’s what they look like when they set fruits? My 2 PawPaw trees have been blooming for the past 3 years or so without ever setting fruits but they are still small — maybe 8-10 feet tall. Just are now/or finished blooming — some blossoms were dark maroon and some were green (just age of the blossoms?) ...did NOT get the chance to try the dead fish under the trees trick...

Looking forward to your follow up reports.

[Nyan]

Yep they are cute little things, but they will be bending the branches soon. Usually they set an average of three fruit per bloom and often one or two will fall off when still very small.

You are right about the age of the blooms. They start green and finish a deep maroon before drying and falling off to reveal the little fruits. Those fruits will be very small in the beginning (the size of a sharpened pencil lead) but grow to the pictured size within a week or so.

I never tried the dead meat thing, but when the blooms would get maroon and the ends of the petals started to bend outward, I would use a fine brush to collect pollen.Then I would walk it over to the neighbors trees and paint blooms and bring back their pollen to mine. I only did that a couple of years before I realized they were pollinating all the way up the tree without my help.

I'll have to see if I can find the picture that used to be my desktop background. It showed some of the pawpaws in the tree with a tree frog on top of the fruit. I guess the fragrance as they get close to ripening attracts the bugs and the froggies follow.

Good luck, and hope you find some fruit out there this year.

[TomatoNut95]

Here's one of my froggies!

[Nyan]

Cute frog!

I did find one pic of the frog on the pawpaws, but of course it is a crappy out of focus nighttime picture...
Anyway...

[TomatoNut95]

Aww, that's adorable!!

[Nyan]

The Cauliflower is looking good growing about as well as anything in the garden due to that last frost we had a couple of weeks ago...

But you can see what happened to the one plant that had the row cover get blown off that night.

[TomatoNut95]

That's what happened to my last batch of cauliflower: frostbite. I kinda thought cauliflower was more frost tolerant than that, but.......

[applestar]

They look so healthy! I’m jealous

[Nyan]

Must be the steep ground it's growing on... No, I turned the darn camera again...

We've been lucky this year with no prolonged warm spells. I've been chomping at the bit to put the row cover on the plants, but no bugs yet!

Not a normal year at all. And you can tell when you look at my little corn patch which the most uneven I've had in years. Warm weather stuff is all behind, but other stuff is going great.

Yellow squash that popped up in a bag of compost, so I spread a few of them out in a few spots with plans to thin them after the next cold spell takes a few. Probably had 50 plants sticking out of that bag when I started.

Blueberries are also going crazy with very good pollination, as the blooms didn't get burned up by the sun. This is a Brightwell that I planted 3 years ago. The Premier berries are just about as loaded.

[TomatoNut95]

Nice squash, I'll show you mine when I get the chance. What kind of yellow is it? Straightneck, Croockneck or Scallop? I'm doing Yellow Scallop and Green Zucchini.

[Nyan]

Yellow straight neck for me. I used to grow zucchini, but I got buried with too many to eat.
And of course, the daughter likes the yellow better, and Dad must obey...
Also planted some spaghetti squash for the first time in years. Have a diabetic neighbor who avoids pasta but loves the spaghetti squash. He'll be happy in a couple of months.

[Nyan]

Well, getting cold tonight so I was pulling the floating row cover out to protect the little ones.

Figured I should cover the Cauliflower too, and I found this:

I guess the weather stayed cool and made them start heading out earlier this year. I'll be picking a couple of heads in the next week!

Last year I was picking Cauli at the end of May and early June... Quite a difference...

We'll call this one a win...

[TomatoNut95]

That's a lovely little head of cauliflower! I guess I'll never get to grow any. Mine never does.

[Nyan]

I guess I've gotten lucky lately. Amazingly we have had almost no bugs on the plants at all this year. Usually it's a battle all the way...

(And I couldn't wait any longer so I went ahead and picked one today.)

Actually I needed to pick at least one today as there are 4 more right on it's heels.

Happy, Happy!

[Nyan]

And for the not so happy news...

I tried an experiment in one of the raised beds this year, and the results have been less than overwhelming...

I had a bunch of small yukon gold potatoes sitting around last fall, so I went ahead and planted them in a 4 X 10 bed to see if they would get a jump start on the season in the spring.

FAIL!

As you can see, I actually gave up on them and planted a rosemary plant, a couple of Dino kale, and some onions around the edges.

Now I have a wonderful mess...

Guess it's okay though, as the pecan tree growing at the edge of the bed will inherit the whole area next year. Maybe it can shade out those invasive white strawberry plants, that take over everything.

[TomatoNut95]

Wow, that is one beautiful head of cauliflower! Good job, I'm envious!

That's a nice bed, despite the failed potatoes! And if your onions do better than my onions I will be supper envious because I've NEVER done good onions either What fertilize do you give yourself? This year I put bone meal on the soil prior to planting, so I'm hoping for better results this time.

[Nyan]

The onions in the back (small) bed got a lot more amendment than these and are about 3 times bigger, so they will be a better example.

I fluffed the soil with a spading fork, then chopped the top few inches and mixed in a couple of handfuls of triple 13 fertilizer, a handful of lime, a handful of ashes from the bonfire, and a handful of old urea fertilizer that was slightly moist from the humid air. Then I pack the soil down tightly around the sets planted just under the surface, as they seem to like a compacted soil and widen out better when the top of the bulbs are at or above ground.

(I've been adding the moist urea to several beds as an experiment this year. It is just slightly starting to de-nitrify, but when added to the lime it immediately starts pouring off the ammonia so fast it will clear your sinuses! Then I just bury all that a couple of inches deep so it turns the NH3 into NH4+ and binds it with the soil to give the early nitrogen they seem to like.)

The funny thing is I almost never grow onions anymore, but they had the sets for 50 cents a pound at the local Rural King store - and I loves me a bargain...

[Nyan]

Dang it, I forgot to take a picture of the bragging sized cauliflower I picked yesterday!

It just barely fit into a wal-mart bag, (Alabama standard of measurement!) but I took it to the house down the street, and they have already cut it up and eaten about half of it...

Probably never get one that size again...

One more chance with this one, if the temps stay down a bit...

[TNCatHerder]

Here's one of my froggies!

Have you named this guy yet?

[TNCatHerder]

I have never tried to grow cauliflower but I have tried and failed with broccoli more than once. Do they suffer from the same pest that eats broccoli leaves almost over night? Those green and brown caterpillar types that you can only find at 2AM with a flashlight?

[TomatoNut95]

Here's one of my froggies!

Have you named this guy yet?

Ha-ha, no; I will find more than one of those guys in my backyard. I'd get him confused with the others and couldn't tell him apart. But I think one of them was a mother I found a bunch of eggs in my water barrel this morning that I had to remove, you'll see them posted in my garden thread

[Vanisle_BC]

Nyan, I envy you with cauliflower heading up in early May. When do you start them and when set out? I'm in zone 7 or slightly warmer. but the local seed co. advice is to start indoors early March and set out late mid to late April (when we almost certainly get some frost so I wait till mid May.) 'Super Snowball' is listed as 65 DTM so even setting out mid April would mean waiting far into June for a harvest. I'd love to be getting cauliflower now instead of well into summer, and my climate zone is close to yours, so please tell me your methods.

[Nyan]

Well I'm kinda lazy, so I buy whatever comes to the local nursery (or big box store) as soon as they get the plants in.
I put them in the ground in late march and cover them with 75% light floating row cover. I leave it on most of the time as we have A LOT of insect pressure in Alabama. The row cover does a great job protecting them from frost damage too. The plants this year went through a cold spell with a low of around 24 degrees one night, and they still did great.

For soil prep, I plant them where I started the compost pile the year before. I turn the compost over in the fall and move it to the next plot, leaving a couple of inches on the ground. In the early spring I just fluff the ground with a spading fork (without turning the soil over) and chop the top couple of inches up with the tines of the fork.
Fertilizer is Ag lime and triple 13, with some slightly moist urea (46-0-0) to make the ammonia release into the soil early and give a quick nitrogen boost to the baby plants.

Wood chips or straw on top of the soil for mulch and that's it. We get lots of rain in the spring so I almost never water.

Usually we have a rapid warmup in the spring, with temps in the 90's by now, so many years the cauliflower slows down and I don't get them sized up until late May/early June. This year has been unusually cool, so all the cool weather stuff has gone wild, and the normal warm weather stuff is behind.

Lots of food and row cover protection seem to be the key things that make the difference for me...

Heh! you are from B.C.? I check out Chek tv newscasts several times a week just to see what is going on up there! I like that channel as it reminds me of television from the old days when I was growing up in the midwest part of our country...

[Nyan]

Not much new going on in the garden, strawberries and cauliflower are about done, so I guess I'm ready to pick and try the Dino Kale for the first time.

I'm not a big Kale fan, so I'm leaning toward de-steming and massaging it under cold water, then sauteing in olive oil, adding some sun dried tomatoes, garlic and roasted chicken broth, then a bit of pesto at the end.

If it's still "yucky" then, I'll be giving away all I can... LOL

But otherwise, with the rain and cooler temps lately, we've had a flush of chicken of the woods mushrooms around the base of a tree I cut down a couple of years ago!

Cool and wet the rest of the week, so maybe I'll try some out before they turn to cork!

[TomatoNut95]

Ha, that's a good way to dispose of stuff you grew but don't want. I've grown Sweet banana peppers and just didn't care for them so gave them away. Grew some Basil plants that I didn't like the flavor of, so gave the plants away. My Chiltepin peppers were too hot, so gave them to my cousin.

[Nyan]

Yeah, I was famous in the neighborhood the year I planted nine eggplants and treated them too nicely. I was picking about 4-5 a day, and leaving them in bags on everyone's front porch to find the next morning... (the only guy in the neighborhood with a garden, but they weren't from me... heh, heh)

Speaking of giving away, I usually plant a round tomato or two in the front so the neighbors can come over and help themselves, and I've gotten to the point that I usually just move volunteers up there for them each year. They ask what type of tomatoes those are, and I tell them "Wonder tomatoes" ('cause I wonder that myself...) and they always love the free tomatoes.

This year's candidate:

As you can see behind the little guy is the cauli plant that took the brunt of a 23 degree cold spell with the row cover blown off. It has four heads on it, each about the size of a black walnut in the husk.
But I got huge heads on all the rest!

[Nyan]

BTW, a quick update on the failed fall planted potatoes.

The bed looks a bit better as they size up, but sure to be a disappointing yield. Oh well, lesson learned.

Not sure why they came up so poorly and so late after the others, maybe the Yukon Golds don't like that, but I think that is the last time I'll try fall planting...

[Vanisle_BC]

Nyan, till now I neglected to thank you for responding to my query about cauliflower timing. Somehow I didn't see it until it was quite old. I've never used row cover as early-planting frost protection but maybe I should do that. Usually I just wait till frost danger is past.

On fall-planting potatoes; I've known a couple of people who habitually just put a couple back in the ground at harvest time. If growing different varieties that could be a comparison experiment. I like trying things like that to see what I can learn.

I'm curious. What is it about CHEK TV that reminds you of your earlier midwest home?

[TomatoNut95]

What kind of soil and fertilize do you provide your strawberry plants? Everytime I get one it dies. Somebody told me that strawberries like sand, so I usually plant mine in a sandy cactus soil mixed with a little MG. Died. Are strawberries just picky or I am I too dumb for them?

[Vanisle_BC]

My strawberries are not soil-picky. Neither am I and they just grow wherever I put them. My soils and fertilzing are less than ideal. I think you must have had some other problem with yours. How often has this happened? Try again? Just abuse them?

[TomatoNut95]

It's happened with each strawberry plant I ever tried. I put it in a pot of sandy-like cactus soil and eventually they just don't do. They'll bloom and may actually give a scrawny, runty fruit, but nothing good. No, I do not abuse my plants, with the exception of them being out in the 90 degree heat while I'm hiding in the 75-80 AC cool.

[Vanisle_BC]

I once read about somebody who believed in talking to his plants - Told his reluctant fruit tree "If you don't produce this year you're going to the dump," and got a bumper crop.

My strawbs are some in the ground, some in pots; no special soil but doing OK. Sorry yours don't work for you.