On 6/10/2015 5:04 PM, Terry Coombs wrote:
George Shirley wrote:
On 6/10/2015 1:34 PM, Terry Coombs wrote:
T wrote:
On 06/09/2015 04:42 PM, David Hare-Scott wrote:
Terry Coombs wrote:
T wrote:
Hi All,

I planted zuke seeds in these cute little 3" peat moss
cups. Three per cup. Not all the cups have sprouted
(I know, PATIENCE!).

When I go to plant them in my garden, can I separate
the multiple sprouts from the same cups, or should
I just prune out the two small ones?

Many thanks,
-T

I like to leave the 2 strongest in each hill . You think zukes
take patience ? Try sprouting Anaheim peppers . My record is zero
sprouts for two years effort . Grrr . Which reminds me I need to
get the okra seedlings in the ground .

Unless your seed is old it is common to get very high germination
rates for curcubits so I wouldn't be putting more than one seed per
pot anyway. If you do, chop the weakest and don't disturb the
roots of the best, curcubits resent this and it will tend to set
them back. This is the reason that the traditional planting
advice is to sow directly. My system is to plant them in tubes,
the square-section plastic sort
that you buy tubestock in that are about 15cm (6") deep and 5cm
(2") across. These encourage the roots to go down not around and
you can get the whole plug out in one chunk at transplant time so
there is no transplant shock. These are much more effective than
shallow jiffy pots. If you want (say) 3 plants you can sow 5 or 6
and plant out only the best. This system costs almost nothing and
invariably produces strong seedlings that take off in the ground
quickly.

Thank you!

Toilet paper tubes work well too ...

Yup, took your advice on those last fall, also can include paper towel
rolls, neatly cut of course. They rotted out quicker than the peat
moss cups and just disappeared.

Hot as Hades outside now, having to water the raised beds daily.
Squash is dying out from the heat, green beans are blooming again,
crowder peas just started blooming, tomatoes are coming in ripe
heavily as are the eggplant and cukes. For some reason the sweet
chiles aren't doing well, haven't found out why yet as last year we
got tons of chiles.
George

I finally got off my butt and planted some more green onions today ... and
decided to go ahead and plant some herbs , a couple of hills of gourds ,
some habaneros and a row of red ripper peas and some whipoorwill peas .
Pretty late , but most of that seed came from the seed swap a couple of
weeks ago . The swap was supposed to be in Feb, got snowed/iced out .
This is my first attempt at growing dried peas/beans , we'll see how that
goes .

We've always let some beans/peas dry on the vine and kept them over for
seed for the next season. I pick some of the biggest and best to be seed
and mark them with twine or a piece of cloth just so I don't forget and
eat them.

Just got the power back on here after loosing it for about an hour. 96F
outside and it got up to 86F inside before the power came on again. I am
seriously thinking of installing a natural gas generator since we have
so many outages here. There are at least a thousand more homes being
built within a square mile of us and outages can only get worse.