On 10/23/2015 3:22 PM, songbird wrote:
T wrote:
...
30! How do you keep them from cross pollinating?

i don't. most beans will self-pollinate so most
of what comes in is true to the original. once in a
while a bumble bee or other pollinator will do the
honors for me and i will get cross-breeds (which is
why i now have so many that i no longer care to
count them).


Also, months ago you told me raised beds were not a good idea
because you always wanted more space. Well ... I could ot
afford the cost of water this year so I let my back lawn
go. Now I have tomatillo and purslane growing where
grass use to grow. So, now the plan is to just do
as you said and turn the whole stinker into a garden.

yeah, today i was out moving rocks and scraping
the crushed limestone away that forms a pathway
between two gardens. hopefully by next spring the
two gardens will be joined together and i'll have
several hundred more square feet of garden space.
we turned the neighboring perennial garden back into
a veggie garden and then are combining the two
gardens and thus removing the separating pathway.
i'm looking forwards to working in this new space
as it is much easier on me to weed and plant in
larger gardens and having more space also means i
can rotate within a garden space and have subplots
of different veggies.

and, well, having more space means i can have
spots to dig holes and bury stuff more easily too.


Next year the game plan is to carve holes into the
decomposed sand stone (very very hard soil) and make
my own make shift pots (providing I don't need a jack
hammer to go a foot deep), fill them with compost,
and have my garden spread out all across the old lawn.

good luck with that! sounds like a lot of
good vibrations will be coming your way if you
do need to use a jack hammer.


Since the cold weather started, my zukes now have
the white powder mold something awful. And on both sides
of the leaves. But, since I stopped watering the
lawn this year, it took an extra two months to hit.

as the sun shifts south it's just that time of
the year too when some plants take it as a signal
that things are done for the season. diseases
late in the season are not an issue i worry much
about as most of the production is done anyways.


I think it is about time to start pulling the worst zukes
out.

up until last week we'd not had a hard enough frost
to kill off most of the garden plants, but that is
no more. now everything that is not cold tolerant is
dead and most of them are buried. finished up burying
several loads of garden debris a few hours ago (before
i started scraping the abovementioned pathway out).

we had some powdery mildew hit the cucumbers and
squash plants this late summer but they kept chugging
along up until it started getting cold.


songbird

We're still getting goodly amounts of eggplant, sweet chiles, and
cucumbers. Probably won't be long before we get our first frost though.

The fall spinach, cabbage, beets, and carrots are up and growing too.

George