Sawyer '14 - Seed Offer

chile_freak · May 27, 2014

1200 plants you're my hero!

Sawyer · May 27, 2014

Seacowboy said:
No worries, next time around maybe. Hope you have a good trip. Thanks, and that's a definite maybe for next time. I usually make the trip once a year.

I wish we could recruit new members but its hard to find hunters up here actually, the ones you do are very irresponsible or have no money to pay dues. The decent isn't bad since I control it with my seldom used climbing gear from years back, its the coming up part I don't like since I have to rely on them to pull me up, but the truck would do in a pinch. That's too bad hunters are hard to find there. I'd imagine there are a lot whitetails there.

Also thanks for teaching me something I probably should have already known or learned by now about the T. cinerariifolium, will be checking to see if the local nurseries have any left and get some seeds for next. Being gone so much when the bugs come and aren't dealt with immediately can lead to disaster quick. That's one of the great things about THP. I've learned, and continue to learn, a ton of new stuff on here.

The layout looks great and look forward to seeing it once all that hard work is done. I just picked up some herbs to get in the garden since I neglected to start those this year myself, gotta get there before thunderstorms roll in here shortly.

I'm behind on herbs, myself. I've got some sage and rosemary I started from seed that are ready to pot up, but a lot of seed I haven't even started yet.

Devv said:
Interesting read on the jet pump design.

I see a ton of work went into tilling that large area, and the soil looks really nice.

250+ plants is going to make you one busy man!

I should have mentioned, I have a Troybilt "Horse" tiller, so the tilling wasn't nearly as bad as it could have been. And you're right, the soil is nice, very nice. It's not uniformly rich over the whole area, but it is deep and largely free of rocks and roots (except where the bamboo is infiltrating).

I'm shooting for about 500 plants in the garden proper, with another couple hundred, maybe, in pots and new beds yet to be prepared. Yeah, it's going to be a busy year.

capsidadburn said:
Space looks ripe John! Can't wait to see it flourish. I'm glad to hear your well issues are in contol. I suppose that's what I have to look forward to if I ever make it out away from town.

Have a great week!

Mike

Thanks, Mike. I hope I can keep on top of things this year. I'd really like to see the garden look the way it looks in my imagination.

Country living is a whole 'nother ballgame from urban or suburban living, but I wouldn't have it any other way.

chile_freak said:
1200 plants you're my hero!

Hey, Paul, thanks for stopping by. Well, I started 1200+ plants, but won't come close to that in actual production. I lost quite a few in flats from inconsistent watering and I'm losing more now to bugs and/or rabbits in the garden. Part of the over-planting is to have replacements for such losses.
Still, as I said above, I'm shooting for somewhere close to 500 in the garden proper and more in pots and new beds. It's going to be a pepper-crazy year.

Here's the weather forecast for the rest of the week:

That's just about perfect weather for planting/transplanting. Today was perfect as well. Only once did it rain hard enough to get wet while working. Most of the time it was cool and cloudy, with just an occasional spitting of precipitation (can't really call it rain). I didn't get any more pepper plants transplanted today, but I did get rows ready for the Jalapenos (5 varieties), Santa Fe Grande, Numex Big Jim, and Numex 6-4. If doesn't rain too much tonight, those will go in the ground in the morning.

I did get a lot planted today, just not peppers. Potatoes (baking type, because I had two gone to sprouts), onions, scallop squash (white, yellow, green, and striped), butternut squash (regular and Greek sweet red), jumbo pink banana squash, Tatume squash, cucumber (2 varieties), muskmelon/cantaloupe (green machine, Hale's best, green-fleshed pineapple aka Ananas D'Amerique A Chair Verte), and more I'm not thinking of right now.

Devv · May 28, 2014

Country living is a whole 'nother ballgame from urban or suburban living, but I wouldn't have it any other way.

I'll second that!

I used a Troybilt pony for 20 years and then gave it to my son, then bought the next size up. This one has a Honda engine and should last me until I'm too old to till..LOL. That Horse model is a beast! I've always wanted one but didn't want to pay the price. I guess I would if was was tilling as much as you are.

Glad you are getting some rain and getting plants setup in the grow area. Pretty soon it's autopilot time!

chile_freak · May 29, 2014

500 in ground and more in containers is still huge! I hit 309 in 2012 and I thought my other half would murder me! After making gallons of sauces and lbs of powder, I still filled an entire kitchen cabinet, and the whole spare fridge and freezer with peppers, pepper relish, pickled peppers, pepper vinegars, pepper purées etc! And all that after giving a bunch away

OCD Chilehead · Jul 15, 2014

Hey John. Was just stopping by to see how your grows goin? Hope all is well and those plants are shifting gears.

Sawyer · Jul 19, 2014

Thanks to all who have checked in here. Sorry I haven't kept things up to date. In fact, there's still not a whole lot to report, pepper-wise. Between the weather taking so long to get right, deer and rabbits and other varmints dining on my plants, and weeds getting out of control, things are only just now starting to take off. I will say the weather has been absolutely phenomenal for July. There has been almost enough rain; I've only had to water a little bit. Last week the lows were getting down into the upper 50s at night and into the mid 70s during the day. (I saw people wearing sweaters... in July.) This is the forecast for the coming week:

I'll take that anytime for July. I'll have to kick up the watering, but this is the longest sunny stretch I've had all year. (Assuming the weather actually does what they're saying, which is not a good assumption at all.)

I have some more weeding to do before I'm ready to post a overview picture of the grow, but just to prove I do have peppers, here's a pic of some Jalapeños.

These are either Ciclon or Colima from seeds from Stefan (meatfreak). I'll have to take a closer look at my chart to know which. I picked two of them to go in a meatloaf I made, along with a couple of Devil's Tongues I received in a most welcome care package from Scott (Devv). BTW, I posted a picture of that package over in his glog, if anyone cares to check it out.

I've got some (White) Devil's Tongues of my own coming on:

These are from seeds I got from either Dave (gnslngr) or Jason (GA Growhead). Again, I'd have to check the charts more closely to know which; I have some of each growing side-by-side. Note the weed growing under the plant. I think that's some sort of chickweed, at least that's what I call it. I intentionally didn't pull it up and I'll have more to say about that in a moment.

That's it for now for pepper pictures, but I have a lot of nons, most of which are pepper-related. I've been paying more attention to the insects in the garden and I came across this unknown presumed pollinator. I think it might be a Dufourea mulleri, but I really don't know. If anyone has any idea, please let me know.

And in the category of better late than never, I finally learned that this is a beneficial Pink Spotted Lady Beetle.

I have for years been smashing them freely, thinking they were just a color variation of the undesirable Spotted Cucumber Beetle. D'oh!

And speaking of cucumber beetles, I have long thought this was a color variant of the Striped Cucumber Beetle:

Now I know it is the Pigweed Flea Beetle. I thought I was being clever leaving pigweed plants to grow as a trap crop to keep these beetles away from everything else. Turns out they feed almost exclusively on amaranth, and without that, they would likely leave the garden entirely. Here's a good .pdf file about them.

And speaking of flea beetles, the Spinach Flea Beetle is probably the most prevalent insect pest in my garden.

At least I knew that one was a flea beetle of some sort.

Earlier in the year, I had a lot Harlequin bugs. Now that I'm between crops of brassicas, they aren't such a problem. Here's a nymph.

I've discovered a trick to smashing them. If you cup one hand under them, when you reach for them with the other, they'll drop off the plant right into your waiting hand. Of course, you have to be not squeamish about smashing them.

I was very pleased to finally find some baby cantaloupes when I weeded the vines. (I'm into my second and third plantings without any harvest due to deer depredation.)

And not so pleased to find this the very next day. I'm not sure of the culprit here.

I've been spraying with a hot pepper/garlic repellent spray and it works, but I have to be very, very diligent in keeping it applied. If I weed something I have to spray that day or the critters will come check out the new buffet (too lazy to root through the grass on their own, I guess). If it rains, I have to reapply, though I'm working on a rain-resistant formulation. If I don't mix it strong enough, plants get eaten. If the plants grow much between applications, the new growth will get eaten. I've had a deer walk up to the edge of the garden and snort at me while I was spraying. She obviously knew, and was displeased with, what I was doing. I just saw two rabbits playing chase around the stubs of what's left of the comfrey. I really should get a depredation permit.

It's not all bad, though, and I have some pictures to that effect, if someone can give me a bump, please.

TrentL · Jul 19, 2014

bmp

I've got 85 in the dirt, 30 in 5 gal cloth, 17 overwinters in 17-19" pots, and 50 spares still in 5" pots.

If you're growing 500+ ... holy moly dude.

I can *barely* keep up with what I've got going and I put a LOT of time in to it.

Sawyer · Jul 19, 2014

Thanks, Trent. I don't have 500 in dirt, yet. I had gotten up to between 350 and 400, but have lost over 50 of those. I've still got hundreds of spares, though, and with the weather as mild as it's been, I'm hopeful. But yeah, it seems like no matter how many you have, they will take all the time you have.

Okay, I'm planning to use some of these for a spicy blackberry pepper jelly.

Usually these are usually dried up and gone by this time of year, but this year they're going gangbusters. Just goes to show how unusual the weather has been.

If I'm not mistaken, this is a tomatillo, which is a little strange, since I haven't planted any yet. I grew some several years ago and did notice volunteers for a couple of years after that. If this really is a tomatillo, it is one persistent plant. I have four of these plants scattered around that I didn't pull up when weeding.

They will be a nice addition to any salsa that gets made, though I've got a feeling it may be just some random solanum weed. Time will tell.

One of the things I want to do with peppers is make some spicy green bean pickles. To that end, I need beans. Since I have a virtually inexhaustible supply of bamboo, here's how I'm trellising the beans. It's not finished yet, but you get the picture.

The gaps in the plants are where deer and/or rabbits ate everything. What's left has been knocked back a couple of weeks. I need to replant the gaps, maybe with squash or melons.

The plants on the front ends of the rows on the left in the above pic aren't beans; they're passion flower.

It is a very persistent "weed" in my garden and it finally dawned on me maybe I should just let it grow. The fruit is delicious when ripe and I think the juice will make a good addition to some pepper sauce recipes. (Note the Pigweed Flea Beetles and Long-legged Fly in the pic. The beetles don't seem to eat the passion flower; they seem like they are just hanging out.)

The tomatillo is not the only thing I've weeded around. I've left common garden vetch wherever it was convenient. This one is growing on one of the superhot chinenses; I don't know which.

I'm experimenting with intercropping the peppers with easily grown ground covers (the chickweed in my previous post, or maybe some creeping thyme) and sparse foliage climbers. The vetch is one and I also have some native wild bean growing in places. The idea is that when the weather gets hot, the ground cover will help shade and cool the soil and the climbers will provide a sort of natural shade for the peppers. Plus, with a little help, the "good" weeds should out-compete the "bad" weeds. We'll see if it works.

When I was setting up the bean trellis, I caught movement out of the corner of my eye and found this little guy fluttering down the row toward me. I picked him up and put him back near the blackberry bushes. (I knew there was a family of cardinals nesting there.)

I later saw another one on the ground and several adults (it takes a village?) flying around and fussing. I had also seen a neighbor's cat hanging around (though after getting a good look at it, I think it may just be feral) and sure enough, the next day all I found were feathers on the ground. Kind of sad, but I'm not quite ready to start shooting cats.

A couple of weeks ago I harvested the potato onions.

These grow like shallots, as you can probably tell from the picture, but they taste like a regular onion. They are also supposed to get as large as 4" across, but I didn't fertilize these well enough to achieve that. They are extremely good keepers, though, and I should have plenty to plant this fall as well as keep some to plant late winter/early spring next year. The goal is to keep enough going to satisfy all my pepper sauce needs.

That's all for now. Thanks for looking.

GA Growhead · Jul 19, 2014

The weather seems good John.
I just had almost three weeks without rain. I got a little over the last two days. Could use a bit more.
I finally put the drip lines down. Was over trying to water everything. That has eased up part of the chore.
Sorry to hear about all the animals feasting on your hard work. Still plenty of time to get a good harvest in.
Rabbit like young bean plants.
They have completely taken mine out in years past.

Sawyer · Jul 19, 2014

Thanks, Jason. In an average year, I've got 91 days 'til first frost and 105 days 'til first killing frost. With luck I'll get 100 days at least. Without luck, well, I don't want to think about that. We've had a first light frost here as early as September 25 or as late as November 11, with a killing frost as early as October 7 or as late as December 6.

TrentL · Jul 19, 2014

We've had too MUCH rain in the midwest here. I was tracking it and from June 1 through July 15 we had rain 27 of 45 days, 12.5" in total. I haven't had to water. In fact, it's been almost a week since we had the last rain and my ground is still fully saturated.... peppers seem to be loving it, along with everything else, except the tomatoes.

The heavy rains were perfect for Septoria to set in on my tomatoes and most were wiped out.

After an early fight with a strong whiff of 2,4-D herbicide from a neighbor back in May, the rains set in hard and heavy.

I've also got an unknown bacterial infection striking on 6 of my peppers now (haven't been able to identify it, I'm about to send a plant in to the state to ID - it's spreading by direct contact which has me nervous...).

Isolating them as best as I can (ripped one right out of the garden, the rest were potted overwinters).

Also frogeye spots hitting a good chunk of them causing some leaf & pod drop.

But overall, they're growing faster than they're being damaged.

Seems whenever nature hands you a boon, it comes at a price.

Sawyer · Jul 19, 2014

I hear you. Too much rain can be a bigger problem than too little. Hope you figure out the disease problems and can fix them. I lost many of first pepper plant-outs this year due to them just sitting there in the wet and cold and never getting established. One of my quince trees has gotten fire blight in it, again I'm sure due to late cold, wet conditions. A lot of my tomatoes are still in flats. I guess I'm shooting for a late crop.

TrentL · Jul 19, 2014

Better late than never, man! Sometimes I wish I had a greenhouse so I could control some of the problems better, but my limited experience with indoor growing on the overwinters, tells me that just causes more and different problems. (Aphids, etc.)

I'll be crossing my fingers for you man.

The peppers in the ground, how big are they getting now?

RE weeding: I laid down weed block between rows this year and a 1" layer of mulch over that. My back thanked me many times over since I haven't had to pull a single weed out of the peppers... most cost effective kickass thing I've ever done for my garden.

Looks neat too.

At the end of the year I'll rake off the mulch to compost for a year, leave the weed block in place over winter, then MAY skip tilling entirely next year. (Depends on if the ground gets compacted; I can shift and plant in between last year's plants to avoid the decaying roots.)

Sawyer · Jul 19, 2014

It does look clean. I grew cantaloupes one year on plastic mulch and they did very well. However, I've got around 5000 sq. ft. of garden space and that would be a lot of plastic and mulch. I just consider the weeds to be mulch on the hoof (free-range mulch?). I pull them and leave them in the row middles. My big mistake was in letting stuff go to seed in the past. If I keep on top of things and don't let the weeds go to seed going forward, eventually the problem will decline. Plus, the more of the "good" weeds I do let go to seed (chickweed, vetch, wild bean), the better able they will be to out-compete the bad weeds.

For the winter, whatever space isn't in winter vegetables or grains, I'll plant to a cover crop of hairy vetch and rye. It really helps with soil fertility to have that green manure to till in in the spring. On the other hand, my yard is not as neat as yours either, so a lot of it probably boils down to one's level of comfort. I kind of like weeding, too, though it does take a lot of time.

My best plants are only about thigh high. A lot of them, though are wider than they are tall. That's from the deer walking down a few rows eating the tops out of everything.

TrentL · Jul 19, 2014

I used 1.5 cu yards of triple shredded hardwood mulch (out of 3 cu yards that I ordered) to cover that patch of garden. It's about 60x22 (1320 sq foot).

Each row cover is 3' wide - I used 9 in between pepper rows (198 linear feet) and just mulched the outside of the outer pepper rows. (Get occasional weeds on the ends, since the mulch is thin and there's no weed block there).

The 300' roll was $75.

For your size garden it'd take at least 5 of them, so yeah, that's a bill ($375). You'd also need a good 7 cu yards of mulch (another $???)

I *wish* I'd had the damn foresight to put strips of it down between my onions. I've lost about 25% of them this year because I let the weeds get away from me. Unlike peppers, which are pretty safe to use a Hoe around, onions are DAMN unforgiving if you get in there with instruments (mine always fall over).

Sawyer · Jul 19, 2014

I rarely have good luck with regular spring-planted onions. Another reason I'm building up my stock of the potato onions, they are more tolerant of weeds.

My long-term goal for mulch is to get enough hybrid comfrey going to have plenty of mulch on hand. (And thanks to whomever's glog turned me on to Bocking.)

JoeFish · Jul 20, 2014

Sawyer said:
I rarely have good luck with regular spring-planted onions. Another reason I'm building up my stock of the potato onions, they are more tolerant of weeds.

My long-term goal for mulch is to get enough hybrid comfrey going to have plenty of mulch on hand. (And thanks to whomever's glog turned me on to Bocking.)

Can you hook me up with some reading on the comfey and bocking?

Thanks for the update! Very nice. I hope to update today.

maximumcapsicum · Jul 20, 2014

Loving the updates John! Your jals look solid. Makes me hungry. Keep the pics coming!

stickman · Jul 20, 2014

Nice to see you back around John! Glad to hear things are beginning to tick over for ya in the garden. It's been a cold, wet spring into summer hasn't it...

Sawyer · Jul 20, 2014

JoeFish said:
Can you hook me up with some reading on the comfey and bocking?

Thanks for the update! Very nice. I hope to update today.

Sure thing, Justin. Jeff H, JJJesse, Pulpiteer, KiNGDeNNiZ, Pepper-Guru, to name a few, all either grow it or are fans. I linked a couple of relevant posts, but you'll find more if you just search the Glogs forum for comfrey. I got my Bocking #4 from Coe's Comfrey and the #14 from Horizon Herbs. The #14 came as partial root crowns, came up almost immediately and is doing well except for some rabbit damage. The #14 was root pieces and, as of the last time I looked, still wasn't coming up. If it doesn't grow, I can already make enough cuttings from the #14 for replacements.

maximumcapsicum said:
Loving the updates John! Your jals look solid. Makes me hungry. Keep the pics coming!

Thanks, Adam. Like many, but maybe more than most, my garden is a late bloomer this year. Stayed tuned, though, because I think it's about to kick into high gear. (Or at least shift out of first gear.)

stickman said:
Nice to see you back around John! Glad to hear things are beginning to tick over for ya in the garden. It's been a cold, wet spring into summer hasn't it...

Thanks, Rick. Yes it has, but it's sure looking better now. If the daytime temps will just stick to the low- to mid-90s for the highest (mid 80s preferred), things will be okay, I think. I really hope to avoid the triple digits.