Zones 8-9 Spr/Sum 2011 Veggie Gardening is UNDERWAY Part III

Yes, I had some stink bugs, Linda. I grabbed and crushed some and had a lovely yellow striped spider who did his/her part with a nice big web. They damaged a lot of fruit, tho. I dont know how you get close enough to flic them. They see my hand coming toward them and they fly. I have to be very fast. I resorted to spraying my fruit with insecticidal soap, also.

Well ... I just checked my zucchinis. The Squash Vine Borer did lay eggs.
I am going to spray again tonight with Azatrol and let see if this stuff will work like advertised.
Azatrol: http://www.igrowhydro.com/InfoSheets/InfoSheet-AzatrolPatrol.pdf

Sneak up behind them, slowly and STEADY, Cam... then, flick that bic! You only have to singe them and they'll never bother you again!

I have a congregation of nymphs on one plant, but it's about to get ripped in a minute. Hoping to squish them, though, before they grow up to poke into my next crop of tomatoes.

my harvest today ... I found a hidden cuke ... maybe 12" long ... ouch !!

Where do you look for squash vine borer eggs or squash bugs? I have looked carefully at my zucchini and yellow squash plants and I don't see anything. Of course the zucchini plants are getting so tall and spread out that I have trouble finding the zucchini hiding close to the base of the plant. It would be a total fluke if I don't have one or the other or both. If I don't, and time will tell, I will attribute it to sprinkling horticultural sulpher when I planted and I sprinkle it around the base of the plant every three to four weeks (I purchased a parmesan cheese shaker for that purpose).

The SVB moth lays little brown, pinhead sized brown eggs on stalks and stems of the plant.

drthor
I followed the link you gave regarding the Azatol but there seems to be two different products, Azatrol on page 1 and AzaMax on page 2. It looks like they both cover about the same "bugs so I am confused on when you use one or the other. I just read on Amazon.com under Product Description for Azamax that its formula is exactly the same as the formula for Azatrol. Do you understand the difference in uses for each product? The stuff is also very expensive, $54.95 for a pint and $114.14 for a quart, so even if it does work, it’s a high price to pay to get rid of spider mites, etc.

yes it is Azatrol. I bought it at Texas Hydrophinic in Dallas. yes it is expensive too .... I bought the small bottle.
I don't know if it will work yet ... but I am at war with the Squash Vine Borer !!!! I will have zucchini !!!
hrp50 ... this is the first thing I am spraying in the garden this year .. I normally don't do anything else.
I follow the Moon planting dates, I make sure that I grow plants at the right time of the year and that they are healthy.
I don't like to use any pesticide ... my DH has pets outside just by my veggie garden.
By now I am on my way to the 25% off sale at NHG !!!! yeaahhhhh

drthor
I'm back from NHG after opening the doors at 9:00 AM. There were more people there at that time than I expected. I purchased a Cherokee Purple tomato plant and some flowers but I also asked if they were going to get in any Black Krim since everyone on this site says that it tastes so good. They told me that they may get some in next week since a number of people had requested them.

What is more amazing about your garden than the amount of production you get is that you do it without spraying your vegetables with anything, at least until now! I spray but try to use only 100% organic products.

Now I must go and plant my haul from NHG before it gets too hot.

I was at NHG too. I went crazy !! 25% off .....yaaahhhhh
Black Krim is delicious .... but any planting of tomatoes after today will not be worth it in our area.
I am not doing fall tomatoes this year. I have tried for 2 years and waisted space.
here what did happen in my garden:
the tomatoes grew like crazy, making lots of leaves anf flowers but not fruit production untill september/october ... which by then I needed the space for the fall/winter crop.
The few tomatoes I harvested never tasted like the spring crop.
The green tomatoes I harvested and wait in the house to ripe ... never really made it.
I hope you will be more successful and you will teach me something with your fall tomatoes.

by the way, at NHG you will get 10% discount if you are a member of the Dallas Arboretum

I belong to the Dallas Arboretum but are you saying that NHG gave you 10% off of the already reduced by 25% price, or 10% off regularly priced plants? They wouldn't even let me use my $5 off coupon from their newsletter to pay for my stuff.

Good points regarding a fall tomato crop but I had such a disappointingly crappy tomato crop from the spring, I only picked a total of about 40 or 50 tomatoes from 16 plants and most were Sapho’s, that I am determined to try different things so I might know what I’m doing by next spring. I even splurged for a soil test to see if that was the problem. I plan on only planting one of my raised beds with tomatoes and plant some in containers leaving the rest the raised beds to plant fall/winter vegetables.

No, there was not additional 10% on top of the 25%. Use the Dallas Arboretum membership on your regular purchases.
I never done a soil test yet ! ah ah
Now I gotta plant all the stuff I bought ..... aaaahhhh .. so hot !

Here my latest harvests

I absolute love eggplants and now cucumbers. Still I cannot find any biterness ... my cukes are as sweet as watermellon ... considering that it has been 100 degrees weather for more than a month here with no rain ... so lucky !!1

I have an idea. In this picture you can see how my tomatoes plants are doing: I am keeping all the new growths on the top of the plants and I keep removing suckers and old leaves on the bottom. In this way all the energy is going to fruit production.
I was not going to keep those tomato plants for fall production and i thought to remove them as soon as they stopped .... which is not the case for the tomatoes I have started in December and buried their roots down 2 ' (they are still producing like crazy)
Anyway, I am thinking to plant the cucumbesr I started a few weeks ago under the tomato plants. The tomatoes plants will shade my cukes untill they are strong enough and I can always trim the top of the tomatoes if the cukes are growing too much ...

These are my cukes hardening off in the shade in my back porch.
I will plant them out next wednesday (in one week) ... because the moon says so ...

Drthor, what do you do with all those cucs?! Really. I'd like to know!
I also "shaved" off all the lower leaves from my tomato plants. They had gotten a disease or something. I'm not ready to use the space so I'll just see what they do...
HEY, it's RAINING here!! Right now. Just because I was going to go outside and do some gardening. But I am NOT complaining!
My eggplant are making a new round of flowers and fruit despite the fact that the leaves keep turning yellow and dropping. Bell peppers are ok but I pulled up one because it kept making concentric circles in the leaves which may be a virus? My pickling cucs are ready to be pulled but the Satsuki Madori are still producing even though the older leaves are getting chopped off regularly. Need to spray Neem. The chard and arugula are great. And I finally cleaned and dried my tomato seeds from the SETTfest. It'll be REALLY neat if they actually sprout! A first for me! Janet

Bariolo. what do you mean?
I eat all of those cukes ... yummy ... my DH loves them ... and remember I am a vegetarian so veggies are my life !!
Your pepper plants have a virus. You need to remove them or they will infected the other pepper plants.
Good luck !!

Did someone say, "dried tomato seeds?"

My harvest today.
So many cucumbers and eggplants ... yummy.I will grill some eppgplant this weekend and maybe I could make eggplant gratin.
I am going to roast the peppers and make risotto with zucchini on saturday ... yum !!
and .... ta' da' ... 3 okras ...

Drthor, didn't know you are vegetarian but still. That's ALOTTA cucs!! But I love them too. I'm going to make some sugar-free dills today and several fresh cuc dishes. And I definitely ripped out that yucky pepper bush. I gave it enough time to get better (kept lopping off the viral-looking parts) but it kept growing back infected. So it's in pepper bush heaven.
Wowzer, Gymgirl! Good job!

Janet,
I "guess-timated" there are roughly 75 seeds avg per plate....

Uh, that's 1,200 tomato plants sitting on that table!!!!!!

SOMEBODY, ANYBODY! SLAP ME BACK TO REALITY, PLEASE!!!!

Isn't anybody else posting pictures of their harvest?
I'd love to see somebody else too ...

Rich,
That's pretty much it. All CRUNCH, and not a lot of Jalapeno flavor. And, definitely, NO HEAT!

Don't think I'll be repeating these. Although, I can say they were quite prolific!

I just had a thought, though. There's a way to make 'em what we need 'em to be! Since they have such great crunch, and are so plentiful, I could see slicing them up into an existing jar of pickled hot pepper brine. The brine will spice them up a bit, and they shouldn't be too, too hot!
I Might keep 'em after all!

Linda

This message was edited Jul 7, 2011 12:18 PM

drthor
I haven’t posted pictures because I'm ashamed to put pictures of my harvest up against yours! I don't see how anyone could be excited over a picture of my 5 or 6 okra pods, a zucchini, and a couple of cucumbers. Maybe it will be different in a few weeks because today I’m going to fertilize my vegetables with bat guano (did you know that Ty will deliver to your house?).

hrp, post your pics and be proud of your harvest!! Don't compare your harvest to someone else's!! We're rooting for ANYONE with ANY type of harvest!

Woot!

Thanks for the encouragement stephanietx. I guess I could buy some produce at the grocery store to supplement my meager harvest and who would ever know? But one of my better qualities is that I am honest to a fault and wouldn't even think seriously about doing that.

I wonder if anyone else has ever done that. Just wondering.

Is this your first year to garden?

one of the best things about gardening is the bragging rights- i don't have any photos yet as summer just arrived in the PNW- my only harvest so far is a handful of pole beans and a bumper crop of buttercrunch lettuce, which is now over. carrots are being pulled, and there are lots of tomatoes coming on. i really don't want a big crop, since i just had rotator cuff surgery a month ago, and won't be able to use my right arm for months. i am getting very impatent and discouraged, but there's nothing i can do- i really enjoy reading all the posts---

In a way, yes. I worked way too much as a CPA for 37 years to have more than a few tomato plants in a container that I had time to care for. But since I retired in February 2010, I have been going at it fast and furious. I didn't get all of my raised beds finished until this spring so you could make the case that this is my first real year of gardening full time.

Why do you ask?

I think that folks who are just starting out are often afraid to post their pics because they don't have as much of a harvest to post, but we've all been first-time gardeners and understand the joy in every single thing you harvest, whether it's one tomato or 20 tomatoes.

Good point, stephanietx! However, I read all of the posts in the Texas Gardening, Southwest Gardening, Tomatoes and Vegetables forums along with selected posts on a number of other forums (I believe that I am following 48 forums total). If I had to guess, I would say that I have seen less than 10% of members post pictures of just their harvests. I would like to see it be a requirement that every member be required to post at least one picture of their harvest or their garden area. That would be very interesting.

I believe quite a few of our members may be technically challenged, and simply don't take many photos. And, if they do, they have trouble figuring out how to upload them.

Linda

Gymgirl
That's me you are describing. That 's why I have to get my son involved, er I mean do it for me..

this is really funny ...
HRP50 now: you watch with the Bat Guano .... JUST ONE TSP for plant and that's it !!!!
I didn't know that TY will home delivery ... that's a great info !
I will not need bat guano for the next 3 years ... I bought so much ...
This saturday at the Coppell farmers market at 9am there will be a free class on tomatoes, growing and preserving, how to make sauce and canning.

I will look forward to some of y'all pictures

Then you have people like me who are picture crazy and take tons of pics of their flowers and veggies! LOL I wish we had the option of posting more than one pic at a time.

Yeah, I found that to be the strangest thing when I started posting. Not being a computer geek, I wonder if it's just a programming nightmare to set that up? Oh, well, I always enjoy your pics and everyone else's, even if you have to keep scrolling. Just keep scrollin', just keep scrollin', just keep scrollin'... :)

I had to go to Az and my "patch" got neglected for about a month. Before then I was getting Okra, Summer squash and a couple melons. The Bunnies also visited, so yesterday I spent the day watering, weeding and cutting grass from the fence. It rained last week, finally, so now everything is growing again.

My flower bed tomatoe did pretty good but it gets eveing sun and is about dead, but we did get some before it got too hot. Now we have a catalope growing like crazy in the same flower bed.