What are you biggest?
Struggles with gardening?
Questions about gardening?
For today's TSPC.
#grownostr
Discussion
Cabbage worms
On cabbage, kale, broccoli, a mix? What are they hammering and where do you live?
Same for me, it’s been broccoli in the past, now it’s tree collards. I presume I need to adopt netting. Southwest Ohio for me.
Sorry it's late. All brassicas get hit. I've resorted to root types (radish and turnip) and kohlrabi since the worms rarely fatally damage those plants. They destroy cabbage plants.
I'm in NW Ohio, newly zone 6a. My garden is at my in-laws' farm because there's decent soil there already, instead of building soil at the house we are renting.
I've kicked around wood vinegar. I've not had great luck with row cover, it's too much of a hassle to work around in the limited time I have to work, so I tend to neglect plants under it.
Where to get started?
Water. The biggest issue will always be water and moisture retention.
Second biggest is onions. I haven’t successfully grown nice large onions.
The key to onions is getting them in the ground as early as you can and making sure the soil is nutrient rich. The reason is that onions are day-length sensitive. They start bulbing once the days reach the number of hours of daylight that the variety has been bred for. So, the bigger you can get the plant (each green leaf will be a ring in the eventual bulb) before that starts, the bigger your onions can potentially be. Fortunately, onions are pretty cold tolerant plants, so putting them in the ground a month before the rest of the garden is possible in many climates, especially if you use some simple protection measures like a cold frame or just covering them with a sheet at night.
There's a breakdown of the three basic day-length types on this page:
Bugs burrowing into every pepper
Bugs eating all my strawberries
Collecting enough carbon!
We finally got a single load of wood chips dropped, but there are not as many opportunities for that out here. We normally have to bust up rotten logs in the woods. We use biochar and leaves too.
I might need to invest in a backpack blower. All those leaves gathered from the woods could be made up for with compost extract. We could do do a rotation so that every place we take the leave from gets to rest for a few years and gets the extract applied.
I am going to talk with a guy who has a tractor for sale. If i get it, I may be able to offer to now other people's fields in exchange for the hay. I would probably gather it lose on a hay fork attached to the bucket.
I know this is at a larger scale than most people are likely dealing with.
Late to the party, but
Can I plant sweet potatoes like I do Irish potatoes? They sprouted slips late this year so I was going to cut them up and drop the chunks in soil instead of rooted plants.