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This is about the latest OSC Reviews Everything:
Best tomato I ever had was a Bradley. According to what I've seen online, it's not a hybrid; if this is true, those volunteer tomatoes should be good next year. Of course, when I get volunteer tomatoes, they come up in September.
Really do water when the seeds are just in. Often.
Plant fall gardens in August. It's inconvenient, but if you don't, things won't be ready before frost, and they just sit there through the winter.
Plant something you don't like and it'll really take off!
Posts: 1877 | Registered: Apr 2005
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Fall gardens. you blow me away. I TOYED with the idea of replanting peas in time for the cooler weather of fall, but thought that was too weird. Next year ...
Of course, this year we are getting temperatures in the high 30s in October - unusual for NC. The basil is all dead. But some of the more robust plants are still producing. So I guess even THAT cold isn't too cold for some.
Thanks for the tips!
And I've never HEARD of Bradley ... so now I'll look!
Posts: 2005 | Registered: Jul 1999
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Your old screenname uses a different e-mail address, Libbie -- is that the one you used when you tried to recover the password?
Posts: 441 | Registered: Apr 2005
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I don't want to claim I'm an expert! And I haven't done the pot-plant gardening...until this fall, so I don't know how it'll turn out.
If it were me, and it was an outdoor deck, I might try lettuce this fall, or wild onion -- something that's good to have absolutely fresh.
The Mother Earth News had something about filling in old laundry baskets with *very* fertile soil, and putting in tomatoes...but they want warmth and sunny weather.
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I planted a cherry tomato plant in my front garden this year. I thought it would be sort of hidden and the homeowner's association wouldn't notice it. Well, that plant was unbelievably enormous, and incredibly prolific. It pretty much ate the rest of the flower bed. And I don't even like cherry tomatoes that well, so most of them just rotted on the vine. Next year is going to be very, very interesting when it comes to weeding out volunteers, I fear!
Posts: 3149 | Registered: Jul 2005
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Well, the tomatoes came out OK, as well as the basil and the red peppers, but everything else was a bust.
Posts: 157 | Registered: Apr 2005
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If you're in Virginia or points south of that, if you plant right away, you can still get some greens in that'll be big enough by mid-late December -- cilantro, Asian mustards like tat soi, small radishes, etc.
Or another cool thing you can do is to start greens now that may not get very big before winter solstice slows things down... but if your winter is mild enough, they'll survive it and then take off in February and you'll get huge crops of greens for a month or two before the plants go to seed. Great way to get greens early in spring while waiting for more freshly planted stuff to mature.
Ones I regularly do = savoy-leaf spinach (hardy to 5-10 degrees F), kale (12-15 degrees), cilantro (15 degrees), curley parsley (15 degrees), sorrel (0-12 degrees).
Posts: 2911 | Registered: Aug 2001
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What do you with your spinach, that makes it not die? Mine usually refuses to come up, and what does come up always dies.
Posts: 1877 | Registered: Apr 2005
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We've already had 6 or 7 frosts here, a couple of them VERY nasty, that last one was in the low 20s...
Spinach dying... hard to say without seeing it... could be a soil thing, if there's a soil micronutrient called boron missing from your soil, then vegetables like spinach, beets, and chard will struggle and be sickly. Boron is added in teensy amounts -- something like a pound per acre, since if there's too MUCH added, it's also bad for plants. (Or you could add good compost -- quality compost will often have some boron in it.)
Or the spinach dying could be from some soil disease -- it's usually good not to have spinach in the same place in the garden for 4 years. A neighbor farmer of mine who grew spinach ran into trouble with this, getting plants that became all yellow and sickly.
Posts: 2911 | Registered: Aug 2001
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The stables help me out every year. I was thinking maybe it was really really sensitive to how deep I planted it (I followed directions, but maybe not carefully).
Posts: 1877 | Registered: Apr 2005
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When are you planting it? Here in central Virginia I'd wait to seed it until at least Sept. 5 or 10th -- I've tried planting it in August, and that's too hot for it -- either the seed would refuse to germinate then (it doesn't like hot soil), or if it did come up, it'd rot in the heat and humidity a week or two after sprouting and they'd all die. Waiting until September really makes a big difference.
Posts: 2911 | Registered: Aug 2001
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Waiting until September really makes a big difference.
