I gave a set of last years seeds to a friend of mine at a local store, they were:

1. Tobasco
2. Thai Hots
3. Caribbean Red Hots (HABANEROS on 'roids) Absolute VOODOO peppers!
4. Long Red Cayenne's

I'm expecting some seeds back for Vietnamese peppers - more on that later.

But tomatoes are going to be the one thing I want the most to happen right....
I reckon I need to buy a roll of two inch fence for them to grow around.

That will be forty five bucks, but is re-useable and is about fifty foot worth

I can make a lot of cages out of that...

PS: Maples - I hear ya bud. I considered myself blessed when I got hold of the FIVE HORSE tiller that has been causing me so much trouble.....

It's a long day diggin' in the dirt when that is all you've got - but it beats the crap out of a SHOVEL!

MARK? Never quit....
There is a lot of very cool stuff still to come

 

Dad bought a used Troy built rear tine tiller, the old ones with cast iron gear box, steel gears belt driven with 2 pulley setting to go with the gears, dad had to replace the belt, he put it on the low pulley, man it'll dig now.
No garden for e, I have nowhere to put one and no one to help tend it as mom and dad live 200 miles away.

 

I try to have cucumbers, carrots, sweet & hot peppers (several varieties) & tomatoes. Every thing I can grow in a limited area to make chow-chow. I have a separate herb garden with rosemary, sage, dill, thyme, lemon balm & whatever else strikes my fancy that year. I have 3 cherry trees, 2 apricot trees, 2 apple trees, 1 peach tree and 1 hawthorne tree. They are small, and only the apricots have yielded crops large enough to do anything with (apricot jam....mmmmm!). As they grow larger, I'll have more work, but enjoyable work.

 

I'm waiting to see dill and chilantro sprout at the moment - they make a good container plant. I'm also going to see what happens with some dwarf lemons in large containers.

Below is a good diagram of pepper plant groups - I usually plant them in blocks just like that, and then allow three or four feet between groups so that I can get between them. A group of eight plants would be a double row around nine feet long.
I plan on groups of six this year ("6-packs" )

This makes for nice tight blocks of plants that are wind resistant.

Tobasco, Habernero, Cayenne, Thai Hot, and many others have a full grown size of about three feet tall by three feet wide. That means to some degree they will grow through eachothers space forming a single large "Hedge". This is desireable when it gets stormy!

Also: One problem I had last year was some kind of bug that chewed through the base of the stems of my seedlings, so I also recommend a six inch circle of sevin dust and snail pellets right around each seedling from the very start.

~Dutch

 

Zuchini will grow to about a nine foot diameter.
Bunches ("HILLS") of five or six plants set six feet apart will allow you to get in and around them -you really don't want vines like that to get tangled together...

Summer squash (Yellow Crooked Neck and Straight Neck) seem to average about six to eight feet in diameter. (5 or 6 growing in a circle around a common "HILL")

Pumpkins and Mellons tend to grow very large vines that are actually laid out in a "CHRISTMAS TREE" pattern. They can run well over thirty feet!
My best advice there is to AVOID GROWING THEM IN HILLS...

It works out much better if you plant two of each twenty or thirty feet apart and train them towards a point about ten or fifteen feet to one side of each other. Otherwise you end up with a JUNGLE that is almost impossible to keep track of.

I know that runs counter to the classic method, but you should have seen what happened last year when I grew them for the first time
It looked like my garden had been attacked by some form of GIANT KUDZU


That picture was taken early in the year - before it was all over the watermellon vines were spreading out into my driveway and I hit more than one with my riding mower.

The picture below was in late july or august and the pumpkin vines ran even further before it was done. One of them topped out at over sixty feet! I had to train it back towards the start of it - because it ran out of room. I did all of that just so that I could see what they looked like, and "OH MY!" did I ever find out...

Sadly - about the only time of year pumpkins are in demand are thanksgiving and halloween. For that reason alone, I think only one or two pumpkin plants a year are all anyone ever needs. (IF you even bother with a monster like that) I gave away a dozen or more pumpkins so that my neighbors had jack-o-lantern material, they never fed anyone.

The watermellons on the other hand were enjoyed by all...

My advice here is that the best place to plant a pumpkin vine is in a spot where you really don't care what grows there...
But they sure are awesome looking. The flowers are around eight inches in diameter

It is the most massive vegetable you can ever grow...

"And if I can do it - YOU CAN!"
(He says, BRIGHTLY)

(all of these pictures are from 2009. The white stuff in the last photo are SEVIN dust - I put it down before the flowers opened)

 

I'm going to prune the roses back to about 18 inches today. I'm also going to prune the last of the trees (2). BTW...pumpkin pie is good ANY time of the year...

 

I found it strange that nobody around me was a punkin pie fan. People grabbed the extra Zuchini's left and right though....

My one gripe with zuchini is the thick skin. But I got a good idea:
Strip the skin off with a potato peeler....

It works like a charm!

 

We made sweet pickles and sweet relish from them, used my food processor, planning on doing it again this year. Dad like fresh pumpkin pie, not very many people make them anymore, may try my hand at it one day.

 

Zuchini bread is also delicious year round. Just slice & freeze to use later. I've also made chow-chow with summer squash, and I'm sure zuchinis would work just as well.

 

Ours is like chow chow, but is too sweet for that use, It's more like a sweet relish, it's great on hotdogs.

 

macgiobuin:

I got your SASE today, and put a sixpack plus one in it... I put them in the mail slot INSIDE the post office, but it's a friday.
I don't know if they work weekends. But they are definitely headed your way!

The extra seeds are from "WEEKS SEEDS" in Greenville NC - something they call a "BIG JIM" chili that produces a pepper as long as 12 inches that is a cousin to the Anaheim Chili of fame and notoriety. A "Chile Relleno" made with that would be doggoned interesting...

If you go to the WEEKS SEEDS website on a google search and look it up, that is what I sent you.

I figure I only need six seeds.

If anyone else wants some, do the same.

PLANTING SEASON IS ALMOST HERE!


~Wolf

-AKA-

~Dutch



PS: I also got a new catalog in the mail from "PARKS SEEDS" that has a lot of real interesting stuff in it. You can go to a seed company like that and get catalogs sent to you by mail without spamming your EMAIL if you work it right.

 

Thanks!!! I've been out of town for a couple days. I'm looking forward to trying these new peppers!!!

 

In the last two days I've spent more than a quarter of my tax return on "YARD".

A 20' by 100' roll of black plastic and a 150' roll of five foot tall "Concrete Wire" fencing to make tomato cages and trellis's out of was a hundred fifty bucks.

Another kennedy note went into tractor parts to get my long awaited John Deere running.

The fencing will have to be cleaned and painted if it's going to last for a few years, it isn't galvanised. But I'll make back a lot more than what I spent in the long run.

I'm simple - if I can get lettuce, tomatos, and a few other things to do any good at all this operation is a success!

 

Get the rust conversion paint to speed up the process, I know the stuff you're talking about, I misplaced my twister, but I'd grab ties from a job site and use that to secure them. LoL Drive rebar in the ground to anchor it, just not be out there in a storm.

 

I plan to drive a 3/4 or 1 inch stick of PVC into the ground on three sides of them and use zip-ties to tie them together. The man I talked to at the lumberyard said he just clips the last horizontal wire and drives the ends of the vertical wires into the ground - but then he said something that got me thinking:
"The part that's in the ground will rust away, you lose about four or five inches of it a year"

Oh no I won't! Not if I can help it... Hopefully the stakes will hold it an inch or two off the ground.

The fellas there also pointed out that tomatos need lots of water. I'm seriously considering digging six three foot by three holes in the ground, or whatever the depth of a large leaf and garden bag is (probably closer to four feet), lining each of the holes with a trash bag, and punching some holes around the sides of the bags about a third or halfway up - then back filling into them. What that would do is form a giant underground planter that has a water reservoir in the bottom to keep more water under the plants

I know it sounds pretty screwy on the face of it, but it makes sense to me

The next two things I need to do are to measure off two twenty foot wide strips that will use every last inch of that one hundred foot roll of plastic to best advantage, and get my tiller up to speed for the year.

(EDIT: 23 FEB) I surveyed out the plots I'll be planting today. 2,000 square feet of just about everything I can think of.
Two will be 50X10, one will be 50X20. I may do ONE or TWO pumpkins this year, but THAT'S ALL!
Tomorrow I'll be setting up carrot and other small plant trays.