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Old April 28, 2014   #46
Vespertino
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Thanks Kat!

Here's a pic of the milkweed, I moved it to the side when taking the pics of the lantana because these don't have flowers on them yet


I'm going with the theory that you can't have a happy garden without happy (beneficial) bugs
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Old April 28, 2014   #47
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Your plants all look beautiful! And I just can not believe how well you are doing there with a bum knee.

Your Brazilian Petunia's are a gorgeous plant to grow. I had some last year. They will each get to be about 2' wide in 3 months time. They are very easy to propagate by cuttings and you can even cover a low lying branch with soil. It will root and you can just snip it off to start a new plant. No need to buy more it is very easy to multiply what you have already got.

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Old April 29, 2014   #48
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Thanks a million Patti for the valuable advice about the Brazilian petunias! I had no idea they were that easy to propagate, I'm going to follow your directions and multiply as many as I can. I went back to the nursery where I bought the petunias but they were all sold out, but I visited another one by chance and they had LOTS! So I bought 3 more pots, that should be plenty to start my petunia army with.

Physical therapy was rough today, so I took a few pain pills then I felt GREAT. Once 5pm rolled around I was itching to do some gardening while the meds were in effect. It suffices to say that I went a little overboard. I made two huge batches of container potting mix and went to town. I planted out a lot of seedlings in grow bags. I planted 8 tomato plants (evan's purple pear x2, rose quartz multi, vorlon x2, bbb, SCP and JD's special c-tex) in 7 gallon bags, 4 edrine eggplant seedlings in 3 gallon bags, and another 4 squash in 3 gallon bags (2 zephyr, 2 striata).

By the time I was done it was too dark to take pics, but this morning before I went to PT I snagged a few shots of some updates.

My peas seem to be doing OK, I really wish I'd planted the in the ground sooner. The old leaves seem to be dropping off, but new growth is looking good. I also planted 2 more snap pea seeds in the planter hoping to replace the ones that died and one of them is peeking out of the soil.




More of my tomato plants are starting to bud flowers!!!! I'm so happy, since they survived so much wind trauma this year. This is my SCP:



It also looks like my zephyr squash and striata d'italiana zukes are going to flower. There appear to be what looks like flower buds growing out of the stems, I'm so excited!!!




And now for the bad news: something is eating my tomato leaves, I checked the plants but found no bugs on the leaves so it appears this insect seems to strike at night and hide out during the day. At first it was just one of my KBX, but now something nearly chewed off the terminal leaf (with flowers) of one of the sungolds. I had been using a ferti-lome insecticide using natural oils, but it doesn't seem to be doing the trick. I'm wondering if it's time to stop by home depot and pick up some sevin dust and sevin spray... Leaf miners have been damaging my thai and citrus basil seedlings as well, so I think I've made up my mind to go to war.

Also a small update on the knee: I'm nearing 3 months post op, so I can walk without a brace and cane now. Combating muscle atrophy and tendon/ligament stiffness are the current obstacles. I can walk around for longer periods of time and bend at the knee a little bit, but I still recruit the hubs when I need a bag of soil, mulch or a hole dug in the ground.

Last edited by Vespertino; April 29, 2014 at 10:51 PM.
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Old April 30, 2014   #49
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Glad to see your garden is doing so well. I have a friend that broke her hip in a riding (horse) accident, the horse actually fell on her. She'd just now starting to walk without a cane.
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Old April 30, 2014   #50
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I'm so sorry to hear about your friend. A broken hip is probably the worst injury one can have, they are very difficult to heal from. I'm glad she's walking around without a cane, it sounds like she's made it through the hardest part of the recovery and starting to get back to normal.

Here's a panorama of all my grow-bags, over half were from the whirlwind of gardening work last night. click for the full image.



I still have a lot left over to plant, even though I can safely say the bulk of the plantings are done:


I planted the last squash in the upper left a few minutes ago and mulched the tops of the new grow bags. I still have a lot of tomatoes left over, I'll see if I can give away to friends. But I'll be keeping the RQM seedlings for fall.

Leaf miners had badly damaged my thai and citrus basil seedlings so I have them a spritz of sevin spray. I also powdered the ground around my planted tomatoes with sevin powder. I worked too hard on my tomato babies this year to loose them to bugs.

I still have to prepare SWCs for:

Thai basil
Citrus Basil
Genovese basil (store bought)
Brazilian Petunias
Milkweed
Latanas

And I have to plant a couple salvias out front.

I'm pretty sure the hard winter has killed off the rosemary plant I inherited with the house. No matter what I do it just seems to be dying a slow death. It was doing relatively well until the hard freeze about a month ago. All the alternating between warm and freezing weather probably did it in. I bought a couple "Hill Hardy" rosemary plants to replace it with. They did really well for me until I accidentally left it out on the patio during last years ice storm, it was encased in 2 inches of solid ice and not much survives after that.

Last edited by Vespertino; April 30, 2014 at 09:13 PM.
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Old May 13, 2014   #51
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Looking good, Vespertino! Glad to hear the knee is coming along. I had an issue with someone nibbling on my plants as well i had to put up a rabbit fence and replant a few cherry seedlings that had been eaten to the ground! I hope you have better luck going forward
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Old May 22, 2014   #52
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Thanks Kelli! I hope the rabbit fence is keeping those rabbit out so the replacement tomatoes can settle in.

It's been a really busy two weeks in terms of work. But today I found a baby Texas rat snake in a glue trap in my garage. It's becoming clear to me that it's time to get rid of the glue traps; this isn't the first snake we caught although the purpose of the traps were to catch mice (which we're pretty sure we don't have any more). I put down some paper on the trap so he wouldn't re-stick himself, and then a little dribble of olive oil to help dissolve the glue.


Once I loosened his skin from a couple inches of the glue, he seemed to realize what the oil was doing and started furiously wiggling himself free. I had to back off because I didn't want to get bit in case he popped off the trap.



I plopped the trap in front of a liriope patch on my front lawn and watched him vanish, hopefully he'll catch lots of tasty mice in the future!
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Old May 22, 2014   #53
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So glad that you helped him, Vespertino. I would have done the exact same thing...the oil was good thinking. Hate to see any sort of animal stuck/trapped. Poor thing.
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Old May 23, 2014   #54
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My replant has gone well and no more signs of anyone snacking on my plants.
Glad to hear you are doing well and more power to you for helping out that little snake. I KNOW they are good for the garden, but they still FREAK ME OUT! Lol
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Old May 23, 2014   #55
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Have you thought about some passion vine? It seriously attracts large numbers of Gulf Frittalaries! Also, citrus will attract my favorite, the Giant Swallowtail.
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Old May 24, 2014   #56
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Where did you find the milkweed transplants? Every place I've gone to is sold out. I have seed but that won't do much good for this year.
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Old May 25, 2014   #57
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I bought them at the Marshall Grain location in Grapevine. They might still have some. I may have to go back and get more, they currently have a terrible oleander aphid infestation and I don't know if they're going to surivie. Soap and pyrethrin spray are helping with the bugs, but it doesn't seem to be enough. The tips of the plants are now dying back and the leaves are yellowing. I was shocked at how quickly the aphids took over, one day everything looked fine, the next they were covered in aphids.
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Old June 2, 2014   #58
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Tracydr- I googled passion vine, those look beautiful! I'll keep my eyes peeled at the nursery, if I don't see them I'll look into getting some seeds for next year.

Sadly I haven't seen my friend the rat snake in my yard since I helped set him free, I was hoping he'd stick around, maybe he slithered off into the greenbelt area near the house. I heard they have a rat problem on the other side of the HOA *shudder*...

The thrips have moved from my rose plants onto the tomato blooms, this was confirmed when I went around with a spoon and toothbrush to help pollinate the tomatoes, and the toothbrush vibrations shook out a LOT of thrips onto my spoon. Yesterday afternoon I hosed everything down with beneficial nematodes and I did a thrip check again today with the toothbrush and spoon. I'd say there's about a 80% reduction in thrips coming out of the blooms in just 24 hours. Hopefully the nematodes that were washed into the ground will help keep the larvae under control. Even if the thrips are controlled (remains to be seen) I've got lacewings and mantis egg pods on my shopping list to help keep the plants picked clean of bad guys. I have some crickets eating holes in my sage that are starting to tick me off.

I have one SCP in a 7 gal grow bag that has a problem: curling leaves and purple veins. I really hope it's not curly top, so I've moved it out away from the other plants just in case. I'm wondering if it might be root-bound (there are roots coming out of the bottom of the bag) or if it's just a phosphorous deficiency. I'll be adding some phosphorous to the next watering, if it doesn't help I'll see about moving into a larger bag. At least there's one tomato on it!



My evan's purple pear is starting to set fruit:



My summertime green dwarf has almost tripled in size and a megabloom set fruit, hopefully that will be a nice big tasty green tomato:


My sibirsky s. has about 4 fruit set:



The moravsky div tomatoes are starting to plump up, I don't think the tomatoes are supposed to get much larger so I hope that means these 3 will ripen soon:



Some sungolds:



This is a bad pic, but it's a couple of my other SCP tomatoes:



My squash took a beating. When I was busy trying to diagnose my sick tomato plants a couple months ago, my healthy squash were attacked by white flies. I lost every single leaf on all but one plant. They've bounced back after I started tending to them with soap spray and diatomaceous earth to get the whitefly population under control. I have a couple squashes fruiting now.



My delikatesse cukes both died on me, so I took a chance and stuck a couple seeds in the container and I was rewarded! This one looks great, the other (not pictured) is also going well.

Last edited by Vespertino; June 2, 2014 at 10:04 PM.
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Old June 2, 2014   #59
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Tracydr View Post
Have you thought about some passion vine? It seriously attracts large numbers of Gulf Frittalaries! Also, citrus will attract my favorite, the Giant Swallowtail.
The Monarch caterpillars will only eat milkweed. The Monarch butterflies will dine on other plants but not the caterpillars.

I have lots of the bloodflower, the common butterfly/milkweed, and I've been giving away seeds for people to spread. The Monarch butterfly population is precariously low and one of the reasons we can control is the milkweed disappearing.

I found a site that has several varieties of milkweed seeds and they are cheap.
http://stores.ebay.com/FLOWER-AND-VE..._sid=206693028

I ordered all varieties and they should be here next week. I am excited to see how they work.

I'd offer to share seeds but I am in Mexico and it is too difficult to get them up North.

Monarch populations

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Old December 30, 2014   #60
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Wow what a year, lot of learning, but sadly not many tomatoes when all was said and done. Once my knee healed enough for me to return to work my free time dwindled to zero. I was taking care of my plants as best as I could but I didn't have time to post many updates here.

Now I have a few days off so I will eventually post some pics.

In summary my yield was very low, most likely due to the mystery disease that hit all of my plants and the poor HOA soil. It was either curly top, TSWV or a combination of both. The plants survived but the yield suffered, so even though I had 27 plants I didn't have a bumper crop of tomatoes. I had some but they were only barely enough for myself and I still found myself buying marfa campari tomatoes from costco during tomato season.

I also had a horrible time with pests. Early on I had a thrip infestation (which had be convinced for a while that my tomatoes were suffering from TSWV), then whitefiles, then hornworms and leafcutters, Oleander aphdids, then finally a near-biblical swarm of grasshoppers.

Because of the disease issue I didn't get any C-tex or rosella purple tomatoes, and only one Vorlon (even though I had two of each plant). However, that single Vorlon was incredibly delicious!

If the new varieties I tried the taste winners were KBX, Vorlon, Evans Purple Pear, Rose Quartz Multiflora, and Caspian Pink. Dwarf Arctic rose also gets an honorable mention.

When the wind storms hit my poor seedlings I got some labels mixed up and what I thought was a summertime green dwarf was actually a dwarf arctic rose. The dwarf performed so well that I'm won over!!!! While I will still be growing some select beeftseaks, I'm going to focus on dwarfs and cherry/pear types in 2015.

Of the varieties I grew the ones that didn't set fruit or died (disease as the probable cause) were Rosella purple, C-Tex, Egg Yolk, Russian Queen, and Summertime Green. I will be growing all of these again for 2015 except for RQ and Egg Yolk.

Of the varieties that fruited for me, I didn't particularly enjoy the flavor of Black & Brown Boar, Sweet Carneros Pink, Benissionante, Moravski Div and Sibirsky S. Now, I should mention that SCP & BBB were EXTREMELY productive in the Texas heat and they did set fruit even in 100 degree weather. Sibirsky and moravski also rebounded when the heat wave was over. In the end I grow for flavor and I think I've decided that I prefer a sweet tasting tomato to a complex one with significantly less sweetness. All above were incredibly bland or lacking in acitidy, with the exception of BBB. BBB struck me as very odd. It was salty, rich and complex, but with a heavy lingering funky flavor and not very sweet. Not good "funky" but bad funky, almost gamey and unpleasant (think running over a dead skunk on the highway).

Predictably, the small tomatoes did very well for me (relatively speaking). I'm very glad that I gave Rose Quartz Multiflora a try, it's such a TASTY cherry! It's slightly less sweet than the sungold but it has more of a complex red flavor- my eyes rolled back into my head as I ate my first one. Since it was one of the plants hit by disease I had a very poor fruit set, despite an abundance of blooms (there were more flowers than leaves!!!). Evans purple Pear was very productive in the heat, and despite being hit with disease. I enjoyed the flavor very much even though it wasn't super-sweet.

After this year I came to recognize a preference for small cherry or pear sized tomatoes since they keep well and are just so convenient for meals, and taking with me to work for snacks or caprese salads. They're also great for sharing with curious co-co workers, no mess or cutting required.

KBX was glorious, there is nothing more to say as so many have sung their praises about it. Caspian Pink was also a very nice tomato I'm growing again next year. Dwarf Arctic Rose was a really surprise, the only one not effected by the poor soil and Curly Top/TSWV issue I had with all the rest of my plants. The hardy and stocky stems took with wind storms like a boss, and the tomatoes were very good!

So that's the year in a nutshell. I'll post some pics over new years vacation

Have a great New Years everyone!
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