Brag Board

Here's the thread to brag on yourself, your latest accomplishment, your veggies, your animals...
but please not the G'kids, or kids, OK? I've noticed they kinda take over other threads, and though I don't mind children, I'd like to find out about other things folks are up to. If you've got a truly great kid (and who doesn't), start a thread for braggin' on your genetic contribution or gud edikatin' or just plain good fortune with 'em.

I don't have kids, I have veggies which requires some babysitting, some feeding, some discipline, but it pays dividends a whole lot quicker. Then it freezes and I get a few months off.... LOL

So here's how that [in]famous high tunnel is doing...
This is the SO standing in the midst of the summer squash seeds Cajun sent along. They are sure loving it in there!

The Heinz 'maters are pretty pleased with the set-up as well....

wow great job
well my pics of my garden are helplessly surronded by weeds at this present time LOL so no pics until i get them jungle things under control LOL
have you tried pumpkins in the high ( not wind ) tunnel ?
we lucked out and got our first pumpkin, though the vine borer got the vine , we got a good size one
its in the basement
the rest of the little pumpkins went to the chickens . They really liked the seeds. :)

Nice work Jay! I like seeing what a weedless garden looks like :) Great job you are doing there.

I bought my first rototiller today. If I can type tomorrow night after using it I will report back....LOL!

good luck Hineni
i love my tiller too but i m using it less and less .
i love it for a new area that is big . Clay is tough to till
have fun with yours

The pumpkin is outside, but I think I planted it too late to get anything other than big leaves. =0( There's a little group of melon plants in the tunnel... the pvc trellis is for them.

It's getting down in the mid-40's already, so this GH is my big hope for ripening anything other than Heinz 'maters. There's red peppers, jalapeno peppers, 3 other kinds of tomatoes, summer squash, cukes, and eggplant in there. I could already use a bigger GH! Dang...

These beds are all and-turned and this winter I've got plans to raise one of them considerable so I can put hardware cloth down and protect gopher-choice crops... like beets, chard and sugar pod peas. That was part of my edicashun this year... those little suckers will burrow right around lettuce and bite the tap root off each and every beet... only ate one whole beet, but put the cabash on a dozen of 'em. Er... I wasn't planning on pickling beets TODAY... gophers write my schedule.

With the sugar pod, they passed up the snow peas and grabbed the newly sprouted sugar pod seeds... tried twice and nothing. I've trapped about 8 gophers so far this year... not my favorite part of gardening, that's for sure.

So I do envy you your tiller, Hineni. I'd like to have one of those little mantis type ones for the beds now.

next year i m going to get a broad fork . I realy think that will work for me . :) they look fun. I can use the excersise . sorry to hear the goghers get the beets before you.

Oooo, yes. I've been eyeing those broadforks too. They sure are proud of them, aren't they? I got soil blockers this last year, but only tried them once for starting beet seeds--worked great--and then something came up and for some reason they didn't get watered and they all died... operator error. %-P It takes me a while to incorporate new systems into my old...well, it'd be gilding a hog to call it a system... shoot from the hip style. LOL

I tried planting by the moon signs once... it was way too complicated for my little mind. And even when I did figure it out, those didn't happen to be the days I FELT like gardening. LOL

Don't think of them as weeds, think of them as plantings for beneficial insects. That's what I tell myself when I fall behind.... =0)

Yeah! A brag board!

Last year my husband and I built and fenced-in herb garden/pond area and many of our plants were transfers from other attempts at growing various useful plants. One of those was a Black Elderberry, that had just barely survived for two or three years, but had never grown more than about 8 inches. So, after it was transplanted, it took off and is now about six feet tall and actually producing berries. It's quite exciting to finally see the "fruit" of your labors!
The photo is of the 'herb garden' half of the fenced area, the Elder is in the upper left corner. This was taken in June, so it's grown since then.

Wow! That's gorgeous! Love the boxed herbs... attractive, unusual, and you can reach everything. That elderberry tree is going to be gorgeous and give so much shade when it grows up... there was a old Mexican elderberry down the road from me when I lived near Albq. and in the spring it woud just be covered with lovely little white flowers, so pretty in the desert. =0)

Show us more?

Beautiful herb garden! You have the right to brag.

Mom, I love your garden---so pretty and certainly is neat and tidy. Is the black elderberry like the one I saw in Wayside Gardens? Theirs was really expensive so I couldn't have one. We have the wild elderberry that grows around here and they are really pretty when in bloom. Thanks for sharing your garden with us. Laverne

Moms that is georgous !
Jay LOL yeah i hear you on the moon thing.
there is a weed i have found that the JB's will eat first instead of the plants ??? yaea go figure
i m trying to get a good picture of it . I like to plant it around my chicken pens. The chickens love the JB's
well i m tilling the weeds. I usually just pick at them everyday and feed the chickens with them but they sure have gotten away from me and it looks like a jungle . So the tiller it is . maybe i can walk in the garden now LOL wish me luck

The elderberry would not have been expensive. I'm sure I ordered it out of a catalog, but I don't remember which one. We've, so far, planted 20+ herbs, tomatoes, sweet potatoes, and six grape varieties just within this garden - many more outside the fence as well. And room for more. It's such an awesome adventure to plant things and watch them grow! Ya'll know how that is.
This is a photo of the other side of the garden.

The elderberry in bloom.

Aaaah... imagining myself reclining with a virgin pina colada in hand, listening to the gentle gurgling of the fountain... What's your address? I'll bring my flip-flops... LOL

That looks like a fairly xeric design, too. It's nice to see such a water wise oasis in the desert. =o)

Certainly my favorite "aaaahhh" spot - where I can relax and de-stress. If you look closely, there are a couple of more comfortable chairs near the fence by the largest tree in the upper right corner of the photo. I can sit in the shade in the afternoon and enjoy the sounds of the water fountain, birds, and insects while watching my kittens run and play. Of course, this usually only happens when my children are pre-occupied with something else and the heat isn't unbearable. :)

Woo, nicely done Moms! Gives me lots of ideas too, since I'm planning a new place from scratch, even the place at this point...LOL! I love arbors and trellises and what not.

Hmmm, I think we have elderberry growing in the woods around here...I may have to hunt one down and plop it into a pot before I go.

Sue, translate JB's?

Jay - my garden thrived amongst grass when the garden got out of hand, surprisingly. It was a little hard to find the onions in the hay though! Now that I'm moving again, I just lack energy to get out there and do anything. There is a new plot tilled though, for a few fall veggies before I move.

Just don't feed that onion hay to the cows! LOL
This is the first year my garden has looked so nice... I don't know what happened. Well, the summer's not over yet, still plenty of time for the bindweed to cover everything...

JB... June Bugs?

I finally finished it!!! My rainwater harvesting system is up and running. =0) I just got it finished yesterday, and today it rained, the first time in a month. Hooray! We didn't get enough rain to get the tank water level high enough to reach the spigot, but it's a start.

It's an 1100 gallon tank and right now I'm only collecting from one side of the roof. Theoretically we should get enough rain each year to run two of these tanks--one for each side of the roof--but I thought I'd just see how reality meets theory and see if the one side is enough to keep a tank fullish while I use the water for the garden. If it does, then I'll get another tank for the other end of the house and do the gutters from the other half of the roof to it. Otherwise, I'll run both gutters to the one tank.

But this is a project that's been years in the making, and it's nice to finally have it up and working. Now I can tackle another unfinished project... hmmm, let's see.... so many to choose from. LOL

I betcha JB is japanese beetles.

Jay and Moms, love your pix. Jay, the high tunnel is amazing. Makes my Little Greenhouse look, well, little. LOL. Right now there is nothing in it but some lettuce starts, it was too hot to keep the tomatoes & 5-gallon citrus in it. The tomatoes aren't doing well outside, but then nobody else's are either! Meanwhile, the Big Garden is doing well and the sap beetles (for that's what they were) have pretty much gone away so I am finally getting some corn fit to eat. And it's yummy. The original Big Garden was 16 x 32, but I have added a new 16 x 16 section and next year will expand it so the whole garden will be 32 x 32. I have several varieties of squash & pumpkins planted in the new section and the corn there is about a foot tall. Here is a picture of the original section, showing the corn that is ready to pick now:

That's a nice corn patch! You'll be able to put some of that up, won't you? =0) What kind of corn did you plant this year?

I've just got a tiny corn patch this year... after every ear got hit by earworms and earwigs last year, I decided I needed to refine my pest control, kinda get a handle on things before I planted another big patch. I have learned that you can't direct dose the little emerging soon-to-be ears with rotenone/pyrethrin... it burns the husks. I think it may have damaged emerging silk, so I won't get as many ears. The ones I didn't 'burn' I've been dosing with Bt and diatomaceous earth... the plants seem to tolerate that well, let's hope the bugs don't. =0) The ears are fattening up, so in a couple of weeks we'll know.

Nice garden AZ! I can just taste that great corn :)

I didn't try corn this year; meant to but it got 'put off.' 32 feet wouldn't be big enough for the pumpkin monster that has grown out of my compost pile. It has escaped the cattle trailer (compost bin in there to keep the dogs from eating all the goodies...!) by a good six feet on one end and I found new growth about 2 foot out on the other end today. It fills the trailer nearly completely. I guess I'll have to take a photo of what a pumpkin plant can do that sprouts in a well manured compost pile....LOL!

Yes you will! Shades of the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown!
"Renegade Pumpkin Devours Cattle Trailer"

LOL, Hineni, I forgot about the ONE pumpkin seed that my kids & I planted in a compost pile when we lived in the Bay Area -- and the plant took over the whole back yard! So I planted about half dozen seeds in my 16x16 garden addition and guess they will become monsters, too. Take a picture of yours -- and maybe in a month or so I can do likewise. Jay, the sap beetles (little black bugs from hell) attacked my corn patch as soon as the first Silver Queen ears put out their silks. One day the silks were waving in the breeze, next day the silks were gone! Close inspection disclosed that literally hundreds of the little creeps were snuggled down into the tops of each ear. LIke you, I didn't want to use any kind of poison on them, so was just shaking them off night & morning -- then a neighbor told me to hit them with vegetable oil! So then I went out night & morning wih a paint brush & a pot of veg oil. The oil seemed to kill them. But it also interfered with the corn's development cycle so most ears didn't have many kernels on them, so the Silver Queen was pretty much wasted. But the next planting of corn, I think one of them is the old standby, Golden Bantam, but I can't remember what else I planted. Next year, I promise I will put stakes with variety names on them for every batch of corn & tomato seeds I plant. I grew some awesome tomato plants in the little greenhouse, then gave away 2/3 of them, and since I didn't know which was which it looks like I kept all the cherry tomatoes and gave away all the big tomatoes! Oh, well. Anyway, I have two more plantings of corn coming along, I think they are both Sugar Baby. I have some Golden Dream and popcorn seeds I don't have room to plant. I get confused about the SE, SU, SH, etc. where you can't plant them next to each other. Since I don't have any faith in any seeds that I plant coming up at all, I just stick them in the ground, water them, and when they come up I am thrilled. Needless to say my gardens look somewhat haphazard.

BTW, the chickens love the sap beetles. If I hadn't planted kale, chard, squash, and beets in between the corn, I'd just turn the hens loose in there. And the corn is delicious, really sweet, even if the ears aren't full.

"Next year, I promise I will put stakes with variety names on them for every batch of corn & tomato seeds I plant. "

Oh yeah, I say that every year, too. LOL

With the mineral oil, you can get a syringe with a teat canula from your large animal vet that will allow you to insert the oil deeper into the ear, near the tip of it, so the silks will stay free to gather pollen. You might try dusting with diatomaceous earth for the beetles... it's supposed to work on any hard bodied bug (lady bugs included =o( ) and I've been using it to treat the earwigs. Jury's still out on it's effectiveness. The mineral oil will also work on corn earworm, but I've read if the weather gets really hot, it'll get rancid. ??? I don't know if that's true or not, probably only applies in AZ.

I made a great little duster from a plastic soda bottle, burning several little holes in the lid with a tiny nail. I can dust the area of each ear and leave the lady bugs in the tassles alone. =0)

Mmmmm! There is nothing as good as home grown corn!

My husband hung a bug light out at night to attract the moths that lay the corn worm eggs. It cut down on the worms quite a bit, but not completely. Of course, the bug light would also attract beneficials, but no poisons involved.

Does anyone have photos of these nasty beetles/bugs?

We seem to have a huge problem with squash bugs, but I've "heard" that if you put the squash/pumpkin off the dirt (on a board or rock or bucket) they won't bother the squash. I have yet to try it though.

I doubt that would work... the problem with squash bugs is they kill the plant, not get into the squash. =0( My best control was turkeys... they're bug eaters and though they wouldn't eat the adult bugs (I'm not sure anything does) they would sit under those big spreading leaves and pick off the egg bunches, and I think they may eat the nymphs, too. Anyway, when I had young turkeys in my squash patch, I didn't have squash bugs.

Now that I don't have turkeys, I usually grow my squash under row cover until they start to bloom, which gives them a big jump on the bugs. So far so good, though I'm not sure there's a big squash bug problem up here (new place).

Was there anything to kill the moths... a bucket of water or zapper? Or did it just distract them from the corn? How close to the corn patch was the light?

Jay have you tried Guine (Hens spelling ? )
do turkeys scratch like a chicken ?
that would be a good idea for my garden.
next year i plan on a tall fence , electric fencing and guine hens . they don't scratch like chickens do .
yes in this part of Ohio we call them Japanese beetles.
i got one pumpkin plant left ! and its doing amazing !!! like 8 pumpkins on it !!! and its 12 feet vines wow. I m praying for good pumpkins with this plant
what do you do with vine borers ? Seven ? on the base of the vine ?
i have a question if i can hijack your thread Jay ?
can i use a JB trap (the ones with the pheonomes ) and feed them to my chickens ? inquiring minds want to know ? ok actually i m just to lazy to pick them everynight for the chickens LOL
jay that sounds like a good little set up with the duster
i have an old sock and my handy dandy little stick LOL basically use it for deter deer on my sweet potatos . They seem to not like the taste ?

It was a bug zapper that he hung, so the moths were killed. (I have yet to find a moth that is beneficial.) The light is - a rough guess - 20 to 30 feet from the garden, but only because that's where we have a place to hang it and plug it in. You could use a post or something similar right in the corn patch, as long as you could plug it in.

This year we planted our corn in a community garden plot, but there is no electricity, so we'll see if we get corn worms or not. We also planted pumpkins, watermelons, beans, cucumbers, and a sweet potato. This is a brand new community garden, so the little critters that live there think they've just been handed a smorgasboard (sp?). Since we planted in July, we don't have fruits yet, but so far the beans and sweet potato have disappeared and the watermelons and cucumbers are struggling. I think the pumpkin plants are doing pretty well. The corn looks fantastic, but I don't think it's tassling yet. (I haven't been over there for a while - my husband usually waters it on his way home from work, so I don't worry about it much.)

Every year is a new experiment for us as far as what plants do well and which ones don't. It sure is fun to try!

Hmmm... we do seem to be straying a bit... starting a new thread
Bugs...
http://davesgarden.com/community/forums/t/1028689/

I think I answered your questions there.

Must post pictures of the pumpkin! My partner kneeled on the only female flower my pumpkin had managed to produce... =0( Bad partner. No pumpkins for us this year. Boo-hoo. ;_;

Some of my harvest this year.

leha that is a nice harvest and very festive looking !
we got lucky and got 5 pumpkins !
here is one of them about the size of a basketball

Gorgeous! I love that flattened shape.

its a Cinderella pumpkin that gets really red . I don't remember the french name for it "Rouge vif ??? " something ?
when its all ready i will get another pic for you

Nice haul everyone, love the colors and shapes. I'll be a competitor next year, so gear up! I forgot I have pumpkins out in the cattle trailer; I suppose I should check on them. I haven't set foot in the garden yet. I makes me sad. But I need to till it under and harvest some chard.

Ya'll did good!

leha - that looks wonderful!

taynors - your pumpkin is beautiful!

The pictures aren’t very good but I had to brag on the Hummers. We estimated that there are maybe thirty birds swarming around the two feeders.

One more of the birds