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Post by bjd on Jun 4, 2023 6:28:38 GMT
As I said before, there are almost no pickup trucks here Just out of curiosity, where did you say that before? When I talked about digging a large phormium out with a pick-axe and you said it would have been good to have a pick-up truck to pull it out.
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Post by bixaorellana on Jun 4, 2023 15:18:21 GMT
Guess I'll have to start memorizing everyones posts so I don't make any more terrible mistakes.
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Post by whatagain on Jun 4, 2023 16:19:47 GMT
Our spinaches are ripe for harvest. Was very fast.
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Post by bixaorellana on Jun 4, 2023 16:40:19 GMT
Is it Spring there, Whatagain, or Summer?
I have a place to start a vegetable garden, but am waiting on a kilo of diatomaceous earth I ordered to get rid of the many ant mounds with tiny stinging ants that are on the plot. In the meantime, I sprinkled some mustard seeds onto three short rows next to my small herb bed. The little plants practically sprang out of the ground!
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Post by mickthecactus on Jun 4, 2023 17:15:10 GMT
Our spinaches are ripe for harvest. Was very fast. Very fast indeed. Well ahead of mine.
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Post by bixaorellana on Jun 15, 2023 23:39:31 GMT
Well, the ants laughed at the diatomaceous earth, but I soldiered on & put in my no-dig garden bed.
It's fat & fluffy -- compost from a coffee plantation -- and bordered by papaya logs. I planted it on Saturday & saw a couple of things emerging yesterday evening. Today (Thursday), few okra & bush beans have pushed themselves out of the ground. I am beyond excited.
The man who brings me the dirt wanted to give me corn plants this past Saturday, but I asked him to wait as there is a place I need to dig up & prepare to receive them.
Instead he gave me a bunch of canario chiles and what has to be 10 kilos (no exaggeration) of green bananas.
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Post by bjd on Jun 16, 2023 6:06:01 GMT
I had heard the words diatomaceous earth on an American gardening video but hadn't actually checked to see what it is. Is it used to lighten soil for drainage?
My vegetable gardening is just a few tomato plants. Of course, since I throw the occasional tomato bits into the compost, my flower beds have little tomato plants sprouting all over the place.
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Post by mickthecactus on Jun 16, 2023 8:52:26 GMT
Can’t have too many tomatoes!
There’s a theory that diatomaceous earth discourages bugs in pots and some cactus growers use it.
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Post by mickthecactus on Jun 16, 2023 9:46:34 GMT
Picked this morning
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Post by whatagain on Jun 16, 2023 12:16:53 GMT
Gorgeous.
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Post by bixaorellana on Jun 16, 2023 17:05:38 GMT
I had heard the words diatomaceous earth on an American gardening video but hadn't actually checked to see what it is. Is it used to lighten soil for drainage? It is made up of the fossilized shells of diatoms, which form deposits of silica. The reason for using it to kill insects is that it supposedly desiccates their bodies. It's used in all kinds of products -- toothpaste, for one, for its mild abrasive quality. npic.orst.edu/factsheets/degen.htmlThose strawberries are jewels, Mick.
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Post by cheerypeabrain on Jun 22, 2023 18:08:52 GMT
Some of my potato tubs... carrots, onions and more taters....
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Post by bixaorellana on Jun 22, 2023 18:16:02 GMT
Glorious abundance!
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Post by bixaorellana on Jun 29, 2023 6:06:37 GMT
Not a vegetable, but .....
Yesterday I got a dwarf banana. I dug a hole while the compost man (Pablo) went to get the plant. Whoops ~ it was much bigger than I thought it would be. Once the hole was deep enough, he set the tree, which is at least 5' tall, down in it & we started backfilling. He stopped me when only the roots were covered, then stomped down the soil all around the tree. After that more soil and more stomping. Apparently this is the right way, so it's a good thing he was there or I would have done it differently. It's setting down in the hole now with a dry moat around it -- dry because I was instructed not to water it, but to let it be until it rained. The moat area is for when shoots come up around the parent plant. It rained this evening. I'm dying to see how fast this thing grows.
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Post by tod2 on Jul 3, 2023 13:23:31 GMT
It is made up of the fossilized shells of diatoms, which form deposits of silica. Now I know! We used to have a swimming pool filter that used diatomaceous earth - it looked like a thick pale grey sludge when removed for a new lot. These days the filters use a fine sand.
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Post by whatagain on Jul 3, 2023 16:01:16 GMT
We had our first cucumbers. Delicious.
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Post by bixaorellana on Jul 3, 2023 21:43:53 GMT
How nice! Nothing like eating from your own garden.
I spent most of today adding to my no-dig garden, except that I had to dig up much of the site. Got a fine, fine harvest of buried bricks & broken bits of this and that. Then I went to one of the local mini-general stores & got a bunch of cardboard to lay down. I only had 2 1/2 gunny sacks of compost, so augmented some of the existing garden, then made two rows where the new cardboard is, leaving the rest of the cardboard waiting its turn.
I'll get more compost from Pablo soon. Since it's all from a coffee plantation, some of the weeds I pull up are baby coffee plants.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jul 4, 2023 5:04:56 GMT
You should get a good crop of cardboard!
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Post by bixaorellana on Jul 4, 2023 5:34:04 GMT
What a stupid thing to say.
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Post by bjd on Jul 4, 2023 7:15:59 GMT
How long do you have to leave the cardboard before you can plant anything?
I have read about the no-dig method but don't see that it would work in existing flowerbeds. I used to turn over the soil every year about 15 years ago in my Toulouse garden but stopped doing it. Here I never do so but it wasn't because I had heard of "no-dig". It's just easier to only make holes to plant things. However I do have lots of weeds all the time.
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Post by bixaorellana on Jul 4, 2023 16:21:39 GMT
Bjd, the cardboard is never taken up, just left to rot down. It's covered with compost or good soil and that can be planted in immediately. It sounds as though you're already using no-dig in your flower beds. Starting from the ground up with cardboard & new soil would only be practical if you had a large enough blank spot or were extensively renovating a bed. I imagine no-dig beds get weeds, too, whether dropped by birds, blown by the wind, or creeping in from the lawn. If you had a particularly weedy spot, you could experiment with covering it with cardboard, then covering that with compost while maybe also dressing the rest of the flower bed with compost if that was practical. Here are pictures of my very rough & ready vegetable garden. You can't buy starts of vegetables in Mexico, so everything had to come from seed. I bought new packs of seed, but absolutely nothing came up from the mustard, parsley, & dill packs. Their allotted spaces have now been given over to other things which I hope will do better. Here is a shot of the first bed ~Longer shot showing the section added yesterday ~The new section with some cardboard yet to be covered. It won't be much, as the end part will be walkway ~The vine on the east(ish) wall that you can see in the first photo. This is a volunteer chayote/mirliton that dropped from the neighbor's vine on the other side of the wall ~The west wall, which I have heavily pruned since moving in ~
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Post by bjd on Jul 5, 2023 8:51:30 GMT
That's great, Bixa. It looks as though you have a nice enclosed place to garden in now. A nice brugmansia too -- I won't plant one because their seeds are extremely toxic.
I have picked a few cherry tomatoes already but this morning went to pick a bigger tomato and found that birds had pecked away half of it. It was quite low on the bush.
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Post by cheerypeabrain on Jul 5, 2023 16:06:55 GMT
Perfectly gorgeous plot Bixa. What are you growing? Beans? Potatoes or asparagus in the 'humps'? You could grow your own sweet potatoes too, the growing season is too short here...and melons...you could grow squashes! Fabulous.
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Post by bixaorellana on Jul 5, 2023 19:11:52 GMT
Thanks, Bjd! Those Brugsmania are all over town, including growing wild They're mostly yellow, but there are some white ones and there's a lovely peachy-pink one growing at the edge of a pasture near me that I have my eye on. In the evening, the sweet lemon scent of them permeates my house.
re: pecked tomatoes -- my sister in central Texas is complaining of the same thing. She's at war with the mockingbirds over the tomatoes, saying that they're now attacking even the green ones. I'm wondering if it's not drought causing them to be so persistent.
Thank you, Cheery! The plants that are up & growing are bush beans, okra, eggplant, & bell peppers. There is a pineapple growing at the end of the bell pepper row. Another row has ginger & turmeric, just now starting to emerge. I've planted blackeyed peas in the non-productive parsley row and sowed tomato seeds in one of the new humps. The other hump has some herbs.
In the picture with the uncovered cardboard, you can see sand up against the wall. That's the area where I've dug up bricks, rubble, half-burnt junk, and sand. I've spread the sand out over real dirt & will augment it with compost. Then, when I can get my hands on some yellow sweet potatoes (not the season now), they'll go in against the wall.
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Post by bjd on Jul 5, 2023 19:34:09 GMT
Brugmansia grow here in gardens but not wild. You have to buy them at garden centres and they are not that common so I suppose their hardiness is borderline.
Last summer we had a terrible drought and blackbirds pecked all the tomatoes and even my neighbour's radishes. But this year we have had some rain and everything is quite green. I think the blackbirds just eat what's easy -- they make lots of holes in the ground and just found the tomato at a good height.
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Post by bixaorellana on Jul 5, 2023 20:22:06 GMT
They probably think you planted tomatoes just for them. Would a birdbath lure them away from the tomatoes?
My mother has jimson weed/moonflower/Datura naturalized in a bed in her yard in southern Oklahoma. It's quite ornamental & would be a substitute for Brusgmansia, as it must be hardier. I'm happy to have that yellow Brugsmansia in the back where I can admire the flowers, enjoy the scent, & not care about the constant messy shedding of the spent flowers. It would take over back there if I didn't prune it.
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Post by bjd on Jul 6, 2023 5:21:35 GMT
Would a birdbath lure them away from the tomatoes? We are constantly being told not to leave any standing water, even in flowerpot saucers, because of mosquitoes. With climate change, we now have tiger mosquitoes which used to live in Africa and have now moved north. They were even worse in Toulouse, where it's hotter than here, but we have mosquitoes too. Eating outside in the evenings used to be a pleasure but now we don't do it any more. You need something with running water and that's just complicated.
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Post by bixaorellana on Jul 6, 2023 16:47:25 GMT
The birds would probably wind up doing what they felt like anyway. The very humid climate here has bugs I've never encountered before -- some of them leave puncture wounds, and some leave deep welts. We're also warned about standing water because of dengue. When I lived in Louisiana, with its very rainy climate, I read that mosquitoes only need about 30 minutes in wet grass to lay eggs and have the larvae get going. The grass in my yard needs mowing right now, but is too wet to tackle at the moment. re: dengue -- It seems there were a couple of cases reported on my street, so the city sent out a fumigator. I got him to come do my house & he was super thorough. It was nice of him & convenient for me, but he didn't do the outside!
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Post by bixaorellana on Jul 20, 2023 22:17:16 GMT
I have teeny little pods on the bush beans now!
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Post by whatagain on Jul 21, 2023 15:58:56 GMT
My wife planted some pumpkins. These ones grew on the fence and start being heavy. we have 3 words in French that all translate into pumpkins 🎃 citrouille. The one that becomes a coach in Cinderella. More orange and smaller more for animal feeding. potiron. Bigger and more yellow. potimarron. Small one more tasty imo.
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