Male and female flowers, I didn't know that
I knew you would know Walnut!

Did you read about my DH green beans getting all eaten in one day? How do you deal with grasshoppers?

I'm so jealous of all you guys' veggie gardens. I've been reading up on it, but it seems rather difficult to successfully grow some e.g. bell peppers, zucchinis, etc.

we have more slugs here than grasshoppers, but i would probably just use some kind of row cover to keep them out.

http://www.johnnyseeds.com/tools-su...ries/row-cover/
this kind of thing ^^

if you just have a few plants to protect, you can use a pop-up hamper from the dollar store to keep the bugs out


we're supposed to use bug netting over our carrots here to keep out the carrot rust fly. i didn't bother because we just grew a few carrots for my daughter and the carrots turned out beautifully anyways. we have 8 foot perimeter fencing to keep the deer out. once in a while, cutworms will take down whole tomato or bean plants, but i usually overplant enough that if that happens, we only lose a few and have lots of plants left for us.

sometimes we get cabbage looper worms on the kale and brassicas but not enough to worry about them. i usually put down ashes and diatomaceous earth in the spring when the plants are little and that seems to help them survive long enough that the caterpillars don't destroy more than just a bit of leaf here and there. it's kind of interesting--when the bugs start chewing on the leaves, the plants will produce more anti-oxidants to help protect the plant. so it makes the plants healthier for us to eat!

Walnut, That's a great tip about covering them with a mesh. I'm going to tell DH and next time he'll be ready with this..lol

Those carrots you're growing bring back memories of what they use to taste like since I haven't had them in so long and the commercially raised ones have no taste at all or barely any.

Thank you for the tips of covering them with mesh.
The pop-up hamper from the dollar store is perfect!!

Hi fellow gardeners. Sorry for the forthcoming novel.

Ken, congrats on getting started. The first year, you may as well just expect a lot of failure, even if you did lots of research ahead of time. Even your neighbors might have different conditions than you, and you can only figure things out by getting started and experimenting. Keep doing what worked, and only repeat a failure if you think you know what went wrong and you have a solution. Otherwise, it might not be worth the aggravation.

It sounds like you might need a fertilizer made for flowering plants. You know those NPK numbers on fertilizers? The ones high in nitrogen are good for leafy greens like lettuce, cabbage and spinach. The flowering veggies - tomatoes, zucchini, squash, cucumber, etc - probably want something higher in potassium. My first year or two, I used Miracle Grow all-purpose, which was 24-8-16. That's all that was available at my hardware store. I got good results, but I got better results the following year when they expanded their garden department and I got some 15-30-15 for the flowering veggies.

This year, my garden was the worst it's been out of the four years I've had it, but it was to be expected. The weather was just awful in spring until it was just too late, I admittedly neglected it since I was more stressed out over the wedding, plus the arthritis in my spine was bugging me and I couldn't have been arsed to weed. I'll have more enthusiasm next year. I'm already looking forward to it.

...And yet, I still had some success. There's a pumpkin ripening, and I've had a lot of cherry tomatoes. My late tomatoes, Brandywine and Burpee Supersteak, also did fairly well. The zucchini died, though, and the cucumber only produced two cucumbers before the powdery mildew killed it. The peppers didn't do too well - again, the hot weather came so damn late. I also had a slug problem that I procrastinated on taking care of.

If you have a glut of ripe tomatoes, the easiest thing to do, IMO, is just coarsely chop them, simmer them until soft, and puree. Throw it in the freezer. It's great for soup or chili. I couldn't be bothered removing skins or seeds. I don't have the capacity to get into canning, and this works just fine for me.

Recommended forum for gardeners and wannabes: https://www.helpfulgardener.com//forum/ It has a good section for veggie gardening. And you can creep my photos.

I have a fig tree full of fruit!

My wife grew up on a farm in Thailand and has quite the green thumb. Most of her spare time is spent working in the garden. There is not much left to harvest this year as fall is gradually setting in.

I actually live in the mountains north of Tucson where it snows every year so we don't have year-round crops like people down in the valley. We also can't grow citrus, but we do have peaches, Asian pears, apples, plumbs, pomegranates and of course lots of veggies. She grows squash, long beans, Thai eggplants, Thai chilis, kale, broccoli and a few others that I don't know the names of or am forgetting. [Edit] Oh and a bunch of herbs too like lemon grass, Thai basil, rosemary, mint, and other special leaves she uses for cooking.

The hardest thing about going 20 carbs was not being able to enjoy much of our fruit harvest this year. Yesterday we harvested the Asian pears and I did cheat and eat a couple... (I called it my "reward" for losing 3.8 pounds last week . )

Eventually I plan to get out of "weight loss mode" and increase my allowable carbs once I start "maintenance mode" that will allow me a few more veggies and maybe one piece of fruit per day - if I'm lucky!

Aren't you lucky to have a gardener in the family! I love fresh veggies!!
I love pomegranates bushes/trees and I've had that on my bucket list for a while now. There are two that I pass frequently at some places I go and I just love looking at them.
One question about them, do they freeze?
The two I see are left unprotected and they are still there, but we really have mild weather where I am and it only freezes once every 2-3 years.

Not real sure about that - it does freeze here where I live every year but we have everything pretty much harvested by then. I have a storage shed connected to the house that gets some of the heat from the house where we put the plants we have in pots, like our Thai chilis, to protect them. The pomegranate "bush" does lose all its leaves after the freeze and grows new ones every spring like our fruit trees do. I would guess that whether or not fruit left hanging was damaged would depend on how hard the freeze was.

i'm in the pnw and in my area people can get away with growing avocado trees and citrus if they provide a little heat during freezes. you can get a gadget called a thermocube that will only turn on if the temp is at freezing, attach a string of old fashioned christmas lights (not leds, you need the heat) and wrap the lights around the tree. and of course people use the warm microclimates of putting their warmer zone trees up against the protected/sunny side of the house, etc...
Meme--it would be amazing to grow your own pomegranates! i bet that there are so many things that you can grow in texas that we would never get away with here!

yesterday, i was looking up how to grow a vanilla bean orchid plant, and i think i'll pass on trying that one for now! it looks really difficult.

TusconBill--your wife's garden sounds amazing! i have way less variety in my garden and found it really hard to keep from over-carbing with my garden grazing this summer.

You're so lucky to have a fig tree in Texas! My mom was from Texas, and she brought cuttings to California from her mother's Texas fig tree and it grew in her back yard for 50 years.....her fig preserves from that tree were utter heaven! I've never seen figs like that in the stores here in California, either. The figs here are completely different. Of course, these preserves were made with a huge amount of sugar, and right this moment I wouldn't eat such food because of the sugar, but I do so wish I had that Texas fig tree at my house. We sold Mom's home last summer when she died, and I took a bunch of cuttings from that tree and tried to root them at my house, but they all failed. So now I'm very sad...

Tucsonbill, I think I'll just take the chance and buy a Pomegranate the next time I see one. They're not cheap though. Around $40 I think but I'm going to give it a try because they are so exotic with their fruit.

Walnut, I had an avocado and an almond both in pots, on the south side of house in a semi-protected area and one night the temps dipped and I lost both which were grown by seed from a friend so they were special. I had brought them inside and out several times but that night I forgot...they're both so tropical. I did keep them a while thinking they might have just defoliated but no, they were gone. I hated telling my friend because she literally brought the Almont seed back from Mexico and grew it to about 4 feet high. Maybe my problem is that I had them in pots and not in the ground..
That's a great idea about putting lights to warm the plants.
I told DH about the upside down netting laundry basket from the 99cents store and he thought it was a great idea!

Carole, That's so cool that your mom brought the cutting with her from Texas to Cali. and it grew for over 50 years. I think they have a long life because I know of one that is probably 100+ years old planted next to an old abandoned home site out in the country. The wildlife eats the figs so fast that I've never been able to see what the fruit is like.
Maybe if your mother's old house is not too far away you could go and ask the owners to take another cutting? Rooting hormone is supposed to help the cutting root better but it's a hard thing to do, I know.

I have a bay leaf tree that I finally found after searching hard for several years. DH found it for me at a real old time homegrown nursery which is so rare these days with big commercial growers supplying most plants these days.
What prompted my want for a Bay Leaf tree was when I read a beautiful story about a family homestead in Louisiana and the history surrounded this Bay leaf tree which stood for generations. The lady writing the story took cuttings before selling the property and planted them at her house and every time she looked at it she remembered her mother.

You said it only freezes occasionally where you are and where I live it freezes every year at least once, usually 2 or 3 times and sometimes even goes below 20 degrees. It sounds to me like you should be OK. Like I said, they do lose their leaves in the winter and they come back in the spring like all our other fruit trees.

I don't remember how much my wife paid for ours but it was small and it was a couple of years before we got our first fruit. We've had it 5 or 6 years now and this year we have about 20 and we have not harvested those yet but we did eat one this week.

that's interesting that it's so hard to find bay laurels where you are. here they sell them at any big store that carries nursery plants in the summer--i've even seen them at canadian tire. i bought one for my husband for father's day last year and it managed to grow thru our colder than usual winter.

it looks like certain varieties of pomegranate will grow here too but it would be risky, if the temps drop too low for too long they won't make it. it would be fun to have citrus and pomegranates but i don't know how practical it would be in the long run. they say that most of those types of trees won't get enough hours of sunlight here to actually make fruit even if i can get them thru the winter. and then i can't really eat them because of the carbs, bleh. healthier than junk food, but even when i'm at goal weight, i still have to watch the carbs because of hormonal issues, etc.

we also have a desert king fig that produces really well. we did big hard prune on it this year, and took a whole whack of cuttings. hopefully some of them make it this year. last year, we only did about a dozen cuttings, and only a couple of them rooted, but they died in the summer heat/drought. i'll have to baby them a bit more this time. everybody talks about how easy figs are to propagate from cuttings but that hasn't been my experience!! i dehydrate the figs for my kids and they love them!

we have a few blueberries, strawberries, raspberries etc, and i want to expand on those. anti-oxidant rich, lower carbed fruits that i can actually eat! it seems like it should be easy enough to use cuttings to increase the number of berry bushes we have. all it really costs is time. the little jars of rooting solution last forever.

Tucsonbill, That's good to hear that your Pomegranate can handle the freezes. That's good news because the thought of not having to baby it is great!
I have too many in pots and hanging baskets to baby already and when I bring them all inside it's like living in a greenhouse. Our temps go up and down constantly so it's inside then outside all winter long because most of the time it's about 70 and them a cold front comes and it drops to 30 then the next day it's back up to 70 again. LOL That's how I lost the avocado and the almond, I missed one night of bringing them in and that was it!


Walnut, The citrus carbs are too high and I have had to give all of them away the past couple of years. I have a navel orange, Meyer lemon and a Blood Orange. I can't remember what the name of my fig is and I lost the tag. It does fruit several times a year which is nice but the squirrels get most of them and since I don't need to eat them, that's OK.