Comments | skeetermonkey: Steven King loves his corn fields... why should I give evil another place to live?

skeetermonkey

Steven King loves his corn fields... why should I give evil another place to live?

Jan 09, 2009 13:52

It's the first week of January, and the garden is doing great. Those few nights of frost we had at the end of December? I thumb my nose at you. I have frost resistant Bloomsdale spinach! I have about 20 spinach plants, and I'd say 5 of them are doing pretty well. The remaining 15 are still sort of shrubbing along with a few leaves and staying ( Read more... )

Comments 4

peregrinejohn January 9 2009, 23:21:31 UTC

I love that book! Freaking awesome, and there's a Yahoo! Group about it where people are always putting up new refinements about it.

It seems terribly unfair that the inedible nightshade thrives where the edible ones (tomato, potato) don't.

pecunium January 10 2009, 03:21:55 UTC

Ok... Onions. You will get some bulbing, but the shock of being cut, and replanted will make them go to seed, (which is usually happens for the first time in the second year). Leeks behave much the same way, and really ought to be planted in deep trenches, from seed(lings ( ... )

don_fitch January 20 2009, 01:31:06 UTC

Some weed seeds just don't germinate in recently-disturbed soil -- and some do most vigorously there. And some have quite a narrow soil-temperature range in which they'll germinate. IMHO, gardening in new/not-recently-maintained soil implies regularly spending much time in The Customary Gardener Position (i.e., /w/i/t/h/ /y/o/u/r/ /b/u/t/t/ /i/n/ /t/h/e/ /a/i/r/ bent over at the waist) eradicating all weeds while they're small. The only ones that seriously arouse my ire are the rhizome-type ones such as Bermuda and Chufa (nut-grass) that can grow from small bits of buried stem when conditions are right & come up from great depths, and a couple of years of careful attention can nearly eradicate even them. Just don't ever turn your back or rest on your laurels for more than a month at a time, and certainly not for a whole year (I say speaking from Sad Experience, repeated several times).

don_fitch January 23 2009, 03:28:52 UTC

For summer squash -- zucchini, patti-pan, yellow crook-or straight-neck, when the time comes, I'd suggest one hill (clump of three or four planted close together) rather than just a single plant, because even the "bush" types tend to grow somewhat in one direction. (I was going to say pick one kind, but actually there's probably no reason not to plant one of each in the hill, as long as you're not planning on saving any seeds from them.) And there's no law (AFAIK) against planting squash in some empty space outside the Garden proper, as long as it gets watered occasionally & big weeds are kept down. Don't worry, by the way, when the first five or so blossoms just drop off -- they're usually males and probably exist only to encourage bees to form the habit of checking in that area, where they'll be needed when some female blossoms start being produced ( ... )