Arguments - Page 3

 


 This means I have to be

Put "Indian Myna trap" into google and you'll get hundreds of hits.

 


that's certainly almost always true - however, factual corrections are a
different situation. _all_ seedlings really _do_ go better with mulch :-D
hee hee.


did you get the Mighty Rain at your place? i do hope so. we got it & it's
made a transformative difference already. 2 weeks ago my garden was all
struggle, but now things are going again. it's wonderful!!

 The watermelon has covered everything

i have heard (but, now having my 2nd consecutive year of Near-Total
Curcurbit Failure *, have not had opportunity to test yet) that if you want
to store melons & pumpkins for as long as you can, the mid-season fruits
store much better than the last ones.

not all pumpkins & melons store for long anyway of course, but if you want
to hold on to some for a few months, you might want to put them away now, &
then you can harrass & provoke everyone you know with your later offerings
in a month or two!!
kylie

* this really can happen, trust me.

 



Congratulations!  I know just how you feel.  It couldn't have come at a
better time for giving us an Autumn break - so nice to know we should now
have enough grass to get the girls through the winter.


I can't understand this at all because it seems to be such a rarity to
manage to have such a failure.  It has me fascinated.

Have you tried adding tspn of Trace elements to the area where you're trying
to grow them just in case you have a problem?  (Although I realise that
could also compound a problem if you have too much of 'X' - but your soil
would be classified on the light side in terms of overall fertility I would
think.
I try to remember to add a tspn once a year but know I'm sloppy about it.
I'm better about giving it to my roses as that is part of my routine of
looking after them in spring.  I can't remember the last time the veg beds a
dose and I'll bet my bottom dollar that my garden notebook has nothing to
say on the subject either - yet another thing I should be more religious
about.

 



some of my failures have ME fascinated too. <g>

as of today, i've ended up with 3 young zucchini (fruiting now), 2 cucumbers
(we might get some fruit before the frost (?) a siberian melon with only 2
fruits on it (from a seed that got accidentally dropped on the ground!!), &
a number of pumpkin plants which are still living but never seem to have
made any female flowers(!) and i suspect it's getting much too late for
that. nothing else made it.

1: i planted seed late, as the weather here is mental & i was trying to
avoid "late" frosts.
2: then, i had germination problems because by then it was getting hot &
dry, which led to most of them just not germinating (or perhaps drying out
at the crucial moment, more likely).
3: of those which came up, the snails & bugs did most of them in. i often
protect wee plants with a cut-off plastic bottle held with a stick, but the
snails are simply more numerous than when we arrived, & clearly developing
an unnatural intelligence ;-) and the weather seemed to bring a plethora of
grasshoppers & such.
4: then i had the swathe of deaths which you have to just accept for little
plants when its suddenly turned hot & there's just no rain.
5: of the remainders, i ended up with what's listed above!! so the lack of
female flowers on the pumpkins is really the only truly mysterious (to me)
situation. the other problems, well, that's life in the garden. luckily i
have turned philosophical about these things.

one thing i did do which i felt was an excellent idea (despite the failure
that followed) is that i put the 2nd (or was it 3rd?) attempt at cucumbers
into egg cartons. (potting mix to the top of the hollow, and a seed in
each). while they were still really small & hadn't outgrown the hollows in
the carton, i split the carton & planted them out (with the bottle covers
per above). until most of them died subsequently of the causes outlined
above, they were fine, so this is something i think i should do next year;
a: you can start them a bit earlier than direct planting & b: they had no
problems settling in like if they had been in pots, so then c: they were
much more resistant to the heat/dryness. clearly, they were not at all
resistant to being reduced to tiny stumps by pests, but there it is. :-) i
tried toilet rolls last year, but egg cartons were way better imo.


well, yes. plenty of minerals but hardly any humus! i strongly doubt this is
quite my thing though. i'm starting to feel inclined to try some of the
biodynamic preps.


i can't emphasis strongly enough that i am an erratic, lazy & fairly
disorganised gardener :-) i've come to accept this so now i can work around
it. it means i've given up entirely on notebooks, organised rotations, doing
things the day i first thought of it, regular applications of x, y or z, and
so forth. some of us are more philosophically inclined to work towards
acceptance of things rather than change <g>

i also feel that we need to be more open to alternative experiences - i
really do know that for most people, cucurbits (esp zucchini & such) are
just dead easy, but there are always people or locations where success is
not assured. i seem to be in such a location (abetted no doubt by laziness &
general disorganisation). on the other hand, imo i'm a pretty good brassica
grower & the reality is that i value brassicas more!!!! (we won't discuss
here what happened to my bumper broccoli crop in spring - damn the ducks &
damn my laziness!) also my tomatoes aren'\t much to write home about,
because i quite like eating tomatoes but growing them just isn't my thing, i
just can'\t seem to get interested.

therefore i think i am saying that my failure with cucurbits is probably not
as fascinating as we think it is, it's probably just natural consequences,
so i'm fine with that. :-)

thanks as ever for input!
kylie

 


What is a siberian melon?


I pull off the ends of pumpkins when they get a bit too long.  I'm sure that
I started this after reading that it forced the plant to produce female
flowers.  I can't remember now but I know I've done it on my one pumpkin
plant and it has lots of pumpkins on it - it's one of those slim waisted,
pale skinned ones rather than a traditional Qld blue shaped ones.  Probably
in one of those notebooks of mine, somewhere.  I read them now and then and
then realise I need to take action and do something.

Perhaps you need to work on building up the humus?  If you have healthy soil
with lots of earth worms than trace elements shouldn't be a prob.  My soil
was crap when I began and parts of it still are.  I know from some of my
pants that I have some deficiencies.  This year I really need to do a lot of
work over winter in areas that I should never have planted in till I'd done
some really good soil prep.

That sounds very familiar.  My garden is generally a mess but it's a pretty
productive one and I do do a bit in some area of the garden every few days
at the longest - usually it's something every day but sometimes, I'm not up
to it, or not available.  The trouble is that in a big garden like mine, is
that by the time I get back to that area again, it's a mess again.

i've come to accept this so now i can work around

I'm not good at organised rotations either but I do try to put things in my
garden notebooks because I can never remember things like recipes for
pesticides or what particular plants like.

Well it does sound liek you are somethimes shovelling it uphill.  I seldom
see snails here and certainly don't have a duck problem in my garden.  My
biggest prob is the bloody sulphur cresteds.