Post Punk Kitchen Forum

thanks snarkyvegan! We do have many squirrels in the yard and a bunny that appears at times, despite my dogs best attempts at catching them. The raised beds are behind my detached garage so I've never seen any critters in there other than some ants and flies, but I'm sure they get in there.

Kind of jealous of the people complaining of drought! I haven't anything in my garden this year since it has rained so much that my garden is chronically flooded and everything I tried got washed away.

Well african violet leaves/petals cannot get wet, ever.

Snarkyvegan, thanks for all the great info! I'll report back soon with tomatoes pics, I hope!

Misting won't hurt African violets, just huge drops of water left on the leaves. You'll know you've messed up when the leaves get brown spots.

Summer squash is best picked when small (like 6"), within a couple days after pollination in warm weather - it will be sweeter and more tender when young! Winter squash is sweetest if left on the vine until foliage dies back in the fall (or right before a hard frost.)

ok, this might be a dumb question, but.

my patty pan squash plant is HUGE. and producing quite prolifically. i went out yesterday to check and all the baby ones had gone moldy. my guess is that since the plant is so darn thick, there's simply not enough air circulating. i should prune a bit, right? i don't know what i should remove, though. everything else about the plant is healthy, no dying bits or wilty looking leaves or anything like that. i always feel bad pruning anything with flowers because then i'm like, "i'm killing baby squash!!". which i know is dumb because if they grow, they're just going to get moldy if i don't prune. but, is there anything specific i'm looking for? and how much should i take off? half? a quarter?
like i said, it's a really thick plant with approximately a gillion vines.

Re patty pan: My climate is very different from yours, so I can only guess as to why they're getting moldy. I know a number of fungal diseases can infect them. In my garden, mold on immature fruit early in the season occurs after poor (or no) pollination - the fruit just sits there not growing until it starts to rot. Late in the season mold is more likely due to cold, over-wet conditions on exhausted plants. I have more of a problem with winter squash rotting, which I can usually prevent by mulching the plants heavily (when young) with wood chips, so they vine over that and the fruit doesn't come into direct contact with soil. But I also mulch all of my summer squash too.

If you decide to prune, maybe cut out individual leaves to allow for better air circulation and entry of pollinators? I am confused about your 'gillion' vines. I think all patty pans are bush-type?, so if you cut the stem back, it would set the whole plant back severely. If you have been harvesting from it for a long period, probably some liquid fertilizer would help too.

I also have never seen a vining patty pan plant. Mine have always been bush type. I second Jill's reco to just trim some of the larger older leaves to thin it out.

If you DO indeed have a vining patty pan, can you post the variety name? I'd love to know.

it's bush type, but it's sending out a million stems(? i guess?) from the main stem. in a vining type pattern. that climbs things. and strangles everything in its path.

i was trying to find a picture that's similar online and i found this:


obviously, this one is a little dead, but you can see how cramped everything is. that's what mine looks like except it's maybe 6 feet x 3 feet.
i was reading the seed packet and it says that they'll produce for "up to a month." we've been harvesting for over a month already so i'm wondering if it's even worth it to bother trimming anything.

OMG that thing is crazy! I'd say yep, it's probably spent but if you want to have fun, try trimming off the stems that don't have flowers or squash growing. Then again, you could pull it and plant Fall/cool weather stuff like kale, collards and radishes.

I was just checking the planting schedule to see what's up, and it's telling me to plant broccoli plants. Which just seems crazy to me. It's a bajillion degrees and super dry.

i'm not sure how quickly texas cools off, but i know for the northeast we would have planted the last crop of broccoli a couple weeks ago. and it's really hot, humid, and there hasn't been any rain. so maybe?

i went out last night and started trimming the all the squash. and then got stung by a bee and slipped into a benadryl coma. so i might be able to finish today. i'll try to get some pictures of my crazy plants.

SHISO IS IN THE HOUSE!!!! being unrealistically optimistic, i brought some dead shiso stalks from my old garden and threw them in the backyard. I counted at least 5 babies yesterday (we've been here for 2 months, including some really cold weather, which seems to be important for shiso- i've never had any success starting them from seed unless i have the whole plant.)

my collards seem to have recovered from the neem after a few weeks of sketchiness. They're curly and twisted, but that's normal (i think).
i just opened up two more beds. I have a lot behind my house that's on a slope, we're building terrace beds (we may put a deck back there but not for a while, the way it's going) and the contractors burned/buried all sorts of bad shiitake in there when they built the house. So the bed opening is a real PITA. So much trash.

I'm very jealous of everyone who can do a winter garden. Our season is way too short.
So far though we've been having a great year in the garden department. We got very little rain in july so I had to water with the hose, but for the most part it's either rained every few days, or I use my rain barrel to water.
I picked about 20lbs of cukes on sunday and made mustard pickles. There's probably 20 more lbs to be picked again, so I'm thinking bread and butter pickles, dills, or possibly relish.
We have enough green beans to have them for supper every night (for three of us), so I think I'll start freezing some. The kale has been amazing. We get a nice bowl full every other day for salads.
When are you supposed to pick beets? Some of ours are about the size of tennis balls, but I'm not sure if they get bigger than that?
The tomatoes we started by direct seeding looked like they weren't going to work out, so we got transplants, then discovered the seeds did in fact grow. I think we have 40 or so tomato plants.
We also direct seeded canteloupe, and thought they wouldn't grow. They did, and there's six melons that I'm dying to pick.
I'm excited to be home now with lots of time to pick/cook/eat the stuff from the garden now that my husband is home (he fell through a floor at work and broke his pelvis and hip, so we spent a lot of time at the hospital). It's nice to get back to enjoying the summer.

AmandaMelanie, I'm so sorry about your husband! RE the garden, you may have a short season, but even in my long season/year round garden I rarely get melons to ripen! And I often don't get tomatoes before September, so there are trade-offs either way.

Beets - depending on the variety, some, like Lutz Winterkeeper, can get quite large and still be tasty, but other varieties get pithy if they outgrow their recommended size, so check your variety/specs if you can. I plant densely and then thin regularly, so I eat beets at all sizes. Tennis ball size sound plenty big to me, for most varieties.

i got spring fever and went absolutely nuts.

in the ground, as starts or already established seeds:
peas, snow peas
dill, basil, thyme, mint, cilantro, parsley, scallions, sage, shiso
roma tomatoes
japanese spinach
napa cabbage
kale, chard
garlic
lots of collards
mustard greens
a few volunteer black bean plants
thai eggplant, bitter lettuces, rhubarb
also just planted brazilian cherry trees yesterday

seeds just set to germinate:
cherry toms
green beans
wax beans
tomatillos
lettuce mix
sweet passionfruit vine
okra
patty pans
italian spinach

my dirt was horrible when we moved in 2-3 months ago (mostly red clay and not-so-clean fill with lots of tiles, bricks, etc). i've been working reallyhard on emending the beds and the results so far are pretty good.

need to figure out when to tie up my napa cabbage- they're already getting big.

ETA: the lot was used for planting before they built our house so we have some weird volunteers- the worst are castor beans (which at least are easy to pull out) and nhames- i think they might be cassava in english? satoimo in japanese, at least. hairy frigging potato things. they are such a bisque, you can't pull them out and the rhizome regenerates forever.

our garden was a greenhouse before we started using it, too. it's awesome that someone else built us raised beds and gave us fantastic soil, but we have a shiitake ton of fennel. everywhere. it is SO INVASIVE.

and hops. jfc, the hops. HATE.

you guys. this patty pan plant is insane. i'm scared.

i pulled 3 squashes off there today and there are several more that are almost ready. it's jumped the row it was in and into the row in front of it so now it's about 5 feet high, 6 feet wide, and probably 10 feet long. FROM ONE PLANT.
and it's only supposed to produce for a month. it's been well over a month and it's not slowing down.

did i accidentally buy monsanto seeds?

i wish i had this problem. my patty pans refuse to germinate, the mustards. that's what i get for buying organic hippie seeds, apparently.....

i have some snow peas that refuse to climb. they're laying on the ground like tantrumming children. climb, my pretties, climb!!!!

see now, the second round of peas i planted for the fall are stunted little things. i think the end of july was just too damn hot for them.

I'm in NY for three weeks so I'm missing prime tomato time. And I'm missing the first butternuts. And carrots. Wah.

The garden store told me to wait until September. Which makes sense to me since it's so very very hot this time of year. And is a bit inevitable since they won't be selling broccoli plants until then anyway.

Do any of you use weedkiller or do you just pull up your weeds regularly? My garden is full of weeds, and no matter how many I pull up there are always more ready to take their place. I'm kind of tempted to get some weedkiller and totally destroy them.

i pull them, but i have also gotten mulch and mulched the shiitake out of everything so that the weeds can't come up at all. even put down newspaper, fabric, etc to block out weeds. inside the beds, nope, i pull.