56 if you count the two volunteers that popped up uninvited in the flower beds, one in front and one beside the garage door.
Some of them are not doing so well, thanks to the extremely hot and dry weather. The volunteers look wonderful, having been mulched in with the flowers they are slowly smothering. But I can't bear to pull them up because after all, what if the other 54 die on me?
I may have overplanted just a tad. However, if we have an onslaught of grasshoppers to match that of the plagues of Egypt, which would not be that unusual in this part of Ohio, I will lose a few of the plants before I get out the Sevin Dust and zap the little offenders.
I, too, am a gardener... Since things have been crazy busy for me with my job, I got started later this year than last, and they are all on containers on my deck. I have four tomato plants, an okra (yes, only 1, it's an experiment) plant, a pepper plant, lettuce, and some flowers - petunias and geraniums (which I planted) and a couple of volunteer marigolds that sprouted with my other plants.
I like container gardening a lot. Less weeds to pull, and since it's up off the ground, I don't have to worry about the deer that live in town eating my garden... (or the monster groundhog that lives in my backyard). A couple of people at my job have tried putting down gardens in the past couple of years only to have them munched by the local deer population. I have never seen so many deer INSIDE the city limits before.
Anyway - although this year I have been unable to - I love to grow heirloom plants from seed and get unusual (an usually more flavorful) vegetables. Some of the tomatoes I have grown in years past looked postively monstrous, but tasted out of this world good. I think it's important to try and keep these old varieties alive for future generations.
Gardening helps me to feel closer to God and to the earth. It helps me to realize that there is something much greater than my day to day cubicle enclosed job out there - that LIFE springs from a little seed - and there is something truly magical in that life.
It's in my blood, I can't help it, my ancestors were Polish farmers. I"m compelled to do it. I'm so proud of my garden my wife is jealous. I had my first juicy red tomatoes today. Man were they good. If you've never tasted a snow pea fresh from the garden you haven't lived. They are sweeter than candy. And when I pickle the beets, ahhh, they are heaven.
Basically I grow a salad. I eat salad everyday for lunch with chicken or tuna on it. I go outside before work with scissors and
cut my lunch. (lettuce of course). I'm planting my second crop of lettuce now. Then I pick some beans and tomatoes and "voila". Dmiller I live right near a lake too, don't let that stop you I'm the next lake over from you. LOL
This year I've got three kinds of lettuce. Romaine, Red, and Leaf. I like the Red the best.
I also have tomatoes, zucchini, red peppers, green peppers, egg plant, cucumbers, brocolli, brussel sprouts, onions, leeks, beans, snow peas, beets, spinach, hand bok choy (a celery like white stalked veggi that is great in a stir-fry)
Then I have a few herbs like oregano, thyme, rosmary etc.
I don't have a big yard, in fact it's at the side of my house. It's only about 12x8. But I pact it in.
Don't be afraid to try it. I know literally nothing about it, but I have fun. Just takes a little water thats all.
The only sad thing is we are selling our house and have bought a floating house on the water. At least we'll have no mortage. We want to travel for a few years and have no maintenance. Oh well, my gardening days are coming to an end. Maybe someday after we're done travelling I'll most likely be back at it again.
Grew up with parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins all into gardening.
Someday when I am back living in the lower 48's I want a place with a bit of a balcony or patio where I can try container gardening.
Some tomatoes, peas, garlic, savory, sage, thyme, basil, rosemary, dill, mint, parsley. That will be fun along with some hanging baskets of flowers. No yards with lots of lawn or weeding to do--just don't have the strength and energyfor it-- but a few herbs and peas along with fresh tomatoes in season in containers--Yeah I could go for that.
Yeah, love it, just bought a new house and out back there is a gently sloping garden which provides two lawns, 2 or 3 shrub borders (one with 4 leylandii trees - they have a limited life span...) and a small fish pond. The top lawn (which is horizontal, not sloping) is earmarked as a vege garden and would have become so this year had the purchase completed earlier than last week. There might still be time to stick some winter crops in - brassicas, perhaps - if I can find my gardening tools in my boxes/packing.
There is something so very therapeutic about working in the soil.
D'you reckon it's worth asking Paw to start a Gardening forum ("In the Garden") like In the Kitchen? :)
I think container gardening has a lot of merits, just haven't done too much with it as of yet, since we have a tad over 4 acres to play with. Every spring we buy a flat of violas, those tiny miniature pansy things. We plant them in the front flower beds and by June they're history. This spring, however, we put them in containers on the front porch, and they are still there! They hang over the planters and look like something out of Southern Living! They smell good, too, having a fragrance that is quite intense in the evenings.
I like a lot of color in my flower beds and a lot of nice smelling stuff.
We have a side patch next to the driveway we use for herbs. Just planted a ton of basil, parsley and lavender seed there. We'll see - if the baby plants are any indication, we can open an Italian restaurant. We planted Basil genovese, holy (Thai) basil, and something else I forget. Also sunflowers.
I've always planted Blue Lake green beans, but also tried another bean that is doing much better. Of course I can't remember the name of it.
Thanks for the tip! The plant is doing pretty well out there, but no okra yet...
I have one green tomato and a BUNCH of peppers I'm letting ripen. I did my own compost pile this year, but didn't get a chance to really work with it in the garden - I used quite a bit in my containers, though, and the plant with the most compost in the pot is 2-3 times the size of the other ones! It's amazing how nature recycles itself.
We've had about a dozen roma tomatoes already, leaf lettuce galore, jalapenos and a few bell peppers. I've got eggplants that are 5 and 6 inches long (I never grew them before - what a hoot they are!), rhubarb - oh yeah, I love my garden. Nothing better than stuffed peppers that I grew myself.
My big boy tomatoes haven't ripened at all yet, but those romas have gone wild - I'm picking at least 2 a day already!!!
Tomorrow we're having company and serving taco salad with homemade salsa, homegrown lettuce, bell peppers, tomatoes - I'm probably more excited about this than I should be, but I'm having a ball.
The other first time thing I'm growing is watermelon - oh man, does that stuff ever grow fast - it's creeping out of the garden already!
My flower garden's doing well too, but the veggie garden is my best ever. Except for the corn, which sucks this year. The green beans were happier before I broke a trunk off one of the plants.
My daughter put the sprinkler on the garden one night last week and "forgot" to turn it off after 20 minutes - it ran for 4 hours before I noticed - doesn't seem any worse for the near drowning...
It's amazing what fertilizing the dirt first did for it this year! I'll be sure to use that or compost again from here on out!
WG I've a 1/4 acre in tomatos, basil, beans and melons and lettuce (yes you can grow lettuce in the summer) in a 10" x 10" shade house. In Georgia its so dry the Okiefenokie swamp caught fire but my stuff kept growing thanks to some deeply mulched topsoil that hat the University put together for my growers school project. I'm working up a fall rotation that'll include organic strawberry starts and winter grown tomatos both of which will be grown in the greenhouse. I've got somewhere like 125 tomato plants 30 or 40 melons and prolly 50 basils most of which will go to the farmers market or marketing network, whats left over will be donated to the local food bank.
I should tell you about my shadehouse. It is made from a 10' X 10' carport frame ordered through Harbor Frieght. it is "framed" with 2x6's (skids and end framing) the top is covered with shade cloth and the sides with bird proof netting. This winter I will take off the shade cloth and netting and replace it with plastic sheeting to convert it to a greenhouse for winter production. I've got a 1/3 hp fan and thermostat to ventilate it and I've run drip irrigation to water. All told I have $800 in the building and can reasonable expect to make my costs plus a profit this year.
If any of you are interested there is a book called Four Season Harvest written by an assosiate of mine Eliot Coleman. He's a market farmer, meaning he makes his living growing food for the local Conneticut markets. He started out working around 20 acres but has since reduced his acreage considerably. I won't tell you what he makes per acre because you won't believe it but he has spent the last 20 yrs refining his techniques and marketing strategy.
Anyways the book, yes I did mention a book...Four Season Harvest will show you how to grow good healthy food for your family year round no matter where you live. You just need to come up with the land.
OH before I forget if you are bothered by bugs, dismayed by drought, puzzled by predators or considering gathering a gaggle of grass feed geese to gather greater income from your small acreage I suggest you check out Attra.Org. It contains sustainable ag information geared for the small acreage producer. Most of this stuff is scalable so if you are considering getting a goat or having a chicken tractor this website has some very good information. I'm including 600 pages of their work as the cornerstone of my next class.
Still no rain, maybe toward the end of the week. We are still amending our soil. When we got it tested at the Ohio State extension, the pH was 4.9, not good for growing much except blueberries, which died anyway. There are other things that also need to be added. We have used a great deal of agricultural lime, and that has helped, but it's still dry out there.
One trick I learned from an old guy in NC was to take gallon milk jugs, rinse them, and puncture a very small hole in the bottom edge, then set it next to a tomato plant and fill it up every day or so. The water will slowly leak out. I'm doing this, would've done it sooner but husband didn't think it was necessary. We have only one small patch of level ground, and that is where the leach bed is located. So when I water at the top of a row, the water runs downhill. The best tomato plants are in the middle of the rows. So I've started putting the jugs at the top of the rows, so the plants there can get some extra moisture.
When we lived is Salisbury, NC, the aforementioned elderly gentleman lived next door to us and owned a home and some land outside of town, where he let us garden. He had amended the hard red clay year after year so that it was absolutely wonderful. I grew 24 tomato plants there, which made a hedge down the middle of the garden. I canned over 100 quarts of tomatoes, sauce, and juice. He told us to put lime in the hole we'd dug, then a nice shovel full of compost, which consisted of ground up leaves and manure and all sorts of stuff.
Last week our new neighbor in the farm house across the road came over to donate some cukes. They have horses and I am welcome to help myself to the manure pile, which I will certainly do this fall to work into the soil in the spring. Also I'm going to get some Planters2 mix, which is a trace mineral additive we used in Fellowlaborers of Ohio garden.
We !'s are into gardening....every year we each pick what we'd like to grow. Typically we've had tomatoes, jalepenos, spinach, salad mix, carrots, green beans, corn, green onions, watermelon, cucumbers, and lots of herbs like oregano, basil, parsley, sage.
In the new house we moved into about a year ago, we tried a garden in the back, but it crashed and burned. JUST found an article in a Family Circle magazine (latest issue) that describes container herb gardens....which got us thinking about container veggie gardens.
We also go apple picking every year.....so I have all the equipment to can ANYTHING we grow or pick!
You might have your county extension test the soil. I took in about 4 core samples 6 feet apart, about 1/2 cup each to the Knox Co. extension service which is courtesy of OSU. It cost about $10 for shipping & handling and in about 5 weeks or so, they sent me an analysis. This includes pH of the soil and the trace minerals it lacks and/or excels in. This is where I got the 4.9 pH info that has improved but not totally amended our soil by any means.
Big containers full of purchased topsoil and special soil mixes would do the same with less bother, also.
Actually the guy across the road has the cukes - he has several horses and thus a ready supply of organic fertilizer, which he has promised to share with me.
I don't think anyone has grown anything on our property other than weeds for a couple of decades. It is kind of hard going, since I don't want to use nasty carcinogens to kill them. I do think, however, that in another year or so we should have vastly improved soil if we keep at it.
Big containers full of purchased topsoil and special soil mixes would do the same with less bother, also.
Happy growing!
WG
If you have some completely composted compost (like my alliteration?) mix that in with the topsoil - works wonders!!
I now have 9 green tomatoes on my 4 plants, and my okra bloomed today - very pretty flowers, I was impressed.
My volunteer marigold has grown into a BUSH! I have never seen a marigold quite this large. I think I'll save the seeds from the plant and see if I can breed a monster marigold plant next year.
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waysider
54 tomato plants?????
That's enough to feed the whole state and then some.
I haven't had a garden for about 15 years.
If I ever retire, I might consider it again.
54 tomato plants????
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Watered Garden
56 if you count the two volunteers that popped up uninvited in the flower beds, one in front and one beside the garage door.
Some of them are not doing so well, thanks to the extremely hot and dry weather. The volunteers look wonderful, having been mulched in with the flowers they are slowly smothering. But I can't bear to pull them up because after all, what if the other 54 die on me?
I may have overplanted just a tad. However, if we have an onslaught of grasshoppers to match that of the plagues of Egypt, which would not be that unusual in this part of Ohio, I will lose a few of the plants before I get out the Sevin Dust and zap the little offenders.
WG
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JavaJane
I, too, am a gardener... Since things have been crazy busy for me with my job, I got started later this year than last, and they are all on containers on my deck. I have four tomato plants, an okra (yes, only 1, it's an experiment) plant, a pepper plant, lettuce, and some flowers - petunias and geraniums (which I planted) and a couple of volunteer marigolds that sprouted with my other plants.
I like container gardening a lot. Less weeds to pull, and since it's up off the ground, I don't have to worry about the deer that live in town eating my garden... (or the monster groundhog that lives in my backyard). A couple of people at my job have tried putting down gardens in the past couple of years only to have them munched by the local deer population. I have never seen so many deer INSIDE the city limits before.
Anyway - although this year I have been unable to - I love to grow heirloom plants from seed and get unusual (an usually more flavorful) vegetables. Some of the tomatoes I have grown in years past looked postively monstrous, but tasted out of this world good. I think it's important to try and keep these old varieties alive for future generations.
Gardening helps me to feel closer to God and to the earth. It helps me to realize that there is something much greater than my day to day cubicle enclosed job out there - that LIFE springs from a little seed - and there is something truly magical in that life.
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dmiller
My yard is *postage stamp size*, and mostly clay, rather than topsoil.
Plus --I'm 4 blocks from Lake Superior.
Weather here is not conducive to gardens.
I'm lucky to have a big rose bush that proliferates year after year!
:)
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polar bear
Gardening? Now you're talkin'. I love it.
It's in my blood, I can't help it, my ancestors were Polish farmers. I"m compelled to do it. I'm so proud of my garden my wife is jealous. I had my first juicy red tomatoes today. Man were they good. If you've never tasted a snow pea fresh from the garden you haven't lived. They are sweeter than candy. And when I pickle the beets, ahhh, they are heaven.
Basically I grow a salad. I eat salad everyday for lunch with chicken or tuna on it. I go outside before work with scissors and
cut my lunch. (lettuce of course). I'm planting my second crop of lettuce now. Then I pick some beans and tomatoes and "voila". Dmiller I live right near a lake too, don't let that stop you I'm the next lake over from you. LOL
This year I've got three kinds of lettuce. Romaine, Red, and Leaf. I like the Red the best.
I also have tomatoes, zucchini, red peppers, green peppers, egg plant, cucumbers, brocolli, brussel sprouts, onions, leeks, beans, snow peas, beets, spinach, hand bok choy (a celery like white stalked veggi that is great in a stir-fry)
Then I have a few herbs like oregano, thyme, rosmary etc.
I don't have a big yard, in fact it's at the side of my house. It's only about 12x8. But I pact it in.
Don't be afraid to try it. I know literally nothing about it, but I have fun. Just takes a little water thats all.
The only sad thing is we are selling our house and have bought a floating house on the water. At least we'll have no mortage. We want to travel for a few years and have no maintenance. Oh well, my gardening days are coming to an end. Maybe someday after we're done travelling I'll most likely be back at it again.
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JavaJane
Polar bear - try the container garden when you don't have your yard anymore! You will be suprised how well it works!
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templelady
Grew up with parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins all into gardening.
Someday when I am back living in the lower 48's I want a place with a bit of a balcony or patio where I can try container gardening.
Some tomatoes, peas, garlic, savory, sage, thyme, basil, rosemary, dill, mint, parsley. That will be fun along with some hanging baskets of flowers. No yards with lots of lawn or weeding to do--just don't have the strength and energyfor it-- but a few herbs and peas along with fresh tomatoes in season in containers--Yeah I could go for that.
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Danny
JJ
okra that's a la plant.
Creol's first brought them here.
You have to cut the fruit in the morning.
and smaller and soft is best.
I always have dirt in my blood.
Was raised with a hoe and a file in my back pocket.
When you get to the end of the row you hit the blade a
few times with the file before you go back.
We had a truck farm.
Still in my blood.
love greens and lugumes.
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Twinky
Yeah, love it, just bought a new house and out back there is a gently sloping garden which provides two lawns, 2 or 3 shrub borders (one with 4 leylandii trees - they have a limited life span...) and a small fish pond. The top lawn (which is horizontal, not sloping) is earmarked as a vege garden and would have become so this year had the purchase completed earlier than last week. There might still be time to stick some winter crops in - brassicas, perhaps - if I can find my gardening tools in my boxes/packing.
There is something so very therapeutic about working in the soil.
D'you reckon it's worth asking Paw to start a Gardening forum ("In the Garden") like In the Kitchen? :)
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Watered Garden
I think container gardening has a lot of merits, just haven't done too much with it as of yet, since we have a tad over 4 acres to play with. Every spring we buy a flat of violas, those tiny miniature pansy things. We plant them in the front flower beds and by June they're history. This spring, however, we put them in containers on the front porch, and they are still there! They hang over the planters and look like something out of Southern Living! They smell good, too, having a fragrance that is quite intense in the evenings.
I like a lot of color in my flower beds and a lot of nice smelling stuff.
We have a side patch next to the driveway we use for herbs. Just planted a ton of basil, parsley and lavender seed there. We'll see - if the baby plants are any indication, we can open an Italian restaurant. We planted Basil genovese, holy (Thai) basil, and something else I forget. Also sunflowers.
I've always planted Blue Lake green beans, but also tried another bean that is doing much better. Of course I can't remember the name of it.
WG
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JavaJane
Thanks for the tip! The plant is doing pretty well out there, but no okra yet...
I have one green tomato and a BUNCH of peppers I'm letting ripen. I did my own compost pile this year, but didn't get a chance to really work with it in the garden - I used quite a bit in my containers, though, and the plant with the most compost in the pot is 2-3 times the size of the other ones! It's amazing how nature recycles itself.
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bowtwi
We've had about a dozen roma tomatoes already, leaf lettuce galore, jalapenos and a few bell peppers. I've got eggplants that are 5 and 6 inches long (I never grew them before - what a hoot they are!), rhubarb - oh yeah, I love my garden. Nothing better than stuffed peppers that I grew myself.
My big boy tomatoes haven't ripened at all yet, but those romas have gone wild - I'm picking at least 2 a day already!!!
Tomorrow we're having company and serving taco salad with homemade salsa, homegrown lettuce, bell peppers, tomatoes - I'm probably more excited about this than I should be, but I'm having a ball.
The other first time thing I'm growing is watermelon - oh man, does that stuff ever grow fast - it's creeping out of the garden already!
My flower garden's doing well too, but the veggie garden is my best ever. Except for the corn, which sucks this year. The green beans were happier before I broke a trunk off one of the plants.
My daughter put the sprinkler on the garden one night last week and "forgot" to turn it off after 20 minutes - it ran for 4 hours before I noticed - doesn't seem any worse for the near drowning...
It's amazing what fertilizing the dirt first did for it this year! I'll be sure to use that or compost again from here on out!
I'd participate in a gardening forum - you bet!!!
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doojable
I've got the absolute BEST way to enjoy a roma tomato summer pasta sauce!
I'll post it if you ask - otherwise I'll assume you already know how to make a great sauce from romas. ;)
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dmiller
Hmmmm. Let me guess -- it has to do with sauce for a pineapple and Canadian bacon Pizza!!
:P :P :P
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bowtwi
Dooj - I'm asking, I'm asking! LOL I'd love to have what you'd call the BEST!
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herbiejuan
WG I've a 1/4 acre in tomatos, basil, beans and melons and lettuce (yes you can grow lettuce in the summer) in a 10" x 10" shade house. In Georgia its so dry the Okiefenokie swamp caught fire but my stuff kept growing thanks to some deeply mulched topsoil that hat the University put together for my growers school project. I'm working up a fall rotation that'll include organic strawberry starts and winter grown tomatos both of which will be grown in the greenhouse. I've got somewhere like 125 tomato plants 30 or 40 melons and prolly 50 basils most of which will go to the farmers market or marketing network, whats left over will be donated to the local food bank.
I should tell you about my shadehouse. It is made from a 10' X 10' carport frame ordered through Harbor Frieght. it is "framed" with 2x6's (skids and end framing) the top is covered with shade cloth and the sides with bird proof netting. This winter I will take off the shade cloth and netting and replace it with plastic sheeting to convert it to a greenhouse for winter production. I've got a 1/3 hp fan and thermostat to ventilate it and I've run drip irrigation to water. All told I have $800 in the building and can reasonable expect to make my costs plus a profit this year.
If any of you are interested there is a book called Four Season Harvest written by an assosiate of mine Eliot Coleman. He's a market farmer, meaning he makes his living growing food for the local Conneticut markets. He started out working around 20 acres but has since reduced his acreage considerably. I won't tell you what he makes per acre because you won't believe it but he has spent the last 20 yrs refining his techniques and marketing strategy.
Anyways the book, yes I did mention a book...Four Season Harvest will show you how to grow good healthy food for your family year round no matter where you live. You just need to come up with the land.
Land...that is a topic in and of itself. Some G'spotters don't own land they should check out http://www.communitygarden.org/links.php for community gardens or
http://www.ams.usda.gov/farmersmarkets/map.htm for your local farmers market.
OH before I forget if you are bothered by bugs, dismayed by drought, puzzled by predators or considering gathering a gaggle of grass feed geese to gather greater income from your small acreage I suggest you check out Attra.Org. It contains sustainable ag information geared for the small acreage producer. Most of this stuff is scalable so if you are considering getting a goat or having a chicken tractor this website has some very good information. I'm including 600 pages of their work as the cornerstone of my next class.
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Out There
Dooj - I'm asking also Please Please. I am growing Romas this year for the first time in about 28 years. I love pasta and good sauces
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doojable
OK - shall I post it here? I think I'll start a tomato thread in the Kitchen Forum.
BTW - this will be heaven in your mouth!
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Watered Garden
Still no rain, maybe toward the end of the week. We are still amending our soil. When we got it tested at the Ohio State extension, the pH was 4.9, not good for growing much except blueberries, which died anyway. There are other things that also need to be added. We have used a great deal of agricultural lime, and that has helped, but it's still dry out there.
One trick I learned from an old guy in NC was to take gallon milk jugs, rinse them, and puncture a very small hole in the bottom edge, then set it next to a tomato plant and fill it up every day or so. The water will slowly leak out. I'm doing this, would've done it sooner but husband didn't think it was necessary. We have only one small patch of level ground, and that is where the leach bed is located. So when I water at the top of a row, the water runs downhill. The best tomato plants are in the middle of the rows. So I've started putting the jugs at the top of the rows, so the plants there can get some extra moisture.
When we lived is Salisbury, NC, the aforementioned elderly gentleman lived next door to us and owned a home and some land outside of town, where he let us garden. He had amended the hard red clay year after year so that it was absolutely wonderful. I grew 24 tomato plants there, which made a hedge down the middle of the garden. I canned over 100 quarts of tomatoes, sauce, and juice. He told us to put lime in the hole we'd dug, then a nice shovel full of compost, which consisted of ground up leaves and manure and all sorts of stuff.
Last week our new neighbor in the farm house across the road came over to donate some cukes. They have horses and I am welcome to help myself to the manure pile, which I will certainly do this fall to work into the soil in the spring. Also I'm going to get some Planters2 mix, which is a trace mineral additive we used in Fellowlaborers of Ohio garden.
Will be looking for that recipe, Dooj.
WG
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Cindy!
We !'s are into gardening....every year we each pick what we'd like to grow. Typically we've had tomatoes, jalepenos, spinach, salad mix, carrots, green beans, corn, green onions, watermelon, cucumbers, and lots of herbs like oregano, basil, parsley, sage.
In the new house we moved into about a year ago, we tried a garden in the back, but it crashed and burned. JUST found an article in a Family Circle magazine (latest issue) that describes container herb gardens....which got us thinking about container veggie gardens.
We also go apple picking every year.....so I have all the equipment to can ANYTHING we grow or pick!
Love it, love it, love it!!!
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Watered Garden
Cindy!,
You might have your county extension test the soil. I took in about 4 core samples 6 feet apart, about 1/2 cup each to the Knox Co. extension service which is courtesy of OSU. It cost about $10 for shipping & handling and in about 5 weeks or so, they sent me an analysis. This includes pH of the soil and the trace minerals it lacks and/or excels in. This is where I got the 4.9 pH info that has improved but not totally amended our soil by any means.
Big containers full of purchased topsoil and special soil mixes would do the same with less bother, also.
Happy growing!
WG
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coolchef
you have cukes already? lucky you. it will be another few weeks here in western maine.
damn i would kill for a cuke sandwitch on home made bread
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Watered Garden
Actually the guy across the road has the cukes - he has several horses and thus a ready supply of organic fertilizer, which he has promised to share with me.
I don't think anyone has grown anything on our property other than weeds for a couple of decades. It is kind of hard going, since I don't want to use nasty carcinogens to kill them. I do think, however, that in another year or so we should have vastly improved soil if we keep at it.
WG
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JavaJane
If you have some completely composted compost (like my alliteration?) mix that in with the topsoil - works wonders!!
I now have 9 green tomatoes on my 4 plants, and my okra bloomed today - very pretty flowers, I was impressed.
My volunteer marigold has grown into a BUSH! I have never seen a marigold quite this large. I think I'll save the seeds from the plant and see if I can breed a monster marigold plant next year.
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