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wbonesteel

Not as much produce, this year.

wbonesteel
10 years ago

Yields have been off from last year. Not certain why. Could be a combination of factors.

Onions did ok to good. Garlic was outstanding. Taters had lots of small ones, not so many average to big ones. Early carrots did good to great, late carrots, not so much. Lettuce varieties were normal to great. Green beans were - and have been - all but a waste of time this year. Tomatoes did *much* better this year than last, but not as good as I'd like. Bell peppers at least grew this year, although they didn't produce anything.

Melons have had average to good production -very sweet, too- while the squash production was and is off from what it was last year. The herbs that survived are doing great, though. Sweet potatoes -in most of their beds- are looking great, so far.

The plants, themselves, for the most part, all appeared to be healthy, except for the green beans, which got some kind of mold.

Weird spring, hot summer, water restrictions...focusing on the flower beds instead of the veggies...these were all factors, but I feel as if I'm missing something, here. Any suggestions, thoughts, ideas?

oh, yeah. Lots of butterflies, bees and beneficial insects, this year, including a naturally occurring preying mantis egg pod that contributed lots of little bug eaters. Except for something that was eating little holes in the smaller taters, we haven't had a lot of 'predation' in the garden this year. Not even squash bugs in any great numbers. Birds got a few things, including many of the strawberries, but we'll have enough strawberries next year to 'share' with the birds and not miss them too much. Ants were a problem on some plants, but not overly much.

Comments (5)

  • chickencoupe
    10 years ago
    last modified: 9 years ago

    I keep hearing this from others despite the rainfall. If find it curious. I only planted carrots this year.

  • mulberryknob
    10 years ago
    last modified: 9 years ago

    We had a good crop of most things this year. The notable exceptions are cabbage and cantalopes. Out of 18 cabbage plants, I got about 7 or 8 good heads--not great big heads but ok. The rest just didn't make or they started to bolt; a couple of the plants had small heads that started to split. I laid it to all the late frosts that finally ended on the 3rd of May. The Joe Parker peppers that I started from seed this year were almost defoliated by the grasshoppers so bore late and nowhere as heavily as last year. The Poblano peppers I bought as plants are even farther behind; I think those plants were too stressed and rootbound when I got them to do well. And the heavy rains that fell a month ago gave the mildew a push on the cantalopes--all open-pollinated and so probably not disease resistant--before half the melons ripened. The rain also caused 9 almost ripe ones of one variety to blow out.

    I have picked a lot of okra, but just the last couple weeks most of the stalks have died. The roots have knots again. I'm thinking nematodes.

    On the plus side I have never before had cucumbers last into September as I did this year. There is still a couple of Armenian plants that have fruit. Most of the rest of the plants have followed the melons in succumbing to mildew. I love the Armenians and the Poona Keeras though as they are so heat tolerant.

    Right now there isn't much left out there. The tomatoes are still producing well, as are the bell and banana peppers. There are a half dozen watermelons still to be picked. The sweet potatoes are doing great. And the Kentucky Red cowpeas that George gave me are, as expected, rampantly covering not only the 6 ft cattle panel but also the drying corn stalks 5 ft away.

    There are still far too many grasshoppers in the garden, and too little moisture in the soil to start anything for fall in the open, but I did plant the screened frames with beets, carrots, lettuce, spinach, arugula and garden cress. I hope they will make something to nibble on until the greenhouse comes back into production in December, from an October planting.

  • Okiedawn OK Zone 7
    10 years ago
    last modified: 9 years ago

    I think my garden's production is about the same as Warren's and Dorothy's---most veggies, herbs and flowers have done fine, but a few have not.

    The cool-season crops---peas, onions, garlic, potatoes, broccoli, cabbage, etc. all produced well and we harvested oodles of everything---almost more than I had time to put up and preserve. Warm-season crops produced well as long as I watered them religiously, except that something got the muskmelons, and by something I think I mean bacterial wilt, although they were at the far north end of the garden growing on the fence and maybe weren't getting enough irrigation as well. I made all the salsa we wanted/needed including lots to give away as gifts, and then did the same with pickles and with jalapeno peppers. I finally just started giving away jalapeno peppers to friends because I'd canned and frozen all we wanted and then some. Y'all know I'm always going to be happy once all the canning jars are filled.

    It has been the best pepper (both hot and sweet), okra, sweet corn, southern pea, squash and cucumber year ever. It also was the best Irish potato year ever, but only because I greatly overplanted. We simply didn't have cucumber beetles much at all this year, and it showed in the huge cucumber yields. I also didn't see many squash bugs until at least July.

    I suppose fruit was the biggest disappointment, but that hinges on frosts and freezes. I cannot keep strawberries alive here in the drought years, and we've been in drought nonstop since June 2012 so there were no strawberry plants this year at all, since all of them died in August 2011 and I didn't replace them.

    Warren, In our perpetually hot and dry summers, I just try to get everything in the ground as early as possible so it can produce as much as possible before the heat really sets it. That gives us better yields than anything else I've done. Even planting a week or two later than I know that I should can cause my harvest to be less than half of what it will be in a "normal" year when I am able to plant on time or even early. (Not that I am sure I even know what normal is around here any more.) The only other thing I can think of is western flower thrips, especially since you're in a hot, dry region of our state. If the western flower thrip population is heavy when edible crops are in flower, they can devastate the harvest by damaging the flowers or by carrying diseases to the plants. Since the thrips are blown in by the wind, there's not much you can do about them.

    Beans do better for me in spring and fall, and don't do much in summer. I can get good bean harvests most years from bush bean seed sown in earliest April, and my local gardening friend, Fred, tries to beat me by planting his in late March, but his garden is on higher ground that warms up a week or too later and doesn't get hit by the late cold nights that hit our low-lying area, so that's a contest I cannot win and he usually has the first bean harvest. I generally save planting of the pole beans for mid-summer for a fall harvest. If I can keep the plants alive until fall, they produce great in October, or if I plant pole beans in July, they'll often produce a great harvest in October. The spring-planted bush beans usually produce a harvest from late May through mid-July, or later if it isn't too hot, but not too much later. The bean plants usually burn up from the July heat in a hot summer or get some bean disease and die in July if we have a cooler, wetter summer. I still have some bean plants in the ground from spring and some from the fall planting, but the grasshoppers are devouring all the plants and I don't know if any of them will survive long enough for us to harvest beans in October. Beans are really prone to bean rust here if their foliage gets wet, so I just try to keep moisture off the foliage. That works with drip irrigation, but there's not much you can do in rainy years when the bean foliage is too wet too often.

    For the plants that need pollinators, I work really hard to have plants in bloom 11 or 12 months of the year for the pollinators. If I don't have winter flowers or shrubs in bloom for the pollinators, sometimes there aren't enough pollinators around in spring. In that case, I'll hand-pollinate whatever plants are flowering but not setting fruit. Henbit is not my favorite wildflower/weed, but at our house it often is in bloom in December and January when the pollinators really need to have something blooming, so I let it grow wherever it sprouts. In really dry winters when nothing much is blooming, I put out hummingbird feeders without bee guards for the bees and other pollinators, using the proper nectar formulation for the bees. I also plant lots of insectary type plants for the pollinators year-round and find that I have had much better crops of all kinds of things ever since I started doing insectary plantings.

    Fruit? Well, the repeated late frosts and late freezing temps slaughtered our fruit tree crop so there were no peaches or plums this year, but the blackberries and figs did okay. Having a ton of watermelons (and some of those still have new fruit and flowers on them) kind of made up for not having tree fruit.

    Dorothy, I don't have a fall garden at all except for tomato plants I planted in containers at the end of June/beginning of July. I water them every day and they set some fruit during a cool spell in early July, but the plants don't look too good. It is too hot and too dry and the grasshoppers are eating the plants. I'm also growing some Cooper Running Beans for George, in an effort to rebuild his seed stock, and they are in pots right beside the fall tomatoes. They are in the same shape the tomatoes are in---hot, dry and continually under attack from the grasshoppers.

    Our grasshopper population didn't really get bad here until August, but since we have stayed hot and dry, it hasn't begun to cycle down yet. In fact, I am seeing new small grasshoppers now so it looks like more continue to hatch out. We need rain, and a lot of it, in the worst possible way. Rain often knocks back the hopper population by encouraging disease.

    I do feel so worn down by three consecutive summers of serious drought. We need to have a real wet, real cold winter to get me back in the gardening mood for 2014. If we stay hot and dry here, I don't think I'll plant much next year....and maybe only in containers.

    It isn't that there wasn't enough produce this year. It is just that it took an extraordinary amount of labor to cover it up repeatedly all spring so it wouldn't freeze in the repeated late frosts, and that cold weather slowed everything down....and then it was too wet for 6 weeks or so and too dry the rest of the time. I've never had to work as hard to get a good harvest as I did this year, and I feel like I am totally tired of the garden and all my gardening enthusiasm is just depleted.

    Our KBDI is 651 and our 4" available plant moisture is 0,07. (You're supposed to water any time it drops below 0.50 because that is the level at which sufficient moisture no longer is available to the plant roots for uptake). There just isn't any moisture available in the soil at this point. No wonder everything that has not been irrigated regularly looks brown and crispy, and the stuff that has been irrigated doesn't look too much better at this point.

    We remain in drought and if we don't get rain soon, I don't know if I'll even plant anything in the greenhouse when it cools off. Without rain, we are going to have an awful fall/winter fire season, so I likely wouldn't be around enough to open and close the greenhouse doors as need for heating, cooling and good ventilation or to water the plants. I just may take off the fall and winter from gardening and focus on other stuff.

    I think that for much of Oklahoma this year, it was the weather with its recurring late frosts and freezes through early May that slowed down a lot of veggies. (That's not the biggest problem either, because lots of people had damage or destruction from severe thunderstorms, tornadoes, downbursts and hail.) Then, if you lived in an area with tons of rainfall, too much rain can be as bad or worse than getting too little rain. I think the weather was working against all of us this year. In some areas the grasshoppers were really bad much earlier or much later than usual, but they were bad, and there seemed to be too few blister beetles around to eat the grasshopper eggs and keep the population from skyrocketing. I keep hoping for a perfect weather year like we had in 2002 or 2004, but it just never happens here anymore.

    Dorothy, Even though cucumber mosaic virus showed up on the Armenian cucumbers in late July, only some of the plants died. A few are still alive and still producing, which is atypical for my garden.Usually I am happy if the cucumber plants are still alive by the beginning of August.

    We have a huge and hungry/thirsty deer population this year, since all the creeks and ponds that still have water in them are really low with stagnant, scummy water,, while other ponds and creeks have dried up completely. Thus, I've been harvesting young winter squash and large, over-mature Armenian cucumbers since July, slicing them up and feeding them to the hungry deer. Around sunset, the deer flock to the area near the back compost pile, where I put the sliced winter squash and Armenian cucumbers out for them. Sometimes the deer are standing on the edge of the woods and waiting for me to bring out the food. I'll look outside through the patio door and see the deer standing and staring at the door! I am so grateful we've had the Seminole Pumpkin winter squash and the Armenian Cukes in production so I can feed the deer. They likely won't be happy when the winter squash and cukes are all gone and probably will start coming up to the house in the dark and will start eating the shrubs and flowers. I just figured I'd keep feeding them as long as I have something harvestable to feed them.

    Dawn

  • wbonesteel
    Original Author
    10 years ago
    last modified: 9 years ago

    Over the last couple of days I've turned over a couple of beds and planted garlic for next year.

    The top three or four inches of soil were dry as a bone. There was little moisture about six to eight inches deep. At ten inches and deeper it was all but dry. Just enough moisture at that depth to say that there's some moisture there. Not enough to even put a damp spot on a paper towel.

    I use an oscillating sprinkler and water for a couple of hours every other day. I 'flood irrigate' a couple of smaller beds, as well. This year, trying to keep the veggies watered will either cost a mint or run your well dry.

    Farmer's Almanac says we should have some additional moisture this fall and winter, though. We'll see how it works out.

  • MiaOKC
    10 years ago
    last modified: 9 years ago

    Dawn, I laughed out loud when you said you might not plant much next year, maybe just in containers. It just tickled my funny bone, I guess! :) Maybe I'll ask you again in January? *wicked grin*

    I completely understand everyone being WORN OUT with our dang weather and all the challenges with growing anything in this climate.

    Personally, having only begun "seriously" gardening (i.e., with a purpose or a long-term goal more than "hey, I want my porch to be pretty this summer") in the last few years, this is almost all I know, and I'm still somewhat astonished when we eat anything I've grown! I've made several crock-pot batches of spaghetti sauce using my homegrown tomatoes, onions, garlic and basil, and I'm probably ruined for store-bought sauces. I did have the good fortune to be in one of the areas with great rainfall most of the summer, so that probably gives a big boost to my sunny disposition on the matter.

    As a newbie gardener who gardens for the fun and the free therapy of it, I hope to take each year as it comes, work with the challenges and try to use them to refine my techniques for the future. I'm sure they all won't be winners (and as I become more experienced, maybe I'll look back at the 2013 season - probably my best thus far - and think "wow, that was the worst, why did I ever think that was good?!") but they will all be part of the experience for me.

    For example, this year I learned I cannot plant my squash west of the tomatoes. I think the tomatoes shaded the squash row too much, so I got huge, waist-high plants until about Aug 15, then they all died suddenly without setting a single fruit. I think squash and peppers will commingle east of the tomatoes next year.

    I also learned that the kind of pears we have (which must have later/hardier blooms than the peach and plum to have set fruit at all) actually ripen from the inside out. Last year we waited until sometime in October when the pears were soft to harvest and they were kind of grainy, and we just assumed that's what a homegrown pear tastes like. This year, I researched it and found out they need to be picked hard and chilled for a week, and now I have some ripening on the counter after their brief sojourn in the fridge. Can't wait to taste them!

    I probably would have had more production this year had I planted earlier than I did (I think it was mid-May) but with the weather and my schedule it was the best I could do. I've done better about preserving what I have grown, and not letting anything rot on the vine or spoil on the counter. Partially due to not going on a summer vacation, I was here to handle things, and partially by just keeping up with chopping and freezing. We're stocked with tomatoes, okra, chopped onions and bell peppers to use on stuff all winter long now (just a bit of stuff - we have a side-by-side so I don't have tons of room, but I hope one day to require a chest freezer for my bounty!)

    Sorry to hijack this thread with my own musings. I hope you get great production next year!

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