What Did You Do Today?

[JW_Halverson]

I have found that things like pole beans germinate and grow better if they are planted through a strip of landscape fabric. I am putting more and more strips of landscape fabric down the planted rows. I put black plastic on the bare spots to keep the weeds down. Plants like okra, squash and tomatoes like black plastic, I think this is so because these plants shade the ground from the Alabama sun. Spinach will only have a germination rate of about 10% or less if planted through plastic but does really well planted through landscape fabric.

I experiment with different planting techniques every year just to see what happens. A couple of years ago my yellow squash grew into my electric fence, there wasn't a bug or stalk borer on any of them all season, the vines grew out for at least 12 ft. I have been trying to figure out a way to put this finding into practice.

Ever experimented with running squash vines up a trellis? Really saves on square footage and they grow fruit just fine! I used to run my squash up the hog panel deer fencing around the garden I used to have years back. At first, I thought I'd need to rig little hammocks when the squash got some size to them, but that was not the case. They just grew a slightly more robust stem to support their own weight. Ya might not get that same result if you are growing champion sized punkins or big watermelons, though!   

[Eric Krewson]

I tried vertical squash with standard straightneck squash, it wasn't a success, I tied the growing squash to a cattle panel. Next, I bought highbred Burpee squash called "rise and shine" which was modified to grow up and not out. What I found when I try to grow squash vertically is I get a few normal sized squashes then the higher up the vine they grow the more dwarf the squash get until they are tiny.

The first picture is of my failed vertical squash, not much production and tiny squash; the second picture is of how they grow in my very rich garden if I let them run on the ground.

[Eric Krewson]

The garden is complete; the okra and beans are coming up.

I had 9 squash plants left over so I took an old piece of plastic over to my neighbor's garden and planted him some squash and a row of okra through the plastic. He is going to be out of town for weeks and hasn't put a garden in. I did the same thing last year when it was time to plant greens and he was out of town; I covered half his garden up with kale and collards. Because I have a tiller on my tractor this is usually a simple job, a couple of passes and I am good to go.

This picture shows my re-cycled landscape fabric in the foreground; I use this piece to plant my winter spinach every year. This year I plugged the extra holes with newspaper and planted 5 cantaloupe plants through it. If you look a little further back, you can see two rows of okra planted through the same landscape fabric for my other spinach patch. This is commercial landscape fabric, very thick and will last forever, I dry it, I fold it up and store it in my shop until next year.

The bare plastic next to the cantaloupe patch is for the vines to run on, they will completely cover this area and produce about 50 cantaloupes.