2024 garden season

[TNTreeHugger]

Sweet potato vines need to lay flat on the ground so they can put down the feeder roots at the leaf joints.
Yes I do love my 12.5 pound taters! lol! Good stuff and fully matured!
The 4 oz ones the stores sell are tasteless and a waste of time!

You are the sweet tater expert, for sure!
Yeah, I noticed that on my mystery pumpkin vine I had year before last - it sent roots into the ground at the leaf joints.

I brought my sprouted sweet tater inside yesterday, the one in the mason jar, I clipped the vines in half and put the cut ends in water.
If these survive the winter will they be good to plant in the spring?

 

[muddstopper]

I am going to add my 2 cents again. Sonny is right, tater vines do need to touch the soil in order to spread and produce more tubers. thing is in pots you only have so much room for the tubers to grow. Trellising or hanging the vines in pot grown taters will allow mor sunlite to reach the leaves an help you plants produce bigger taters in the pots. gound planted thaters need the room to put out vines to gather the sunlite,. The size of the pot will make a bigg difference in the size tater rhat can be grown. small pots and lots of vines results in strings, not taters. One thing i have tried that with limit success is planting slip in one pot and placeing a non planted pot right next to the planted pot and letting the vine grow across the nonplanted pot and rooting itself. this results in a new plant and more future taters. It works, but its slow go.

 

[muddstopper]

I am having a hard time typing. I had a stroke a couple weeks ago and now have mobility issues and motor skills. Typing is hard and needs lots of corrwctions. For that reason i am just going to stop trying to correct my s[ellong an punchuation. baare with me as i continue to make a foll pf myself and jsur undrstand if someone wants to be a spelling oe gra,,ar nazi, I font give a f if you dont like the way I am writing this.

 

[Del_]

I am having a hard time typing. I had a stroke a couple weeks ago and now have mobility issues and motor skills. Typing is hard and needs lots of corrwctions. For that reason i am just going to stop trying to correct my s[ellong an punchuation. baare with me as i continue to make a foll pf myself and jsur undrstand if someone wants to be a spelling oe gra,,ar nazi, I font give a f if you dont like the way I am writing this.

So sorry to hear it.

Wishing you the best my fellow gardener.

 

[TNTreeHugger]

I am having a hard time typing. I had a stroke a couple weeks ago and now have mobility issues and motor skills. Typing is hard and needs lots of corrwctions. For that reason i am just going to stop trying to correct my s[ellong an punchuation. baare with me as i continue to make a foll pf myself and jsur undrstand if someone wants to be a spelling oe gra,,ar nazi, I font give a f if you dont like the way I am writing this.

Oh no, I am so sorry to hear that.... I wanted to give your post both a sad face for the stroke part, and a "love happy face" for your spunky positive attitude.

Don't fret over the typos - just keep typing and it will get better.
Besides, the human brain is pretty good at filling in and replacing missing letters.

Remember seeing this online?

AI Overview

Yes, the human brain has the ability to "fill in" missing letters on text, particularly when the first and last letters of a word are correct, relying on context and its understanding of language to decipher the overall meaning, even if the middle letters are jumbled or missing; this phenomenon is often called "typoglycemia."



Thanks for the tater advice
Keep typing - we need you here!

 

[sonny580]

sorry about your health. --- just do what you can and hang in there, keep pushing on and dont worry about what others think!
The tater pieces in water will make a bunch of roots and spindly vines 10 feet long on the floor IF they live. Most likely they would live for a while but not all winter.
The water will turn bad and plants usually rot off in the water after a while.
I have been told to cut pieces of old vines and store them in bags in the fridge. I cant see that working either.
Starting with the tater itself at the right time in the spring is the only way to get good plants at reasonable cost.
We used to order plants from Georges plant farm til the prices got too high. At that time we always planted 1,000 plants and got a little discount on the order. Just getting 1 or 2 bunches is out of the question so we grow our own now. Just another step down and a kick in the ass from suppliers!
EVERYTHING has gone up and continues to do so making growing your own food more costly and forcing people to rely on the govt. and chimna grown crap!
They are messin with our seed so it wont grow also!
IF you can save any seed of your own it always grows. May not have the varieties you want but its food!

 

[TNTreeHugger]

sorry about your health. --- just do what you can and hang in there, keep pushing on and dont worry about what others think!
The tater pieces in water will make a bunch of roots and spindly vines 10 feet long on the floor IF they live. Most likely they would live for a while but not all winter.
The water will turn bad and plants usually rot off in the water after a while.
I have been told to cut pieces of old vines and store them in bags in the fridge. I cant see that working either.
Starting with the tater itself at the right time in the spring is the only way to get good plants at reasonable cost.
We used to order plants from Georges plant farm til the prices got too high. At that time we always planted 1,000 plants and got a little discount on the order. Just getting 1 or 2 bunches is out of the question so we grow our own now. Just another step down and a kick in the ass from suppliers!
EVERYTHING has gone up and continues to do so making growing your own food more costly and forcing people to rely on the govt. and chimna grown crap!
They are messin with our seed so it wont grow also!
IF you can save any seed of your own it always grows. May not have the varieties you want but its food!

I've also read that the seeds saved from the garden do better over time as they acclimate to that specific area. That true?

 

[sonny580]

Yes it is! They adapt to your soil and climate making them your own varieties. I save a lot of my own seed every year. Tomatoes come up volunteer in the garden so I just dig out some and put them in rows then cultivate the rest out.

 

[muddstopper]

I am not to picky when it comes to sweet tater slips. I usually just tkae a couple of store bought sweet taters and place in a open glass bowl on top of the fridge. The taters will sprout and frow vines qithout any other input from me. I havent really thought about when I started the tater in the bowl thing. but its usually about htis time of year after all rhe pumkin, and sweet tater pie making is over with.That gives the taters about 5 or 6 months to produce slips and they qre usually hanging off the fridge by then. i harvest the vines and plant in the largest pots I have, keep then watered and harvest taters in the fall. Pretty easy growing, even for a lazy man. Again I aint trying to feed the neighborhood, but I could easily increase rge number od slips producw byt triming and rooting the vines for more slips. I would just need more pots.

 

[TNTreeHugger]

I am not to picky when it comes to sweet tater slips. I usually just tkae a couple of store bought sweet taters and place in a open glass bowl on top of the fridge. The taters will sprout and frow vines qithout any other input from me. I havent really thought about when I started the tater in the bowl thing. but its usually about htis time of year after all rhe pumkin, and sweet tater pie making is over with.That gives the taters about 5 or 6 months to produce slips and they qre usually hanging off the fridge by then. i harvest the vines and plant in the largest pots I have, keep then watered and harvest taters in the fall. Pretty easy growing, even for a lazy man. Again I aint trying to feed the neighborhood, but I could easily increase rge number od slips producw byt triming and rooting the vines for more slips. I would just need more pots.

Thanks for the tip. I'm going to try that and get a few extra sweet taters next shopping trip.
The vines I brought in are hanging in there. The two cut pieces have a couple of roots starting and the ones still attached to the cut spud look good, too. The leaves turned yellow, but haven't fallen off and the growing ends have new leaves on them.

 

[sonny580]

If they are starting new leaves, they are not dead and the old leaves will just fall off and be replaced with the new ones.

 

[TNTreeHugger]

The vines are looking great. I pulled off the brown leaves and there is new growth emerging. Also Lots of roots coming out on the vine pieces I cut off the main vine and stuck in the water.

So, next spring, when I plant these outside, should I just plant the entire vine, or cut between the leaves and start individual plants?
Maybe set the vines in a bowl of water to get the roots started??

 

[sonny580]

You could cut the vines up and start a lot of plants that way. I would go that route.

 

[TNTreeHugger]

You could cut the vines up and start a lot of plants that way. I would go that route.

I'll do that. Since it only took about a week for roots to come out, I'll cut them up and lay them on a shallow pan of water about a week before I'm ready to plant.
Something to look forward to.

 

[muddstopper]

You could cut the vines up and start a lot of plants that way. I would go that route.

Eactly the way I do it.

 

[TNTreeHugger]

So I asked this question over in P&R last night

Speaking of organic matter, I've been wondering if all the dead/dying water hyacinths and water lettuce in my three ponds would be good to bury in my garden beds.
What do you think?

I have quite a bit of it, probably enough for each raised bed in the garden.
Pretty sure if I just lay it on top it will be a mushy mess by the time I want to plant.
Would it be better to dig a trench in the center of each bed and bury it?
Or would it need to be composted outside the garden before using in the garden?

 

[sonny580]

either way would work as long as its not on top of the ground. I prefer to compost stuff IF I have the time, otherwise I just dump it on top then plow it under. --- gotta be plowed under!

 

[TNTreeHugger]

either way would work as long as its not on top of the ground. I prefer to compost stuff IF I have the time, otherwise I just dump it on top then plow it under. --- gotta be plowed under!

Thanks Sonny, that's kind of what I was thinking. More work on the garden. I wasn't quite finished with it anyway. I have another hog panel that I want to move into the new garden area for beans and other climbers. Also need to bank the outer edges with cardboard, like I did in the first garden, to help keep the soil in place.
Next couple of days are supposed to warm up a bit and be good to get outside.

 

[farmer steve]

Hey guys and gals. 2025 garden season will be here before you know it. Seed catalogs are starting to arrive. CHECK ✔ prices before you buy!! A for instance. I bought 2lbs of lima bean seed from my one supplier yesterday. $4.70 per lb. I did a Google search for them and came up with prices anywhere from $7 to almost $20 a lb and this was from some other reputable companies. The Montauk sweet corn I bought was $15-30 more per bag from internet sellers.