Hey JustAnne, thanks for the thorough description of how you start your fall veggies. I don’t start them inside because I would rather not run the grow lights again. I do use Sluggo, and cover the lettuce with row cover.
What size flats do you put the seedlings in? How long do you aim to keep the plants in the flats before transplanting?
Hey Jim, I don’t use grow lights except in Jan-Mar. True that lights are needed to ‘grow’, but temp is more important in germination which I understood was a problem. Soil in small cells and even flats heats up quickly to 85-90 deg outside here. Brassicas don’t like that so much. I use heat mats in winter and AC vents or frig in summer for germination purposes primarily. Here aluminum pans are cooled to 60-70 deg by the AC vent (we keep the house at ~82 deg). I put 2 small pots to show what I use for germination. So summer ops look like this
Once enough of the seeds have germinated, you can transition them into natural light. Are you familiar with germination rates vs. temp for seeds? I can post a pic for reference if you like.
At some point I prick out the seedlings out of the small germination pots into flats to grow on. The size of the flat is defined by what I can lift. These got hit with a gulley washer last night but are moving right along.
They can grow quite large in this if I need to wait until there is room. The bigger they are the better their survival rate.
@scottfsmith Can you please move this winter gardening discussion to a new thread? Not sure how to.
Cool beans! You have quite the system. I am familiar with the germination rates vs temps. This year I started broccoli, cauliflower, kholrabi, and cabbage in cells. I did keep the cells out of the sunlight until they germinated, then moved them into full sun. I have been moving them in and out of the shed every night to avoid bug and slug damage. This is a daunting task when added to the already endless chore list.
I have directly sown lettuce, mustards, rabe, turnips, and asian greens into the garden where the garlic, zucchini, summer squash and some spring lettuces were. I made sure to add an inch of compost before planting. It has been cool in PA so that has helped, but about half of the lettuce did not germinate. Weirdly, it seems to not germinate in bunches, like a foot of seeds in a row won’t sprout but the ones around them will. I went back and replanted.
I will be sowing spinach, mache, claytonia, more lettuce, radishes, arugula, and some herbs in the coming weeks.
Nice Jim. Please keep us updated. Would love to see photos.
Tender seedlings are toast when direct sown in my garden. When they are small, one bite and they are all gone. Putting out larger plants ensures you get to see if they are being eaten before they disappear.
Some of your lettuce that is missing may have actually germinated and been eaten. This happened to my carrots in early summer…then I saw the small stems that were left. Winter lulls us into forgetfulness about how bad insect pressures are in summer.
OK, some garden pics from our various plots.
Corn patch, with Honey Select in foreground. Each stalk has a couple ears growing.
Me standing in among the HS for perspective. I’m 6’, and the tassels are a foot above me.
Some HS silk on the ears, almost purple-ish. Ears are nicely sized, some almost a foot long by now.
Some of the tassels on the Silver Queen, I think it looks nice. I like how the pollen dusts off of it with just a small rattle of the stalk.
Some SQ ears and silk, just starting to form. Looks like two ears per stalk as well.
Three rows of beans on right side of corn. Two left rows are mostly white and striped half-runners and row on right are Rattlesnake pole beans. We ran wire lines between 5ft T-posts for vining, but they were put up too late. Next year we’ll use welded wire fencing that we use around the fruit trees for trellising.
Bean vining up a pop-corn stalk. These have 4 ears per stalk, but they are a lot smaller than the other sweet corn we’re growing.
Close up of Rattlesnake bean blooms, with a little bean sprout next to them
Small mess of the Rattlesnake beans. We had them for supper last night. Pretty good flavor cooked, but they are one of the few beans that I could eat straight off the vine. Very sweet, not real fibrous-y. Not as prolific as the half runners, but the taste means we’ll grow them again next year.
Overall, we’re pretty happy with the progress of the beans and corn. We’ve already canned 7qt of half runners, and hope to do many more. Keeping our fingers crossed re the corn, hoping we can harvest some before varmits discover them. We’ve never harvested a decent sized crop of corn over the last three growing seasons.
Lovely,
I tried to grow a three sister garden this year because I have three little girls. If anyone doesn’t know, you plant corn, then when the corn is about a foot high plant beans to grow up the corn. You also plant squash between the corn to crowd out the weeds. Apparently this is what the Native Americans did.
It did not work great and I won’t do it again.
I had never grown corn before and I have probably harvested 50 ears, which were very good. The beans are just now starting to flower on the corn stalks. I think the corn got too big and shaded the squash. Both pumpkins were doomed. Two of the spaghetti squash found their way out and are growing through the yard. There may be a butternut squash in there somewhere. The whole thing is a weedy mess and I won’t be doing it again. It was fun for the kids though.
The 3 sisters garden was meant to be dry corn for grinding and dry beans - whole thing to harvest in fall
It doesn’t seem to work for sweet corn and green beans
It worked great for the corn and seems like I’ll get a lot of beans. If I get 8 squash I’ll be lucky.
Thanks. My wife claims they do the two sisters thing here. That is, plant corn, then later, sow the beans. We did that the first season here, and we had some limited success. But to me it was just a big mess. We harvested lots of beans that year, canned quite a few quarts. We didn’t get any real harvest of corn, maybe froze a few ears, but didn’t can any.
Last year, she wanted to do it again in another plot. But the corn never really took off because of a late freeze, and then deer and or coons. Beans did poorly as well, and then it became a big weedy mess, so a lost year there.
I didn’t want to try it again this year, the corn seems to keep the weeds at bay when they get bigger, and she’s kept the bean lanes cleaned out. We should have got our bean support wires up sooner as a lot of the vines are down on the ground, getting muddy, not good. But they still seem to be producing well.
She planted some pie pumpkins out by the barn, and they have taken off like crazy. Leaves bigger than a catcher’s mitt. But, haven’t seen any pumpkins yet. They were planted in rich soil where a horse spent a lot of time so lots of “nutrients” there. Oddly, the deer have left the leaves alone.
My tomatoes get a lot of stink bug damage here… various types, I believe. I end up with a slight white corkiness/mealiness under the skin. What do folks do to combat this? I don’t spray anything. I still eat them, but they are less enjoyable… still great in cooking :-).
Okra? 
I wanted to comment that that photo (by SMC_zone6) says it all, why we do what we do, only 6 likes? Come on people. What is that white fruit center bottom?
It sure is. I never really know what to do with okra, though. I always just roast it with olive oil and salt. Any hot tips, Mrs. G?
It’s a mix of White Wonder cucumbers and Boothby’s Blonde cucumbers. They’re pickles now 
I grow the same yellow warty summer squash this year and I really like it.
This is my first year growing it. I like it a lot too. It’s dense without being overly watery. My staple summer squash is Romanesco, which @mrsg47 recommended a few years back. This one is called Rugosa Friulana.
Nice harvest, Steven. What a nice variety of veggies. Looks like you have a good amount of basil? Is that Genovese? What kind of tomatoes are we looking at? Corn?
You could always make pickled okra, if you got too much of it. I loved it while growing up back in OK. We planted a lot of okra this year, but deer took care of them, along with our reg and sweet taters, and most of our tom’s. But, I won’t go into that again.
Our cukes have been going like gangbusters this year. The Mrs has made at least a dozen quarts of various pickles- bread & butter, dill slices and spears, and soon she’ll be making some sweet pickles of some type. Our best cuke harvest in four years of trying.
They look like cucumbers, I don’t know them that well. I didn’t know they had whites. I’m growing Chinese yellow. I pickled some too, and will do more soon.
The seeds look small, they look good!
I grew some bottle onions…they didn’t size well…the weeds took over. Next year i plan to grow more.
