The Tulsa Forum by TulsaNow

I don't want this thread to be just about my comments or complaints, but since it is the time for gardening I figured we could/would/should have a thread.  And I'll start!

I plant a salsa garden every year.  A persistent tomato rot problem along with a standing water problem caused me to move my garden last year (which was then killed by city contractors, whole other story).  So this year I planted rows raised about 6", probably still not as well drained as it should be (spring in Oklahoma is damn hard to make well enough drained!) but decent. 

I planted tomatoes, garlic, peppers, onions and cilantro.  As well as other items that are shockingly non-salsa related (lettuce, greens for the bearded dragon, a token row of corn, peas . . .).  We also did one of our front flower beds as an herb garden this year, which should be nice (Cilantro, basil (bruscheta), mint (mojito), chives, rosemary, parsley, more mint (mint juleps)).

Anyway, I come home from work for lunch and some bastage topped off 4 of my 6 tomato plants.  Looks like some kind of insect I guess - there is a dog/rabbit proof fence around it and nothing else was disturbed (the omnipresence of dogs probably keeps Rabbits away anyway).  But all the other plants and the 2 Roma Tomatoes were unharmed.  There is evidence of what appears to be diced up leaves around the poor little plants and they are cut clean with the ground.

I sprayed Saturday evening with an all-purpose garden insecticide, so I thought I was good.   I Googled  it and still am not sure.  Any green thumbs out there that want to tell me who or what I need to kill?

I can't help with your problem, but you are going to share some of your rosemary with me anyway, right? ;)

If it takes root, I sure will next year.  The thing grows like a weed once established.  That along with my mint, chives and parsley.

I spray a light mixture of dishwater dish detergent on my plants. It washes off easily and seems to discourage most pests.

Ditto.

I've ended up with a plethora of rabbits around my home this year so I'm curious how that's going to go. 

My dogs wanna eat 'em but I can't deal with "Silence of the rabbits" man.

Yeah, I'd garden myself but with my yard space so limited I don't want to give up any more of it.

Sounds like a nice garden you've got started there.   Were the tomatoes cut off at the ground?   If so it was tomato cut worms. 

http://www.essortment.com/all/cutworms_rcit.htm

I dabble a bit in gardening.  I have two greenhouses, a water garden and garden space along the south and east sides of my back yard.  Do a lot of container gardening on the deck and patio, it is the container plants that I over winter in the greenhouses.   

Here is a nice garden forum to get questions answered. 

http://pharmerphil.proboards.com/index.cgi?


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I was going to say cutworms, as well.  I always wrap my tomato plants in aluminum foil (just 2" below ground) and never have had any problems.  The tin cans also work well.  I hate to spray poisons on anything I am going to eat, and the dishwashing soap won't work for cutworms. 

I should add a disclaimer that I am really not a great gardner, though I waste plenty of money every year trying to convince myself that I can grow things.  I do ok until around August, then everything dies.  I hate the heat.

Yeah, sounds like cut worms. Simple fix (next time) is to use a milk carton with the top and bottom cut off or a collar of some sort of carboard material sunk about an inch into the ground and sticking up about an inch or two above ground. Some plants come with an organic collar that dissolves. The worms are unable to climb the barrier. As the plant grows you can remove it if it doesn't dissolve. 

Plant three tomatoe plants. One for the birds/squirrels, one for the bugs and one for yourself. :)

For cutworms, push a popsicle stick down into the soil right next to the stem. It keeps the cutworms from wrapping around the roots of the plant.

I have cutworm problems too. I use the aluminum foil approach every year.  Works very well, also keeps snails from climbing up bean plants.

I planted some new plants yesterday and took a closer look.

Some plants had leaves sheared off, others had all the leaves sheared off and whatever it was kept going right down to the dirt.  But mostly in nickel sized pieces.   I was unable to observe any kind of worm or bug on the plants, the fence is 95% rabbit proof and no other plants were disturbed (including the lettuce).  So it has to be some kind of worm.  This AM all plants were still in tact!

So I guess I'll foil the base of the plant.  My grandfather always planted tomatoes in old paint cans or milk jugs - guess I know why now.  I used to think he was crazy (and in some ways, well, yeah he was), but damn if that old saying about old people knowing what they are doing is sometimes right!

Alright I am almost ashamed to admit this but here goes.
The wife at the end of last growing season ordered the Topsy Turvy Tomato planter. Now I am not a big as seen on TV guy but she spent some pretty good money for these green plastic hanging bags.
I will be planting some Tomato's this weekend and I will let everyone know how it turns out in a few months.

I used to do that with 5 gallon Home Depot buckets.  cut a 2" hole in the bottom and you're good to go.  Works great, just make sure whatever you hang em from can hold about 70 lbs, or you'll be disappointed after a big rain. ;)

Some tips I've learned the hard way over the years:

Never plant tomatoes in the same space 2 years in a row.  Verticillium rot, fusarium wilt and several other diseases are very common and persist in the soil only if tomatoes are grown in the same spot year after year.

You can take a 20lb bag of good potting mix, poke a dozen pencil holes in one side, lay it in your garden on the perforated side then cut a 2" hole in the other side and plant your tomato.  For some reason this makes them grow huge, and they are far less disease laden.  Works good for peppers too.

Use tobasco and water in a spray bottle to get rid of squirrels if they try to eat your tomatoes.  BB gun works too.

For aphids I just use a powerful garden hose sprayer and blow em away every day.    I hate the mess associated with seven dust.  If I spray them enough to keep their population down, the ladybugs take over when temperatures heat up.

If you're a tobacco smoker (doesn't apply to you FOTD), wash your hands extremely well before you even get close to your tomato plants.  Tobacco virus is about the most common disease.  Causes the leaves to just brown out and dry up before the tomatoes ever get a chance to ripen.  It then lasts in the soil until next year to reap havoc again if you plant in the same spot.

Plant radishes and/or small lettuces around your tomatoes.  they like a bit of shade and as you harvest and replant, they encourage you to cultivate and weed the soil around your tomatoes.

Don't ever grow cabbage.  Every time I've done it, the cabbage loopers invade my tomatoes, lettuce, and anything else they can get to.

If you want to have fun, you can buy these little tomato boxes.  they are about 3" x 3" and you snap them around your tomatoes until they ripen (or get too big for the box).  Not only do they stop bugs but you get very cool square stackable tomatoes.

DO NOT COMPOST TOMATO PLANTS.  Unfortunately the furry little stems harbor most of your nasty diseases after the season is over, and every tomato plant is seething with disease by the end of the season, even if they don't look like it.  Allan Storjohann gave me a very high tech composter years ago and I get it up above 140 degrees every season, but I learned that still won't do the trick.  When I eliminate the tomato plant waste I never have any problems (took me several years to figure that out).

I like the topsy turveys (I used to use 5 gallon buckets), especially for compact determinate plants like most romas.  If you use them for an indeterminate like a sweet 100, you'll have long ugly vines strung all over your patio.

The problem is Gaspar, most people only have one place they CAN grow tomatoes.   :-\

I understand it is not optimal and I had to move my garden because the diseases that accrued in the soil.  But each time I move my garden it is an investment of 10-20 hours of time to take down the old fence, put up a new one, kill the Bermuda in the new garden sit, till the soil, add amendment, put up an aesthetic rock wall and then reduce the previous garden location to yard.  Keeping in mind that my mid-town lot allows limited space.  Particularly limited on space  that has good access to sunlight!

I will need a long term solution to that problem.

Try the bags then.  That's what I used to do when I didn't have room.  Takes care of the weed problem too.  Just lay the bag right on your soil, or lay down a weed barrier fabric first.  Also an inexpensive drip watering kit from Depot with a timer makes things really easy.  I started off with a cheap drip kit and ended up putting drip irrigation everywhere around the house.

Gaspar, thanks for the bag tip.  Since most of my time is devoted to home renovation right now, a garden would be last on the list of priorities.  I love good home-grown tomatoes, sounds like a great solution for my time pinch right now.

One year I couldn't figure out why all my plants were getting eaten.  (All of them!  Tomatoes, flowers, okra...everything I planted was nibbled off when it was young and tender.)  I'd put a small gauge fence around the garden, and assumed it would keep the rabbits away.  (The holes in the fence were maybe 2 inches by 3 inches....which seemed smaller than a rabbit to me.)

Then I saw the rabbits just running through the fence with nary a hesitation.  As it turns out, they can squeeze through much smaller holes than I imagined.

I tried all sorts of suggestions, including spreading dog hair and blood meal around the garden, and the old "have a meat-eater pee around the perimeter" trick.  (That was amusing.)  The bunnies just laughed.

Now, I always use chicken wire, and I make sure there's no gap between the soil and the bottom of the fence.  My cat has been helping, too. 

The only downside to the kitty patrol is that I've learned that bunnnies actually scream when they're being killed by a cat.  Not what you want to hear first thing in the morning. 

Well, Clarice - have the bunnies stopped screaming?

Not what you want to hear at 3 in the morning when the cat comes in the doggy door with one in her mouth.  Sounds like a human scream.  Great way to wake up!

I use something very similar to this:

(http://images.lowes.com/product/659754/659754970291.jpg)

It is more attractive and more sturdy than chicken wire.  My dogs do well enough keeping most rabbits away, so keeping the dogs away is the real trick!  Stupid girl dog.  She went over a rock well and jumped over this fence with 2 strands of wire above it, then cleared the rock wall on the OTHER side and landed on my lettuce.  Once in there she picked up a 6" plastic pot full of rocks and scattered it around.  Then picked up a Tupperware thing full of starter plants from seed and carried it to the other side.

Then she left.  No real damage but for 4 lettuce plants.

Last year my garden was a war zone.  I trimmed back rose bushes and intertwined the thorn branches into the fence.  I put stakes out away from the fence and put up strands of wire (dogs can't jump well over long distances and clear a 3.5' fence, more of an UP type of jump).  I placed random stakes inside the fence so she had nowhere to land.  I placed a swing along the fence so she couldn't even get there.  (contractors were working behind the fence last summer and knocked out a few of my 6' fence pickets continuously, hence the motivation to get back there and bark at them through the fence holes).

Eventually my cumulative work paid off.  But by that point the combination of garden destruction and the difficulty I had of getting back there made it not worth the effort.   Stupid grumble (I mean that in that my female dog is unintelligent).  But she's so cute with her floppy ears and whatnot.  

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As a somewhat related story:  my girl dog (my boy dog is damn good, so no boy dog stories get told) kills things.  Rabbits, squirrels, birds.  She ran down a deer once at my uncles house (it fell jumping a fence, she caught it and didn't know what to do).  Basically, any animal dumb enough to go in my backyard had better be smart enough to know it is risking death.

On occasion she brings us these prizes.  My wife is usually not-so-happy to receive a slightly chewed on squirrel.  She doesn't chew them up too bad (my dog, not my wife) let alone try to eat them or gods forbid roll in their guts (unlike if my boy dog finds a dead fish at the lake).  But on one occasion she brought my wife a headless squirrel.  Per my wifes testimonial, she couldn't find the head.  It HAD to be in the backyard somewhere.  But alas.  I couldn't find it either.

A couple months later the dogs are coming in at night and acting like camels.  Not only the girls dog - who was a stray in Tulsa for months per the vet so she drinks when she can as much as she can and will eat until she throws up.  I told you this dog isn't bright.  I digress . . . so they were BOTH coming in and drinking like they had no water all day.  I just thought they were getting picky and shifted from a desire for pond scum to filtered water.  So I started putting water out for them each morning in a farm bucket (kept it from freezing too).

So early this spring I'm cleaning out the half-barrel water garden (old whiskey barrel) / dog water source  that has turned into a hippo pond for the much aforementioned stupid girl dog (she hops right in, plants no longer survive in there.  Cattails, lilys, irises, hyacinth, water lettuce, all dead. She also ate the fish out of it. "Girl, why does your breath smell like koi?" Thanks for that.).  Come spring it is stagnant, low on water, and full of leaves and other garbage.  As I got to the bottom scooping it out the water smelled like a swamp, but this time not the usual swamp smell - it was particularly bad. 

Lo and Behold!  I'm chucking out cups of water and suddenly something chunky flies out.  I gaze upon it as it sails through the air, unable to place it.  Not a rock.  Not a dirt clump.  Not a dead fish.  Something my boy dropped in there?  It lands on the already drenched ground with a dull splat and rolls to a horrific stop.  A semi mummified and well soaked squirrel head is looking back at me.   Which was nice.

It may have been the first time since the inception of marriage that a husband had been excited to tell his wife he had located a missing squirrel head. We did not save it.

Too bad you didn't save it.  I would have put it on a tiny pike in my garden to serve as a warning to others.

I love these gardening stories.   Good information and entertaining experiences.   

I used the exact same wire for my garden. After attaching it to my railroad ties. I cut the top wires and bent them outward in order to keep my dog out of there, i know it sounds cruel but after a couple of jumps in there he stopped doing it.

and now I want a garden.  If only I could afford it...

I'm still afraid it might wind up at my house as a house-warming gift....blech!  What was in the backpack again yesterday, Cannon?

Stuff to make Philly Cheese Steak for supper.  Thin sliced round, red onions, garlic, bell peppers, provolone, swiss cheese and a loaf of French bread.   Damn it was good.  Mind you, I did wake up at 3am to be "punished" for my excessive eating.  Still, I think it was worth it.

That and a pickled severed squirrel head which I left in your neighbors mail box with a note asking if you could date their daughter.

Well, the younger girl got one...a freaking bunny.

Went to let her in and there she was at the back door with the non-kosher half in her mouth.

Happy to say the door is glass so I saw the carnage before opening it up to the nasty.

Both dogs got baths at about 10 last night to get off any rabbit residue.

No luck finding the front half so I'll mow the yard this eve (need to anyway) and see if I can find it.

That was a super gross way to end the day.

I never heard the scream.

My dog weighs all of five pounds.  If anything, the bunnies might try and carry Butch away.  He's managed to sneak in before with a sparrow wing or leg.  He sounds just like Taz when you try and take a trophy away like that.

I've heard that scream several times. My 13-year-old greyhound has killed five rabbits in his lifetime. He's so damned fast (even now), he can be on top of the critters in no time. He nearly killed a stray cat, too.

The ice storm provided good hunting for her and her sister.  A kamikaze rat ran right at her, many squirrels have gone to the mighty oak in the sky, a robin that I had to finish off (unpleasant).

I've told her every time I let her out for a year now, "don't kill anything today".  She didn't listen yesterday.

Some parts of our backyard look like a war zone. While I was filling some of the ankle breaking and twisting holes, I found a dead mole.  I guess my dog was successful. One less mole to attack my pepper garden.

Swimming pools are a great way to catch all sorts of vermin.  I remember the first time I had a drowned mole in the skimmer basket I freaked.  At first glance I thought it was a huge rat.  I guess he'd tunnelled out and had no clue where he was going.  I get birds, mice, bats, toads.  Everything but fish.  ;)