Garden 2010--Pic HEAVY

[lesa]

Looking good! You'll be doing the tomato dance, very soon!! Sorry the bugs are driving you out- that stinks! Do you have a lot of standing water near by?

 

[sparkles2307]

We live next to the county drainage canal....and theres a swamp behind the house, and laws being what they are, we arent allowed to alter the natural course of any water on our land. I want to scream.

 

[lesa]

Oh, I had the same situation at my former home. An unused part of the Erie Canal ran behind the house. There were days you couldn't stand to be outside! They didn't wait until evening either!

 

[ducks4you]

Lovely garden pics!! Your bell peppers don't look sickly at all, they're just smaller than what you might have bought and transplanted from a garden center. I have smaller ones, too, because I had to weed before my sprouts were visible, and this was after I had bought 6 sweet peppers and put them in the ground.
Also, it's not bad to direct sow your tomatoes. You won't get quite as much fruit as you would had your started them inside. However, I have noticed over the 15 years that I have grown tomatoes and sometimes ONLY tomatoes, that mostly in the Midwest we don't get green tomatoes until July and they usually don't start fully ripening until August. AND, the "volunteers" that I keep oftentimes play catch-up and start flowering when they are smaller.
In 2009, I had my plants out with plastic greenhouses in April!! I actually had some red tomatoes to eat by the 4th of July. It was a lot of work and I lost about half of them to cool/cold weather.
Feel better?

 

[ducks4you]

We live next to the county drainage canal....and theres a swamp behind the house, and laws being what they are, we arent allowed to alter the natural course of any water on our land. I want to scream.

I guess you missed the thread about skeeters, but you could try planting things that attract mosquito predators, like dragonflies. Here's from one of my previous posts--
If you have a pond, (OR A CANAL!!) make it friendly to dragonflies, because their larvae eat mosquito larvae and the adults eat adult mosquitos.
http://www.gardeningclub.com/all-about- ragonflies
"Select the right plants. Dragonflies and damselflies are not picky, so any native aquatic or wetland vegetation will work. Plants that will thrive in your pond include bulrush, pickerelweed, cattail, and water lily. For spots around the pond, consider blue flag iris, cardinal flower, red-twig dogwood, summersweet, and winterberry holly."

 

[sparkles2307]

Red dogwood grows well here, for some reason there arent any cattails in the canal....maybe the county keeps them out for drainage purposes? THe swamp is almost dried up, nothing will grow there, its under dense tree canopy, no sunlight, and dries up mid July each year. DH keeps buckets of water in the garden which doesnt help, but we put lids on them. The big issue seems to be the row of blue-spruce that is 10 ft from the garden. The skeeters live in there. DH looks at me as if I've sprouted horns when I mention doing anything to his precious spruce trees...

 

[hoodat]

Try making a garlic spray by running garlic cloves in a blender with some water and then spray it on the trees. Mosquitos hate garlic and it even kills them in the larval stage. It doesn't seem to kill adults but they avoid it. I guess garlic works on little vampires also.

 

[sparkles2307]

Good to know hoodat thanks