Category: Garden

Posts about gardening and related topics, such as canning and maybe other aspects of food preservation.

Post G22-050: Parthenocarpic squash, is this a joke?

 

Edited 8/6/2022:  I may have been somewhat hasty in my original post.  I removed the insect barrier.  As expected, I am now getting full-sized summer squash.  But the largest of these, so far, has only a vestige of seeds.  For all intents and purposes, it’s seedless.  To me, this suggests that, at some point, these squash plants did indeed begin producing full-sized fruit despite a lack of pollination.  Perhaps they have to produce a handful of tiny ones first, before they give up on getting pollinated and begin producing full-sized parthenocarpic fruit.

The original post follows.

One tiny detail.  The seed packets for parthenocarpic squash failed to mention one tiny, little detail.

Looking on the bright side, you know how summer squash will go from small to gigantic before you know it?  One day they’re barely edible, three days later they’re barely liftable?

Or how you can be inundated with zucchini, to the point where you have to keep dreaming up new ways to cook it?  Where you start figuring out ways to hide it in food, so that your family won’t object.

The good news is, parthenocarpic squash have both of those problems licked.

They’re tiny. Unless a miracle happens, my parthenocarpic summer squash are going to weigh in somewhere around one ounce each.

If you’re interested, read on.  Or just check the photos below. Continue reading Post G22-050: Parthenocarpic squash, is this a joke?

Post G22-047: Heat and tomato ripening, just one more thing that I can’t test this year.

 

I’ve been harvesting ripe tomatoes more-or-less continuously over the past week.

Accordingly, it’s about time I admitted that my prediction of a period of no ripe tomatoes, due to excess heat, was wrong.  And it’s time to do the autopsy. Continue reading Post G22-047: Heat and tomato ripening, just one more thing that I can’t test this year.

Post G22-046, Vinegar and other organic herbicides

 

I’ve just been taught a first-hand lesson in why hardware stores sell 30% acetic acid (vinegar) as weed killer.   That’s because regular household-strength (5%) may or may not work.

Here you see a section of my driveway, sprayed yesterday with vinegar (4%).  It’s now a mix of dead and clearly undead weeds.  

Perhaps this explains the mixed reviews that vinegar gets, as an herbicide.  Above, it clearly left most of the grasses untouched, but did seem to kill some of the crabgrass. Continue reading Post G22-046, Vinegar and other organic herbicides

Post G22-045: Today’s driveway forecast: Mostly weeds, with occasional stretches of partly pavement.

 

This post is about killing a whole lot of weeds growing up through a long stretch of poorly-maintained asphalt driveway.  Options considered include:

  • Commercial weed killers (Round-Up, Spectracide).
  • Vinegar
  • Salt
  • Mechanical (weed whacker)
  • Heat.
    • Propane weed flamer
    • Electric heat gun
    • Boiling water
    • Steam
    • Solar, up to and including solar oven

This post is just about gathering the facts, trying to make my mind up.  I haven’t really tested any of these yet.

Arguably the biggest revelation (to me) is that several of the alternatives (e.g., vinegar, heat) are really no different from using a weed whacker.  It took me a while to figure that out, but all they do is take the tops off the weeds, leaving the live roots intact.  That’s just a roundabout way of doing what a weed wacker does directly.  In which case, it’s hard to argue in favor of some D-I-Y approach, when there’s a tool actually designed for the job.

After a false start with vinegar, I’ve decided to go with heat.  Primarily a solar approach, which seems to fit my situation well.  It’s an approach that isn’t typically used so there isn’t a lot of information out there on how well it works.  It’s plausible that I can amp it up enough to kill the roots.  Plus, I already have the materials on hand to try it.

The idea is not just to get the driveway surface hot enough to kill the top of the weed (and have it re-sprout), but to bake the driveway so hard that it kills the entire weed, root and all.  We’ll see if I can achieve that, or whether that’s just so much wishful thinking. Continue reading Post G22-045: Today’s driveway forecast: Mostly weeds, with occasional stretches of partly pavement.

Post G22-043: Rephrasing “tomatoes don’t ripen in the heat”.

 

This post is my best explanation of “tomatoes don’t ripen if it’s too hot out”.

Why does that need an explanation?  Because I’m still getting a few ripening tomatoes, despite the heat.

After some close observation, I think the correct statement is “tomatoes won’t start the ripening process if it’s too hot out”.   Once they’ve started the ripening process — passed beyond the “mature green” stage to “breakers” (see chart below) –I think they continue to ripen, heat or no heat.

The upshot is that you don’t get a nice, sharp cutoff of tomato production, contemporaneous with a string of hot days and nights.  You get a dip in tomato production some days later, as the ones that have already started ripening continue.  But the ones that haven’t made it to the “breakers” stage get stuck at “mature green”.

At least, that’s my best guess for what I’ve been observing in my garden this year.

(Completely separately, tomatoes won’t set fruit under excessive daytime heat.  See Post G24-021, on tomato blossom drop and heat.  Both of these effects — blossom drop and non-ripening — depend somewhat on the variety of tomato being grown, with some tomatoes (e.g., Floradade) having been bred to perform somewhat better in high heat.)

Continue reading Post G22-043: Rephrasing “tomatoes don’t ripen in the heat”.

Post G22-041: Tomato non-ripening, will it be deja vu all over again?

 

In the middle of July 2020, we (Northern Virginia, Zone 7) had a prolonged period during which tomatoes would not ripen.  That attracted a lot of attention, locally, because most of us had never experienced that.  Questions were posed on our local plant-swap group, and the answer came back that it had been too hot for green tomatoes to ripen. Continue reading Post G22-041: Tomato non-ripening, will it be deja vu all over again?