Depends on your lot size and the layout of your yard. I have mine in my backyard but i dont have a neighbor behind me.
Mrs struggler just shot it down. Most of my eight year old son's friends are allergic. "I'll order Benadryl." Was not acceptable. 7k sqft lot. The hive would've been 50' from my back slider and 70' from my neighbors. Would a hive even be doable? I live in Novato, CA. I would assume bees are active year round here.
Kids these days are allergic to everything. I ate 2 pbj sandwiches everyday for 4 straight years in highschool. Now i can't even feed my kids a pbj for lunch. Fkn ridiculous. If your kid is allergic to peanuts then make sure he doesnt steal or trade for my kids sandwich.
friend of a friend has 5 hives give or take on ~30X30 8 miles outside of downtown denver. he is a bee guy, but nonetheless it's doable. tell her you would dump them if they became aggressive and not that it'd be a good idea to bring this up, but only one or two out of 1000 people are actually allergic to bees. most just need to get stung a few times and then the symptoms aren't so severe put out a bird feeder with rocks and some water so they don't end up in your neighbor's pool or whatever looking for a drink and you're good. you could probably get a hive started anytime of year out there. maybe you can find a hippy out there marketing his bees as non-aggressive
Yes, assuming there's no restriction in your town/HOA. Some towns have beehives banned. Otherwise, it's fine. They're going to go out up to 3 miles away to get forage. If you were worried about them flying out at person level, put them facing a wall or wind break that forces them to fly up.
Once it gets hot and dry, they'll ripen. Cut back the water a little if you're watering them. I let my garden go a week without picking and came back with this:
Most tomatoes won't ripen until the soil temps drop below 80 degrees. Like someone else said, cut back on watering them so they don't split and just wait.
That's a pretty bitchin' gravity defying jar of beans you have there. I just picked 7 lbs, 8 oz of beans on Monday night with another 6-7 lbs still waiting to be picked. I staggered the planting of all of my other beans, so the rest will be ready anywhere from 1-3 weeks from now.
My red brandywine tomatoes are killing it this year. This is my third one this week that's been over a pound. I've been picking about five a week from each one.
A couple of my tomato plants have been hit with blight I think Good thing is most of them are about as tall as me now
Mine were doing great 4-7 a day, but have since been killed by squash vine borers. Hate those things.
Speaking of vine borers, my squash and zucchini were wiped out by squash bugs and maybe vine borers. Bought two new zucchinis yesterday so I can try to get some out of this growing season. Best advice for dealing with both vine borers and squash bugs?
I've read up on it some. The best advice was plant early because they're going to get them. Information also talked about traps or insecticide. I've also seen that you bury one of the leaf stems and it will root and you can remove the infected part, but I haven't tried that.
Checked on a couple of my hives this morning. Between 2 hives, I've got 3 supers I can extract on, possibly next weekend. Also found a nice new queen that's laying from a split I made. Also, my dogs grabbed my first ripe cantaloupe and ate it .
Some of the other master gardeners in my area have used injection of Bt with pretty good results. Bt is a lot safer than Sevin or any insecticide for vegetables - it's actually organic because it's simply a bacteria that messes up the insect, but is harmless to humans. This option is certainly more intensive than sprinkling on some chemical, but it's safer and it works from what I've heard. http://homeguides.sfgate.com/inject-squash-plant-vine-borers-56110.html
Some of these tomato plants are about 6' tall now Jalapeño "Banana" peppers. They're looking like bell, which I'm not happy about. Thai Dragon Cayenne
Can you give some tips on what you do with your peppers? I'm very new to gardening and my pepper production is absolute shit compared to yours. I'm getting like 1-2 at a time. Actually any advice from anyone would be great. A little background info: I got a late start this year and I would say about half my peppers a week or so ago were looking great, nice size and great color but not producing anything yet. I started to have a lot of the bottom leaves start to yellow and fall off so I hit them with some fertilizer (can't remember the name but some good garden youtube guy recommended it.) Didn't really seem to help, read that epsom salt was good for them and might help so gave them a bath in that last night hoping that helps. I've got several different peppers, eggplant, tomatoes, okra, sweet potatoes, cucumber. Only things that seem really happy and producing well are the okra, tomatoes, and I think the watermelon (was even later getting that in the ground but it's growing like crazy, just not producing anything yet)
I haven't done much with the peppers honestly. I bought them from a local nursery, planted them in quality potting soil, and pulled the buds the first few weeks so the plants could focus on growth. Watered when the leaves get droopy. Had a fight with aphids for a while, but I seem to have got that under control. Unfortunately while my peppers are happy, a couple of my tomato plants have been hit with blight.
Regarding the bottom leaves yellowing and falling off....did they look fine otherwise? Did you noticed any dots or spots on the leaves before this happened? What was grown in the soil previously and if you can recall the type of fertilizer, that would be helpful. If it is in fact a nutrient deficiency, then it suggests a mobile nutrient since the symptoms appear on older growth. I'm really not a fan of the epsom salt fertilizer methods, most of the academic studies have shown little benefit from it. There are better sources of magnesium out there. To be fair, I know several gardeners that swear by it though. Odd your peppers and eggplant are suffering but not your tomatoes. All 3 are in the Solanaceae family and are heavy feeders (high nutrient requirements each year).
The leaves looked fine, I didn't notice any signs of anything looking off. I'll snap some pics tonight and see what brand of fertilizer I used. Most of my stuff is spread between two raised beds. They have different dirt makeups though. The newer raised bed I bought several different brands of soil/compost from the store to mix together.
So here is what I'm dealing with. Pics are the fertilizer I used plus a few of the vegetables and condition. As you can see there is a fair amount of wood chips in the beds from some of the bags of dirt I used. I wonder if that's my main problem, those wood chips stealing nitrogen as they break down. The fertilizer I have used twice. Put a little in the hole under the plant when I planted them in mid May, and then again a couple of weeks ago. Didn't really measure just a really small handful for each plant. Spoiler
At the very least it looks like something is munching on your tomatoes. Aphids perhaps, they've been a pain in my ass all season.
The squash looks like vine borers are fucking your shit up. Seven Dust can be helpful with that. I try for a fully organic garden every year but I have to use seven on my squash at the least if I want to get any fruit.
Maybe I should have labeled the pictures, those are cucumbers. That literally happened in the last two days.
Those look like cukes. If it's vine borers, there will be little holes or scabs in the vine near the base of the plant. Depending on where he's located and when that picture was taken, he may have planted after the vine borers life cycle had already ended. Make sure that your squash plants all have enough soil mounded up at the base of the vine. Once they start sprawling, the roots at the base can become exposed to sun and it will cause the vines to become brittle. FWIW, the leaves near the base of my squash plants usually turn yellow early in the season. As long as the rest of the plant is green and you get lots of flowers, you'll be ok.
Regarding your fertilizer - you went with an organic product, which is fine, but most of those nutrients take a little more time to release than conventional products. Also, the 5-7-3 on the bag is your N-P-K value and those numbers are also pretty low (but typical of organic fertilizer products). For comparison sake, if you water your plants with a Miracle-gro solution down by the base, you would be providing a highly soluble (almost instantly plant-available) source of nutrients and the basic type (there are different formulations) has an NPK of 24-8-16. For tomatoes and peppers, I always use something higher in N and K. In many areas of the U.S., P isn't really that limiting in the soil, so you don't need a lot of it, or need a formulation where P is the highest number. On your pepper pictures, your leaves have a brown spot or spot of yellow that appears spreading. I only see a leaf or two at quick glance that simply look a little yellowed (or more uniform yellowing). That brown or yellow spot suggests a disease rather than a nutrient deficiency. There are so many different kinds of diseases it could be (either bacterial or fungal), that it would be really hard for me to tell you anything specific. It looks a little more fungal to me, but any other gardeners can chime in on that. I'm much better with soil issues. Your tomatoes look a little yellow in that 3rd garden pic and could use a shot of N. It also looks like a little early blight setting in. Cucumbers look like they have a fungal issue. Did you notice any white powdery-ness to the leaves lately? Spots or areas of white? Have you had quite a bit of moisture and warm temps lately? Fungal diseases love moisture and warm weather. It could be several fungal diseases are picking up in your area. Hope that helps or at least gets others to chime in.
I was thinking blight, but didn't want to say it. I've been fighting it on a few of my tomato plants for weeks now. I've about pulled all the lower leaves at this point trying to save them.
Yeah, that's about all you can do when blight starts to set in. Clip/pinch off the infected branch as soon as you see symptoms and hope the new growth above keeps your production going. I always wipe my scissors down with a 10% bleach solution between plants when trimming up blight too. Blight spreads most commonly through spores in soil getting splattered on to the lower branches. I've worked really hard the last couple years to cover my soil with a mulch (straw, newspaper & grass clippings, or wood mulch) as soon as I put my tomatoes in to try and prevent the soil from getting on those leaves. It has helped a bunch. This year my tomatoes are in an area I've never grown in before and () I haven't spotted any blight yet. Russellin4885 - may want to try and use some sort of mulch around the base of your tomatoes next year.
All good suggestions, thanks. Yea, there was about a 2 week period that we got a ton of rain, about 4 inches worth and with temps 85+ everyday. I already pulled one tomato plant that I suspected had blight, it was actually beside that one. That was probably about a month ago though. Next year I'll mulch and I guess use a different fertilizer. Cucumbers I have noticed yellowing of the leaves but not any white on them. I've only gotten about 4 cucmbers off it so far and none of them have turned green, they're a white/green mixture. Not sure what that means.
I went to a fruit growing workshop put on by the Clemson extension service today. It was held at their fruit research farm where they're researching peaches, apples, blackberries, and paw-paws. It included a tour, samples of the various blackberries and peaches they were growing, and presentations/discussions on how to grow the various fruits successfully, both commercially and for home use.
Spotted some Thai Dragon peppers changing colors tonight. Hard to see, but the one on the right is bright red.
I had a black tomato about ready for picking yesterday afternoon, so I left it overnight to ripen a little further. I went out this morning and the damn thing was gone! No sign of it, just the stem where it had been. Nothing else was touched... Wtf? As a side note, here's some better pictures of my ripening peppers
Today's harvest. Tomato plants should start picking up soon, provided the squirrels don't keep stealing my fruit. Also noticed my banana pepper plant which looks like bell pepper, but is more the size of cherry peppers, is starting to ripen. I'm curious to see how those turn out.
Tomatoes for salad. I chop about an hour ahead of time, salt and pepper in the colander, let them hang out over the sink to shed some of their water. Tomato flavor amplified.