Latrobe said:

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Three solid days of work and this is where I am……

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If you don't mind me asking, what was the cost? This is exactly what the Wife is wanting me to put in.

With Corpus water worries and nematode issues, I'm pretty limited this year, but I do have a few serranos, some lettuce, onions, and cucumbers.

My serranos are really great looking, but tasteless. I used the usual amount in some salsa and wondered if I'd made some sort of bad ketchup.

B-1 83 said:

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My serranos are really great looking, but tasteless. I used the usual amount in some salsa and wondered if I'd made some sort of bad ketchup.

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Same with my jalapeños so far. Plant looks great, and there is plenty of fruit, but they're milder than a bell pepper. Quick googling said maybe I've been watering a bit too much, and a little stress will help increase the capsaicin.

This brief cold snap put the brakes on my squash. I'm guessing as it warms up next week, they'll pick back up.

Anyone have any experience with getting cucumbers to put on female flowers? They're blooming like crazy, but it's almost all male flowers.

I'm jealous. I have a small back yard that's mostly taken up by a pool. And the yard is surrounded by trees and the house is to the south... so the whole thing is heavily shaded.

I built a small cage of 2x2s and chicken wire to keep the squirrels out. It fits 2 tomato plants. It's in the sunniest spot in the yard, but it still only gets a couple hours of sun a day. Really not enough. The chicken wire is a pretty strong deterrent to pollinators (and I haven't seen any honeybees yet, this whole year, in or out of the cage) so I've taken to manually pollinating the tomato blooms with a paint brush. Still, I've gotten 2 tomatoes so far and have about 5 green ones slowly growing.

My next yard will have room for at least a small garden. This house had to have a pool (for the grandsons) but the next one we'll choose a yard for me.

Astroag said:

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Latrobe said:

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Three solid days of work and this is where I am……

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Why so slow? Lol…I keed I keed. Looks awesome! What's going in there?

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Thanks! The first layer is hardware cloth (1 in). Covers the grass and secured to the sides to keep any burrowing animals out of the garden.

The sides are covered with a landscape fabric. Just wanted to prevent any soil leakage from in between the cedar planks. The landscape fabric is only on the sides, and not on the bottom, to maintain good drainage.

Then I started my bottom layers. First was a layer of cardboard boxes over the hardware cloth, followed by dead leaves and branches from all over the yard. Just a general filler. Waiting on the arrival of 12 cubic yards of fill dirt for the middle layer, and then I'll finish it off with good gardening soil on top.

I ended up adding some braces to prevent the whole thing from collapsing once the dirt was placed.

S.A. Aggie said:

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Latrobe said:

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Three solid days of work and this is where I am……

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If you don't mind me asking, what was the cost? This is exactly what the Wife is wanting me to put in.

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The back wall is 16 feet long, and outer side walls coming back to the front are 8 feet. So 56 ft perimeter and 30 inches tall. I used cedar planks all around. Lowe's actually worked with me and gave me a great rate on the wood (signing me up for a contractor account) which knocked the priced down by 30%. All in, I think I am somewhere around $1100, but now I need the dirt. That is a job I do not want to do myself since this is in the back of the yard, and you can't drive to it (so wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow)….

Couldn't find the 2026 garden thread so I thought I'd ask it here.

Need some help with watermelon. Last year we got some decent sized (about the size of a store cantaloupe, or bigger than a soft ball) but they just wouldn't get any bigger and would rot away while I tried to let them grow.

I don't want to make the same mistake this year as we are starting to get small flowers turning into melons now.

How's everyone's harvest coming?


https://imgur.com/a/xES0bro

I'm not an expert by any means. Grew some great cantaloupe a few years ago. Last year was a bust. This year is looking better.

I water heavy while melon is developing, then cut back week or so before harvest. I leave them until the stem starts to separate on it's own. Helps to elevate the melons on something to get them off the ground so bugs don't get them.

I have the largest best producing yellow squash plant I've ever grown. I have three hills of them right next to each other and one of them on the end is twice the size of the other

I lost both the patty pan squash I planted. Have about 6 zucchini plants left. All are huge. 1 is out producing the rest. 2 have not produced a single zucchini... All in same row, being watered by same drip tape, with same fertilizer...

Craziest thing...

skelso said:

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How's everyone's harvest coming?


https://imgur.com/a/xES0bro

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It's going. I planted half as much as last year and I guess next year I'll need to plant half as much again. This is only one or two pickings. We've been doing this every few days. Too much.

But this year I did something different with my extra space…sunflowers. It's the wife's favorite flower so I figured why the hell not?

Ok you experts, I have a question. Last year, we had the motherlode of tomato worms, not a single one this year so far. But we have an influx of leaf footed something or others, like a stink bug but longer and narrower, with these leaflike flare things on their back legs. Somewhere they suggested Neem oil but the *******s are unaffected by it. Any suggestions on getting rid of these damn things?

Malathion and Permethrin. I switch between to two. I hit them every 3 days until it's managed.

It will kill bees so spray late evening or when the pollinators aren't there.

I use BT and Spinosad for stuff like this as well but if it doesn't make a big difference, I go full bore. Too much money in vegetables to let them get hammered.

What do yall use for fertilizer? Those are amazing harvests compared to what I get in Katy

Twenty years of no-till down the drain for my little plot. Nematodes got too bad and I had to till it up and solarize it. Maybe done by September 1 for fall planting. My compost pile is on high speed to help replace the flora and fauna I'm about to bake.