Talking Dirt. get your mind out of the gutter, not what you think

[sheepdog 10]

I can't believe with 58,085 members at Xisto, we have so few gardners!I'd really like to swap tips and tricks with other fellow gardners. My question now is how to prevent black spot on Zinnias. They are such pretty flowers and come in so many great colors, but they always get ugly looking black spots on the folage by mid season, sometimes even earlier. Other than the black spot and my total inability to get a good seed mix in my flower bed, it's doing really well this year. But somehow I managed to get most of the orange cosmos on only the first half of the bed I hand seeded. It's really thick on the first part of the bed and non existant on about half of it. The orange cosmos is a new addition to the flower bed, I did have the purple shades and a few white cosmos allready in the flower bed. I raised a small bed of it all by it's self last year and worked it hard to save all the seed from it so I could put it in the big flower bed this year. I manage to save a whole quart jar of it's seed. Now that I have the orange going good, I need to work on my white cosmos. It seems to have less and less of it growing every year. And I really could use a bit more white in the bed. I also seem to have trouble getting any merrigolds to thrive in the mix. I just get a few even though I do save a lot of seed from different varieties of merrigolds. I'm thinking maybe a lot of varieties are hybred and won't grow back from saved seed?????

[rob86 2]

I'm more of a vegetable gardener and even that I'm no expert with. I tried taking the seeds from a red pepper from a store after eating it, and they grew into beautiful and healthy looking pepper plants only to have all of the blossoms fall off and produce not a single fruit/pepper whatever. I'm thinking they must do something to the seeds of the vegetables you buy so you can't use them to grow your own. This has nothing to do with marigolds, but I don't know anything about marigolds, so it's some kind of reply anyway!

[sheepdog 10]

I was always told that the potatoes you buy in the store are treated with something to prevent them from sprouting in long term storage, so you couldn't use them for seed. But they do seem to sprout somewhat if you leave them set long enough, but whether they would actually grow and produce potatoes, I don't know, I suspect they wouldn't grow real well.As far as vegtables in the store, many of them are from hybrid plants. They are bred for disease resistance, a particular shape, or productivity, depending on the type of vegtables we are talking about. Hybrids do not reproduce from seed, unfortunatly. Since they have to be grown in mass for consumer consumption, certain traits are important for the mass plantings and mechanical harvesting that is done with so many crops. It's a shame that tomatoes have to be bred for commercial harvest, and they forget about taste so they can be picked and shipped. I don't even bother eating tomatoes unless I grow them myself, they have absolutly no taste when you buy the store bought ones. I do feel sorry for people that are dependant on grocery stores for all their food. Sadly, most have no idea what they are missing!

[sheepdog 10]

Finally today I finished up at least the seed harvesting part of my flower bed. And my back feels findished too! Still having trouble with the merrigolds, they were slow to set on seeds, so I waited until today, when the plants were all but dead and just pulled up the whole plants and carried them down and put them in a big tray in the kennel where they can dry out. Hopefully enough will have mature seeds on them for next year. I still have quite a few more trays of flower heads that have been drying in my seed room, (an open but covered indoor/outdoor dog run not currently needed for dogs) That will take some time, but at least I can gather them up a few handfulls at a time and hull them while I sit inside somewhere warm. I am afraid I am going to be quite a few jars shy of my normal yearly collection. Won't be able to seed the bed so thickly next spring. I'm thinking about trying to find some mulch of some sort and put a layer along the edge of the bed, it's a bit wide anyway, and that would make it easier to weed, and not take as much seed. Problem is finding a sufficient quanity of mulch. I would like to use sawdust, they used to give that away, but now the sawmills sell it to make wood burning pellets for the pellet stoves, so that old trick is out. The shredded bark they sell is pretty, it comes in some nice colors, including a red shade that looks good, but it would be to expensive for the lenght of my flower bed. I also had a problem with the cosmos setting seed this year. I got a very poor harvest back from my purple shades this time. For some reason they bloomed like crazy, but didn't set seed, or the seed was extremely slow to mature. And just about the time I would of had a decent round of seed to gather, the goats escaped and made a pass down the full lenght of the flower bed just daintily picking my seed heads for goat snacks. I was not happy with them. So, tommorow the Hired man can take the lawn mower to the bed to grind up all the stems and stalks, and then aside from hauling rabbit and goat poop and wood ashes to spread on it, the flower bed is finished for another year.