The House Plants Thread

It's too late to plant tomatoes.

Also, if you try again in spring, you're going to need to maintain them. They needs lots of water and sun and do well with lots of compost. They are vines and need a place to climb and lean so you'll need a plan for that. If they grow really well, they can collapse in on themselves if not trimmed or held upright. You'll need to try to trim the foliage about a foot or two off the ground to help prevent fungus spores from splashing up off the ground. There is a ton of stuff on YouTube when it comes to growing tomatoes.

AngryGerbil said:

It's too late to plant tomatoes.

Also, if you try again in spring, you're going to need to maintain them. They needs lots of water and sun and do well with lots of compost. They are vines and need a place to climb and lean so you'll need a plan for that. If they grow really well, they can collapse in on themselves if not trimmed or held upright. You'll need to try to trim the foliage about a foot or two off the ground to help prevent fungus spores from splashing up off the ground. There is a ton of stuff on YouTube when it comes to growing tomatoes.

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Agreed. I have a long time veggie farming buddy and he swears by the 'Topsy Turvey Tomato' style. He made his own version rather than buy the 'as seen on TV' one, but they work the same way. The hang the rot ball overhead and let the plant grow down, it keeps them off the ground, and you don't have to support them growing up.

That's not a bad idea either. It's like your growing them as spilling hanging baskets lol!

In either case Lanx, tomato growth has to be managed somewhat. It's not a 'set it and forget it' type plant. Spider plants.... now those things defy science and can grow in a fence post with barely any water. Can't eat spider plants though....

Lanx said:

Dang, what's a good set and forget edible food?

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Pineapple. You plant a top and come back 5 years later to harvest it.

Wherever you plant it, you'll want to know how many hours of sun that spot gets. That is a major limiting factor in what plants can go where. My Elephant Ear needs lots of sun, but if I put my Shamrock out in its spot it would fry.

Swirskii Mites year end review and analysis from a home gardener using mostly pots.

I posted about it but earlier in the year but to recap I bought some swirskii mites. These came overnight in a cylinder from Portland packed in ice packs with instructions to apply immediately upon receiving them, which I did. These are predatory and carnivorous mites that eat white flies, thrips, and aphids and do not eat plants, pets, or people. They are almost microscopic and come packed with oats and bran and you're supposed to sprinkle the oats at the base of the plants so the mites can crawl up the trunk and get to their prey that live on the undersides of leaves.

Review: The goggles, they do nothing. It is difficult to tell if these mites helped my situation at all. I suspect they did not. I think our regular neem oil sprays, hand-picking of bugs, and wiping the leaves with a wet cloth is the thing that won the war. We did win by the way. All plants appear to be free of bugs for now. The sunflower went down to some brown fungus, but not to bugs.

Analysis: I had to check 5 dealers because none of them sold individual cylinders of mites. Every place I went only sold crates of 50 or 100 cylinders to pallettes of 100 crates. I just wanted one tube but nobody sold just one. I finally found the place in Portland who did sell them individually.

I think the reason they are not sold individually is both because of the way they are grown and produced in the first place, which is to say on a strict weekly cycle. And also because I've learned they need a bit more density in order to flourish. This means that a handful of mites scattered across 10 pots on someone's front porch, is just not enough density for the population to take off and flourish and then eat all the bad-guys. This density is not found in a typical home gardener and only in commercial operations, thus, they only sell them in crates.

All in all if you are a small time pot gardener or have only a small patch of an outside garden, then I can't really recommend mites. The low-tech solutions seem to still work fine at that scale and are much cheaper. My neem oil cost me like 4 bucks, my mites cost me like 90. Mites are probably still great in large operations with dense and large growing, but at the small time scale they are not effective on the bugs and wouldn't be cost effective even if they were.

Avoid them unless you're growing on a bigger scale.

Cut out any crossing branches and use the three-cut method on the bigger branches.

Lanx said:

Also my backyard tree is big and tall and growing perpendicular branches through my power and cable lines, just leave that alone and hope for the best?

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In my neighborhood the power company comes along every 3 years and prunes all the trees around the power lines.

Lanx said:

Cool

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That was the quick 2 minute version. This is the nerdy version:



This guy is great by the way. His advice seems pretty studied and solid.