question on bone meal and onions

[T]

Hi All,

Organic bone meal (phosphorous) promotes flower, fruit set up, and root growth.

Question: does the root part apply to the bulb of onions?

Many thanks,

-T

[songbird]

T wrote: ...

the root system is below the bulb and the bulb is made up of modified leaves. :) of course it will make a difference if the soil is deficient. onions like a pretty good quality soil, but may do ok in poorer soils.

my worms really like any bits that come from the garlic or onions.

i did not plant any green onion seeds early this season to get some green onions. oops. all the onions i have growing that i could take and eat for green onions are too tough and are flowering. my bulb onions are coming along ok so far. recent rains have really helped out all of the gardens.

songbird

[T]

Hmmm, then maybe a higher nitrogen content?

[songbird]

are the plants struggling to grow? normally i amend for the heaviest feeding plants and then rotate plant through that same area for another few crops before i amend it again. using different types of crops means you can draw from different nutrient profiles.

songbird

[T]

Nothing grows really well for me. I have a black thumb. But last year I got tons of peppers, goji berries, white onions tops.

This year the garlic failed (again), the pepper seeds 100% failed, and the eggplant seeds 100% failed.

The bilberries are finally flowering and flowering a lot. The choke berries have a lot of fruit on them, and it looks like I may finally get some black berries.

[songbird]

T wrote: ...

do you need some midday shading?

as far as i know both peppers and eggplant need warmth and even moisture. eggplant can sprout a lot faster than peppers. 70F - 90F temperature range for sprouting. so if you are trying to sprout them in a place that isn't uniformly moist or warm they may not do as well. that's about the extent of my eggplant and pepper sprouting knowledge - i normally get all my starts from our local greenhouse because we do not keep it very warm here and also we just don't have a good spot to sprout many plants.

:) success! :)

around here we have some small wild raspberries that are black that will grow in any sandy soil barren location if given a chance. blackberries i won't plant because they are so hard to control and i have enough projects already...

songbird

[T]

I have no idea ...

That explains a lot of things. When I planted my pepper seeds and my eggplant seeds, the nights were down to 35-45F and the days were 50-70F. I am wondering if they will come up in August or if they just rotted sitting there getting watered every day.

I could plant later, but the growing season is too short, so I am stuck with the greenhouse. And I can't grow indoors due to my wife mold allergy.

I was trying to do as much a I could from seeds as the recession and market changes have impacted my income greatly. It was worth a try. At least I finally got onion and tomatillo seeds to come up!

You got my full attention. Wild means they have not been hybridized for unnatural levels of carbohydrates.

I need a botanical name so I can chase them down at one of the wild plant web sites.

No problem for me. I can see for you because you have a green thumb and know what you are doing. Me, on the other hand with my black thumb, can kill anything edible I want just by looking sideways at it. Unfortunately, it does not work on weeds, who just laugh at me.

Thank you!

-T

[songbird]

...mentioned wild small black raspberries...

here's a useful link which saves me some typing. :)

any time you can grow from seeds that is certainly usually cheaper than trying to find and buy starts. i wish i could do more of it here, but there's just not very much decent space at all for that. it's a small house and there's no basement with easy access, the light is poor for growing things too. i keep only a few houseplants - as a kid i used to have shelves and shelves of them along with other plants scattered around the house (a different house that was much larger).

i don't plant them as they would be just another thing coming up in places i don't want them. i don't have any time to forage them either which we used to do when we were kids (and i didn't have all these gardens to keep after :) ).

the problem you have is pretty difficult location/climate/soils and with that probably some very intense sunlight when it also gets to be hot outside. you also may not be on a very good water supply in terms of water quality (i'm guessing based upon your general location in the dessert SW).

it's hard to do things with hardpan alkaline soils in an arid climate. you pretty much need to pull out all the tricks for soil building at the same time dealing with arid conditions and if you try to do raised beds the heat and drying winds make that even tougher. pretty much what you need is a way to bust trenches down deep enough to hold any organic matter you can manage to grow and scrounge up along with some wind breaks to help hold moisture but then if your trenches don't drain well enough you can also get too wet when it does finally rain so you need a way to soak in the extra moisture somehow too. not an easy situation. it can be done, it takes time though.

as time goes along you can learn and adapt some things and get better. just use your brain and apply the scientific method as much as you can, observe what happens, try new things, etc.

every season you should try to bust those ground pots up a bit bigger if you can and scrounge whatever organic materials you can find to decompose over the winter months when there is more moisture. the acids from the decomposing materials will also help bust up that hard ground (and the roots from any plants will also help with that). if you can do a trial sometime of sprinkling the empty pots with winter wheat or winter rye (the grain not the grass) and then turning that over in the early spring it may also help. i would love to do it here in rotation but Mom does not like how the chipmunks will take the seeds and move them around. she's really picky about how things look and considers mulches of dead plants to look too untidy - which is pretty sad to me because they really help break up the heavy clay we have - i'd be years further ahead in soil conditioning here if i could have grown these in rotation with my other plantings through the winter, also they look a lot nicer than bare dirt to me. such is the breaks. we do what we can and keep on going. :)

songbird

[T]

Rubus occidentalis Awesome!!! (I had looked up the wrong ones.)

My neighbors do much better than me, so a lot of it is me. But the all have fancy raised beds, etc..

I am amazed how much nice the soil in my pots gets every year. Really feels nice on my hands. I use to think farmers were a bit nuts when I would see them pick up some dirt and get excited. Now I understand.

I learn something new every year. Most of my learning comes from you.

Oh, found my first squash bug yesterday. He got a dish soap bath.

And since my ground pots are about 2" below the surface so that water won't run all over the place, any squash bugs hiding down by the roots got a good soapy bath too.

He was a big one too. And since the plant wa not too big, it was easy to check all the leaves for eggs. None were found.