Vegetable Garden

Who's got one ? what are you growing ? and how's it coming along? Mine consists of sweet corn , cabbage , brussel sprouts, cauliflower, broccoli ,cucumbers, zucchini, peas, tomatoes , peppers , acorn squash, pumpkins, and assorted spices. The cold wet weather hasn't been very conducive to good growth so far for me. But with warmer weather in the forecast things should turn out. I hope those of you growing fair better.

What about onions? What about beans? Why do we even have bees?

I blame ​"Bee Movie" for my lack of knowledge there. Ever since watching that movie and seeing ​what happened ​when the bees stopped working I just assumed they were solely reliable ​for pollination   
If you haven't seen it, great movie!

Junkie peppers are the same way. The flowers are both male and female in the same flower is my understanding.  Quick Google search confirms that all nightshade plants are self pollinating 

I've never heard that tomatoes are pollinated by wind, I ​always thought ​it was just corn that relied on the wind. ​I think that reinforces the importance of trellising tomatoes then to ​let the wind do its job. Learning new things all the time!

oldhunter, my wife makes between 15&20 jar's  of raspberry jam a year, depending on the yield. Gives 95% away. She doesn't even eat jam. She just loves to cook and bake. Same goes for the pickles and zucchini bread.

Carpio no worries about your tomato flowers. They are self pollinating by wind. Yes bees can pollinate tomato flowers but for the most part the toamtoes will pollinate themselves. 

I'm slowly getting more planted in my gardens. About 20 more pepper plants, 4 tomato plants, a row of beans and some lettuce to go yet. I planted last night until the rain started. The soil is pretty moist in all of my gardens but seems to be draining pretty well - no standing water or anything. When planting one of my tomato plants last night I dug a little too deep and got into some buried fish guts (which were mostly broken down already, surprisingly), but man did that smell! Hope I get some beautiful tomatoes off that plant!

Quite a few bumblebees by me and some are huge.  They like my geraniums but I haven’t seen any on my tomato flowers.     Anybody try artificial polination with an electric toothbrush.?   

Onions are starting to bulb. I have some that are almost ping-pong ball size 4 inches up on the neck. That’s not good for storage, but it’s gonna be some massive onions. I still have not seen any bumblebees for pollinating, big bees, and non-pollinators.

That sounds like a magic mix right there!

Thank you.
So I kind of cheat a little bit, my local Community has a yard waste recycling center, where it actually turns into very good compost. So what I typically do is at the end of each growing season I take a couple 55 gallon garbage bins fill about halfway a little more with the compost, empty the remaining soil that I have in my my containers that I grew in, separated all the old roots and everything so that it's clean. add a couple bages of black kow manure, and just some generic fertilizer for vegetables, stir it all up and leave it set over the winter time, then come spring blend it up again, and use it. And if I happen to run out, I go to local hardware store, pick up some gardening soil that's on sale.

That's some good looking potting soil, what kind did you ​use?

Some of the pepper plants have now been planted in there permanent containers. Shishito, F1 Jedi jalapenos, Yellow Jalapeno, yellow Piquing, Black Panther, and assortment of sweet peppers. Hope to get the rest potted over the weekend 

A gallon of seeds,  How much jam did you make ?  

After making jam, I had close to a gallon of raspberry seeds that I threw in a certain area. No berry plants have grown in this spot!