Let's see those '11 gardens!

[SvilleKid]

Originally Posted by jjirons69

Cliff, reading your post reminds me of my dad and most of my immediate kin. All are rural or semi-rural and have big gardens with freezers and cabinets full of veggies. My mom keeps me in constant supply of field peas, corn on the cob, corn off the cob, butterbeans, pickled beets, canned tomatoes, and canned string beans. Our stand up freezer in the garage is full of garden goodies. Nothing like butterbeans and okra in January!

A big advantage I got this year from planting early, and harvesting early was (except for tomatoes) an amazing lack of pests on the plants. I had probably less that 5% of my corn with worm damage, almost no pea or butterpea damage from bee/wasp stings, and had zero tomato worms. The only problem I had in large scale was a heavy aphids covering on my tomato plants about half way in. A couple applications of home-made "soap insecticide" took care of that! It used to be that you could buy soap insecticide from stores. Now, aphid control comes in a multi-pest spray that isn't really that veggie friendly, unless you have two weeks to wait to harvest!! So I fall back to an age old remedy told to my mother in the early 1970's. Wash a sink full of greasy pots and pans in a sink full of water. (The way things were done before built-in dishwashers) Take the resulting soapy, greasy water and apply it to the affected plants. If one application doesn't do it, try a second.