My Going To Seed Crops 2023 [Reckless Pepo Mix, Corn Sweet Mix] No fertilizer, No water, No Sprays, Wood Chip Mulch System

[peterd (Peter Dilley)]

I spent the last 4 days digging up and moving my extra wood chip piles and spreading them across the garden. Wore me out, I must be getting old as I fell asleep all afternoon after finishing it all.

Some updates on the garden.

Watermelons forming.

Sweet potato still trying to keep its head above an ocean of watermelon vines.

Watermelon not satisfied with covering all the ground wants to escape up the fence.

The corn that decided to germinate and grow is now starting to split off from the main stalks.

Absolutely good news on the 1951 and 1965 USDA accession beans. New leaves are not malformed. What I originally though might be signs of DNA damage in long term storage seems to be extra hard seed coats on germination causing damage to the cotyledons but the new growth seems good. I have also top dressed them with wood chips and move them back over the rows. No further germination signs are appearing and no germination at all from the 1966 USDA accession beans.

Reckless Pepo Squash got top dressed.

Here you see the stunted squash still around.

and after top dressing now you don’t. I buried it under the wood chips to remove it from the landrace seeds this season.

Rest of the Reckless Pepo doing good and continuing to develop.

I harvested the first India Kajari melon. This was a sneaky one. It showed yellow from looking top down. After I cut the vine I noticed the green on the top facing the ground. It had the aroma but needed a few more days to develop full sweetness.

I would also like to see the seeds already fallen out of the netting and laying in a sweet pile of juices.

But seeds were what I was after so I was not disappointed.

Here they are laid out to dry after fermenting a few days in water. I removed the floaters and then removed any bent or funny shaped sees then toweled them out on the heat mat for drying down for the next week.

[anon14613632]

What varieties of watermelon did you plant? Mine are at a similar stage of development as well.

[peterd (Peter Dilley)]

I have started with all the reds I could find locally at the store here. They were big name but poor germinating seed outside of one which was a small one. Sugar baby I believe. I stopped labelling and tracking them due to germination issues.

The packets I kick started my landrace with:

Congo. I know for sure every seed except one failed to germinate.
Charleston Gray
Jubilee
Sugar Baby
Crimson Sweet

Now out of all those packets of seeds I only got maybe 9 or 10 plants that made it and want to live. The rest took the die and die early approach in my grow or die philosophy which suits me.

I’ll add in more as I find them next grow. I am wanting to get some yellows and oranges in with the reds. Yellows I believe predate the reds in human cultivation.

[peterd (Peter Dilley)]

The weather apps didn’t warm me about no storm . The alerts came in after the power had already failed from the lightning and thunder and came back on again.

Looking at the government weather site they recorded 0.86 inches of rainfall for my city.

I went out to look at my rain gauges I had emptied the day before.

Out to the melon patch to look for split melons. I already found a few, and discarded. I also found a throw back in fruit type the farmer was selecting against to clean up the Kajari for Baker Creek.

Only a few exhibited this large shaped melon. The majority were small spheres of the typical Kajari look at Baker Creek.

[peterd (Peter Dilley)]

I reached out to the farmer that cleaned up Kajari seed.

What he shared:

I may have sent you some of the original seed stock that I got from Baker Creek…The original seed stock came from Pakistan. The first year I grew them there were several off type plants in the mix. There were a couple Cantaloupes, some Crane melons a couple mystery melons, and a few obvious crosses that were half Kajari and who knows what. Apparently they didn’t take any care to isolate the plants back in Pakistan. It only took a season or two of culling to have the seed pure again.

[peterd (Peter Dilley)]

A quick photograph of the Okra plant to illustrate how I would prune a row of Okra if growing them for eating rather than for seed.

All the lower leaves below the flowering and fruiting portion of the Okra plant are cut off and dropped. This removes a lot of stinging leaves from the plant as well as providing a fully clear view of the flowers and of the fruiting pods. It also allows quick and easy access to harvest the Okra pods as they mature, again with minimization of any stings.

[peterd (Peter Dilley)]

One Reckless Pepo has a lot of tendrils the others don’t have.

Summer fruit tree training. All the three thick scaffolding branches got cut back hard, half the growth was cut off. The remaining smaller scaffolding was left alone with in tact growth tips on its branches. My aim is for this branch to develop and pull more sap and energy through the smaller scaffold allowing it to thicken up and catch up to the first three scaffolds by next year.

Good news for the blue passionfruit flowering vine. After cutting the caterpillars in half the stems decided to sprout and have a second go at living.

Still picking the Kajari, there are quite a few self-separating their stems from the vines even though not showing fully ripe signs.

I am only saving seeds from the round melons. I have found the tall oval melons so far taste more vegetative (2 sampled) and one was even bitter (1 sampled).

Other than that everything is going good:

1. The Kajari vines are showing signs of giving up for the season.
2. The watermelon shows no sign of stopping and is growing strong.
3. Sweet Corn Mix that decided to germinate and grow is growing strong. Only one shows signs it might be an uncrossed heirloom tossed into the mix as it doesn’t have any of the growth habits of the rest that decided to live and grow.
4. One bush form Reckless Pepo had a small cluster of Squash Bug eggs on the underside of one leaf. I rubbed them off by hand. No other Reckless Pepo shows egg laying.

And first sign of some animal presence in the backyard garden.

[peterd (Peter Dilley)]

Squash bugs have found the reckless pepo squash. At first I had two days of egg clusters laid under the leaves. Easy to find and remove. Then it stormed. I didn’t go out. The next day it stormed in the morning.

I went out this afternoon. Instead of egg clusters under the leaves I now see single eggs laid randomly all over the stems and leaves.

I was also cutting off all squash leaves touching the ground or half grown and yellow after touching the ground. I found two separate pairs of mating squash bugs playing hid from me at the buttom of two plants. After they ran out a lead I was going to cut anyway I cut the bugs in half along with the leaf. A single large squash bug as also at the bottom of the stem. I cut that one in half as well.

I have not gotten all the eggs. I have been out all day and already have the sunburn sting. I’ll go out tomorrow and see if I can find and rub off the remaining eggs although I think it may be a losing battle to find them all.

I don’t have any trap plants yet in the garden. Millet is said to be a trap plant for squash bugs. And planting Blue Hubbard Winter Squash and Red Kuri squash are said to be sacrificial trap crop plantings.

For scent masking it is recommended to plant Daikon Radish all throughout your squash plants. Also for scent masking you can cut up a bunch of onion and place them all around your squash plants.

For physical squashing. Gloves work well for adults. For eggs you can go to the stationary store and get those rubber finger and thumb thimbles with rubber bumps on them that are used normally for helping to grip and flip through papers. They grip squash bug eggs real well when rubber them off your plants.

Soap and water in a spray bottle to quickly suffocate hatched squash bug nymphs.

[peterd (Peter Dilley)]

Storms at the perfect timing for the ripening of Kajari melons means I have walked through a large mass of vines starting to go on their way out and cutting off or picking up melons not fully ripe but that have split open from the rain water.

I did get seed saved from four kajari that had the correct shape and coloring and were sweet. I have a fifth in a bucket of water in the garage doing a bit of a ferment. So seed haul is still great and I was expanding the seed so any kajari to eat is icing on the cake this grow out.

[peterd (Peter Dilley)]

Might be the last chance I get to see the Reckless Pepo in the garden. I went out this morning to look at the eggs more closely. There are hundreds of them and there were a “lot” of Squash Vine Borers flying around the plants stinging the stems.

So not only was I getting a ton of Squash Bug eggs but also hundreds of Squash Vine Borer eggs. The Squash Bug eggs are easy to get to and remove. I tried rubbing off the Squash Vine Borer eggs but they are hard to reach with the ridges of the stems being in the way. I don’t think I am going to be able to get to them all so I may have to resign myself to losing all the Reckless Pepo before even the first flowers come out.

Squash Vine Borer Controls, as you can see, none through history have been very effective.

[julia.dakin]

Thank you for posting these depressing but excellent photos and tips for controlling the pests. I hope that something survives, but that sounds too optimistic.

Is this year worse, or would you normally lose all pepos? How about the other squash species?

Here’s a sympathy photo of a maxima plant yesterday suffering from a cucumber beetle infestation.

[peterd (Peter Dilley)]

Hi Julia,

I have not ever grown squash plants here exactly because I know the SVB and squash bugs are bad in this region of the country. So this is grow #1.

Last night I was thinking on this before drifting off to sleep and remembered that Spinosad is an OMRI certified product for organic growers. It won’t do anything to the adult squash bugs but it will control the squash bug nymphs. And perhaps to a lesser extent have an effect on SVB worms trying to eat a hole into the stems to burrow inside and set up house to eventually kill the squash plants from the inside where controls won’t reach them.

It is another bacteria as with Bt but unlike Bt is is broader in spectrum of what you can use it against so you don’t have to buy four different strains of Bt for example to control 4 different pests. It was originally discovered in a rum distillery. It lasts longer than Bt, but water is its nemesis so rains can wash it off. If it stays dry it should be effective up to at least a week. I didn’t relish spraying but I can tell already before flowering they the level of egg laying means I won’t catch them all and with SVB moth larvae the six GTS Reckless Pepo plants that survived to just start to grow some emerging flowers would be gone in less than a week.

Five GTS Pepo are bush. The 6th is the only vining form to make it.

When dry it is honey bee safe (so they say) so they recommend spraying it at night when the bees are no longer out gathering nectar and pollen so it can dry before the next morning.

I went out this morning and cut half the leaves and stems off. Everything below the flowering section of the stem goes. Anything crossing another stem goes. Anything touching the ground goes. Opening up the flowers to make it very easy for pollinators to see and get to the flowers and very easy for the gardener to see any squash to harvest. It also allows more air flow and reduces incidence of powdery mildew. Then a spray top and bottom of the leaves and all sides of the remaining stems with Spinosad mixed with water in a hand pump sprayer (right now I need the initial application on but subsequent sprays will be at night). This is first spray on anything ever this year.

[peterd (Peter Dilley)]

On a brighter note the GTS sweet corn mix that decided to grow is thriving (my guess most of it is the landrace and not any or much of the added heirlooms). No water, no sprays, no fertilizers.

[peterd (Peter Dilley)]

Watermelons, sweet potato, blackberries are doing their thing as well.

[peterd (Peter Dilley)]

I found my first packet of orange watermelon seed. Orange tendersweet.

Doing some research a lot are hybrids so off the list but I do see I’ll have to keep an eye out for orangeglo and desert king as those didn’t mention anything about being hybrids.

I’ve put my orange tendersweet packet in the fridge with my other seed packets and will try them out next year with whatever seed crosses my red watermelons make this year.

I will have to start looking at the yellows next.

[peterd (Peter Dilley)]

Still decently hot today.

Just a few quick photos from the garden.

I really only went out today to harvest some Okra to nibble on while checking out the rest of the garden.

As you can see this variety can let you get quite long pods without them going fibrous and tough and inedible. I ate both of these long pods off the plant.

The 1965 Accession Year-Long Beans still seem to be looking good and healthy, even in this heat.

The 1951 Accession Snail Bean is looking like it doesn’t like the heat as much as the year-long bean.

Reckless Pepo, bush type. You can see how many lower leaves I have already cut away from the plant. Most of those had eggs on them. The remaining leaves show a few spots almost akin to cucumber beetle damage. A few squash flowers are beginning to appear now. It will be interesting to see how even with the organic spinosad weekly applications how long these squash will stay looking health with the SVB eggs on them that will soon hatch.

The cluster of three bush types.

and the one and only vine type.

I can see more watermelons as I did a leaf identification on what I thought was purple yam and the leaf shape more closely matched morning glory so I decided to terminate that plant from the ground. Quite a few watermelon vine tips got broken that grew in that area but on the bright side I have exposed about 6 melons that are now very easy to spot and monitor on the ground. I am not pruning vines after 1 or 2 melons to maximize melon size as this year I am after seed crosses and want more melons, smaller sized that have more opportunity to have crossed with insect pollen transfer.

[anon14613632]

@peterd

Still decently hot today.

That’s stout. We had 97 degrees today.

[peterd (Peter Dilley)]

We are said to be heading into the three hottest days of the year. 105 each day.

Today’s temperature for reference.

Some plants like this Creeping Zinnia flower from the front garden have given up.

I will be processing it for seed when I get motivated to sit outside and get it done. For now it can keep drying out.

Straight to the corn since @anon14613632 and I had been talking about corn GDDs and the effect of heat above 30 C / 86 F. Mine are stunted short but have already tasseled out and sent out the silks.

I don’t think a single varietal seed survived, these are all the landrace seeds in the seed pack.

In the background are Moringa trees, they didn’t even start to sprout above the ground until a few months ago and now they are well over the height of the fence. Amazingly fast growing trees.

I have the phenotypical behaviors described in other posts.

The only vining Reckless Pepo is still hanging in there.

Two photos needed since this vining plant is a spreader.

Right next to it is the wire cage to protect the last strawberry plant I had. Looks like it is crispy toast now in this weather.

It is a good thing I collected the seeds from it a few months earlier and germinated them. There are even a few runners in there.

The rest of the Reckless Pepo are bush types and this pair has one large leafed and one still smaller leafed forms together, feeling the heat and still being champions but also feeling the heat at the same time.

The three cluster next to the okra is the best looking of the bunch.

But look closely in those squash leaves and you see the pestilence that is Squash Vine Borer moths stinging the plants daily.

The Kajari Melons have long stopped producing and given up themselves to the heat. I have a small glass jar full of collected seed so it was a very good grow out this year to expand seed stocks. The watermelons that decided to touch base have now started taking over the kajari melon space.

Watermelons in general still going strong through the heat.

Where I ripped out the plant with the morning glory style leaves there was a lot of watermelon vine damage, I had a different melon varietal growing but it got damage so I had to pull it.

If we are lucky we might get below the 100s next Monday.

[UnicornEmily (Emily Martha Sorensen)]

Yeah, we’ve had a few days above 100, and my plants aren’t thrilled about it. Your plants seem to be doing great, given that heat!

[nodinesplants (Jeremy Nodine)]

Looking good, what kind of okra is that?