When to Pull the Plug (on your plants)

When to pull the plug on your plants. This is always a tough decision to make for me. I have a real hard time determining when my plant is officially dead and devoid of hope. Take for example these pictures of my snow pea plant. This plant grew on its own outside of my raised box. I'm guessing from a fallen pea from last year's crop. Now I've reaped quite a bit from this bastard plant. Then I went on vacation for a week and it was left unpicked but watered. I'm guessing that the plant has a shut off mechanism for producing new veggies when there are too many peas still on the plant.

But you can also clearly see new growth on the very tips of the plant. There are new green out spurts of healthy plant. It's even producing more peas. But when do I throw in the towel and rip it up. In this case it's not even growing in a raised bed so it's not taking up valuable space.

I also have pepper plants from last year that barely survived the winter and seem to be recovering but not fast enough for my liking. I guess in the back of my mind I always think nature can somehow recover and reproduce the magic.

But if I didn't rip out the dead and dying I wouldn't be able to add new plants to the mix and help the soil recover. I guess I need to learn more about what plants can be grown year after year compared to the one and dones.

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Recycled sunflower stalks used to make grapvine trellis

So a little while back a posted about my grapevine extending out from my fence into the alley. It needed some support for it to continue its growth. So I brainstormed and thought what better way than to re-use the stalks from the sunflowers as a natural trellis. So I found a few tall stalks that were great for the task. I literally had to hatchet the stalks down. My clippers weren't strong enough to cut through their thickness. I already broke one set of pruners trying. I stripped the leaves off and dug them into the ground. Then used a smaller stalk as a cross beam for the vine to travel down. I think they really work out well. They similar color to the vine itself and add a natural touch to what would probably be an artificial structure. I have no idea how long they will hold up but I'm hoping a long time. Especially once the vine become entangled. I've also used some of the smaller sunflower stalks to create support sticks for leaning plants. I reccommend trying to...

Grapevine reaching out for support

So my grapevine is reaching out for support. I've tried to weave this vine into my fence but there are places where its just reached beyond for more. So i think I might try to build somekind of support structure into the alley. Maybe a simple pole or piece of wood to create a natural grapevine arch. My strategy has been to weave each independent vine into others to create a super vine that can still reach out and support itself. Sort of looks like an elephant.

Topping your early pepper plants

So I know you are going to think why would I want to cut the tops off my young pepper plant? Won't it die? Won't it hurt the plant? Take this example above of this young Shishito pepper plant. Now you can see with my snips I am about to cut just the top section of the leaves. Below the cut area I still have three levels of leaves. I don't recommend cutting your plant if it only has one set of leaves. Only perform topping when there are more than one set, preferably multiple leave layers. The cut will force growth back to the lower levels making your plant more stable with more lower branches as well produce more fruit. One stalk will be unstable when fruiting and limit production but the topping will add more layers and depth to your plant. This topping exercise can be performed more than once to help make a more dense plant. Some will even go so far as to remove flowers to help the plant grow larger or stronger before producing peppers.

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