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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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.

Pest Control. My methods of extermination.(Gophers mainly)

So if you've seen some of my past posts you know that I've had encounters with possums and raccoons in my backyard garden. I've trapped 3 raccoons and eliminated 2 possums but gophers had been a problem in the past I wasn't really willing to tackle. At least until recently. The gophers in my backyard alley were ruining plants and soil everywhere. I'd had enough. So after some serious research I chose my weapon. A Victor Black Box Gopher trap. The amazon reviews were great and it was under $15. Now as you see the trap here it's set and ready to go. You would just point that end (the open end) towards an open tunnel. It works like a reverse mouse trap, instead of pinning a rodent down it pulls them up and pins them to the roof of the trap. The trigger is that coat hanger looking metal piece in the middle. It packs quite a punch when triggered. Now you can't just look for an open hole and stick it in front of it. I watched YouTube for about an ho...

Tomatillo stages

Just a few shots of my juvenile tomatillo plants. Above is what the tiny tomatillo starts out like. It will quickly grow and expand out. It's good to have some kind of netting, fencing or string because the stalks of the tomatillos tend to weaken with the rising weight of ripening tomatillos. I used some clothesline to help guide my young plant towards my fence in hopes that I can weave branches for structure. I think the smaller plant may be a purple tomatillo plant. It would be a welcomed color change from all the greens and yellows.

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