Welcome! You have chosen a hobby that can that can feed body and soul for a lifetime! Avocados sound like a difficult choice to me but I haven't tried myself. Have grown most of the others mentioned in pots. They all bear but don't expect enough to cut your food bill noticeably. Groworganic is a good supplier. I bought 10 of their trees last yr. Price is right and all grew but they were minimally packed and kinda dry on arrival. I'd suggest looking for bare root trees in January at big local nurseries. When I lived near Fresno they carried them at good prices and at the best planting time, mid winter. My favorite low chill nectarines that should be widely available bare root are Arctic Star and Snow Queen. Check out the San Diego chapter of California Rare Fruit Growers online or whatever chapter is nearby. They have long lists of best cultivars, scion exchanges, and regular meetings to learn and meet fellow growers.

Unfortunately diagnosing plant issues whether they're fungus or virus or deficiency/toxicity is difficult since many symptoms of different issues are identical or very similar. The cucumber looks like a fungus to me but also possibly potassium or manganese deficiency but considering the size of your res and amount of buckets you're running coupled with the fact that your ppm is remaining stable it's doubtful it's a deficiency. The other option to consider is with your ppm level for some younger plants excess potassium can interfere with the uptake of a bunch of other nutrients. So what may look like a deficiency is not really that it's not there for the plant to use but that the plant can't uptake it since, in this case possibly, it's being blocked by an excess amount of potassium. You said you're using MaxiGro which is what I use as well for most plants and is a really good mix for vegetative growth but at 1400 ppm it may have been too much K for the cucumber. Some plants are picky. Most people will do what you did which is just put the plant and the peat cube right in the bucket. And there is nothing wrong with that except for if the cubes get saturated and stay that way they can get mold, fungus, or algae growth which can hurt the plant. Using them is not the issue it's just you need to make sure they aren't getting saturated and control that with water level. I put my plants directly into the hydroton after germination them in a soilless mix. I don't want anything in my buckets that doesn't need to be there. The dampening off that you can get from it usually is just a seedling issue and once plants get bigger it's not a problem. I would just make sure those cubes are staying saturated. What you are doing sounds like a good plan. Flush it out. Start with a weaker mix and go from there. At 1400 ppm, depending on conversion factor, it's either 2 or 2.8 CF. I run my full grown fruiting tomato plant, very nute hungry plants, at 2.6. So that poor brussel spout seedling was getting blasted. Some young plants can handle high levels but other not so much. You're probably going to have to work your way up and find a level that feeds your hungry plants on the lighter side and your not so hungry plant on the heavier side. You're not going to be able to be optimum for all of them. One more thing. If in 2 weeks ppm was staying stable given the same water volume it's too much in my opinion. Everyone has there own way of doing it but I like to see my EC levels dropping on a daily basis. I top up my buckets to a consistent water level and check EC daily. As you noticed when you're water level dropped your PPM went up. Add more water and it goes back down to probably around where it started which means you're plants are using much nutes in relation to the concentration in your res. I like to see a daily drop in EC. Too low a concentration of nutes can cause uptake issues as well as too high a concentration. I like to find that level where I know nutes and water are getting used daily which means I am more in that sweet spot. Hope that makes sense.

Gourds that have grown to maturity will easily spend the winter outside, stored in a sheltered, dry spot...it doesn't matter if they freeze. The outside dries to a hard shell and will last almost indefinitely. I have several I have left outside, in the garden, for YEARS as an experiment, to see how long they would last. I come across them as I tend the garden every spring and kick them to another part of the garden. :-) The problem is....gourds are very much a hot weather fruit and require a long growing season to truly mature to the stage where they will successfully cure to a hard shell after being picked. I live in SW Ontario near Sarnia and have grown gourds for years. Even with our longer, milder summer, I still have to plan my gourd growing carefully, to get gourds that mature on the vine before the cold weather comes and the vine dies off. I start gourd seeds early and grow them indoors under lights or in the greenhouse to get them to a nice size plant before the last frost date is past and it safe to plant them outdoors. I "harden them off" before planting outdoors. I take old 2 gallon plastic nursery pots and cut the bottom out, then place one around each gourd plant. It protects the young plant from the wind for a while and also creates a nice warm microclimate for the plant until it becomes more of a vine and starts to climb out of the enclosure. Then I remove them. So...yes, you can put your gourds out into a nonheated shed for the winter. Having some mold grow on the shell is normal and can be cleaned off later. You REALLY don't want that mold in your house anyway! I'm sorry to say the ones that have gone soft are starting to rot and won't get a hard shell....time to throw them in the compost pile. Those ones didn't get mature enough on the vine before being picked. I hope you get some that are successful!

Are these the Sungold F1's? http://www.johnnyseeds.com/vegetables/tomatoes/cherry-tomatoes/sun-gold-f1-tomato-seed-770.html If so, they are "Indeterminite". And thus topping your vines should not have 'ruined' them. What may have happened is they could have become quite stressed, or used up the nutrients in the potting mix and would have 'naturally' stalled out. What is the size of your containers the type of potting mix (ie: brand, or formula) you use How much sun they get What you fertilized them with, and how frequently A picture :) My guess is they're hungry, or so stressed they aren't going to recover. But I topped an indeterminate vine this year by accident and it sent out four suckers to replace it.