Have you had any roblems with ants farming aphids on your okra? This is my first year growing okra and both plants are covered in ants and aphids. tomorrow, i'm buying corn meal to kill the ants and dawn to spray the aphids. the okra seems to be the only thing they are bothering. planted right next to thriving cukes and yellow squash... i've never had the ant farming issue before. i've had ants in one corner and aphids in another but this year they are working together! ick! I bought one of those plastic owls and have a motion sensor light, takes care of the rabbits and bunnies just fine and we all get to live and let live. :)

I don't think I have any "secret" tips but I'll throw out a few tidbits about raising each crop. CUCUMBERS: I grow two kinds--slicers and picklers. I like to grow all of them either on a fence, a trellis or a cage because the cukes are easier to find that way. It is amazing how hard it can be to find a green cucumber in all those green leaves if you let the plants run along on the ground. Sometimes I plant a bush variety like Picklebush because bush pickles give maximum productivity in minimal space. You can even grow Picklebush in containers. I don't plant cucumber seeds until the soil temps are at least 60 degrees because they don't germinate well in cold soil. Adequate watering is essential or cucumber growth will stall, so I water well and mulch heavily. I like to pick cucumbers while they are smallish--esp. for pickling. And, be sure to keep the plants well-piecked. If you leave even one cucumber on the plant too long, the whole plant slows down and stops producing. If you only have room for one type, but you want to have both picklers and slicers, plant a picking type and harvest some for slicing too. However, using a slicer as a pickler doesn't usually work. If you want to grow an unusual type, Lemon Cucumber is a great heirloom type that is lemon-yellow at the picking stage, or orangey-yellow if you leave it on the vine too long. CANTALOUPE: Most of the melons we call "cantaloupe" in the USA are actually muskmelons. I grow all my melons (cantaloupe, muskmelon, and all the minor melons) the same way I grow cucumbers--vertically, usually inside tomato cages. You can put a lot more plants in your garden that way and the melons are less likely to rot or have insect damage if they are not lying on the ground. With heavier melons, I make a sling or support for them using either cheesecloth, or knee-high nylon hose. With melons, overwatering and overfeeding can dilute the flavor, so I take care not to overwater, especially once fruitset is occurring. If the plants are overwatered after melons have formed and are ripening, the flavor can be awful (as in, there is no flavor) and the texure will be poor. So, water 'em while the plants are growing and flowering, and then be really careful not to water too much. I don't feed mine at all--just improve the soil by adding organic matter every year and let the soil feed the plants. Often, people think their fruit is poorly flavored because their melons cross with cukes or other cucurbits, but that is not what happens--it is the overwatering/overfeeding. Melons perform best on loose, friable, sandy loam or silty loam although they perform well for me in highly improved clay, esp. in raised beds. I prefer the flavor of heirloom melons, but grow both heirlooms and hybrids in order to have a nice variety. If you are buying plants or seed, any of the Hale's, Hale's Best, Hale's Best Jumbo, etc. are great. For heirloom melons, you can buy seed of many. Some of my favorites are Collective Farm Woman, Canoe Creek Colossal, Piel de Sapo, Charentais, Eden's Gem, Pike (best performer in clay soil that I've ever seen), Nutmeg, Prescott Fond Blanc, Early Frame Prescott, and Golden Jenny. Honestly, though, I've never tasted an heirloom melon I didn't like. SQUASH: Lots of people overplant squash. I usually plant only 1 or 2 yellow crookneck plants and 1 or 2 zucchini plants at a time, although I will succession plant new plants later in the summer as the original plants play out. I tend to plant these at the edge of the corn bed because they are huge monsters and can get quite large. The key to good production is to check the plants daily and harvest promptly. Failure to do so can leave you with very large, tough crookneck or straightneck squash or very large, often watery zucchinis were poor texture. People who grow for "size" often don't get the best flavor. I usually plant squash only after the cold nights are over. Squash plants like a lot of water too, but are prone to foliar disease, so soaker hoses or drip lines or watering by hand at the ground level and keeping water off the foliage works best. Winter squash, including pumpkins, like really warm soil and I don't plant them until the soil temperature has been at least 70 degrees for three days in a row. Most winter squash and pumpkins take up a lot of space, so mine go on the edges of the corn bed where they can ramble and roam to their heart's content. There are a very limited number of bush types of winter squash and pumpkins, or mini-pumpkins, if you have space issues. These plants get foliar diseases like powdery mildew very easily, so I won't plant them until June if April and May are very rainy, and that often helps keep disease to a minimum. Squash bugs are a common pest. I try to keep these to a minimum by checking the backs of leaves for eggs and removing and destroying those eggs if found, and by hand-picking and drowning any squash bugs I see. Squash vine borers are your plants' number one enemy and covering the plants with floating row covers (and pollinating flowers by hand since pollinators cannot get inside the row covers) helps keep their damage to a minimum. JALAPENOS: Peppers are grown pretty much the same as tomatoes, to which they are related. I always start with transplants. If direct-seeded, peppers won't produce until late summer or fall. I set out my peppers about two to three weeks after tomatoes, or about the first couple of weeks in May since cool temperatures can permanently stunt them. Peppers set best when nightimes are above 60 degrees and daytimes are below 80, so May really is their perfect month for growing, flowering and setting fruit. If you are getting lots of blooms by the end of May or even in the first couple of weeks in June before the true summer heat arrives you'll have a great yield. Hot peppers set fruit better all summer long than sweet peppers, but both will set well in the fall. Pepper plants are brittle and break easily, so I either stake them to 2'-3' tall stakes, or use the small, cheap tomato cages you buy at the store, to support them. Even just a heavy load of ripening peppers can snap the plants in half, and support helps prevent that. Pepper fruits themselves get sunscald easily, so I often plant them where they get full sun from sunup until about 1 or 2 p.m., then shade until about 4 or 5 p.m., and then a little sun late in the day and they produce just fine, with less sunscald too. Sweet peppers are often harvested green, but I like to let them turn their mature color before I harvest--it takes a couple of weeks more, but the flavor is 1000% better. I usually grow sweet peppers that mature to red, orange, yellow, purple and chocolate. Peppers are water guzzlers and will sulk if you let them get too dry, so I like to water deeply and never let the peppers wilt. If they wilt, they do not bounce back as well as other plants do after wilting. By the way, hot weather seems to make peppers hotter, so the hotter your summer weather, the hotter and better your pepper flavor. WATERMELONS: These take up a lot of space. A whole lot. So, I tend to go with smaller space saver types. The best melon I've ever grown and eaten are Blacktail Mountain, bred by Glenn Drowns, who owns Sandhill Preservation Center. The seed is available from Sandhill and from other sources too like Seed Savers Exchange and Baker Creek. They are small melons with dark red flesh and dark green rinds and superb flavor. Other small bush-type melons that I grow in my garden include Sugar Baby, Bush Sugar Baby and Yellow Doll. Like cantaloupe and muskmelons, too much water ruins the flavor and too much fertilizer, especially nitrogen, causes white heart--which is white spots with no flavor in the middle of the melon. So, avoid chemical fertilizers and don't overwater. Melons put out their vegetative growth first but you ought to see flowers appearing about 8 to 10 weeks after the plants are transplanted, or after the seeds sprout. If you use transplants instead of seeds, and you set them out at the right time (soil temps should be at least 70 degrees), you'll get blooms and melons about 2 weeks earlier from transplants than from direct-seeding. PEAS: I don't know if you mean cool-season peas like green peas, sugar snap peas or snow peas, or if you mean southern peas like black-eyed peas, crowder peas or cream peas, so let me know which ones you're growing. OKRA: Okra is one of the true heat lovers and goes best if planted fairly late. Okra sprouts quickly if direct-seeded in warm (75-90 degree) soil. Generally one planting is all you need (unless deer get into the garden and eat your plants down to the ground) and the plants produce all summer long. Keep the okra picked or production shuts down. I pick when the pods they are 3", 4" or maybe 5" long. If you let them get longer, they'll be very tough. Once okra is producing, I pick every day or every other day. It only takes about 4 to 7 days for okra to go from the flower stage to being ready-to-pick. I think okra is a gorgeous plant and like to plant it in my mixed border along with flowers and herbs--especially when planting the ones with red pods. If space is an issue (the plants can get 6' to 8' to 10' tall), you can grow the dwarf ones like "Baby Bubba" or "Little Lucy". Both look wonderful in flower beds or pots as well as in the veggie garden. In deer country, it is almost impossible to grow okra unless it is protected by a fence. Dawn

Dorothy, I was afraid you were going to tell me that you had rich, loamy 'eastern Oklahoma' soil....and you did! I have to confess that it leaves me feeling baffled! Based on everything I know about nematodes, including some first-hand experience with them in my parents' garden in Texas, I know that they are a severe problem in sandy soil. Back in 'the olden days' when I was a kid, you could fumigate your soil chemically and it would kill the nematodes. However, I don't think any chemical fumigants are available to home gardeners these days because they are just too deadly and kill EVERYTHING in the soil including all the microorganisms and earthworms. I think some chemical fumigants are still used, especially in Florida, by commercial growers. And, I think I used the wrong term to describe plants that I said were 'resistant' to nematodes. That is how they were described when I was younger, but the terminology has been revised to "tolerant of" nematodes. It is a small technicality, but apparently the word 'tolerant' does not imply the plants could completely resist nematodes, and the word 'resistant' might imply that. Even tolerant plants often succumb to nematode damage, although they might last 1, 2 or 3 weeks longer than plants that are not tolerant. So, how do we arrive at a logical reason for the presence of nematodes in your soil? First, I would do a jar test and try to determine if there is a % of your soil that is sand. If so, that could explain the presence of the nematodes. However, unless there is a fairly high % of sand, the organic material in your soil OUGHT to counteract the sand content. If you've never done a jar test, let me know and I'll describe how to do it. When we first moved here, I used a jar test to help me determine what the clay content of our soil was. I discovered, through the use of several jar tests, that I had widely differing amounts of clay in different locations. On our property, heavy, dense red clay devoid of organic material predominates, but I also have some soil that is best described as sandy-clayey soil and silty-clayey, and one area that is almost pure sand, yet another one that is almost pure silt. In all cases, though, the basic solution is the same.....the addition of tons of organic material. Secondly, it might not hurt to read up a little on cotton root rot. We have cotton root rot in the heaviest clay soil on our property, which used to be part of a farm....on which cotton was once grown. When I began losing plants to CRR, I knew what it was immediately because CRR is a huge problem in Texas, where I grew up. Cotton Root Rot affects thousands of plants and it also causes sudden death. If your okra plants were being affected by CRR, they would die very suddenly and often the 'death' moves up a row plant by plant. However, with CRR, when you pull up the roots or dig around in the soil near the roots, you often find a stringy, fibrous mat that looks sort of like the decomposed remains of very old carpet. That mass is a key sympton to watch for if you suspect CRR. Okra and plants related to it are very susceptible to CRR. Since you are going to solarize during the cooler months, you might want to leave the plastic on for at least 12 weeks, and fall to winter may be better than winter to spring, because the degree of moisture received in eastern Oklahoma can make solarizing harder in spring weather. Your high moisture and humidity levels in the spring could encourage fungii to grow in your soil underneath that plastic. I suspect the last thing you want to do is to encourage the growth of more fungii. Third, nematodes are a popular discussion topic on the Tomato Forum because they are such a problem for tomato growers. If you have time, you might want to go to the Tomato Forum and do a search for 'nematodes'. There are several threads there that have a LOT of good info on nematodes, including ways for home gardeners to combat them. Fourth, if you are growing the standard commercial varieties of okra, you might want to try a couple of heirloom varieties to see if you can find one with better nematode tolerance. Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds (www.rareseeds.com) and Seed Savers Exchange (www.seedsavers.org) both offer heirloom okra varieties. Hope this info helps. Dawn (who grows okra primarily to entertain the deer, because they love it so very much, and I cannot keep them out of it!)

Just a common old garden spider.....nothing to worry about and nothing to do with whatever may be ailing your holly (not a Japanese holly, btw). Garden spiders are good things and should be encouraged. FWIW, hollies can be cut back hard and they will backbud or produce new growth from bare stems. Your plants look perfectly healthy otherwise and with no sign of insect or disease issues so why they are so leggy and sparse now is most likely due to cultural conditions....lack of water at some point, possible cold damage at some point or issues with the root ball when planted.