Alright!
This is John Kohler with growingyourgreens.com, and today we’re looking at a nice sunflower
my friend Christian actually gave me this plant, it’s probably edible, but it’s
not going to make edible seeds like the big sunflowers, but nonetheless it’s very, very
beautiful, so it’s blessed with many, many blossoms, and I just love sunflower blossoms.
Here’s one that’s going to open today, it’s morning here, and I thought I’d make
an episode today about the melon trellis, so the update with the melon trellis over
here, so the crazy melon trellis you may have seen on some other episodes that looked pretty
crazy like some space alien something or other made out of white PVC tube and it didn’t
look too attractive before the melon vines grew up on it.
Looks wonderful right now it’s a nice basically big privacy screen, you can’t even see my
house from the street, and we have lots of melons on it.
So you can see the front actually grew out really well and the back did look like this
until earlier this week when we had to actually trim it back.
So in the back here looks naked.
But the cool thing is you can see all the melons hanging.
So the melons are hanging in there, there’s a nice big one, I think that’s probably
maybe a Crenshaw, and [inaudible] some kind of cantaloupe varieties, and Crane melon which
is actually the guy in this area, Crane, made the Crane melon he crossed some melons and
made the Crane melon.
And I got a couple more melons over here, but what you’re not seeing over here is
a lot of the foliage.
So yeah so a lot of the leaves we had to actually pick off, and the reason for that is I was
taking my morning walk through my garden, and I saw something, and actually what it
was was white powdery mildew, so we’ve actually gotten most of the leaves but here’s a leaf
that I missed, and we could zoom in real close and you could see right there, there’s some
white powdery stuff on there.
And if we flip the leaf over usually on the backside it goes through and there will just
be a mass of white leaves, I’m going to pick that off right now.
And so I guess it’s white powdery mildew and there may be some kind of mildewcide you
can spray, but I’m not doing any mildewcide, so you know the other method is manual prevention,
manual control, so we basically picked off all the leaves with my white powdery mildew
in the hopes that we got it all and that it will not spread.
And that was a couple of days ago and today I found definitely some more white powdery
mildew over in this section so you could see I was busy at work clipping these back and
taking them off, also removing any dead leaves.
Also this time too I thought it might be a good idea to actually clip off the growing
tips, so for example this is a growing tip where the plant’s actually still trying
to flower and is going to attempt to make more fruit, which is all good and everything,
but I’m going to break it off actually right here because when you break it off it’ll
stop focusing on growing more and actually focus on any fruits that are on the vine,
so some people, you know I’m no melon expert by any means, I’m doing Internet search
on that, but some people really only let their melon vine fruit one or two melons for the
optimal best melon in the whole world, and if you’re into that, that’s cool.
I want to go for production and have lots of melons and hopefully have them all ripen
up so you know at this point, it’s almost futile to have any more flowers and anymore
melons develop because we’re here in August and it’s going to start getting cold soon,
and if we’re getting powdery mildew now, that’s just what’s in store for me so,
more powdery mildew and getting gold and the melon’s not going to make it.
So at this point I just want the melons that’s on the plant to ripen up without having to
make anymore because they will not get mature and into full term on the melons.
So this is John Kohler with growingyourgreens.com, and I need to actually pick another leaf off,
but yeah oh and the other thing is my gardener Tiffany, so she’s really paranoid about
powdery mildew, so she said “John, whenever you’re working with the powdery mildew,
take all the leaves away and send them to the compost offsite, because you don’t want
to be keeping them around here number one, and sometimes some people may even recommend
putting them in a plastic bag and putting them in your regular garbage so it doesn’t
get composted with the regular stuff and then you’ll bring back the powdery mildew spores
in the compost.”
So I thought that – oh here’s another one.
I could walk around all day see the little white spot?
That’s powdery mildew.
So we’re going to pull that off, oh here’s another one.
I mean I could sit here all day and get them all, and you know this will be totally barren
afterwards.
So yeah you don’t want to basically cross-contaminate.
So she was like really paranoid, like “Okay John, if you’re dealing with powdery mildew,
after you deal with it, definitely wash your hands really well before you even touch anything
related to the melons.”
So I mean all the cucumbers that I have, cucumber beds are like one, two, three, four beds away,
but you know this, I did get this last year [inaudible] my community garden on my cucumbers,
and some plants seem to be more affected than others, so I’d say that maybe melons are
not as immune to powdery mildew as say cucumbers are, but the other thing is we definitely
want to be careful, because this can spread.
If I touch this leaf to another leaf, or you got some powdery mildew on your hands and
you transfer it over to your cucumbers, then your cucumbers are going to have some issues,
and I mean I’m all right with the melons, but man I don’t want my cucumbers having
any issues yet it’s still too early.
So once again this is John Kohler with growingyourgreens, and remember you can grow your own greens
and your own melons, and let me get a close-up on this little guy hiding back there, I think
that’s just so cute.
Alright.