Growing a vegetable garden.please help!!?
Question:My potatoe plants are huge, they are crowding everything! can I cut the plants back? will it stunt the potatoe growth? Also is there a way to get vine veggies( squash, zucchini, cucumbers) to grow in a certain direction? I think I put too may plants in my garden, they are already huge and everything seems crowded! plz help, I would like to be able to harvest everything, but am concerned they will choke each other out if I let them continue till fall!
Answers:
Best thing to do if you can is to either thin them out or make some sort of trellis so they can go vertical, for the squash and cucumbers, if theyre the viney types.
The zucchini, theres not much you can do there for a trellis, but you may have to thin some of the lants out, removing every other or every third plant, or else they all will crowd each other out and by early to mid august, most of your zucchinis will be producing small fruits, the ones that are still alive.
The squash, I do not know what types you have, but if you have the viney kinds ,like butternuts or spaghetti squash, a trellis would work.
Fence posts with chickenwire or inexpensive kind of fence material between the posts. Have the vines go up the posts.
Will probally have to physically secure the vines to the post, but do not make it tight. Twine or cotton string probally the best to use.
If it is like yellow, crookedkneck, summer or other kinds of squash that is the ground type, will need to thin them out. You may have some success if you are able to transplant the ones you thin out to another area, but all of those may not make it.
The potatoes, you can cover them with dirt so that the top foot sticks out and increase your yield. The stalks you bury will go to root and produce even more potatoes, thats better than cutting them back which would retard their growth, or even give them such a shock, that the plant could die off.
Planting them in the spring, it is hard to beleive that they will get very big in a little amount of time. I did the same thing with a bunch of butternut squash a few years ago. By the end of August, I had a 30' by 30' area of vines all over, a lot of butternut squash, but they were either average or to the small size because of overcrowding.
Otherwise, the way it sounds, you got good soil, plenty of sun and enough moisture in which you got some good size plants. Good job.
you're just going to have to thin them out.
And as for the vine plants, just move their branches carefully to the direction you want them to be.
Plants need space, their productivity will only suffer if you cramp them.
I think it would be okay to cut the potatoes back, you just won't get as many. Just like other plants, when you cut one branch the food just goes to the others, unless you go crazy. just a couple of snips should do the trick. As far as the squash, zucchini, and the cucs, you really can't tell them where to go, unless you get some chicken wire or something to guide them and move them along the fence often. If they are overcrowded, they will not have enough space to grow anyway, so you might as well trim while you still have time for the rest of the veggies to grow. Just a thought.
If they are that crowded pull every other plant up or everything will be stunted. They need sun to mature all they are getting is shade.
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