I continue to experiment in Hawaii. On Christmas Eve, I planted about 50 snow peas in a raised bed, and transplanted a small okra plant outside. I spoke with someone who farms here, and he said he thought it would be too cold for okra (which I thought as well, but figured I would try anyway). He thought it might do OK here in the summer.
At the moment, I have a pumpkin plant that is doing pretty well, a broccoli that the bugs are eating alive, a jalapeno that is slowly coming along, and I just transplanted some oregano.
I am having trouble getting tomatoes and basil started. Once basil does get started, I have been told that it does very well here. Tomatoes are succumbing to fungus because of the very wet weather. The farmer said that I need to have them in greenhouses.
In the cool weather right now, I need to focus on carrots, broccoli, and cilantro.
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From my experience last summer in S.Ontario (Canada) with tomatoes and basil, we normally have hot, rather dry summers but last summer was a cool and wet one and:
ReplyDelete- the basil never got off to a good start because it wasn't warm enough. In past summers, when the heat goes and stays up and the weather is usually sunny (I'd guess daytime > 27C consistently) and it gets started it grows well. There were even articles in the local newspaper about disappointed Italian immigrants who couldn't get their basil going that year.
- tomatoes also did poorly because of the fungus, exacerbated and enabled by the wet weather. Appparently, the fungus spreads in the air and so can spread in wind or via splashing from infected plants and needs a moist environment to thrive, which I guess is why a greenhouse -- a sheltered, dry environment -- would work well. We had a number of consecutive days of rain, which is rare for summers here. The plants didn't get a chance to fully dry out before the next rainfall. It was a very bad tomato season for a lot of local farmers, too, including the CSA that I am a part of -- hardly any tomatoes this year.