gardening

Over the years, I've noticed that my garden has a range of different pollinators. Sure, the European honey bees do show up, but it's for the big events, like almond or lemon trees in blossom. Less glamorous pollinators, like native bumble bees and various flies do the everyday pollination of my squash, eggplant and plum trees.

Here's a link to an article that describes the connection between the honey bee and modern agriculture, and points out that in a thriving diverse ecosystem (like our gardens) we still can rely on the more natural range of pollinators.

www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2017/06/13/532729268/why-honeybees-are-the-wrong-problem-to-solve

dantesspirit

So much rain means lots of growth. Unfortunately, it also means things bloom, but no pollinators are around to fertilize them, because of the rain. Here's hoping at least a week of no rain every day will help in that case.

The Heirloom tomato Indigo Rose has at least a dozen tomatoes in various sizes now. The Omar's Lebanese has a few tiny ones started.

( More! )

tielan

Winter planting got slightly derailed by my acquisition of a six-week job. And the late autumn plantings got disrupted by the new fence we’re putting in between our back neighbours and ourselves. As a result, all my seedlings are languishing in seedling pots too small for them, and I had to pull up the otherwise-growing-beautifully sweet potato.

( pics of the garden )

I’ll probably need to do a separate post for the pumpkin harvest in the next couple of weeks… :)

bridgetmkennitt

How is your garden going so far? Is it looking great? Is the weather fighting you or working with you?

tielan

Report from a late summer garden (in the southern hemisphere):

Harvest and planting for winter.

My area in Australia is mild enough that cool-weather leafy greens do pretty well over winter, so long as you protect them from frost.

I know most of you equatorially-north folks are just getting into planting times for your gardens - what do you plan to grow this year (and how's that coming along), and is there anything new you're going to try this growing season?

Speaking for myself, I'm trying to grow: cabbage, cauliflower, bok-choy, raab broccoli (I've never had luck with regular broccoli), rocket, brussel sprouts, onions (both the ones you use the leaf stalk and the ones you store the bulb), carrots, parsnips, sugarbeet, and the usual run of beetroot (which I have finally worked out how to cook: bake in individual wrappings of foil, and then after 40 mins, put a dob of butter on top and bake for another 40 mins).

3rdragon

How do you track what you have planted where, and what you want to plant where, and what you planted there last season?

As a kid I just did popsicle sticks with the name written on, but nowadays I have ambitions for crop rotation and record-keeping, and little sticks just aren't cutting it. We have a map, and a Google spreadsheet with when we planted stuff and how long it took to germinate*, but neither is an easy way to know if I should plant lettuce in this particular spot, or if kale would be a better choice this year.

---------
*I didn't make it -- a friend of mine gave me a copy of hers, and I just put stuff in boxes.

sleepyfairy

Heirloom plants are those that haven't been standardized by scientists or commercial growers, but that come from small communities and are bred manually and naturally, so they may not be uniform. They're usually defined as plant varieties that existed before the 1940's when people began looking for more uniform produce that can be farmed for a bigger yield at the expense of taste (which is why I think any supermarket vegetable advertised as "GMO free" is a misnomer, but that's a subject for another time).

A lot of heirloom strains are dying out because in a lot of places it's illegal to sell the seeds (particularly in Europe), which is a shame because even though they tend to be more varied in output they're often much more flavorful than the commercial varieties.

Does anyone here focus on heirloom vegetables? Over the last couple of years I've taken an interest in it and this year I procured a number of seeds from one of the local mennonite families. The girl said that she's glad more people have taken interest in heirloom growing in recent years. They're only labeled like "carrot" or "cabbage" so I'm really looking forward to seeing what I end up with! If so, what do you grow?

bridgetmkennitt

We all have at least one. It's that plant that you try to grow and grow, but for some reason or another, it just dies or doesn't bloom or doesn't grow any vegetables.

What plant do you consider your nemesis?

tellezara

Hi guys! I found this comm via

dw_news and hope you might be able to advise me.

We moved house last October. The back garden is enclosed and doesn't get a huge amount of sun. It is mostly paved with some raised beds, so we've planted some shade loving greenery. In the centre is a very sad token patch of lawn (with bald patches) measuring about 2 x 1.5m. We want to dig this out and turn it into a Zen garden - I was going to put down weed mat with sleepers on the sides and fill with white gravel. But now my husband quite likes the idea of having a small tree in the centre of this. I'm a bit iffy about this due to the small space but I don't know enough about gardening to have a proper justification for my unease.

1) Are there any good tree types for a shaded garden, that don't grow large but don't require the daily upkeep of bonsai?

2) Is 2x1.5m enough space for tree roots without them going under and distorting the paving if I plant the tree in the ground??

3) How can I have a tree but still keep the weed mat down?

Thanks for any advice you can give!

bridgetmkennitt

How is everyone's garden doing? Or, if you haven't started planting yet, what do you plan on growing in your garden?

cyprinella

I'm still going through the catalogs to figure out my veg order but I fell down the wildflower seed rabbithole. I ended up with a large bag of native wildflower seed mix from American Meadows with which to do some Concern Citizen Tired of Looking at Non-Native Weeds gardening over some finished road construction sites in my neighborhood. Anyone else have something cool on order?

katertot

Hiya! Several friends of mine have moved over from livejournal and I'm hoping the communities are a little more active here than there. Judging by the date on the previous post, I'm out of luck. But it can't hurt to try. :)

I'm in central Iowa, the weather is cold, and I've recently ordered a whole bunch of seeds from rareseeds.com thanks to them matching sales for charity a few days back. I've got several garden areas, mainly a vegetable garden plus a bunch of neglected flower beds. (Thanks kids!) I'm excited to revamp at least one of them this spring, something I've been saying I'll do for a few years now. I've got zinnias, cosmos, and tomato seeds on the way, including a couple of more interesting colored zinnias.

In the meantime, hopefully the owls and hawks around here do a good job on the voles this winter, they are becoming quite a nuisance!

What are you most looking forward to this spring?

Current Mood: optimistic

bridgetmkennitt

Hi. I'm Bridget and I just found this comm. I've been looking at gardening things on Pinterest and recently bought a basil plant because I want to try out an edible indoor container garden and figured a basil plant would be a good test drive. I bought a starter plant from Home Depot and bought a plant light so it's sitting on a shelf in my room.

Does anyone have any experience with an edible indoor container garden, or some sort of variation on that?

dantesspirit

Technically this covers the last week of June too, but who's counting...

Back in May, I bought a catnip plant. It was subsquently transplanted into a 10" pot and left alone for a few months. This was by the end of June, and after having multiple cuttings taken from it, as well as being rubbed against several times and munched on by Aries. It had quadrupled in size.

This is that same plant as of today. It is now in a 12" pot and it has doubled in size again. Yeah.

The driveway was regraded and recycled asphalt was put down. This neccesitated repairs to the strawberry bed and the iris bed on the side, as those bricks are not mortered together (yet). The front bed along the front of the driveway also has several cracks were the small bulldozer hit it. *sigh* When I pull the irises from it, to replace the dirt, I'll have to see about potentially repairing it.

I had to thoroughly wet the driveway down while watering the front gardens before I could go smooth out the ridges and such left from the tires. Once it all compacts down, it'll be a lot smoother and weeds won't grow in it, so that's a bonus, I guess. Although, they did leave about a foot wide stretch along the strawberry bed that's bare gravel and dirt. Hrm.

( More... )

katemonkey

Because when you grow Salad Blue potatoes, you expect something like maybe two-three inches long, something nice to mash up and enjoy.

( You do not expect this: )

eien_herrison

Haven't been around much, I've been too busy with regular life to really post here, but I have been working on my garden.

Temperatures have skyrocketed here over the past couple of weeks; good news for my tomatoes and peppers, not so good news for my lettuces. We were still digging out last year's potatoes when they started growing again, so we lost a ton of seedlings due to needing to dig them up ( :( ).

However, what's been the real success has been our indoor pepper plants:

( More info here & image under cut )

tis_caitlin

Monday, January 7, 4-5:30 pm:
( Easy-to-Grow Native Plants for California Gardens )

------------

Tuesday, January 8, 7:00 pm:
( Planning a Native Rain Garden )

alexbayleaf

Hi everyone,

I posted here a while ago about a new project to build a social website for food gardeners, something like Ravelry (for those who are knitters/crocheters and know Rav) but with a Dreamwidth-esque ethos and open source development process.

Anyway, this is now progressing well, and is definitely a happening thing \o/ Right now we're coding hard on the site and I'm also working on setting it up as a business. As part of this, I'm doing a very simple market research survey, just to find out a bit about what other gardening websites people use, and whether they'd like to use (and pay for) Growstuff.

If you've got a few minutes (literally 5 mins at most, it's a very quick survey), would you mind heading on over to http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/GZCNK9K and answering a few questions?

If you have friends who grow food (fruit, vegies, herbs, etc) or would like to, it would also be great if you could signal boost to them.

Thanks so much!

lizcommotion

Hello! I am a secondary gardener in my household, as I live with a Master Gardener who has staked out most of the gardening territory + I have chronic health issues that sometimes get in the way. (And sometimes I ignore them, like today, and plant a camelia, and then my hips hurt. But I wanted my hands in the soil.)

I had a question that is not strictly gardening related, but sort of about a gardening hardscaping project. I wanted to build this rustic garden tuteur as a cool looking structure and thing for vines to grow up. Plus, we have a bunch of extra branches lying around from some serious pruning we had to do when we moved in. (Too many trees close together = not good for trees.)

Here's my question: the garden tuteur instructions call for peeling bark off the logs before making the structure, but I think this might be rather hard on my hands with the chronic pain/inflammation. I think it would look equally cool with the bark still on, but I don't know if that would end up rotting as time went on...or if I would mind. Any thoughts?

Mods - sorry if you decide that hardscaping questions are inappropriate, I'll try posting elsewhere if you deem it necessary.

alexbayleaf

Hi everyone!

sabreuse pointed me over here and I'm glad to have found this community.

I live in Melbourne, Australia and have a container garden for vegies/herbs/etc, which I share with my housemate

aquaprofundanet. We're renting at present, and our landlords aren't keen on us making any real changes to the garden, so we're limited in what we can do. Still, we get some vegies out of it, and seldom have to buy herbs, and we supplement with a bit of urban foraging and some fruit from friends with trees.

My dream is to have a place with enough space for a big vegie garden, fruit trees, and some chickens, but I sometimes despair of ever being able to combine that with my profession and my need to live somewhere with decent internet. Fingers crossed for better rural broadband in the near future, I guess.

The other day I was talking with some friends about how I wished there was a really good online community site for food gardeners, especially the sort of green/sustainable/hippy types who are into organics, permaculture, urban agriculture, self-sufficiency, slow food, heirloom vegies, and that cluster of interests. I was thinking something like Ravelry, but with an explicit Dreamwidth-like ethos and of course all open source. Since people seemed into the idea I've started a community for it at

growstuff so if anyone here would like to join us in building this thing, please come on over.

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On Garden Pollinators

State of the Garden, June Edition

heading for winter in Sydney

Garden Check-In

last gasp harvest

Keeping track

Heirloom Gardening

Your plant nemesis

Garden plans!

It's spring somewhere!

What's in YOUR seed order?

Intro

Introduction

State of the garden, July edition

I'm showing off this potato everywhere.

Gardening Progress

South SF Bay Area, CA - Native Gardening classes this week

Food gardeners, could you spare a few minutes?

Intro post and a question

Intro and a new project

Profile

June 2017

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