gardening | Plans for the spring?

Well, today was going to be finish with the raised beds, but the incredible amount of rain stopped that plan.

I'm looking at tomatoes (of course), carrots in a month or so getting started (I live in a subtropical area, they don't get much time), melons, and a few small dye plants (safflower and whatnot).

good luck with the melons! Mine were overwatered by rain over the summer and they melted :C

It gets too hot for most melons here, so usually by early June they have to be done growing.

I still have tomatoes ripening! We haven't had a freeze.

I plan on planting onions and peas in early March. I plan on sending away for hops rhisomes, so I can make beer later in the year.

Mine froze back in october, but admittedly my plants were gone before them. I lost energy last summer

I have compost! So much compost! I actually have a problem where my compost is too N heavy because it's all poultry manure and straw. I'm really hoping the couple of bags of bone meal I've dumped in there will help balance things out. Last year my tomato plants were huge and leafy and never set any fruit.

But otherwise I haven't looked at my seed spreadsheet yet. I usually wait until I get the seed catalogs after the first of the year.

*crosses fingers* Good luck with the composting!

Oh man, I need more poultry manure (I have two chooks and they do an okay-ish job, but right now I also have an entire woodchip mulch pile decomposing on my lawn).

Unfortunately anyone around here that keeps chooks also keeps the poop for their own gardens. Hm. Although I have a friend with five chooks that might not have a use for the straw bedding of her chooks. I might give her call.

Compost is AMAZING, though, when it comes to getting gardens sprouting...

I mean, raising 40 ducks and 20 chickens over the course of six months on a townhouse lot is a quick and easy way to get lots! ;)

(they have since moved onto more appropriately sized pasture and I just have two secret ducks shhhhh)

We also do kitchen scraps and the husband is a big coffee drinker which adds a good amount of N too.

That would indeed be an effective way to get lots of poultry manure! I might start by contacting my friend, though. :D

The kitchen scraps go to the worms or the broader compost, but you've just reminded me to contact the local coffee shops and roasters in the area. I just have to get them to fill up some big buckets with the used grounds...

I still miss the big compost bin at my parents' place. But I'm determined to continue composting at my rental home, which means... I've been chucking my kitchen scraps, coffee grounds, and powdered eggshells off the side of my front steps. Behind a big cedar that hides the mess. Hopefully in the spring I'll dig it all into the dirt and have nobody be the wiser.

So I have a couple of largeish Rubbermaid bins (they're the Roughneck 25 gal) that I compost in. I drilled holes in it following these directions and it works really well! Obviously not quickly as my big bedding pile does since it doesn't get hot the same way a big pile would but it does reduce the suburban trash pests getting in it.

I also seem to end up with soldier flies in it every year which is both a blessing and a curse: Great poultry food and churns through organic waste FAST but also gets anaerobic fast and you have these wasp-looking flies around.

I'm trying to figure out what I can reasonably do indoors with a tree blocking the light from the windows, since I live in an apartment with no balcony. I'm considering shelling out for full spectrum lightbulbs and some extra lamps, though. Anyone have advice for indoor container gardening?

Edited 2018-12-09 00:20 (UTC)

there's some indoor plants that are nearly impossible to kill. Pothos is a nice indoor plant, one you can keep anywhere. I'd say you *might* be able to grow herbs with a lamp. Not certain though. The reddit community r/gardening has a newbie thread for questions like that that are answered in really good detail, if you'd like to try there as well

I actually have enough window light to keep a mint alive for.. three and a half months and counting (my mother's, and she usually just tosses them at the end of the summer so I figured it couldn't hurt to try). But mint kind of has its own determined thing going on.

i think we have finally had enough time here that we are going to [budget permitting] rip things out of the back 'garden' and put in some raised beds and grow things again. not looking forward to the work, but def looking forward to homegrown vegs again!

I'm frustrated and disappointed at the very limited garden space available to me at my rental home. The only "garden" space in the yard is overgrown with bushes and trees. I've done my best to prune them back, even though what I really want to do is rip out half of the young elms that probably sprouted by accident and grew from neglect (Previous tenant AND landlord both didn't give a shit, based on the way I found this place. :/ )

Anyway. I have some bulbs planted in what little dirt remains available, so hopefully spring will bring daffodils! Plus marigolds, herbs, and jalapeno peppers in my pots. Definitely catgrass for the furbaby.

Fingers crossed that I'll be able to convince my landlord to let me rip out a strip of grass beside the driveway for a flowerbed. Then I'll go dig up a few clumps of wildflowers from beside the highway, and voila-- hardy climate-adjusted flowers, for free.

That sucks. :( Is it possible to have a container garden somewhere, somehow to expand your space?

Yes, I have 4 large pots, plus a few smaller ones, and an enclosed porch that will help me sprout seeds a little earlier in my chilly Canadian spring. I just miss having half a yard of dirt for a vegetable garden. And I'm grumpy about the existing garden space being overgrown with trees I can't destroy without permission lol. They're choking each other but I can't dooooo anythingggg...

Edited 2018-12-09 06:27 (UTC)

I'm not sure yet, to be honest. I've been thinking of lavender and some herbs, but I haven't narrowed anything down. I'll probably decide after going to a plant sale or two.

I've got my primula seeds in, because too many primulas are never enough. Last year's primulas all died from the drought and my forgetfulness, with the exception of one tiny and extremely lucky plant that I'm honestly not convinced is 100% out of the woods. So I've bought almost exactly the same seeds as last year, except one that was sold out.

I also want to put some hardy geraniums in somewhere. I discussed it with Husband and he had some suggestions for places they could go. I don't think those will be from seed.

Finally, still dithering on the iris question. I know I'd like some, I just have no idea whether they could actually live in our garden. Husband thinks our soil might be too dry for them, because the ones his parents have like a boggy area. But I know someone who grows them in her garden in Texas, and it's all very confusing. I think if I see some at a reasonable price I'll just try it and see what happens.

Due to my limited space I've only been Growing culinary Herbs, fragrant flowers and Fruit trees. I don't Cook as much SE Asian cuisine as I used to and have got rid of my Lemon grass plants and are deciding if I'll give my Turmeric and Galangal plants away in Spring totally instead of just starts.
I've added a 'Green Ischia' Fig to my fruit trees. Originally, it was to replace a nonproductive Persimmon but it's so small I'll give the P another yr.
This month I start some of my Annuals and Biannuals like Sweet Sultan, Sweet Williams and for the last attempt, Foxglove. The latter never make it through the 2nd Spring due to our heat and humidity. My two courtyards are basically patterned after the classic English cottage garden...
Cheers,
Pat(not looking forward to clearing all the Freeze-killed vegetation in the yard)

Your garden sounds so pretty!

What do you usually cook with your culinary herbs?

Mostly Asian(Japanese, and Thai), Italian and classic American. One of my projects the lasst couple of yrs is to reverse engineer my Mom's recipes. She kept everything in her head and even those that I know all the ingredients, I don't the proportions. Luckily, I have a clue because my Mom(who was considered a great cook) didn't know how to Cook when she married my Dad and Had only a Betty Crocker cookbook. I've found in the pre60's editions a number of recipes that are pretty close so I know they are probably what she started with. Have her Eggplant casserole down(I think mine is actually better;>) but still haven't cracked her soups or her dips.
Cheers,
Pat

It's summer here, so I'm in the middle of planting.

This week is going to be: tomatoes (wapsipinicon), beans (snake), lettuce, and possibly leeks and carrots.

And, just on the subject of compost: I cannot sing it's praises enough. I had a couple of compost heaps that I made over winter and just left to degrade, and once the weather heated up, the crops growing in there went BOOM.

Corn, about two weeks after I put the seedlings in (grew the seedlings in seedling trays to about 10cm tall, then planted them out): and they're bigger now.

Garden winter to spring

At this point in time, I'm dealing with way more growing things than I know how to deal with, and the usual issues of making sure everything has enough nutrients and water so the heat won't kill it off. Just planted out seedlings of pumpkins/melons, tomatoes, capiscums (bell peppers), and eggplant this morning, and have a bunch more to do in the coming week.

And otherwise I have to start working out how to eat zucchini. We have a lot of it. A LOT OF IT.

I am jealous of your zucchini! I've got squash borers too bad to get any. It's tragic. I've assembled some recipes for years when I did get fruit.

I keep forgetting that the home-grown zucchini won't necessarily look like the shop-bought stuff, and I don't pick it young and tender. Learning new habits.

Thanks for that link, though - some good ideas there. I've thought about making zoodles a bit (my sister is gluten intolerant, so we have to go gluten-free whenever possible), but we don't have a spiraliser and the young zucchini I'm seeing tend to be pretty small (about 3-4 inches) at most. So it's slice and dice and cook in something else most of the time. But I'll try shaving zoodles off with a peeler.

Ooo, nice. Congrats! Is there a way to donate to a food bank with all the excess veggies?

I don't think so. Laws about food donations wouldn't allow homegrown produce around here.

Plans for the spring?

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