gardening

I'm feeling particularly proud of my garden this week, and wanted to share pictures with the interwebs. ;)

I live in Brooklyn, New York, in a neighborhood with a little space; we have a first-floor apartment with a backyard, but our whole yard is paved, and lined with little evergreen trees in raised beds. We've also got good light only on one side of the yard, moreso now that our next door neighbors put up an eight-foot fence on their side. (I'm actually fine with this, since it keeps their pit bull out of my yard, which the previous fence did not.) So mostly I do container gardening, with a few plants in the raised beds where I can squeeze them in.

I'm also a food-gardener. Er, OK, I'm a foodie who gardens because that means I get easy fresh produce. I also compost because I'm a foodie and have enviro-fascist leanings. I have no inherent love of putting things in dirt and making them grow, but it's grown on me over time. And I don't reeeeealy do much research into my gardening; mostly I throw things at dirt and if they die, sulk and curse their departed spirits.

On to the photos.

( pretty growing things, occasional asking of advice from wise fellow gardeners )

I'd feel very accomplished, if it weren't for the fact that a lot of the Bangladeshi immigrants in my neighborhood actually garden so hard-core that their front yards are full of carefully arranged furrows of okra and peppers and eggplants. I am a rank amateur compared to my neighbors.

rydra_wong

Via

lyrstzha:

Window Farming (NPR report)

bluemeridian

Howdy! Gardening season is indeed upon us here in northwest Ohio (zone 5b, fyi) - if you're starting seeds it is anyway! This is my second year of 'serious' gardening and, like the first year, is still mostly about tripping along and trying things and being amazed when something actually grows. I've been chronicling my progress in my journal (tag: gardening) and I do have a separate gardening journal with the garden stuff cross-posted for the convenience of my very non-fandom, barely-computer-using relatives (Blues Garden).

As of right now, just over 4 weeks out from our final frost free date, I have growing in the living room tomatoes, beets, leeks, onions, peppers, basil, oregano, sage, impatiens, lettuce, and a couple of other flowers all started from seed (here's a list of all the cultivars I'm planting this year). The garden itself is still a muddy mess! I have my fingers crossed that it'll be ready to go in just over two weeks when it's time to plant the seed potatoes.

( Some images from last year. )

You can find more pictures from last year at my 2009 photo album, and there's also a 2010 photo album that's just started to get underway.

(I've also been known to ramble on about canning, as that obviously ties into my gardening! Technically, it has its own separate tag - canning - and separate photo album. *g*)

fatoudust

Hi, hi! It makes me happy to see this comm revving back up.

I live in the high desert in Arizona, about 6000 feet in elevation, so our climate is seriously whack. We generally get about 11" of precip a year, but this year has already been high, so perhaps we're breaking our drought? And because of our elevation, we get true winters (which this year has meant lots of snow) and our growing season is atrociously short. I'm not actually supposed to plant out until June.

So! Being a resourceful sort, we built our house to accommodate and I have a flourishing winter garden in our south-facing sunroom. Given the chance to do it again, I would expand this room significantly, add a tap and a drain, and reduce the overhangs to be more all-season for plants. As is, it's all seasons for humans (and thus cool and shady in the summer, warm and sunny in the winter) but only fall-spring-winter for the plants.

( Garden pic and explanatory text. )

We cleared the backyard recently (well, had a friend knock down the construction piles of dirt with his bobcat) and planted grass seed, but I really don't need a lawn, just some sort of groundcover to prevent erosion in our hardcore winds. Something the dog can run over and that I can pull tumbleweeds out of.

Bulbs are coming up in our east side flowerbed, but the rabbits are the only ones happy about this, evidently, as it's really a bit too early for them. And we have an outdoor raised bed, but have not made plans yet for it. I also need to cut down last year's Russian sage growth so this year's can spring forth. I hope to do a butterfly garden on the southwest side, but am not sure if I can manage it or not.

Anyway, yay! Hello, gardeners!

fatoudust

So, hi! I signed up for this group when I was still just a little lost openID, wandering in the aether without an icon to my name.

And then I forgot about it. So I remembered, and I'm back, and I'm excited to talk about the vagaries of gardening, because, lo, I need the help, y'all.

I'm in the high desert of Arizona. That puts me mostly in zone 6, because while we do get the hot weather, we're mountainous. I'm at about 6000 feet, and that's the lowest I've been in recent history. It was about 7000 when we were in NM. So we get very dramatic swings of day/night temperature. And of course, no water. We get about 17 inches average over the year, mostly concentrated in the monsoon months of late summer.

And we just built a new house. It's in a new development, piñon and juniper. Our lot was cleared for the septic tank, so we're fighting off tumbleweeds (which are nasty sharp when mature, I'm just tellin' ya.) and other seriously brutal weeds. There are natural grasses and wildflowers in the neighboring lots, but we're picking & choosing because of fire danger.

The house is passive solar, with a sunroom that has a solar floor (thicker than usual slab to serve as thermal mass) and is the most comfortable room in the house all year round. The large windows with overhangs mean we get winter but not summer sun. So the room works as a fabulous winter greenhouse, but the sun completely does not enter it during summer so we need to figure out something else for those plants then.

So! All that is to say, I have two interests. One is landscaping and the other is food gardening. We had a great winter salad garden in the sunroom, but our outdoor forays have been less successful due to various critters who deeply appreciate our provision of provisions for them. The greens are still growing in the sunroom with indirect light, though. They seem unkillable.

Outside we have the grapevine on its second year; looks like it's going to bear this year. And then there's plans for the raised bed: we intend to do tomatoes and potatoes and a Native American traditional Three Sisters garden, which is corn, beans & squash. We were told we couldn't start until June because of frost danger, so we've got an extremely short growing season. And we'll be gone for part of it.

As far as the decoratives go, we have two flowerbeds containing Russian sage and assorted bulbs. Oh, and we planted organic garlic in the flowerbeds. Hee. It's a bulb. They're doing great; rabbits ate the rest of the bulbs, pretty much.

And I've got a sack of wild bird trees from the Arbor Day Foundation that need to go in the ground.

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My Garden!

When you don't even have a windowsill ...

Introducing a Garden!

Yay, gardening!

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June 2025

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