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Raspberry and blackberry I wouldn't recommend for containers unless you have the space for the big rear end pot they need to do well. I don't really like my raspberry bush since it takes up so much space for only 3-4 weeks of reward. With strawberries you can at least do a mix of June and ever bearing and enjoy fresh berries that way, Although yes fresh raspberries and blackberries taste 100% better than the early picked sour poo poo in the store
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Apr 1, 2015 13:09
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For starting a compost bin, would coconut coir work in place of straw?
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Apr 1, 2015 14:46
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cheese eats mouse posted:Raspberry and blackberry I wouldn't recommend for containers unless you have the space for the big rear end pot they need to do well. I don't really like my raspberry bush since it takes up so much space for only 3-4 weeks of reward. With strawberries you can at least do a mix of June and ever bearing and enjoy fresh berries that way, How big of a pot would you recommend for them? I have more room for pots than I have gardens.
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Apr 1, 2015 16:48
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detectivemonkey posted:How big of a pot would you recommend for them? I have more room for pots than I have gardens. I have some in 10 gal pots, but I got those for free from a dumpster. I couldn't picture them doing well at all in a 5gal like tomatoes. I just didn't have the best experience growing them in containers and think they do better contained in their own bed. If you have the money go for it, but I don't think it's worth the cost.
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Apr 1, 2015 17:41
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icehewk posted:For starting a compost bin, would coconut coir work in place of straw? I had a hard time finding a reference for the C:N of coir. One book said fresh coir pith was 100:1. Straw is usually 50 to 75:1. So it would work in slightly less quantity than straw to maintain the right C:N ratio. But straw also contributes a little to aeration because of it's structure where as coir seems to be more of a powder. Really though, you should be trying to find the most local sources of carbon and nitrogen for your composting rather than buying coir that's been shipped halfway around the world.
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Apr 1, 2015 19:48
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I got my soil test back from the agricultural extension. I've been looking at stuff online after getting it back, and also asked my one gardener friend about it. The big points I got from it are... First off, holy goddamn, $5 per sample, or $3.50 if you send in 5 or more? That's so ridiculously cheap, it's almost laughable. Especially for the information I got. I feel like I know what I'm working with now. Second, my soil in my bed is apparently a bit acidic. A pH of 5.4? I guess that makes sense, since I've read that oak leaves will do that to soil, and having gigantic oak trees all around, well....yeah. I've previously thrown in coffee grounds because I read that tomatoes like that, which probably didn't help. That bed will mostly be tomatoes, hot peppers, and cucumbers. I guess the soil isn't too bad for those plants, but I probably won't be putting coffee grounds in there. I've seen ashes suggested, which is fine by my since I have a source of that. Third, the NPK levels are supposedly a little low. 12-20-104. After some confusion, I found that those are in parts per million. Apparently, those are livable numbers, but my plants would react well to some fertilizer? So I'll have to get on that, too.
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Apr 1, 2015 20:44
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cheese eats mouse posted:I have some in 10 gal pots, but I got those for free from a dumpster. I couldn't picture them doing well at all in a 5gal like tomatoes. What about some dwarf blue berry plants? My Tophat and Northsky seem to have overwintered alright.
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Apr 1, 2015 21:01
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Rotten Cookies posted:I got my soil test back from the agricultural extension. I've been looking at stuff online after getting it back, and also asked my one gardener friend about it. The big points I got from it are... If it only tested NPK and pH then that price is about right. My extension office soil tests also cover organic matter %, magnesium, calcium, sodium and sulfur along with some science-y stuff I don't entirely understand but they also cost $20. Your nitrogen is low but that's to be expected. N is water soluble so it tends to get washed away over the winter by rain and melting snow. P and K are both a little low. You probably want a fairly balanced organic fertilizer. Adding too much N at once will burn the plants and a lot of it probably gets washed away and wasted. You can add small amount of N throughout the growing season as needed, usually something like blood meal. pH is also fairly low, but to be expected. The recommendation on one soil test I had for a pH of 5.4 was to add 160 lbs of dolomite lime per 1000 sq ft, but that test also showed that the magnesium was low. If you don't know your magnesium level then it's better to use agricultural lime which doesn't have a significant amount of magnesium. Any kind of lime should show the percentages somewhere on the packaging so you can be sure of what you're getting. Cucumbers like pH 5.5-6.0, tomatoes 5.5-7.0 and peppers 6.0-8.0. In general it's good to shoot for 6.5-6.8 as that's where the largest number of nutrients will be the most available to plants.
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Apr 1, 2015 21:52
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Rotten Cookies posted:Third, the NPK levels are supposedly a little low. 12-20-104. After some confusion, I found that those are in parts per million. Apparently, those are livable numbers, but my plants would react well to some fertilizer? So I'll have to get on that, too. I use "fish and poop" liquid fertilizer. It is 9-6-2, might help you.
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Apr 1, 2015 22:03
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ashez2ashes posted:What about some dwarf blue berry plants? My Tophat and Northsky seem to have overwintered alright. Can't comment as I've never tried blueberries. I'm a lazy gardener with anything past weeding and basic watering and heard they're more effort than that. I bet someone else can chime in. Container gardening can get pricey, especially when you scale up so I always stuck with stuff that was guaranteed before I found my co-op garden.
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Apr 2, 2015 01:33
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ghetto wormhole posted:Peppers take a relatively long time to germinate and they require a lot of moisture and temps between 65-85f, the higher the better. Hotter peppers like habeneros and ghost peppers and stuff take an even longer time to germinate(and grow). My bell peppers took 10-12 days to come up under perfect conditions and I planted some year old seeds of a very hot variety and they're still not up yet. Plus pepper germination rates are generally lower than most plants and they don't last longer than a year or two.
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Apr 2, 2015 03:53
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I'm about to get some shiitake spore pegs and oak logs and start growing mushrooms from the logs. Does anyone have experience with this? I recently got my vermicompost bin going, and I've already made several batches of wormshit tea. (They made my tomatoes and basil sprout immediately) I know that vermicompost tea makes everything go crazy, but i was wondering how much bigger it made Mushroom yields? Say i had the tea brewing in a tap cooler, with a tube that wicks tea to the logs that i can shut on and off, is there a rough % increase in shiitake yields i would get? Can someone also describe how fungi colonize logs? I know you have to soak them and then let them dry but i would like to know how that works exactly.
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Apr 2, 2015 10:46
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I've got a smallish balcony and we produce a lot of organic waste from veggies etc. I'm looking to process this cheaply and turn it into soil for the balcony garden. I was considering making a small worm farm but I don't want to keep them inside, the balcony gets full sun so I'd have to protect it somehow, and I'm worried about the heat killing them - or overfeeding them. I am now thinking about hot composting it in a medium sized bin that I just shake around and tilt every couple days after the first 4, but how do you go about harvesting the compost when you're adding new material every single day? Do people tend to have two bins that they use on a 20-day rotation? I.e. you spend 20 days adding material to one bin while the other is 'composting', then you empty the composted bin and swap. Presumably a large part of the newly composted material would have to go into the new bin to match the quota (we're a household of 2 so we don't produce kilos of waste at a time) but is that a reasonable idea?
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Apr 2, 2015 14:26
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Worm farms have two or more bins stacked that worms can move freely between. One is food another is poo and bedding. When they have produced enough poo you can scoop it out from the bottom bin, making sure that there aren't too many worms in what you're taking out. You get the tea from a tap at the bottom, I run some water through once a week to clean it up a bit, and can add food every day ie kitchen scraps once worms have matured. Full sun is a no no. Morning sun is ok. You don't want to cook them
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Apr 2, 2015 14:36
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Yeah I don't think I have anywhere appropriate for the worms to go unless I build an shady enclosure on the balcony and even then I wouldn't want to risk it. I think hot composting would be a lot more accessible and easy for me as a budget DIY project.
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Apr 2, 2015 14:41
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My worm bin is a plastic thing from the dollar store. Probably going to move them to a nicer box in the vague future, but they seem happy for now. I just drilled holes in it and keep it on the enclosed porch/garden with a chair blocking it from the sun haha. I've accidentally left my wormies out in a freeze multiple times. They're fine as long as you protect them from wind, like anything else in a freeze. They're having lots of babies now!  I mix the nitrogen producing stuff (food, weeds, bunny poo, etc) with dry leaves as bedding and it seems to work. I also picked off a bunch of moss from a neighbors oak and put it in there to balance out the moisture. I honestly think it's really just a balance of wet matter and dry matter. I started the whole thing out with leaves and some leftover garden soil. I'm looking for a super cheap and effective food processor or electric grinder I can use to grind my food scraps into nasty trash slush for my worms, if anyone can make suggestions. I kinda want to speed things up.
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Apr 2, 2015 14:51
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Tsinava posted:I'm about to get some shiitake spore pegs and oak logs and start growing mushrooms from the logs. I don't have any real experience with shiitakes, but I've grown several kinds of mushrooms over the years, and it always seems kind of hit-or-miss. I've had the best luck with wine caps in a bed of wood chips. The nice thing about them was that they bloomed within a year of planting the spawn, which I guess isn't the case for shiitakes most of the time. Shroomhenge:   I'd be interested to know how your shiitake logs work, but are you sure you need to fertilize them? I don't think I've heard of doing that. Also, I thought this was the worst time of year to cut logs to put mushrooms in, because they've used up all their stored energy to come out of hibernation, whereas cutting them down just after dropping leaves in the fall is the best time, because they just finished storing up nutrients for the winter. I wish I could give you references, but this is just stuff I've read in catalogs and on random websites over the years.
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Apr 2, 2015 15:04
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Tsinava posted:I'm about to get some shiitake spore pegs and oak logs and start growing mushrooms from the logs. My friend just sent me something about growing shitake in logs like 2 weeks ago. There's a whole playlist. I'm not really interested in mushrooms, but I watched them all sort of half-heartedly, but it seemed pretty informative. Here it is
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Apr 2, 2015 17:37
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Tsinava posted:Can someone also describe how fungi colonize logs? I know you have to soak them and then let them dry but i would like to know how that works exactly. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypha http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycelium Those pages explain it better than I could. Remember that mushrooms are just the reproductive part of the fungi, the main body is much larger and much harder to see or at least distinguish with the naked eye. my kinda ape fucked around with this message at 17:52 on Apr 2, 2015 |
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Apr 2, 2015 17:43
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So after doing a little bit of homework it seems that fertilizing mushroom logs is a viable method only it requires a bit of mindfulness and timing. Apparently mineral solutions and compost tea have been used to fertilize shiitake and oyster logs but if you're using a live fertilizer like compost tea, you have to wait until the logs are essentially fully colonized to do it or else the spores in the compost tea will take. Apparently shiitake aren't as competitive as oyster mushrooms so it depends on the species too. I'm about to get all the materials together and start it though and find out for myself.
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Apr 3, 2015 06:34
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tree question: I planted a bare root cherry about two months ago (zone 10a). it started putting out little leaves very quickly, but in the last ~5 weeks, it hasn't put any new ones out, and some have died. I have been doing the thumbnail scratch test on it fairly consistently because I'm worried about it, and today one of the branches was brown below some of the withered leaves. I underestimated the amount of shade it would get when my neighbor's tree leafed out, and right now it's only getting sun from about 12 pm to 5 pm. should I move it? what can I do to save it? 
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Apr 4, 2015 03:37
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 Grow my pretties grow.
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Apr 4, 2015 19:15
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Got my garden tilled, weed block down and cold weather crops put in. Yay! Onions are planted, as well as radish, lettuce, and scallions. Let the growing season begin! Very glad i finally broke down and purchased my own rototiller.
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Apr 4, 2015 22:22
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Slightly off topic, but I just put in my first fruit tree: I've been cutting things down since I bought this property several years ago and that made me sad, but the pear, apple and cherry trees were old, diseased and unmaintained for a long time so they had to go. This is a Newtown Pippin that I picked up potted. It got planted, aggressively pruned for an open center, watered, temporary staked, and protected from bunnies and deer. If it does well I'll probably add 3 or 4 more mid to late season varieties to keep it company (it's a self pollinator, but I'm sure it will do better with more trees in close proximity). I used to be a landscaper, so I'm familiar with planting and maintaining ornamentals, but I've never dealt with fruit tree saplings before or pruning for yield so I spent a bunch of time hitting up relevant ag school web sites for information first.
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Apr 4, 2015 22:46
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IT BEGINS Lettuce and spinach mixed bed. Alos HAIL  Radish  Still no sign of carrots, but I think I saw some onion.
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Apr 5, 2015 03:06
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I planted a little balcony garden and now there are a million flies on my balcony. I think it's my smelly compost potting soil the garden center told me to get. How do I get rid of them or at least greatly reduce their numbers?
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Apr 8, 2015 22:13
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PokeJoe posted:I planted a little balcony garden and now there are a million flies on my balcony. I think it's my smelly compost potting soil the garden center told me to get. How do I get rid of them or at least greatly reduce their numbers? Sounds like fungus gnats. They love overly moist soil so let the pots dry out more before watering them again. You could try a beer or vinegar trap to cull some of them. Or read about all the wonderful pesticide options here: http://www.ext.colostate.edu/pubs/insect/05584.html
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Apr 8, 2015 22:46
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Would diatomaceous earth help any with tons of gnats like that? Now and then I do a lovely job of balancing the wet and dry in my compost and the other day was thinking maybe I could just blast DE in and on the compost bin. I don't ask so much for me, because I can just add more dries and be fine after a few days.... but if it could help PokeJoe there it'd be real easy to just buy a 2lb bag or so and dust his plants a bit after he waters them.
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Apr 9, 2015 02:43
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Put some old aquarium lights to use to start our garden from seed this year, sacrificed along with my dining table for a good cause. Built a simple housing unit for the lights  Washers to secure the lights when it comes time to raise them.  Yesterday first sprout, squash:  Today's status:  So much progress good job little guys! Several tomato plants joined the squash today as well:  Cute little basil sprouts: 
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Apr 9, 2015 03:30
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Awesome rig--the risers look great! Someday, I too shall have a grow op in my house... In the meantime, this is our first spring in our new place with a great garden, so far I've got peas coming up, a lettuce bed, some radishes, carrots, potatoes and some volunteer strawberries that I transplanted. I've had little planters on patios before, but never a whole garden to play around with... Gardening is super addictive! Also, I found mystery! grows in bunches, smells like garlic, but last fall (when we moved in) they didn't get taller than a foot or have the blooms like garlic does... Is there a way to positively ID it? Can I just dig it up and eat it like spring onions/green garlic or are there Secret Poison Alliums that might kill me?
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Apr 9, 2015 03:44
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Garlic chives maybe?
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Apr 9, 2015 03:53
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Micomicona posted:Awesome rig--the risers look great! Someday, I too shall have a grow op in my house... Definitely sounds like chives. They should be hollow. Pictures would confirm the ID. They're usually just snipped off near ground level to harvest. They're perennials that will self-seed too. Every few years the clusters can be dug up and divided. I've never heard of or seen anything that resembles them, poisonous or not.
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Apr 9, 2015 05:12
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Apr 9, 2015 05:14
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Cpt.Wacky posted:Sounds like fungus gnats. They love overly moist soil so let the pots dry out more before watering them again. You could try a beer or vinegar trap to cull some of them. Or read about all the wonderful pesticide options here: http://www.ext.colostate.edu/pubs/insect/05584.html I made a little bottle trap for em and it didn't work. I also picked up a bag trap at the hardware store but no luck so far. Perhaps i'll try out some pesticides if it doesn't work well enough.
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Apr 9, 2015 05:21
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Anyone tried growing jalepenos indoors in winter? I like to have them around for cooking (not to mention having a little plant buddy on my desk), and the supermarket doesn't always have them, plus they're pretty pricey. I live in Tasmania and we're heading into fall/winter, so I don't think they'd do too hot outdoors. OTOH, Aussies kvetch about the cold but it's really about the equivalent of northern Florida/souther Georgia, maybe even a bit warmer (even in winter, it really only snows up in the highlands), so maybe they'd do OK on a window?
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Apr 9, 2015 09:55
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Pompous Rhombus posted:Anyone tried growing jalepenos indoors in winter? I like to have them around for cooking (not to mention having a little plant buddy on my desk), and the supermarket doesn't always have them, plus they're pretty pricey. I live in Tasmania and we're heading into fall/winter, so I don't think they'd do too hot outdoors. OTOH, Aussies kvetch about the cold but it's really about the equivalent of northern Florida/souther Georgia, maybe even a bit warmer (even in winter, it really only snows up in the highlands), so maybe they'd do OK on a window? How cold does it get? Freezing will kill them, but temperatures around 4-5C (40F) they are fine, though they get kinda grumpy and stop producing around that temperature. Otherwise a sunny window should be ok, although if you can get a greenhouse or enclosed sun porch that would be a lot better. I find they need LOTS of sun to produce abundantly. Otherwise I'd just go for if it you can get a seed packet. They are not rare at all and pretty easy to grow from seed. I just let mine die every year and then use the seeds from that year to grown the next generation every spring. The extra peppers I sun dry on a window or warm spot and use them in cooking during the winter for spice.
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Apr 9, 2015 13:27
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Nice article on building raised beds: http://www.nwedible.com/lawn-to-garden-in-one-weekend/
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Apr 9, 2015 16:54
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Only one of my many many Okra seeds sprouted so far in like 6 different cells of a 64 cell seed starter tray with peat pucks. Burpee brand Clemson Spineless, nothing fancy. But that one sprout is quite robust and already fast growing. I guess this is ok considering how huge they can get. Still weird.
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Apr 9, 2015 20:55
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What does everyone think of growing cucumbers on a lattice? I'm going to build one and I'm debating if I should use the 'upside down V' version of the straight up version. I tried tying up a couple to stakes last year as an experiment and that didn't go that well.Cpt.Wacky posted:Nice article on building raised beds: http://www.nwedible.com/lawn-to-garden-in-one-weekend/ Very good info in there. ashez2ashes fucked around with this message at 00:43 on Apr 10, 2015 |
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Apr 10, 2015 00:21
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No, I don't think they're chives--they're not hollow, they bigger and denser. I'd thought they were garlic, but they don't have bulbs. They look more like narrow scallions growing in a bunch, but smell more like garlic. They may be ornamental, they look intentionally planted. Mysterious!
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Apr 10, 2015 00:46
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