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I've just planted potatoes by cutting off the eyes from potatoes I bought in the store. They seem to work pretty well. I've had some stuff in the ground for months at this point. It never froze here this winter, so I have a tomato plant that is seriously taking over a raised bed. I have watercress and greens (mustard and gai lan) that are doing well but both the cress is probably going to start dying off in the heat. Strawberries have regrown from plants I had in a raised bed last year, but only three or four plants so I'm not expecting much. Tomatillos have re-seeded themselves, too. Beans (don't remember the variety, but shelling) are kicking rear end and peas are doing well too. Lots of herbs in pots (basil varieties, mint, shiso, chives, garlic chives, rosemary, sage and a few others), nastursium and several varieties of pepper plants that slowed to a crawl during the winter and are now growing like crazy. Just planted okra and cucumber as well as summer savory and a few more pole beans. I'm not going to be feeding my family on this garden, but we'll be saving money on a few things. Honestly can't remember what else I've planted, but I'm forgetting a few things. Also, made the mistake of transplanting some stinging nettle that I foraged into one of my beds, and now I have to wear gloves when I weed. Turns out I don't like stinging nettle all that much anyway, so that was unwise... Edit: I'm in New Orleans.
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Mar 30, 2020 18:35
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Try to keep them sort of dry, though, because in my experience (admittedly in very humid south Louisiana) potatoes can start to rot before they develop eyes. The neat thing is that each "eye" a potato starts can become its own plant. And each plant will produce multiple potatoes. Bear in mind this is only my second year growing potatoes, so your result may differ. Good luck, though, and please update here.
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Mar 31, 2020 05:59
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Kaiser Schnitzel posted:The local paper’s former garden writer who nobody seems to like says that because we get so much rain here, the best way to compost is just throw kitchen scraps on top of your beds and let the worms do the work. The logic is that a compost pile is going to mean really great, well fertilized dirt right under your compost where all the nitrogen has washed out. He’s not entirely wrong and it does work, but it doesn’t make you many friends among your neighbors when all your beds look like trash piles. That's Dan Gill, and he's an rear end in a top hat but he knows what he's talking about most of the time.
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Jun 11, 2020 06:40
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Motronic posted:Honestly, that's one of the few really key skills to successful gardening. And learning to recognize them early on while you can save things. I've been gardening in containers and raised beds for 10 years or so and this is a true thing. I'd add that it's also valuable to learn the phases that beneficial insects go through. Last year I had a bunch of ladybugs in my garden and then started seeing these husks of dried up, dead ladybugs. I was also seeing these weird black and red, elongated bugs crawling around and because I am a fool I decided that the elongated bugs were eating my ladybugs. In fact, they were larval ladybugs, which actually eat more pests than adults. This year I had a really bad aphid infestation on my beans, and I couldn't control them with neem oil. I was about ready to pull them when the ladybugs showed up. A week later I can't find aphids, but the ladybugs are everywhere and have moved on to other plants. My okra is killing it as are two varieties of beans. My tomatoes are no longer producing, but I got gallons of the things starting in March so I'm ok with that. I have a few chile peppers that have been growing for three years now and are still producing so much fruit that I have trouble giving away the various hot sauces I make from them. No luck this year with a lemon cucumber that did really well last year. Fruit will start to form but never get bigger than a golf ball before rotting and falling off. Probably borers, but I'm not so invested in the plants that I'm going to try to perform surgery. My greens are done now; I have a few still in the ground to produce seeds, but in NOLA I can plant more in August for a late fall harvest. Mustard greens, collards and Chinese broccoli all do well in my yard. I get a little damage from snails, but not enough to worry about. One other thing I've learned is that you can definitely build raised beds too high. The first couple I put into my garden were made with cedar fence planks, and I built two beds 3 planks high and another, square bed 4 planks high. These are on a concrete patio and I filled the bottom 2-3 inches with pea gravel before adding a mix of compost, gardening soil, topsoil and probably a few other bags of dirt that were on sale. The dirt was by far the biggest expense, and I'm doing a lot more composting now to avoid that in the future. Unfortunately I'm not set up to buy dirt by the truckload and the neighbors objected when I took a shovel to their yards. In the beds I built four years ago, the soil level has dropped to the point I've had to remove the top planks to allow newly planted seeds to get any light other than a couple of hours at mid-day. Lesson: don't build too high unless you're willing to add dirt/mulch regularly. Also, using 2/2 staves as supports works great for about 7 or 8 years before the supports start to rot and have to be replaced. The next beds I put in are one plank, and I put them in over grass. Basically I dug sections of grass about six to eight inches deep, flipped them so the grass was on the bottom and the dirt on top, then covered with newspaper/cardboard and added a mix of compost, garden soil and topsoil to the very top of the plank before planting seeds. That was in February, I think, and by now the plants in those beds are getting their roots into the soil (so I don't have to water as much) and there's still very little weeding to be done. Next year I'm going to add more dirt and do a better job of mulching, and I have a feeling it will be even better. Question: what the gently caress is eating my loving figs? Last year I could not keep up with the things and this year they're gone before they come close to turning ripe. It can't just be birds, unless the local avian population has heretofore been ignorant about the delicious juicy fruit growing in my backyard. I have seen a few rats scurrying along my fence in the backyard; could it be them? I no longer have a cat, unfortunately, since the feral cat I nursed back to health three years ago finally went to live on a farm last fall. It's early yet, but last week the tree was drat near covered and now there are maybe a half dozen. For reference this tree is about five years old - about 15 feet in circumference and height. edited to correct my insensitivity and ignorance. rojay fucked around with this message at 15:12 on Jul 20, 2020 |
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Jul 19, 2020 16:19
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Harry Potter on Ice posted:I dunno I like the newest one. That looks like a pretty sweet setup, and some very interesting... okra between your corn and tomatoes. I've given up and pulled my cucumbers. They were all getting hammered by borers. I may try again in another part of the garden; they did well in raised beds last year. I'm considering pulling my tomatoes, too. I didn't really prune effectively and while they seem to be growing vigorously, they aren't producing fruit any longer (just a few flowers now and then) and I could use the space. I still have issues pulling plants that are "healthy," but I need to steel myself and put that corner of the garden back into use. Right now my okra is really taking off and the shiso/perilla I planted last year re-seeded itself and is taking over parts of my garden even though I'm pulling it pretty regularly. I have two sorts of beans; one is a variety of blackeye "pea" that survived an aphid infestation after ladybugs showed up en masse. They're doing well, though I should expand my trellis system to let them grow up and away from other plants they're starting to shade. The other is a weird edamame/fava that produces a ton of pods in clusters that need to be shelled after they're removed from the pods. They self-seed every year, and grow so well that I don't really mind the labor. I must have planted them three or four years ago, but I have no memory of what they are.
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Jul 26, 2020 18:55
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lil poopendorfer posted:Dont give up!! Diatomaceous earth powder will shred them--and most other pests--to pieces. I have two pepper plants that were infested with aphids and I just covered the whole plants with the stuff and within 24 hours they went from hundreds to less than 10. Neem oil + soap didnt do poo poo. It's non toxic, cheap and easily available. Wear a mask/respirator when using it though, it'll mess your lungs up with prolonged exposure. I'm finally starting to see some more aphids on my beans now. They were completely killing the plants for a while, then ladybugs arrived and wiped them out. Now I see a few aphids from time to time and a few ladybugs and my beans are starting to take off. My okra plants were getting eaten by massive grasshoppers, but I seem to have scared them off lately and now I am trying to come up with novel ways to use okra because the four plants I have in the ground are not letting up. I have stewed them with tomatoes and onion, cooked them down in a couple of Indian recipes, put them in gumbo, fried them and more recently used an Ethiopian recipe. About to pickle a couple of quarts, too. A chef I work with recommended grilling them, which I've done but hadn't occurred to me this go-round. And on preparing tomatoes, I like to halve them and squeeze the juice through a strainer to get rid of most of the seeds. Then I roast them in a low oven until they start to break down before putting them through a food mill. It ends up being a pretty concentrated sauce, which makes it a bit easier to store in my over-crowded freezer. Sometimes I'll throw a little onion into the roasting pan, but for the most part I prefer to add seasoning on the back end. rojay fucked around with this message at 16:45 on Aug 14, 2020 |
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Aug 14, 2020 16:39
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Kaiser Schnitzel posted:
Sweet. I keep forgetting to search for a foraging thread here. Most I've found online end up being 90% "hey what is this plant/mushroom can I eat it?" and 10% responses like, "yes, once."
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Aug 28, 2020 14:42
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SubG posted:So jealous. Every time I've tried to grow okra they've been demotivationally runtish, probably because the evenings are too cool. Perfect timing for that answer. I have three plants that are 9-10' tall and a couple on their way. So far I have been able to bend the top of the plant to snip the pods, but soon I'll need a stepladder. I hesitate to top them because that's where all the flowers, and thus the pods, are setting. I may top the biggest one to see whether it starts bushing out. But like everybody else down here, I already have too much goddamn okra anyway.
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Sep 4, 2020 16:41
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I am hoping someone can help me figure out what the hell is eating my pole beans - specifically, chewing through the vines, often at the base of a leaf cluster. In the last week, my plants have been drat near 60% defoliated. I first noticed something was eating through the bean pod on one side to get to the beans. I saw a huge (5") grasshopper on a vine and figured that was it, but I thought I chased the little bastard and its two smaller friends off with a combination of hitting them with a stick and spraying them with a mixture of neem oil and sevin. I haven't seen them around anymore, but I also can't find any other pests on my plants, and I've been looking diligently. Google suggests a lot of potential pests, including several varieties of caterpillar/inchworm, but again, I can't find any and I have an army of lizards and ladybugs running around the plants. I guess it's possible some of the ladybugs are actually beetles, but every time I think I've found one, it appears to be a ladybug after all. If I didn't know any better, I'd think whatever is doing it is acting with malice. It just chews through vines and doesn't appear to eat the leaves. I wasn't worried about it at first, because I stupidly let the beans grow over one of my raised beds, and they were totally shading a couple of pepper plants, but now I'm worried I'm going to lose them altogether and they've only started really producing over the last 30 days. This is what the damage looks like. I know there are other problems - some aphids and some leaf miners, but I don't think the issues are connected. https://imgur.com/a/9U4wT9e Halp!
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Oct 11, 2020 16:53
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Johnny Truant posted:The two catgrass plants I bought for this purpose lasted all of 4 days Someone gave us a spray that uses citrus oil to dissuade animals - in this case dogs - from chomping on things they shouldn't. The ingredients are "bitter extracts" 20% iso alcohol and lemon extract. You can probably make it yourself if you put the zest and pith of a lemon in alcohol to soak for a few days. And if you use vodka, let it go a couple of weeks and then add simple syrup, you've got limoncello. 2 birds, 1 stone my friend... Alternatively, I just bought a bottle of lemon extract for $2, and that might work too if you dilute it in water.
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Oct 15, 2020 20:22
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Earth posted:Harvested the sweet potatoes today. Got a frost on Sunday night that killed the vines so we figured it was time. Got four sweet potatoes. One other thing to consider is that some plants do well when grown together, and some don't. I've always read that carrots and tomatoes grow well together, for example. There's a chart here: https://www.farmersalmanac.com/companion-planting-guide-31301 that looks reliable. Like Jhet said, having a sense of how the plants will grow is also a good idea. I put some beans in two adjacent raised beds and the things ended up going haywire and shading out most of the other plants in the beds. I should have done a better job of training the vines and keeping them trimmed, but at least now I am getting a lot of beans despite pest damage. On that note, I have finally discovered what was chewing through my bean vines: rats. I've got a dozen or so insanely hot, dried habanero peppers, and I'm thinking about grinding them and mixing with water to spray on the vines every so often to dissuade them. I guess I should lay out some poison, but there are stray cats around and I am a weak-willed man when it comes to killing animals that I don't intend to eat.
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Nov 5, 2020 16:53
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zaepg posted:I want to do a metal raised bed with some sort of wire mesh on the bottom since my backyard is concrete. Has anyone had luck with this? I built raised beds over concrete out of cedar fence boards and 2"x2" posts. I just stapled landscaping fabric to the bottom and about halfway up the sides so that the dirt wouldn't wash out, and it worked well. I added a couple of inches of pea gravel to them before filling with dirt, which was probably overkill. I've also done it with cinder blocks, and to be honest that's probably what I'll do the next time. The wooden beds last about 5 years before the supports start rotting and boards need to be replaced. Metal sounds like a fine alternative, though. Definitely get more dirt than you think you'll need. Over time organic matter will decay and the level will settle. The first beds I built were three board-widths high, which was a dumb stupid thing to do because that's a poo poo ton of dirt and I ended up having to remove the top board so new plants could get enough light.
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Dec 8, 2020 18:05
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Is anyone interested in curry tree berries?
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Jan 3, 2021 09:07
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Harry Potter on Ice posted:Like the seeds to grow one? Yes! DM me. I am pulling them from my tree as they ripen, as apparently birds enjoy them. I can't promise they'll all be viable, but I have two more trees in my yard that grew from berries I tossed in that general direction...
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Jan 4, 2021 20:27
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Sockser posted:Staple some plastic sheeting inside your beds Con: Drainage. You can use landscape fabric, which will help keep dirt in the bed when you water and will keep weeds down.
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Jan 17, 2021 07:13
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wooger posted:What prevents the water getting between the wood and plastic? I'm with you on plastic. Particularly in zone 9a, I'd think putting plastic on the sides would just hold moisture on the wood. It'd be something like a "WE'RE OPEN FOR LUNCH" sign for termites, depending on the wood used. In terms of why I use landscape fabric, I did it for beds that I put over a concrete patio in my backyard. In addition to the fabric, I added a couple of inches of pea gravel to the bottom so water wouldn't pool. I don't think it was necessary, to be honest, and if I build these sort of beds again I'll just throw in the pieces of broken pot and large tree limbs I collect now and then to add bulk and in the latter case to provide nutrients as they decay. I added worms from the yard to those beds, and when I dig in the ones that I replant now and then, I still find them. They seem fat and happy, but I don't speak worm so they may be morose. I built the beds out cheap 2" x 2" posts and cedar fence boards. On the oldest ones I have (about 4 years) I'm starting to see the 2 x 2 posts rotting at the bottom, but for the most part the cedar boards have been solid. I should have used larger, treated wood for the posts. I also built them too tall, which is problematic because all of the weight of the soil puts more pressure on the bottom posts/boards and it takes a lot of dirt to fill a raised bed that's around 2 feet high. Even with a couple of inches of pea gravel I had to use a combination of potting soil, compost and topsoil to fill them, but that stuff breaks down pretty quickly, leaving the surface of the soil *well* below the lip of the bed. I've added more soil and removed the top board, but when I replace them in a few years I'll do a few things differently if I don't just buy a bunch of cinder blocks instead. The wooden beds look a lot better, but cinder blocks don't rot, and I'm in 9a, too. I've also built the same beds over grass, and for those I cut out the soil in squares under the bed to a depth of around 4 inches and flipped it so the grass was on the bottom, then laid untreated cardboard down before adding my soil mixture. Those beds are also much shorter than the ones I built over concrete.
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Jan 20, 2021 19:30
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SubG posted:I have had the worst fuckin' luck with these guys. Lao green stripes too. Japanese eggplants? No problems, seeds germinate, plants grow well, they end up productive as hell. Thai eggplants? Sprout, grow two or three inches, and then just stay there for six months. I've had bad luck with eggplant generally, as well as zucchini of all things. We rarely have a freeze that lasts more than a few hours where I live. Until the winter storm that hit last weekend, I had a few chile plants growing and a tomato that self-seeded and was already pretty big and producing (a tiny cherry variety). Those are dead, as are a few other plants that I didn't protect, so I'm going to buy some seeds at a local garden shop/nursery soon and get them in the ground. Will definitely plant more chiles, since those do extremely well for me, as well as cucumbers, watercress and a few different greens. I'll wait a bit to plant beans, though I have at least one variety that self seeds and covers about 10 square yards along a fence every year. There's already a small vine growing up the four feet or so that's left of an okra plant that I left in for that purpose. My Chinese broccoli survived in the ground, as did my strawberries - neither of which were protected. I pulled up a weed called "Cleaver" and used it as mulch over the peas that I planted 2 weeks ago and were just starting to come up. I didn't think it would work, but I'll be damned if they're not still (mostly) growing. Another surprise survivor was my curry leaf tree. I'd stripped most of the branches off to freeze the leaves, thinking it wouldn't survive even if I covered it, but so far it's still kicking, and I don't anticipate we'll have another hard freeze this year. I have no idea how you people deal with actual cold weather. I mean, I do, because I've read this thread, but yikes.
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Feb 20, 2021 22:03
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Motronic posted:Glyphosate, 2,4-D and a liberal squirt of dish soap. Go over the ivy a bit with your string trimmer to get it nice and scarred up. Now spray the hell out of it. I may have to do that with creeping fig. I planted it in a large wooden container next to a corner of my decrepit cinder block garage. It did exactly what I wanted, which was to cover the cinder block up. Then it continued to climb over the non-functional "sliding" iron doors, along the other side of the garage and then onto the concrete patio that's between my back door and my decrepit, fig-covered cinder block garage. Now it's onto the small, fairly well shaded backyard that has only been successfully producing grass for the last two years after I had to remove a big ornamental pear tree that died and fell onto my roof. I don't care about grass too much, but I do have a dog and it's the only place he can gambol (and poop) without a leash. That and the space is shaded on one side by the garage and a fig tree and on the other by huge palms my neighbors planted. There's just not all that much I could grow there and still leave some space for the dog. If I can find the time and the resources, I would love to put some sort of barrier up that would make it easy to keep the creeping fig trimmed. The problem with spraying it is that I do like it covering the garage; I just want to stop it from spreading, but the area where it's spreading was, before the recent freeze, also home to some form of taro that we call "elephant ears" here. It would be really difficult to sever the vines that are vacating the garage so that spraying where I don't want it won't kill the whole thing. Alternatively, I could go back in time and not plant the creeping fig. If anyone has advice on either option, please share.
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Feb 28, 2021 22:43
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wooger posted:I remain to be convinced that Hugelcultur isn’t a worthless gimmick. Certainly using freshly cut wood rather than pre-rotted is a bad idea for the nitrogen related reasons noted above. I haven't really done hugelkultur, but I have bulked out raised beds with dead branches and it's worked out - or possibly it's worked out despite the branches? Having said that, the best spot in my garden is the place where a 20 year old flowering pear tree died a few years ago. I attributed that to the gradual rotting of the roots, but maybe it's just a coincidence? I'm working on a plan to replace most of the grass in my small front yard with other plants. I've got lemongrass thriving in the back and it seems to like the climate here. I've got a few seedlings I can plant as well and at some point I'll break down and buy a citrus tree.
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Mar 18, 2021 17:45
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gvibes posted:
Depends on what you used as to how much/quickly, but there will be settling in your beds and filling them to the top is not a bad idea. I've had to add potting soil to my beds several times over the years and in fact I ended up removing the top plank from beds I built too high.
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Mar 22, 2021 16:43
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guri posted:I've gotten it to successfully germinate once and I wish I could remember specifically what I did to make that happen. I've tried various seed packs from Japan in recent years and haven't had success again. That reminds me that I should make my annual attempt again.. Red shiso would outcompete just about anything in my garden except maybe creeping fig. It comes back every year and if I don't pull it, it crowds most stuff out. I also grew a Korean shiso that has light green leaves, but I didn't have as many seeds to start. Turned out to be a good thing because the aroma was really off-putting to me. It's not as prolific as the red stuff, but I still see it popping up in a few places in my yard. All of which is to say that despite its apparent geographic origin in northeast Asia, it grows quite well from seed in hot and humid SE Louisiana.
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Apr 18, 2021 15:31
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Kaiser Schnitzel posted:Weather keeps knocking over my sunflowers Weather has knocked my tomatoes around recently, too. I'm more worried about the pumpkin/zucchini/whatever the gently caress it is that's clearly already beset by some sort of boring insect. I am also concerned that the trellis system I've got set up for the beans is not going to be able to handle the weight and the torsion on the leaves when the wind blows. Alas. Chard posted:eggplant flowers are beautiful You should check out some okra flowers, fellow human.
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Jun 21, 2021 06:23
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Kaiser Schnitzel posted:Probably squash vine borers Almost certainly. The good news is I've mostly gotten over my aversion to pulling plants that just aren't working. Still takes me longer to make the decision then it should, but I'm taking baby steps. On the topic of weed control, I've always read that if you're trying to kill weeds by laying down cardboard or something similar to block light, you'll need to keep it down for much longer than a few days. Having said that, I did just put some cardboard down in a 5' x 5' section of my garden that I weeded pretty thoroughly. It was a section that I'd previously planted with starters I bought from a local nursery. When I planted them, I put landscape fabric down and cut holes for the plants, then mulched on top of the fabric and around the plants. That was three years ago, and the weeds have only just started taking over. So much easier to pull weeds when they can't put deep roots down. Probably going to use that method again shortly, since I still have a good bit of the fabric left. Finally, my efforts to finally grow tomatoes other than the marble-sized cherry tomatoes the seeds for which a friend told me he got from some guys from Costa Rica have apparently failed again. Even the places where I planted Roma, the tomatoes that are growing are putting out the little cherries. They're tasty, but it takes dozens of them to make a pint and that's about the most I ever get at one time. At least they work well in papaya salad. The one plant I'm pretty sure is a Roma was taking off for a while, but it's now starting to yellow and wilt a bit at the growing tips, too.
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Jun 21, 2021 20:59
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Jhet posted:It sounds like your soil is a bit low on nutrients. Try some tomato fertilizer and regular watering. Tomatoes can grow great, but are particular about regularity of water, and really do well when you give them lots of nutrition. You may have to fertilize again in mid-July too if your soil is starting out low. Excellent, thanks! I water them regularly because of the heat, but I don't often fertilize. Paradoxish posted:Vine borers aren't game over for squash if the plant is otherwise okay. Just dig the bastards out and then bury the stem. If you don't have good enough access to fish around in the stem but you have a good idea of where the little guys are, you can just stab the stem in a bunch of places until you're pretty sure they're dead. Zucchini are tough motherfuckers and will almost always be fine. I'll trim out the yellowing/wilting bits and see if it does the trick. Thanks.
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Jun 23, 2021 16:38
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I finally have cucumbers and beans that haven't been consumed by pests. I have hope for the okra sprouts, too. Fortunately we have a really long growing season, so I'll see something from it in a few months, I think. And jesus the figs. Last year was not great. What figs we had were eaten by birds or rats or both. This year they can't keep up. I've pulled a couple of gallons off already and it's still full of ripe and semi-ripe fruit. I should have topped it a few years ago, because it's 15 feet high at this point, and it's in a corner of my back yard, meaning there's some parts of it I can't easily access. I have roasted figs with and without sugar and/or wrapped in prosciutto, stuffed them with goat cheese mousse, fried them in thinly-sliced ham and right now I have a ginger-thyme-lemon jam going. I guess I'll make ice cream and some chutney at some point. And just keep eating them out of hand.
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Jul 9, 2021 00:10
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CancerCakes posted:
You can totally eat the flowers on any cruciferous plant. They're freaking delicious, too; sort of like nasturtiums. And you guys are giving me flashbacks with the vine borer stories. They've killed any sort of cuke/zucchini/pumpkin I've tried to grow for the last two years. I have some cucumbers growing now and so far so good. I've pickled radish and mustard green pods and they're excellent. I always let some of my greens go to seed - fresh mustard seeds are awesome.
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Jul 29, 2021 21:41
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Paradoxish posted:Vine borers aren't too bad if you take a defensive approach. Grow your zucchinis vertically if you can and trim off all the lower leaves, then check the stem for eggs. Keep the whole bottom part of the stem doused in diatomaceous earth and reapply it after it rains. I've been paying closer attention and the plants are in raised beds. I think I'm going to make it at this point.
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Aug 1, 2021 00:39
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Ida f*cked my garden up bad. It also took a couple of windows off the house, but I was sort of looking forward to the beans, okra and cucumbers that were pretty much just getting going. Alas.
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Aug 30, 2021 22:57
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Platystemon posted:drat I never really thought about how many partners I participate in sex with. I don't know what discontinuous vasculature is, but I'm intrigued. I mean, I want to please my plants, if you know what I mean and I think you do.
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Dec 3, 2021 05:41
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My tomatoes are fruiting like crazy. I expect that from the one that produces tiny little marble-sized tomatoes, because it only stopped for a few weeks in the dead of winter, but the "roma" that also survived the winter is going gangbusters too. I've got some mustard greens that I want to let flower and set seed, but then I'll pull those and plant some warm weather stuff. Other than the roma, most of what's in my garden is self-seeding. I have some beans coming up in various places (though I do plant some pole beans, too) and the same is true for the perilla, basil, pumpkin, culantro, curry tree, epazote and a half dozen edible "weeds" that I've managed to transplant from foraging trips - pellitory, Florida bettony, three or four little mustards, dandelions, nettles (mistakes were made) and before long the purslane will be coming in...
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Apr 19, 2022 17:29
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mischief posted:You killed mint more than once? That is honestly impressive. I would either look for different seeds or start really questioning my life decisions. I've grown mint and then I've had mint just die out on me. You want real life questions? You want the truth? I can't grow zucchini.
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May 25, 2022 04:03
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The figs on my tree have started to ripen, but 80% of them have been pecked at by birds. It's like they're loving with me; they just take a couple of pecks at each fig, rendering them useless. I love birds; I feed them and they nest in the palm trees next door but I want my figs this year. The tree is too big to make a net effective, so I guess I'm stuck using things that may scare them off. Anyone have advice on using things other than a fake owl?
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Jun 29, 2022 17:35
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mischief posted:We always had pretty good luck with the old pie plate on fishing line solution at my mother in laws, she's got a bunch of pear trees that were getting just savaged every year. If you sling a few fishing weights in there the rattling will keep deer out pretty well too. Oh man, I have some foil half sheet pans that I bought when I was doing food relief during the early days of the pandemic. They're too big to use for my family, so I've just got them sitting around. I bet I could cut some up into weird shapes that would blow around in the wind. With my luck, though, that would just attract some of the hundreds of crows in my neighborhood. Fortunately, I don't have to worry about deer in my home garden. We do have some property an hour away that gets deer, and someday I hope to revive the garden my grandparents had there, but that's a ways off and by the time it's feasible I'll be getting pretty long in the tooth. Having said that, and assuming it doesn't bother the neighbors, some sort of audible aspect sounds like a good idea. Thanks!
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Jun 29, 2022 18:58
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kafkasgoldfish posted:Holy cow, are you serious? Look at the size of them! I try to find them on my tomatoes before they get that size, but ...
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Jul 19, 2022 14:29
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I see that labeled as "globe" or "spicy globe" sometimes. Edit: a quick search makes it look a lot like Greek basil... rojay fucked around with this message at 23:20 on Jul 30, 2022 |
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Jul 30, 2022 23:16
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SubG posted:Had completely the opposite experience: bought the Malabar on a whim many years ago and it's been entirely self-propagating since then. Usually have to pull up a few because it's an aggressively sprawling/climbing vine, so it likes spreading itself to nearby soil. See also: shiso (red and green) and in my yard, cherry tomatoes, some sort of fava bean hybrid, fennel and lemon grass.
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Aug 7, 2022 17:44
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Two years ago there was a huge grasshopper eating my beans. It was really beautiful and I was like, "well, I have a lot of beans" for a few days but eventually I convinced it to leave by hitting it with a stick. Didn't kill it, but I felt a little bad because I clearly broke one of its legs. This year at least one of the things is back and it has torn my bean plants the gently caress up. It chews indiscriminately, by which I mean sometimes it eats leaves and sometimes it just chews through the vines. In the latter case, that means that whole sections of the plants wither and die. At this point it's managed to kill 60% of the foliage and the truly infuriating thing is that I cannot find the motherfucker and it's been 2 weeks. I have said things out loud in my back yard that I hope my neighbors have not heard, or if they have, that they know I'm talking about a bug and not a person. I try not to use any insecticide because I've had better luck just removing pests by hand or with a hose when they get bad, spraying limited amounts of neem oil, and letting predators get the rest (YEAH LADYBUGS) but I am at wit's end here.
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Sep 15, 2022 19:53
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Shifty Nipples posted:Are unripe habaneros edible/palatable or will it all be for nothing if they don't hurry the hell up and ripen? Oh indeed they are, as others have said they pickle well. They don't have the real fruity aroma that ripe peppers do, but if you're worried about losing them to cold weather or pests, go ahead and pick them. I also had some worm damage on a few of my habaneros, but fortunately whatever was doing it is being eaten by other bugs/lizards. Wish I could say the same for my pole beans. At one point there was so much foliage that it covered a ten square meter area I have set up with posts/crossbeams between two raised beds. Just when they started to flower, something started eating the vines and now they're completely hosed. I literally got a single ripe bean off of them. Still can't find the culprit, but whatever it is is big enough to avoid the common predators but light enough to access the tips of the vines.
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Sep 30, 2022 17:56
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mischief posted:Greens are always nice and relatively painless to grow. You know what's worse? I have actually grown gai lan successfully once. So I know it's possible but every other time it's been a disaster. I can grow collards, mustard greens and turnip (greens, anyway too much clay for much in the way of root vegetables here) but gai lan? Nope. I also can't grow cilantro without having it bolt immediately, but I don't care that much because when it goes to seed you can have the best ground coriander you've ever tasted. Also, I have learned that I can grow culantro which I think is sometimes called Vietnamese cilantro? It actually self-seeds all over my garden now. It's a good bit more pungent than cilantro but if you just use a little less it's a pretty good substitute.
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Oct 1, 2022 00:36
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 17:41 |
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Soul Dentist posted:Welp gonna try drying it anyways. I did see an idea to candy the stalks on the internet so I did that too: They're pretty delicate, so they aren't the best to dry. You can freeze them, though. I let mine flower and then collect the pollen. It's super-fragrant and added as a garnish when you plate a dish it has a pretty significant impact.
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Oct 10, 2022 21:50
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