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I threw out a bunch of plants I had no place for, and were getting a little long in the tooth anyways. It was a bunch of pitiful peppers and leggy tomatoes, along with a spindly tomatillos. I planted some other stuff this week, rather than toss it - 3 Serrano peppers, 2 'Lightning Mix' Habaneros, and one last black cherry tomato. Last weekend I planted a bed of Sunflowers of various types, and day before yesterday I pulled up some of my lettuce that bolted and planted New Zealand Spinach. I got tomatoes ripening all over the place, 20 stupice and a couple handfulls of juliets are turning orange and are going to be ripe soon. My wife snacks on the juliets while she's in the garden so who knows how many I'll actually harvest. We have some bush beans producing too. The corn is approaching 5 feet and looks like it will start putting out ears soon. Cucumbers are flowering, and the tomatoes are still going too. One volunteer sunflower is flowering too, I will have to take a pic when it's fully open. I've added vertical bamboo poles to my bean trellis that was made out of a broken futon frame. The yardlong beans really like winding around a pole as opposed to weaving between the horizontal slats. They've gone from not vining at all to halfway up the thing in two weeks!
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May 17, 2013 00:59
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coyo7e posted:I've got 3 or 4 tomato plants, russian kale (supposed to be heat resistant and it's gonna be a hot summer I can tell,) red leaf lettuce, brussel sprouts (my roommate says they smell like poo poo while growing, which I wasn't aware of,) lemon cukes, thai basil, scarlet runner beans, uhh... Rosemary. A bunch of seeds from last year's packets. I am gonna plant them tonight or tomorrow. And not too pricey, either. One day...
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May 17, 2013 01:20
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cowofwar posted:We have a pretty big raised back deck and if I was to replace it or build a deck in the future I would sink a giant cistern underneath since it's useless space anyways. Hook it up to the gutters and use it for the gardens in the summer. I saw an episode of This Old House or some similar show where they installed a huge bladder under someone's deck for just such a purpose. It looked pretty cool, but it wasn't a trivial installation.
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May 17, 2013 04:46
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Gaia's Garden has a nice chapter on water. It's been a while since I read it but I do remember the general advice that the best place to store water is in your soil. There were some other ideas like a series of ponds to filter greywater, swales and keylines. I'd be a little cautious about using rain gutter water though. With composite roofs you may have chemicals leaching out that you don't want on your veggies. With any kind of roof you may have dead animals in the gutters and certainly plenty of bird poop. Fine for fruit trees and other stuff where it isn't in direct contact with the part you eat. I made a little more progress on the hop planting by breaking up the clods and raking the area out:  I still need to work in fertilizer, lime and compost before planting. After going back and forth with the city over the last month it looks like my best option for a trellis is the flag pole/teepee model. Connecting two poles together with wire would form a structure according to them and require a permit if it's over 6 feet tall. But flag poles can be pretty drat tall without a permit.
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May 17, 2013 07:02
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AxeBreaker posted:I threw out a bunch of plants I had no place for, and were getting a little long in the tooth anyways. It was a bunch of pitiful peppers and leggy tomatoes, along with a spindly tomatillos. This is my first time growing tomatillo plants and so far I am very impressed. I thought that they would do poorly this North, what with the short growing season and all the being indoors, but they are kicking my tomatoes rear end. Tomatillo:  Twerpy little, tomato plant 
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May 17, 2013 13:00
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I just moved into a new house and the builders put that cloth stuff down with wood chip mulch all around the edge of the yard a couple feet out from the fence. I want to put in some low flowers/bushes along the fence (maybe some sunflowers and blackberries, too) but I don't know what to do with the cloth/mulch. Should I just remove it? Or remove the cloth but leave the mulch? The soil underneath is really sandy (I'm in Denver). I planted a couple tea roses today and just cut a hole in the cloth and pushed the mulch back up around it but I don't know if that's the right thing to do. I'm trying to grow some tomatoes, too but I'd like to see if the soil kills hardier things before I bother so I've got those in a pot. Someday I want to do a more involved veggie/herb garden, but it's probably not going to happen this year.
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May 19, 2013 05:40
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I dunno about the temps where you live but my experience with my current square meter garden is that tomatoes overgrow very easily. I had allocated 3+ seeds to every square along the edge of the box thinking I would get 2 or 3 duds. I ended up with about 4 plants per square and some have overgrown and withered their neighbors. If you are concerned about the soil being too harsh for the seeds, you might try starting them inside in an egg carton. I have a question about tomato plants. I see that some of you have fastened them to a cage-like structure. Is this mandatory? I used loosely tied fishing wire to fasten the plants to tight lines that run in the sides because the wind in the rooftop where the garden is located is too strong. Do tomato plants need a support to fasten themselves into?
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May 19, 2013 06:26
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Rocket Wizard posted:I just moved into a new house and the builders put that cloth stuff down with wood chip mulch all around the edge of the yard a couple feet out from the fence. I want to put in some low flowers/bushes along the fence (maybe some sunflowers and blackberries, too) but I don't know what to do with the cloth/mulch. Should I just remove it? Or remove the cloth but leave the mulch? The soil underneath is really sandy (I'm in Denver). I planted a couple tea roses today and just cut a hole in the cloth and pushed the mulch back up around it but I don't know if that's the right thing to do. If it were me I would remove the cloth (sometimes called landscape fabric) and keep the chips, maybe replacing the cloth with cardboard if you're concerned about weeds growing up. Chips are an excellent mulch and will break down slowly to eventually improve your soil. Sandy soil is going to drain faster and need to be watered more often, and it won't hold on to nutrients as well as something with more clay. Cutting a hole in the fabric is fine too. Eventually things are going to grow into the fabric from above and below and make it much more difficult to remove though. Also, try to keep the mulch from directly touching the plant, say 2-4 inches away from the base of the plant. TerryLennox posted:I have a question about tomato plants. I see that some of you have fastened them to a cage-like structure. Is this mandatory? I used loosely tied fishing wire to fasten the plants to tight lines that run in the sides because the wind in the rooftop where the garden is located is too strong. Do tomato plants need a support to fasten themselves into? Tomatoes will grow just about any way you can think of. Lots of people use cages because that's what they see everyone else doing, and the cages are advertised as tomato cages. Most people stop doing it after they realize the cages are usually not big enough or sturdy enough. Commercial greenhouses will usually train the vines up strings attached to the roof. In my garden I train them up bamboo poles and attached them with figure-8s of twine every foot or so. There are tons of other methods too. Tomatoes do benefit from some wind, both to reduce the chance of disease and the actual bending of the plant stems encourage them to grow thicker and stronger. In your case on a rooftop it could be too much wind and and securing them is probably a good idea. Just keep in mind they are going to get heavier when the fruit sets and they'll catch more wind as the grow more leaves so make sure everything is secure.
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May 19, 2013 07:45
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 I'm so far behind this year. 
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May 19, 2013 14:33
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Desmond posted:Does anyone have some good ideas for how to build a simple drip irrigation? Our summers can be pretty dry, though we have tons of rain in the other seasons. Ours is simple enough. Our main irrigation "main" line runs past our raised beds. I installed a hose faucet from it at that location. We attach a pressure regulator at that point and a battery operated timer, connected to the drip system itself. The drip system is basically 1/2" tube from which each plant has a separate GPH pressed into it, connected to a 1/4" tube to a lasso of 1/4" dripline. Works very well, but... ...the mistake we made last year was when we had the timer pumping water. We were pretty dumb and had it running in the evenings, when the water in the tubes must have been hot as hell. Black tubes full of water sitting in the Utah sun for hours will do that. This year I'll be running the tubing under mulch and running the system in the early mornings. Fog Tripper fucked around with this message at 16:27 on May 19, 2013 |
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May 19, 2013 16:18
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Well it finally got hot enough for my lettuce I begin to bolt. We ate so many salads it has been glorious. I made the final harvest today and will till the ground tomorrow. I ordered some purple tomatillos, painted corn, new Zealand spinach and jalapeño seeds. Time for the summer planting, The rest of my garden is going great. Tomatoes are setting, Swiss chard is exploding, melons and squash going nuts and the beans finally woke up and started climbing, my okra is beginning to shoot up, all the onions are popping out, but my herbs are still being shy. Hopefully they pick it up.
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May 19, 2013 19:11
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Pardon the bad lighting, and lovely cell phone camera, but here are some pics of my garden thus far. Pictures link to full size. Yay, corn starting!    Sunflowers  Israeli cukes, we harvested one at about 5" and it was pretty good.  Armenian cukes, the ones my wife started as transplants dies, so these started later from seed.  Jalepenos.   My Yardlong beans have finally taken off, aided by more vertical poles I added to the structure.  Other side.  Corner shot   Watermelons (Bush Sugar Baby)  Stupice being weight down by tomatoes.I'm getting a handful or two every couple of days now between these and the Juliets.  Harvested this today- it was full of ants and aphids. I washed em off, but it's getting chilled and washed again before we eat it.  Bad blurry shots of as much of the garden as I could get.  
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May 20, 2013 06:23
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This is my first year growing a garden and so far it's been a smashing success! I have several spinach plants growing and have been harvesting leaves off them for the past week. One of them didn't produce many leaves, but instead went straight to making seeds. I'd like to hang onto these seeds for next year (hey, more free spinach!), when should I harvest the seeds? And now I'm going to maybe break the rules and ask a question about fruit. Three weeks ago I bought what I thought was going to be 2 strawberry plants, but it turned out to be closer to 30 strawberry plants once I pulled them out of their planters. When I planted them they looked like little more than sticks with about 6 inches of root structure. Now there are 3-5 clusters of leaves on each plant and the stems are all green/red depending on the variety (I bought early summer and late-mid summer varieties), can I allow myself to get excited for strawberries this summer or should I dampen my expectations until next summer? I live in Lancaster, PA for what that's worth.
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May 20, 2013 14:49
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Wildtortilla posted:This is my first year growing a garden and so far it's been a smashing success! I have several spinach plants growing and have been harvesting leaves off them for the past week. One of them didn't produce many leaves, but instead went straight to making seeds. I'd like to hang onto these seeds for next year (hey, more free spinach!), when should I harvest the seeds? I don't know about spinach seeds in particular, but wouldn't it be better to let one of your slow-bolting plants go to seed to collect? If you take the seeds from the one that bolted early, I think you're selecting for early bolting in subsequent generations.
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May 20, 2013 15:26
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Peristalsis posted:I don't know about spinach seeds in particular, but wouldn't it be better to let one of your slow-bolting plants go to seed to collect? If you take the seeds from the one that bolted early, I think you're selecting for early bolting in subsequent generations. This is an excellent point and one that I can't believe I didn't consider. Thank you!
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May 20, 2013 15:34
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Had company this weekend and got to show off my garden beds a little bit, and then as soon as they left I put everything into the ground (It's been pouring on and off for the last week,) finally!  Indigo rose tomato, Brandywine tomato, russian kale (supposed to be heat-resistant, and I expect it to be a dry, hot summer - I'm skipping spinach, most of the kole/broccoli crops, and snow peas entirely, for now), lemon cukes, patty pan squash, "red fire" leaf lettuce, royal burgundy bush beans, thai basil, brussel sprouts, scarlet runner beans. My family is probably going to have another huge green bean crop this year (my parents are more of the roundup+fertilizer gardening school,) so I haven't bothered too much with beans, although I am planning on doing a lot of canning and preserving this year, beginning with pickling a crate of asparagus from the grower's market, soon. I've still got about 30 sq feet of unused space in my beds, I'm planning on putting in a lot more carrots this year - they were the gift that kept giving all the way through January/February from last year, coming in second to the kale for consistent long-term productivity. I have one more prime spot for a tomato as well, I'd like to get one of the fabled mortgage lifters. My roommate has a lot of  gardening experience and he is planning on growing some tomatoes and random stuff in 5 gallon pots/buckets this year, so I'm looking forward to a little bit of friendly competition, as he's got the advantage of cherry-picking sunny spots around the yard, while one of my beds is partially overhung by a medium sized deciduous tree (some kind of green smallish-leafed maple, iirc) which I'm planning on experimenting with this year, as cover for my partial-sun crops which will want to bolt in the summer sun, like the lettuce. I expect to have either cut away a lot of the branches or simply remove the tree by next spring, in all likelihood.AxeBreaker posted:Harvested this today- it was full of ants and aphids. I washed em off, but it's getting chilled and washed again before we eat it. 
coyo7e fucked around with this message at 17:11 on May 20, 2013 |
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May 20, 2013 17:07
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Welp, the tomatoes got a blast... of frost. poo poo. They might come back, but I'm not holding my breath. Good thing I didn't put out the peppers, they wouldn't have made it.
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May 20, 2013 17:12
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Anyone had any success grown sweet corn in containers? I'm doing a bit of a mini vegetable garden and I have a few large-ish pots left over and I am thinking about giving it a go. I'm not expecting miracles. One ear would be an interesting experiment.
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May 20, 2013 23:14
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Martytoof posted:Anyone had any success grown sweet corn in containers? I'm doing a bit of a mini vegetable garden and I have a few large-ish pots left over and I am thinking about giving it a go. I'm not expecting miracles. One ear would be an interesting experiment. I haven't tried personally but it's worth a short. Corn root systems aren't very deep but they are heavy feeders so you'd need some liquid fertilizer. Pollination could be a problem since they are usually planted in a block of 4x4 and pollinated by wind. The pots may also be at risk of blowing over in the wind when the corn stalks get 6-7 ft high.
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May 20, 2013 23:41
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Rocket Wizard posted:I just moved into a new house and the builders put that cloth stuff down with wood chip mulch all around the edge of the yard a couple feet out from the fence. I want to put in some low flowers/bushes along the fence (maybe some sunflowers and blackberries, too) but I don't know what to do with the cloth/mulch. Should I just remove it? Or remove the cloth but leave the mulch? The soil underneath is really sandy (I'm in Denver). I planted a couple tea roses today and just cut a hole in the cloth and pushed the mulch back up around it but I don't know if that's the right thing to do. At least the builders left you with bare soil. I've been watching house construction proceed in my neighbourhood in Vancouver, and it seems to consist of sowing foundation gravel in every square inch of the property, liberally sprinkling with assorted other builders' rubble, driving over it all with a caterpillar-tracked digging machine so that it has the consistency of concrete, then covering it over with a foot or less of topsoil and pre-grown turf.  Anyway, in your case, what I would do if all you have is pretty sandy desert soil, is order in a small truckload of compost (or manure), and work this into the parts of the garden where you want to grow vegetables/blueberries/flowers. If you want to get fancy, you can get your soil tested, and look into more sophisticated amendments, but adding a bunch of organic matter is almost always a good thing. TerryLennox posted:I dunno about the temps where you live but my experience with my current square meter garden is that tomatoes overgrow very easily. I had allocated 3+ seeds to every square along the edge of the box thinking I would get 2 or 3 duds. I ended up with about 4 plants per square and some have overgrown and withered their neighbors. If you tomatoes are actually choking each other, you should definitely have thinned them out, and from the sounds of it you may still need to do so. How big are your squares? Are they some rough equivalent of one foot (like 30x30cm)? The absolute smallest space a tomato can take up is one square foot (30cmx30cm), and even then it has to be an indeterminate (vining) variety, and you have to train it straight up on a stake (by carefully pruning off all but the main vine, and attaching it to the stake as it grows). This is what I am doing this year, but I still am not putting the tomatoes within 1m of each other, as they would shade each other out. I'm using the squares in between for smaller, shade-tolerant crops like spinach and lettuce. If your garden is literally one square metre, I would guess you could get away with at most one plant in each corner. If you didn't prune as much or used a cage, you could easily fill the whole bed with just a single plant in the middle.
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May 21, 2013 17:11
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Martytoof posted:Anyone had any success grown sweet corn in containers? I'm doing a bit of a mini vegetable garden and I have a few large-ish pots left over and I am thinking about giving it a go. I'm not expecting miracles. One ear would be an interesting experiment. Burpee was advertising a variety "On Deck" hybrid, that can be grown in a 26" container with 9 stalks. Also, one of my gardening books mentioned corn in containers, but suggested using multiple as one wasn't enough. The same book suggested a 10' by 10' area as the minimum for corn, when everyone else suggests 4' by 4'. I think 4-6 18 gallon containers from Walmart could work, and those are easy to set up drip systems in. You might be able to get away with fewer if you use bags to gather and distribute the pollen to the ears.
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May 21, 2013 19:57
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If you're OK growing popcorn rather than sweetcorn, you could try strawberry popcorn. They grow to only 4 feet, so should work much better than a full sized variety. But if you're just looking to fill a few large pots, how about squash, peppers or tomatoes?
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May 21, 2013 23:35
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Lead out in cuffs posted:At least the builders left you with bare soil. I've been watching house construction proceed in my neighbourhood in Vancouver, and it seems to consist of sowing foundation gravel in every square inch of the property, liberally sprinkling with assorted other builders' rubble, driving over it all with a caterpillar-tracked digging machine so that it has the consistency of concrete, then covering it over with a foot or less of topsoil and pre-grown turf. Completely true. I'm planning the pruning as soon as I figure out which plants go. Ah well, plant and learn Terry, plant and learn.
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May 21, 2013 23:44
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I have some cactus cuttings I want to plant, but I have no sand to make cactus soil. Can I make something suitable with just potting soil and perlite? I also have some activated charcoal if that helps in any way.
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May 22, 2013 00:55
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Zratha posted:I have some cactus cuttings I want to plant, but I have no sand to make cactus soil. Can I make something suitable with just potting soil and perlite? I also have some activated charcoal if that helps in any way. You might want to bounce over to this thread: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3543738 It's a general plants thread, but there is a lot of cactus/succulent talk so far.
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May 22, 2013 16:32
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Awesome, thanks! I will post it there. Edit: Didn't even need to post, got my answer in the thread. 
Zratha fucked around with this message at 16:46 on May 22, 2013 |
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May 22, 2013 16:42
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 I finally had time and a windless evening to put the plastic up on my tunnel, right before a hard rain. You can see garlic in the opening and there a 6 tomato plants inside taking up about half the space. The rest is for peppers and eggplant when the weather warms up. Also, one of my seven monstrous artichoke plants in the foreground. I harvested the 2nd and 3rd artichokes last night off the one plant that started producing really early and I can count at least 30 more forming on the other plants.
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May 22, 2013 18:10
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I walked outside this morning to let the dogs back in and found one of them digging a giant hole right in the middle of my eggplants. UGH! Luckily no plants were harmed but my dog still got a good scolding. I guess I'll have to re-think the "fence" that I have around my raised beds. Anyways, can anyone tell me what is going on with my pepper plants in this picture? They did not look like this yesterday. 2 of my 6 plants look this way while the other 4 look great. We have had some pretty crazy storms and heavy rain the past couple days. 
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May 23, 2013 15:04
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We planted cucumbers a month or two ago and they died (san jose, CA, and in pots outside). We had some success with them last year. So, my wife went to the supply store, dumped the old soil, got some new ones and potted them a couple of weeks ago... and they just died. We're watering them enough but we still haven't got around to buying ... uhm, fertelizer or whatever. Plant growing stuff? We're getting some this weekend, what is recommended?
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May 23, 2013 18:07
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redreader posted:We planted cucumbers a month or two ago and they died (san jose, CA, and in pots outside). We had some success with them last year. So, my wife went to the supply store, dumped the old soil, got some new ones and potted them a couple of weeks ago... and they just died. We're watering them enough but we still haven't got around to buying ... uhm, fertelizer or whatever. Plant growing stuff? We're getting some this weekend, what is recommended?
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May 23, 2013 18:53
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redreader posted:We planted cucumbers a month or two ago and they died (san jose, CA, and in pots outside). We had some success with them last year. So, my wife went to the supply store, dumped the old soil, got some new ones and potted them a couple of weeks ago... and they just died. We're watering them enough but we still haven't got around to buying ... uhm, fertelizer or whatever. Plant growing stuff? We're getting some this weekend, what is recommended? You will probably not get good cukes out of a pot, because they like to send out a deep taproot and suck up a lot of water. So unless your pot is like 5 feet deep they're not going to grow very well. I'm guessing they die after the taproot gets trapped by the bottom of the pot. I guess if you're determined, probably the best way would be to keep them in a pot with a bunch of holes in the bottom and put them in a tray of water. You might be able to fool the taproot that way. I've started seedlings before and had taproots trailing all over the place by the time it comes to plant.
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May 23, 2013 19:34
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cowofwar posted:You should start them in a raised mound just like other squash. They don't like it wet. Ah crap, I planted my zucchini in the ground. This is going to be a slaughter because I planted like four giant tubs. Wonder if it's too late to dig in and pull out the seeds before they die.
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May 23, 2013 19:37
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Maris Stella posted:Anyways, can anyone tell me what is going on with my pepper plants in this picture? They did not look like this yesterday. 2 of my 6 plants look this way while the other 4 look great. We have had some pretty crazy storms and heavy rain the past couple days. It looks like hail damage bruised the leaves. Is that what you were talking about?
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May 23, 2013 19:37
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medchem posted:It looks like hail damage bruised the leaves. Is that what you were talking about? Yea pretty much. I figured that's whats wrong but I just thought it was curious that the other plants didn't get the same damage. O well, I'm not complaining. thanks!
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May 23, 2013 20:09
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redreader posted:We planted cucumbers a month or two ago and they died Because in that case I'm hosed for cucumbers in a pot as well. Oh well. More space for the crazy amounts of cherry tomato and bell pepper starters I have left, I guess.
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May 23, 2013 20:32
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Martytoof posted:Ah crap, I planted my zucchini in the ground. This is going to be a slaughter because I planted like four giant tubs. Wonder if it's too late to dig in and pull out the seeds before they die.
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May 23, 2013 20:33
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They're potted in giant tubs with really good drainage
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May 23, 2013 20:41
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I've done zucchini in giant Tupperware tubs before successfully.
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May 24, 2013 01:55
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I went to an interesting talk today on growing potatoes from seed. Not seed potatoes which are really genetic clones, but actual potato seed which are usually called True Potato Seed. Through some genetic magic the seeds will make completely new varieties and don't have the risk to carry on any diseases. You get the seeds from harvesting "potato berries" that are the fruits of potato plants and look like little green cherry tomatoes. TPS doesn't seem to be widely available for sale but I did find this guy in Washington who apparently created the Green Zebra variety of tomato, and appears to have TPS for sale: http://newworldcrops.com/wp/ If the potatoes that grow from a seed are good then you can name a new variety and save some to replant as normal seed potatoes. It sounds like a fun thing to try but I'm not sure where I'd plant them this year. I've already got about 8 common varieties planted this year so I may just see if anyone of them produce fruits this year and try it next year.
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May 24, 2013 06:23
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Can you name them in the same way that people name stars in the sky? Or is there an official fda.gov/nameyournewpotato.htm type thing?
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May 24, 2013 20:44
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