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What type of plants are you interested in growing? This poll is closed. |
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| Perennials! |
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142 | 20.91% |
| Annuals! |
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30 | 4.42% |
| Woody plants! |
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62 | 9.13% |
| Succulent plants! |
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171 | 25.18% |
| Tropical plants! |
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60 | 8.84% |
| Non-vascular plants are the best! |
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31 | 4.57% |
| Screw you, I'd rather eat them! |
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183 | 26.95% |
| Total: | 679 votes | ||
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I want to get some food-bearing plants that are cold hardy for New York City - I have too much stuff already that needs to overwinter inside. Definitely thinking of a honeyberry bush, then maybe a highbush cranberry or a serviceberry. Any other ideas?
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Jul 18, 2020 15:02
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 01:37 |
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cultureulterior posted:Get some illegal blackcurrants. Ooo, I didn't even think of those for some reason. That's going on the list for sure!
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Jul 18, 2020 16:10
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Sprue posted:My big surprise fact this week is that yarrow is an asteraceae (aster family), not an apiaceae (carrot/parsley family). Wtf. Everything about it, even its frilly little leafs remind me of wild carrot. Does anyone else have some unexpected grouping that surprised them, especially a common plant? Maybe not news to anybody here but I grew a bunch of herbs for the first time this year and I realized that cilantro and dill and parsley and anise are all in the same aforementioned apiaceae family, and then mint, basil, rosemary, sage, marjoram, oregano, and thyme are all in the lamiaceae family. I never really thought about how these things were related before I started gardening.
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Jul 18, 2020 17:21
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I post in both threads because I don't really get the difference. I have a container garden and some ornamental houseplants, some inside and some outside. Is the breakdown supposed to be edible/inedible? Inside/outside? I'm in an apartment so there's no yard per se.
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Aug 26, 2020 16:04
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Mecca-Benghazi posted:The bottom ones are a bit limp, the top ones are fuller and keep their shape pretty well, they’re not resting on the edge of the pot. I have an aloe that was like this due to a period of neglect, and I wound up cutting off the droopy bottom leaves and repotting it deeper. It worked well for me but I think mine was farther gone than yours.
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Aug 28, 2020 23:35
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Supposing you were a monster who figured special succulent soil wasn't THAT big a deal (eg, me) - if you repot in a different medium, do you need to try to remove every bit of soil from the roots before transplanting? Or can you leave the root ball in soil if the rest of the pot is succulent medium?
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Aug 29, 2020 15:00
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I just pulled about two gallons of sludge out of my building's gutter. Turns out there was a plastic bottle blocking the downspout so it's probably been accumulating for a while. Is there any reason I shouldn't dry it all out and then add it to my compost? A lot of it is probably potting soil from my plants, which are on that roof, but I can't know how much. I've just shoveled it into some empty pots for the time being.
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Aug 29, 2020 20:04
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RickRogers posted:Any tar on your roof? If not, neither are any other undesirable substances that might have gotten washed out then it's probably fine, probably just leaves, moss and your old soil after all. Hmm, almost all of the roof isn't tar but there's about a yard of tar covered with gravel bits right by the gutter. Does that make it a non-starter?
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Aug 29, 2020 20:24
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Yay, thanks! The compost project is going well. Almost every day now I have to aggressively prune the flowers off two of my big basils and then I add them to the bin, so every time I open the lid now it smells awesome.
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Aug 29, 2020 20:40
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Yay for Facebook plant swap groups. I have an insatiable need for soil and pots, so I posted five of my (many) purple oxalis in a local swap group asking for soil or pots in exchange, and they were all claimed within 45 minutes. Oxalis is so easy to grow and divide that I think I'm going to start deliberately maintaining a larger "crop" of them just for swapping purposes. I will then flood the central Brooklyn plant market to the point where they become worthless as a currency of exchange. This is how many I currently have (including the ones to give away). I split them two weeks ago, there were only 5 or 6 then. 
showbiz_liz fucked around with this message at 19:50 on Aug 31, 2020 |
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Aug 31, 2020 19:46
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Lead out in cuffs posted:A trowel is helpful for getting soil into the new pot around the root ball, but you can also use your hands. And if the pot is plastic and is at all flexible, you can give it a couple good hard squeezes first to help loosen the root ball from the sides of the pot.
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Aug 31, 2020 20:37
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I have an opportunity to take on a major role in rehabbing a butterfly garden in a public park (as in, my friend and I would take over from the one lady who's been doing everything and is looking to hand it off). Currently it's super overgrown and a bit shabby, but more than half of the plants are actually supposed to be there, so it's not a disaster or anything. I am super excited about the possibility but I'm pretty new to gardening in general and have never done something like this before. Any tips, thoughts, horror stories? We're in NYC.
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Sep 8, 2020 22:46
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Oil of Paris posted:Are you trying to stay native or just want to make the pollinators and butterflies happy? I think native is nice but not the priority. Seems like priority one is increasing the milkweed, which is present but being outcompeted by other stuff. I'm going to take photos soon, and my friend is also gonna get a list of the current plants from the current person in charge (who also has some seeds we'll need to inventory). I can only identify some of it by sight. I know there's a big patch of mugwort on one edge that we'll need to fight.
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Sep 9, 2020 15:56
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Wow this is rad. Knew I was asking the right people. I'm probably going back to the park tomorrow, so I'll try to get photos then.
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Sep 10, 2020 18:29
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I'm still sorting through all my photos of the butterfly garden and trying to identify what I can, and I'll definitely post here for advice after. You all have already been super helpful, because the lists of good butterfly garden plants you gave me showed me what to look for. I've already been able to identify a lot of what's there! For now, here's what it apparently looked like in 2014 when it was first planted and what it looks like now:   First priority is definitely going to be clearing more space for milkweed, which is there but has been pushed to the margins by spreading plants like cat mint and four-o-clocks. We have both common milkweed and swamp milkweed present, and there are some saved seeds in a shed somewhere too. Sounds like the best time to plant milkweed seeds is coming pretty soon. I'm also definitely going to aggressively prune back those huge buttonbushes on either side (research says late winter for that). I can't believe they weren't even there six years ago. showbiz_liz fucked around with this message at 17:46 on Sep 17, 2020 |
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Sep 17, 2020 17:31
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D-Pad posted:So my normal oak tree dropped this monster: Honestly doesn't look too far out of the ordinary for me (but I grew up in a very oak-heavy area). Wikipedia says the normal range across various species is .5 to 2.5 inches long, and this seems to be within that range.
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Sep 19, 2020 19:24
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First day of really working in the butterfly garden as opposed to just taking photos and exploring. We decided to start with the bed that's overflowing with four-o-clocks and has a few scattered milkweed plants. The four-o-clocks had spread so much that I didn't even know there were pavers edging the plot. Yanked out about four square feet of those, plus a bunch of violet root clumps that were hiding underneath, and a couple of young trees. Tomorrow we're going back to finish prepping the cleared part of the bed and then plant milkweed seeds (which we have a whole bucket of). And of course this is one fraction of one bed out of many, many beds.
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Sep 21, 2020 19:41
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B33rChiller posted:Hey jade plant people, I have a strange situation. I've been attempting to propagate a hobbit jade, but every one I start from a leaf grows without tubular leaves. They end up growing to form leaves that are smaller than a regular jade, but shaped roughly the same. I have a branch cutting that has taken root, and it seems to be producing the tubular leaves I'm lookong for. This person had the exact same issue. Reading through the thread, it sounds like hobbit jades are a recent and unstable mutation, possibly caused by a bacterium, and what you're seeing is very normal, including the different results from branch and leaf cuttings.
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Sep 23, 2020 17:17
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Snip snip motherfuckers (the blob is my friend's kid) We are making slow but steady progress in the neglected-for-a-year-because-covid butterfly garden - cleared half a bed of four-o-clocks for later milkweed planting, chopped all the young trees, started to uncover and re-mulch the overgrown paths, and pulled a bunch of mugwort (we will probably need to use more drastic measures there though). I'm going tomorrow by myself to see if I can get the milkweed bed totally prepped for planting later this week. I wanted to ask today about the goldenrod though, which you can see in the foreground. It has all collapsed like that and is just splayed all over the place currently. It probably should have been cut back by half in the late spring. My research suggests I can trim it way down in the winter - but how far down? Can I cut it all the way to the ground?
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Oct 5, 2020 18:44
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I'd definitely throw in oxalis triangularis. Purple leaves, pale pink flowers. I have a bunch of it, it's really easy to grow and propagate (not my photo):
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Oct 10, 2020 21:09
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My parents planted birch trees shortly before I was born and by 15-20 years later they absolutely dwarfed the house. This was ok except for the fact that their voracious demand for water led one of them to tap into the sewer line under the front lawn.
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Oct 29, 2020 19:39
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the fart question posted:Hey I’ve got a purple oxalis in an indoor pot that’s done great over the summer, but it’s got a bit big and bushy. Can I just cut that sucker back or will that kill it? Purple oxalis is the first plant I ever kept alive long-term, and I can tell you: I moved into an apartment with terrible lighting, realized my potted oxalis was doing badly, put the dying potted oxalis underneath my bed for a full year, it turned into a pot of literally just dirt, and then once I moved somewhere with light and stuck it in a window and watered it again, it sprang back to life immediately and got bushy and huge. I have since divided it like five times and now I have SO MANY oxalis and they cannot die. Basically, cut it back as much as you want, it will be just fine.
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Nov 8, 2020 03:45
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Appoda posted:Also, is it a bad idea to start an herb garden in december considering they'll be in an unheated room, next to an ice-cold window? Probably should've thought of that before I asked but I suppose I could keep it in my room for the winter months. You can buy a $10 heating pad to put under them that will keep the soil warmer, that should help.
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Nov 30, 2020 09:22
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 01:37 |
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Professor Shark posted:My fiance and I are moving and we would like to take a feature of our current house to our new one: a huge maple tree that we both love. I gathered ~30 seeds from the little helicopters on my lawn, but how can I store these things for the winter so that I can plant them in the Spring/ Summer and have them survive? Maple seeds want to be chilled for a while before they begin sprouting, because in their natural environment that's what happens - the seeds drop in the fall and are programmed to wait until they've gone through winter to sprout, otherwise they'd sprout immediately and then die in the cold. Actually lots of plants require this. If I were you, I'd try planting some of the seeds outdoors in the ground now, and put the others in the fridge following advice you can find by searching "[variety] maple cold stratification." They may tell you to wrap them in moist peat first, or some other method. (If you don't know the exact variety, post pics and someone who isn't me should be able to help!)
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Dec 6, 2020 18:56
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