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Modest garden expansion is finally almost done Picture is poo poo because I have to replace the camera glass on my phone and I've been lazy. Was supposed put up a real fence this year, but that's like 3/4 acre of brush that's in the process of being cleared behind it so it'll probably expand again. We've been experimenting with intensive gardening bullshit. Last year we grew 16 tomato plants in a 4x4 planter more or less successfully. This year we cut it back to 9 in a 4x4 so we could prune less. Also going to attempt to get the zucchinis vertical so they can share one of the smaller planters with a ton of cukes.
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Jun 17, 2020 01:37
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| # ¿ May 19, 2024 11:42 |
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i say swears online posted:can i plant so many beans around my other stuff that they get too much nitrogen and slow down fruiting to focus on leaves? probably not. living legumes don't return a ton of nitrogen to the soil, and afaik it's up for debate if much at all makes it to neighbors. the big benefit with companion planting beans is that they basically don't take any nitrogen away from nearby plants. my cucumbers are basically surrounded on all sides by insane numbers of beans and they're flowerin' and fruitin' like crazy
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Jul 6, 2020 20:34
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Sylink posted:yo these god drat tomatoes need to start turning so I can pick them, the plants are all lying sideways because I didn't really stake them properly. if you're doing big rows like that try using a florida weave, especially if you're single stemming them for stakes already anyway it'll seem like a huge pain in the rear end at first, but it's waaaaaaay easier than managing individual stakes for a fuckton of plants
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Aug 13, 2020 12:57
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welp, a groundhog has circumvented the garden defense to snack on my glorious tomatoes luckily I have plenty of them so I will leave friend groundhog alone for now
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Aug 20, 2020 17:28
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I can't decide if ridiculously high density gardening was a success or a failure. On one hand, we're up to almost 80 lbs. of tomatoes and some plants are still holding on and going strong. On the other hand, my two 4x4 planters (9 tomato plants each) got some kind of fungal disease and it spread through those guys like COVID through a Georgia high school. They've also been unmanageable and out of control for like a month now, but they aren't dead yet. We planted a ton of different varieties this year, so it's kind of fun for the kitchen counter to constantly be filled with mixes like this:  Eggplants and peppers both seemed to take pretty well to high intensity gardening, but these little fuckers are my favorite this year:  I think the plants are finally dying off, but we've been getting about as many cucamelons are in that bowl nearly every day for the past 5 weeks now. It owns.
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Aug 27, 2020 02:46
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Platystemon posted:What do the cucamelons taste like? Citrus-y cucumbers is a pretty good description. The small ones are kind of sweet, larger ones more sour. When they get big they taste like a cucumber dipped in lime juice. They make a really nice snack in the garden but I’m liking them dumped in salads too. “big” is relative though because they only get to be about the size of a grape Paradoxish has issued a correction as of 04:19 on Aug 27, 2020 |
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Aug 27, 2020 04:16
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Organic Lube User posted:My wife wants to turn as much of our backyard into garden as possible. My limiting factor is going to be soil, however. I can make the beds easily enough but to fill them seems like it will get expensive. Are there any hacks to cheap but good soil? There's a lot that goes into good soil and it's hard to kickstart raised beds in one season without really breaking the bank. The problem with cheap fill is that it's going to be effectively "dead" soil, so you're going to need to amend it a ton and for raised beds you may have drainage issues if the texture isn't right. If you're starting now (like right now in the fall), then a good mix of fill and manure might be okay. I'd amend the beds with compost in the spring and then use a good organic fertilizer throughout the season. Good soil really needs to be grown, though. So starting cheap is fine if you're okay with potentially having less-than-stellar results in your first season. If you keep amending with compost and take care of your beds (cover crop in winter and keep them mulched in spring/summer) then you can eventually turn subpar soil into a great growing medium. Also, square foot gardening is fine, but you need to take some things with a grain of salt. You can grow a tomato plant in one square foot, but you need to single stem it and that takes a lot of pruning. I think the guidance for zucchini is like two squares and that's just madness. Making square foot gardening work typically requires really good soil and going aggressively vertical.
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Aug 27, 2020 12:31
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it's generally a bad idea to use dog or cat poop directly as fertilizer, and you shouldn't really use cat poop at all if you're going to use dog poop then compost it, but make sure you're doing hot composting and the pile actually gets hot otherwise it's definitely going to be in the realm of not entirely safe (although you probably won't get sick) using an area where a dog pooped once upon a time is fine, though, as long as it's not an active doggy toilet
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Aug 29, 2020 02:50
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lol it's going to be above 80 for almost a week straight in the middle of loving may rip all my lettuce
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May 16, 2021 04:29
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I honestly can't imagine living in a place where I need to actively water a lawn or risk getting yelled at by an HOA. What an utterly hosed up waste of resources.
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Jul 3, 2021 01:58
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Adding eggshells to the soil for calcium is a myth unless you're playing a really long game. Eggs take a long time to break down, to the point where I usually have to sift eggshells out of my finished compost and add them back in for the next batch. If you're doing this because of blossom end rot then it's more likely that you've got either a moisture or a nutrient issue. In most cases, the problem isn't that there's not enough calcium in the soil, it's that the roots can't access it. Bone meal is definitely the better way to go if you really do have a calcium issue, though.
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Jul 4, 2021 02:06
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honestly I'm always pretty suspicious when people say they need calcium in tomatoes usually the real issue is just that the soil is too moist/too dry or getting uneven amounts of water, so the roots can't access the calcium even if it's present and right there
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Jul 4, 2021 02:13
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How long since transplanting? Are the plants flowering and not setting fruit or are they not flowering at all? How hot is it? If you've got flowers, then it's probably either a heat or pollination issue. Tomato plants can't really set fruit when it gets too hot (usually 95+), so if it's been super hot then you might have to wait. If not, you might just not have enough pollinators. You can pollinate tomato plants really easily by just giving the flower trusses a little shake when it's warm and dry. No flowers could be a bunch of things, including too much nitrogen and not enough other nutrients in the soil.
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Jul 9, 2021 03:52
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Solkanar512 posted:
I'm jelly of your cukes because we've had cucumber beetles wreck our entire crop loving yet again Luckily we had backups this time that we're just about to transplant into a bed that should hopefully be safe from the fuckers now that we're using the old cucumber bed as a honeypot trap
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Jul 17, 2021 04:35
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Atrocious Joe posted:i'm currently in the middle of battling Japanese beetles. i've killed hundreds so far this year by smacking them off leaves into a soapy bucket I hate these motherfuckers but I'd take them over the cucumber beetles at this point Love spotting a single beetle and knowing that it's probably already too late for my entire crop because they'll all be dead from bacterial wilt in two weeks
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Jul 17, 2021 04:56
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Neem oil works pretty well as a fungicide. Hit the leaves that have still have spots if you don't want to remove them, and spray down nearby foliage, too. The real key is prevention, though. You can aggressively prune cucumbers and they'll still be prolific producers (might even produce more). I prune the hell out of the lower vines on established plants so that there's about 8-12" of just bare vine. That makes it easy to water the roots without getting the leaves wet, and it also lets you do some pest control without worrying too much about hurting bees or other pollinators.
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Jul 20, 2021 15:25
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Jabronie posted:If you can handle a lot of mulch you can call your local arborists and tree trimmers to take their truckloads of wood chips. Their trucks are 10-20 cubic yards though. Some will work with you if you're in a convenient route to dump off the rest. This is how we get our wood chips and it's great, as long as you're not looking for anything colored and you don't care if there are twigs and leaves in the piles. Extra chips are great for balancing out compost piles, too.
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Jul 28, 2021 03:43
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Karach posted:anybody implemented drip irrigation systems in their garden? I'm just starting to research this - any suggestions at systems to look at would be very welcome. I finally did this last year. I can make a big post about it if you want, but my main advice is to skip the kits. They all kind of suck, mostly because they include too much random stuff that you probably won't need and nowhere near enough of the basic poo poo that you will need. I originally bought a kit and I still ended up spending about $150 on orders from Drip Depot (which I highly recommend) to cover 16 raised beds. Meanwhile, most of what came in my kit is still sitting in a closet right now. My only other two big pieces of advice are not to bother with the fancy, expensive screw-on fittings and also to buy a lot of fittings, especially for the 1/2" tubing. I used an absurd number of elbow, tee, and end cap fittings to cover 16 raised beds. I only used the screw-on fittings for my end caps, since I wanted to be able to easily remove them to expand the system later. Aside from that, the dirt-cheap compression (like this) or barbed (like this) fittings are perfectly fine. The compression fittings are supposed to be one use, but you can pretty easily get the old tubing out with some pliers if you gently caress up. It's also useful to buy a few in-line valves for the 1/2" tubing. They're pretty cheap and you can use them to selectively water parts of your garden. I've got a valve on each raised bed and I'm extremely happy I decided to do it that way.
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Mar 2, 2022 17:35
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Starting out with a small section of your garden is a great idea. Drip systems are pretty expandable, and (at least for me) it was way easier to visualize and understand things once I started playing around with parts. Starting small will give you a feel for the parts you'll need and how much time it takes to get everything together. If you're planning on taking that approach, buy some end caps like these: https://www.dripdepot.com/item/irritec-perma-loc-tubing-end-cap-perma-loc-size-half-inch The cap on the end lets you flush the system and the locking nut makes them relatively easy to take on and off, so you can replace them later with a simple coupling if you want to expand from that end without cutting into your existing tubing. While I'm a fan of the much cheaper compression fittings or barbed fittings for most stuff, the locking nut ones are useful if you know for sure that you'll need to remove them in the future. I'm not sure how much I can offer versus what's already out there on youtube, but I'll try to remember to come back tonight and make a big "I'm a big idiot and even I managed to install a drip system" effort post. edit- I thought I had more pictures of the completed system, but this will give you a rough idea of how I have things laid out for low raised beds:  That 1/2" line runs through the whole garden between the planters while also acting as a header for each bed. Paradoxish has issued a correction as of 19:51 on Mar 2, 2022 |
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Mar 2, 2022 19:45
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The Voice of Labor posted:tomatoes are now in the ground. a week earlier than usual. ground at root depth was, admittedly, still a little on the cold side, but if we get another week in the 70s and 80s I don't think it's going to be a problem. Meanwhile, I'm worried about the cold hardy plants that I direct sowed because they all started popping two days before temperatures dropped from 60 degrees down to 20 degrees. Crossing my fingers that my hastily erected row tunnels will keep my itty bitty greens alive.
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Mar 29, 2022 03:57
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I've got a bunch of mustard greens, spinach, kale, kohlrabi, swiss chard, pak choi, peas, and cabbage all growing alongside my summer crops in flats under grow lights right now. I almost never grow that stuff indoors as transplants, but I had a bad feeling about this year so I decided to start a couple of extra flats for safety. Honestly glad I did. If my direct-sown greens make it through this freeze then I'll find space for this stuff and have a nice succession going, but at least I've got backups. This exact time last year I was worried about my greens bolting because we had a spat of freak 80-degree temps.
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Mar 29, 2022 16:27
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TheSlutPit posted:As a PNWer I will never stop laughing at the idea of people growing blackberries intentionally instead of destroying them with extreme prejudice. I live on the east coast and I'm currently in the process of clearing about a half-acre of blackberry occupied territory so we can expand our garden. My arms and legs are a bloody mess because these assholes will happily tear through thick leather gloves, a heavy hoodie, and jeans. The worst part is that tearing back the brambles is revealing some much scarier invasive weeds, but that'll be a concern for another year.
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Apr 25, 2022 19:05
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| # ¿ May 19, 2024 11:42 |
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Spoondick posted:it's not buried yet, but it's 103 out today so gently caress digging holes... sounds like an october job That's what I did last year. Got everything laid out and installed in the "gently caress it's hot I'm not dragging a hose around" phase and then buried and prettied it all up when it was nice and chilly out.
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Jul 25, 2022 05:52
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