The birds (or squirrels or cats or bugs) always, always, ALWAYS eat my lettuce seeds. I’ll sow cabbage, spinach and broccoli in the smaller bed and I’ll get some of everything-- except lettuce. Every single time. And I always sow it. Every season I think ‘this time I’ll get some lettuce’ and every season I am disappointed.
Another thing that I have yet to grow successfully is squash. I think I may have a squash specific germ in the bed. I plant the squash. The squash grows like crazy like squashes like to do. I’ll get squashy flowers. I’m all ready for actual squash and then— the plant dies practically overnight. Sort of shrivels up, gets slimy. Like it’s rotting only instantaniously. After the 3rd time this happened, I stopped trying to grow squash.
You have squash-vine borers, the most evil insect in the world!
A good friend of mine bought some kind of injectable thingy that she injected into her squash vines (nematodes, maybe?) and she didn’t lose a single plant to the bastards! Meanwhile I was cutting open vines and squishing grubs and still lost 1/3 of my plants. I’m getting some nematodes (or whatever they were) this year!
Broomstick, I’m pretty sure I have some Beaver Dam pepper seeds I can send you if you need some more. I live about 25 miles from the Beaver Dam that is the pepper’s namesake, so I grow it regularly.
Last year I grew a scant handful of Turkey Craw beans that I got ins some seed exchange a few years back, and boy am I mad that I waited so long to grow them!
They were tremendous in every way;
The rabbits left them completely alone while ravaging the Purple Queen beans planted right next door.
They grew in a manner resembling the mythical beanstalk of young Jack, one vine grew off the top of its trellis and latched on to a nearby apple tree!
They made the most delicious green beans I’ve ever had
They also provided me with a bounty of dried beans that were easy to shell and are really tasty.
I plan on planting a lot of Turkey Craw beans this year.
Thanks for the offer, but I’ll decline for now. A friend of mine actually already came to my rescue, looks like I’ll be able to start some indoors and still have some “extra” seed to sow directly just in case.
US Zone 5b here (Mohawk-Hudson valley region). Thinking about getting some stones or bricks to make a little barrier fence around the tulips and irises that I planted encircling the lamppost on the street median strip in front of my house, so the overzealous city-works mower won’t keep chopping them down this year.
Last year the tulips were pretty much over before the mower got going, but he kept axing the iris (and later the morning glories) before I saw a single flower. Okay, it’s not his job to tell the flowers from the weeds, but I’m tired of their not getting a chance to bloom.
For the veggie garden, have started looking at seed catalogs but haven’t ordered anything yet. Thinking about planting a clematis in some of the recently filled-in root holes of the big maple (I think it’s a Norway maple cultivar, with reddish-purplish leaves year-round), but I think the usual pink and purple clematis shades will look terrible with the maple leaves. Should I just get a white one? Is there a really blue clematis or other color that would look good with a dark-leaved Norway maple?
Of course I start this thread and suddenly we have sleet, snow, and cold for two weeks…
Despite all that, the bulbs are putting up tentative green stalks, so between that and the lengthening days I know spring really is coming despite the snow.
It’s been a mild enough winter overall that I never stopped feeding the compost heap out back - in past years if we’ve had a couple feet of snow or sub-zero weather I usually say heck with it and stop going out there. By that time I’m usually generating less kitchen scrap simply because I’m diving into the frozen vegees anyway which are already trimmed.
I’m trying to figure out how to handle mulch this year. I’m not mowing lawns this summer. Between a full time job and also trying to help my spouse with his business venture it’s just too much for just a few extra dollars. Wonder if I can find out who the landlord will have doing it this year and ask them to drop off the grass clippings? Maybe a buck a bag? I do like the way it keeps the weeds down but don’t really want to spend a lot of money on it.
Still considering adding to the garden area, maybe another 5x20 foot strip along one side of the current patch.
Planted my seeds yesterday to get them started. Looking to transplant May-ish. I only do the chile peppers from seed, so this year we got: arbol, aji amarillo, aji limon (lemon drop), corne de chevre, piri-piri, rooster spur, fatalii, mustard habanero. I’m not bothering with the ghost pepper (bhut jolokia) or Trinidad scorpion this year. I’ll probably also get some Thai red seedlings in May.
The rest, we’ll see. I plan to get some greens going for a change. I always neglect the rest of my garden to concentrate on chile peppers. Oh, and tomatoes. There’s always tomatoes. I’m also thinking of getting potatoes in, using one of those vertical methods for growing them.
*Sorry for the awful mobile pic. I usually take much more thought out pics for my yearly garden album. I’ve been waiting for the sun. We haven’t had much sun in the last week.
Gardening type people! I’ve been meaning to start a thread about this, but I’ll ask here instead.
We bought an abandoned house on 15 acres in southern Maine last summer and have been renovating it. We were thrilled to discover a large asparagus patch behind the house, but it was extremely overgrown with thick grass last summer. We got horses at the end of the summer and let them graze the area down, and right now it’s covered with a good 2’ of snow. Anyway, my question is how do I help that patch thrive. I don’t even know if it’s possible to weed it, the grass was up to my waist and just ridiculously lush. Any thoughts?
I, myself, do not have any weed control. I’ve tried everything, if everything includes mulch, landscape material and frustrated hand pulling. I can hate on some weeds, lemme tell ya, but it doesn’t help.
Meanwhile back on the ranch. . . The year before last I separated and gave away most of my Iris gone wild. My son insisted we keep what we call the Mother rhizome and 3 baby bunches. We also planted very old daffodil bulbs just to see if they’d grow. (as you can see my gardening terminology is mostly made up by me). I thought I had given them enough room but already today, even though there is fresh snow on the ground from last night, they are fighting each other. At least they’ll crowd out the weeds until about mid-spring.
Zone 5, Chicago burbs. I always start a zillion seeds, but I’m not quite feeling it yet. Maybe next weekend. I did acquire lots and lots of seeds yesterday. You’d think that would inspire me. So lazy today …
Zone 3, Calgary, AB. I bought a big ol’ bag of dirt at the Home and Garden show yesterday - one cubic yard, to be delivered in April some time. My garden has done very poorly; I think the soil is tired and worn out, and this stuff is supposed to refresh an old patch. We don’t start seriously thinking about planting until the May long weekend (around May 24th) around here, but you can get stuff like potato eyes in the ground earlier.
Regarding carrots, I had some carrots from a previous planting come up last year, and I just let them go to seed. I loved them - they were a nice, tall, sturdy plant with big umbrels of pleasant-smelling white flowers on them - I’m going to plant carrots in my flower beds and let them all go to seed this year! (Except I just learned it takes carrots two years to flower - so next year I’ll have great carrot plants again.)
Hm. Would heavy mulch not interfere with the sprouting of the asparagus spears? I’ve heard it’s a nightmare to transplant asparagus, but I almost want to just dig it up with the backhoe and try to pick the plants out of the root tangle, and then re-plant in a clean bed. Although this sounds like a lot of work which may well be futile considering my general disdain for weeding; I would likely end up back where I started in a year. I also don’t know how old this bed is, could be 20 years and maybe at the end of it’s life anyway. Maybe I’ll just harvest what I can this spring and see what happens.
I don’t feel too bad that I haven’t started my seeds yet. Since it’s 14 degrees right now (Chicago suburbs). Went to buy my seed potatoes and they aren’t even in stock yet! Last year at this time it was 80 degrees. Crazy.
Asparagus is pretty tough, I doubt heavy mulch could keep it down.
We had wild asparagus in a very poor location so I decided to dig down and transplant some of the crowns, I was amazed that I had to dig down through 3 feet of heavy clay soil! If the spears can push though that, I don;t think some mulch will foil them.
After 6 years in this house, the deer have finally found my yard. They’ve destroyed several shrubs already this winter and have been pawing through the snow to find grass underneath, so I’m definitely going to have to build a serious fence around my garden this year. That’s an expense I wasn’t planning on, but I guess that’s life.
Is anyone else near my part of the world? I’m trying to grow veggies in containers this year. I’ve got a few strawberry plants from a few years ago that I’m going to try to revive and hopefully get a harvest from. Everything else is starting from seed. Three days ago I started some cucumber seeds left over from last year and some zucchini seeds from this year using the damp-paper-towel-in-a-plastic-bag method. All the cucumbers are sprouting and one of the zukes seems to also be sprouting.
I also started cherry and beefsteak tomatoes, yellow squash, two types of bush green beans and bell peppers using little paper sprouting pots from the dollar store. I’ve got all six little sprouting pots sitting in a low plastic food container on top of a layer of gravel that I put some water in - the whole thing is in a big plastic bag and on top of the refrigerator (I just put the whole thing in the big plastic bag today to try to make things a little warmer for the seeds.) I’ve also got dill and chamomile in two small windowsill containers.
I’m impressed with the cukes and zukes sprouting so quickly - none of the others have sprouted yet. I’ve got to still get some roma tomatoes and better boy tomatoes and some yellow and white peppers, oregano, and one replacement blueberry bush, and that should have me covered. My plan is to start new sprouts about every two weeks so I’ll have a pretty continual harvest all season. I haven’t done it this way before, but I think it will work - at least, I hope it will. I’m in the Montgomery, AL area, which I think is zone 8a.
These veggies are things I cook regularly (right now I’m pretty much cooking everything from scratch,) and some of them are so expensive at the grocery store! For instance, even in the summer, red, yellow, and white peppers run about $1.50 to $2.00 EACH. That’s outrageous! Even green beans stay well over $1.00 a pound all year long. That’s just entirely too expensive. I’m planning also, if I can find an extra container, to try growing some potatoes as well, just to see if I can do it. Potatoes are cheap, and I don’t eat them often - so the potatoes I’m just going to try growing for fun.
Some local fellow is advertising in the paper 25 Ghost Pepper seeds (Bhut Jolokia) for $6.00 postage paid. Wikipedia says that’s one of the hottest peppers in the world. Not for me, thanks. I bet they burn a hole right through the envelope. :eek:
The first eggplant seedlings are up (indoors, under lights) and many ornamentals are making progress from seeds and cuttings (highlights include variegated rhubarb and dwarf crepe myrtles).
I have no idea why someone would grow Bhut Jolokia peppers, aside from bragging rights to the world’s hottest pepper. The plants reputedly are temperamental to grow and you can’t use the pepper except in very tiny quantities, with great caution on the preparation end (and I speak as someone greatly looking foward to the special hot salsa tonight at our local Mexican food joint).
