I feel the need to discuss my gardening projects with people - anyone interested in talking plants? I mean, talking about plants - I can’t imagine anyone NOT interested in talking plants!
I do! Can we do all topics: veggies, fruit, flowers, trees, etc or were you thinking more about veggie gardening specifically?
I don’t know how interested i’d be in such a thread long term but I do happen to have a few immediate questions I might post.
I already tried to start one this spring. The garden threads only seem to be of interest for a few days and then some time needs to pass. Maybe a monthly garden thread would work. Such as the May thread or the June thread.
I was thinking anything dirt and growing organism related.
That’s probably a good idea. So, call this the May thread?
I just got my peas in! Yay! And the cotoneaster hedge is about 1/3 in.
I’d be interested but I see one difficulty is the plants and soil I have here are entirely different to Canada. I would be interested in how you go but I can’t see how a hot climate with dreadful sandy soil would interest most gardeners in the USA.
I do have a nice callistemon though.
Dirt ehh?
you AntiAerogardentite.
I would participate! I like the idea of doing a monthly thread.
So here’s my part:
I just had my first radish and my first salad greens.
I’m also in the middle of moving some perennials around and figuring out what I’m going to plant in the neighbor’s garden (well, the part that’s between our houses that’s currently lawn, but that we both want to be plants.
I’ve got some hostas and daylilies and will be getting some ferns tomorrow in a plant exchange, I think.
Also, my coreopsis just started to bloom today (they’re just the plain, orange-yellow species that reseed themselves happily; they came with the house and I’ve managed to spread them all over the place).
We’ve had a great spring - everything’s looking very lush and flowers are blooming about 2 weeks ahead of schedule (I’m expecting my first daylilies any minute now; there are stella d’oros blooming all over town right now and mine usually start right after those).
I’d love to hear about what goes on in your garden, Cicero.
Oh, and I vote we let those Aerogardeners participate. Even if they don’t believe in dirt. 
GT
I’m a novice gardener, and we live in a condo so I can only do containers. But I have a nice little garden growing on my balcony!
I have some lettuce and spinach starting to come up, and the nasturtiums should be coming up soon.
Rosemary, sage, lime thyme, thyme, and mint are all doing nicely, and one of my alpine strawberries is thriving. The other one is still growing, but not nearly as quickly - I don’t know what its problem is, they’re both in the same pot! I
I got two dwarf blueberry bushes for Mother’s Day, and I need to get nice big pots for them - but they’re doing great so far. And I have three little tiny pots of sugar snap peas that seem to be doing nicely, but their soil gets dry pretty quickly. We’ll see if I can keep them alive.
Like I said, I’m completely a newbie at gardening, so I will take any advice anyone wants to throw my way!
I just finished putting in new block walls where the delphinium used to be before the flood. I’ve added organic peat, and cow manure compost to the soil to make it good again and level with the wall. The soil is fixed about 8" down. I have 12 new delphinium plants to start the bed. Tomorrow will have to be soon enough to plant them. The whole bed along the sidewalk has to be finished yet, but I concentrated on the delphinium section to get it done. It has me wiped out as it is. I finished getting the pea trellising up for the growing peas today. Now I need to get another up for some new pea plantings. My carrots look nice. The potatoes got frosted back at the beginning of the week.
We moved into a new house recently and have a ton of work to do - it was empty for almost a year when we bought it and before that pretty negelected. But it once was loved - it has some nice bones, a very old non-working sprinkler system and a few surprise bulbs have come up!
Wednesday I planted my garden - all transplants. My first time doing veggies in the ground!Tomatos, peppers, 1 summer squash and 1 zucchini (it is a good thing I don’t know where you all live!), bush beans, buncha different herbs, strawberries.
I have to install my new drip irrigation system on Saturday.
Next up is planning a shade garden for the north side of my house that is overrun with weeds and has - ugh - a 3 inch layer of pea gravel. Not sure what to do about that. But on the up side the reason it is so shady is a stand of 4 mature plum trees! I want this area to be my kids garden experimentation and general play area so we did stick a few big-box-store impatiens in the ground. Any other suggestions for a shade garden welcome!
Can I throw a couple of discussion topics out there?
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For those of you growing tomatos, how do you support them?
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What is your mulch of choice?
My mulch of choice is pine bark, Hedda. One of my former neighbors used it because a horticulturist friend recommended it and I decided I liked it because it smells nice and ages to a nice, natural-looking brown. I try as hard as I can to plant in a way that I need as little mulch as possible, though. I’ve found some groundcovers that aren’t hopelessly annoying (Veronica Waterperry Blue is my current favorite), plant perennials pretty close together and fill gaps in with annuals. I’m still a ways from being mulch-free, but that’s really the direction I’m trying to go.
As for tomatoes: I grow them in containers and stake them as best I can. Once I move a few things around, I’ll probably grow them next to my garage and use a combination of trellis and stakes.
stargazer, it sounds like you’ve made a great start. Don’t worry if some things don’t work out. Eventually you’ll figure out what types of plants work in which location and figure out how much pruning/deadheading/etc. you are willing to handle and get comfortable with your garden.
As you can see, I’m in a garden-chatty mood (I had a really stressful week at work; guess what I do to de-stress?), so if any of you have specific questions, I’m willing to give it a shot.
There are a couple of REALLY knowledgeable gardeners on the board (paging twickster and ellelle) who I’m hoping will stop by and share as well.
Almost forgot: went for a walk tonight. There are about a million irises and peonies in full bloom in my neighborhood. They’re gorgeous this year and made me smile…
GT
- Just a stake if they need it.
- I use small bark nuggets - they don’t have much smell and I like the look of them.
Our peonies are coming along nicely - I think they were delayed by all the recent crappy cold weather. I picked up a red peony today - it has a little frost on the tips of the leaves, but everything does this year. It was the right price, anyway. 
I’m thinking about a big, pink peony, too.
Stargazer, my only advice about container gardening is to keep a good eye on them - they seem to dry out in a surprisingly short time.
I have a deck container garden again this year. I have tomatoes in four containers and they are exploding. I use the “Ultomato” cage/stake system I found at Home Depot, which works well when supplemented with ties and additional stakes. Last year my container tomatoes produced more tomatoes than a family of 3 could eat. I also have cucumbers, cantaloupe, green beans, strawberries, and lettuce, as well as basil and lavender, and flowers (from seed) in containers such as zinnia, sunflowers (will eventually go in the ground), alyssum, forget-me-nots, and shasta daisies. I love my garden!!
This is true. I usually have to water everything every day unless it rains.
Thiss looks like a great place to ask questions!
I admit- I am not much of a gardener. I have not planted any vegetables in YEARS. This year I decided to plant a cherry tomato plant in a big pot on the back deck. All went well for a while, I was so excited to see those first little green tomatoes popping out on it.
Then, last week, the bottom leaves started turning yellow, and it is getting worse. It has full sunlight and I keep it watered every other day or so. What could be causing this? Is my tomato doomed?
Oooh! I’m in.
This year my husband and l were looking at my teeny tiny patch (with onions, garlic and chive) and decided on the spur of the moment to expand massively. So we’ve built a raised bed with 5 tonnes of soil and 1 of manure and I’m really going for it this year. I’ve got: onion, garlic, spring onion, peas, mangetout, beans, sweetcorn, broccolli, lettuce, rocket, spinach, leeks, parsnip, carrot, 7 containers of potatoes, watercress, chilli, pepper, cucumber, winter squash, tomatoes, basil, dill, coriander, mint, parsley, thyme, strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, an old apple tree, lavender, bay and rosemary. I’m so excited this year, I keep going out and just looking at all the rows, desperate for something else to appear!
I actually just love the planting and the cultivating, I’m really new to this, and quite bad at it, I think! Last year was a much smaller scale and we actually just got a couple of meals of potatoes and a handful of tomatoes, plus bucket loads of herbs. I don’t mind in the slightest though, I treat it as relaxation and as something good for my soul, I’ve never worried that I’m not a great success at it. Having said that, I’ve expanded so much this year I think I’ll be taking it more seriously.
One thing I’d like to ask - and I realise we’re from all over so the answers might vary (I’m in the South East of the UK, fairly mild and stable climate): has anyone else seen a real late start to the season this year? We’ve still got a riot of tulips flowering about a month or so later than normal, it’s very noticeable. We had a shocking winter and lost a lot of stuff, so it seems the garden’s been very slow to recover. I wondered how widespread this has been (in the Northern hemisphere, obviously).
Short of mass murder, any ideas on controlling chipmunks? The little bastards eat everything, including the tomato plants on my deck, sunflower seeds AND sunflower seeding transplants (although this might have been the rabbits).
My mother says I should put out some mouse poison, and I suppose I could, under the deck where no children or pets could get at it.
On a more positive note, I have a lovely wildflower garden seeded under my breakfast nook bay window, along with some russian mammoth sunflowers (which survived the chipmunk carnage, so far) and I can’t wait for the loveliness. I’ve got some other interesting varieties of sunflower too, including deep orange and brown ones.
My long-term plans call for a couple of dogwoods at the back of my yard. I’m in a strange situation; I have a fairly teeny back yard, but it opens onto a large green space. So I have a view and open space without the maintenance … it just cuts down on what I can plant. I don’t want to hedge myself in; I want to “include” the green space in my virtual back yard … but on the other hand, without much planting back there it looks rather forlorn.
I’ll join but the only seedlings I have that survived are jalapenos. They will probably die when I move them to a bigger container so I keep putting off doing it but I know they can’t survive in their current containers much longer.
I made one self-watering container and tried some peas and radishes in it but I forgot to mulch the top and the top dried out a couple times, just couldn’t wick up the water fast enough.
I discovered I have a couple pests in my yard. Something was knocking over some plants on my porch, this killed a couple seedlings. I figured out the culprit when I found a peanut stuck down inside a Christmas Cactus. I do not put out peanuts so it must be a neighbor who is feeding squirrels. Why do they have to bury them in my potted plants though?
Then I saw some baby Lubber grasshoppers climbing up a wall, so I grabbed a rock and started smashing them. I then checked my Bird of Paradise and it was covered with them munching away. Og, I hate these things. They can do a whole lot of damage in a short time, so you pretty much have to check your garden every day. I found a couple on my porch, too, heading for my seedlings. My
poor B of P was just starting to come back after last years lubber assault.
Google Eastern Lubber and you wil see what I mean. The small black ones with the green stripe are youngsters that grow into these huge 3 to 4 inch long yellow things. You can only kill them with direct physical violence (pick or knock them off the plant, then stomp), so don’t wear sandals or good shoes when gardening. If you go the poison route you pretty much have to directly drench the
beasts because a light spray won’t effect them. So, it’s just easier to save the beneficial insects and take the direct kill method.
They are toxic so nothing eats them, I heard that Shrikes might impale them on
something, let them marinate for a while and then eat them, maybe they get less toxic after toasting in the sun. But I’ve never seen any shrikes around here, too bad because a carnivorous songbird that impales its victims seems kind of bad ass cool to me.
Yeah, the season seems delayed here, too, because of recent crappy weather. It’s been a strange winter and spring here.
I just learned a new tip for gardening with bulbs - put some fairly large holed mesh over the bulbs in the ground, so the shoots can come up but the squirrels can’t dig them up. I haven’t tried it yet, but it sounds good. I tried planting with mesh around my plants above ground, and it worked beautifully for keeping squirrels out - I think it would work for chipmunks too.
Ellen, you have what is known as a “borrowed” view; I agree that closing it off would be counterproductive, but you could frame it nicely from both sides.
Just mowed the lawn which included treading on one of my newly planted papaya and trimming the sweet potato - oops. I’ve got a couple more papaya in my seed tub, so I’ll replace the one I killed - shame it was doing well. Arugula has just come up and I’ve prepared four small beds for it - yum yum - plus I’ll be able to sell it if all goes well.
Somebody mentioned delphiniums - oh I adore them, I’ve put a little patch out the back and have some along the front fence. I’m waiting for chives, parsley, jalapeno peppers and some flowers to come up and I’m going to sow some tomatoes later today. It’s been raining and overcast these last few days so it’s been great to get things going. A couple of pumpkins have come up too.