Gardening Questions

Factual Questions
61

Make sure to buy heat tolerant lettuce like I said. One day of hot weather can send some into bolting. I said I’d tell you when I found bolt resistant stuff. Buying some other varieties at 10 cents is prudent for quantity and variety, but having resistant varieties get you something later. Some of the cheap ones will be the bolt resistant varieties too.

You can get these at Walmart for about $1 each.

Lettuce:
Salad Bowl Leaf
Burpee Bibb Butterhead
Rosalita Romaine
The Burpee Gourmet Blend with (Prize Leaf, Royal Oak,Salad Bowl, Red Salad Bowl, Mighty Red Oak)

Radish:
Cherry Belle - It’s the fastest growing and least likely to bolt. Plant some right away, with other varieties. You should plant small amounts a week apart for at least a month.

Peppers:
Carnival Mix Bell Pepper Burpee - It’s a mix of 5 varieties in different colors.

I plant the first radishes where warm weather crops like peppers will be planted. The radishes will be out when the peppers go in. By planting later crops of lettuce and radishes under tall crops they can last longer. I actually use leaf lettuce as a living mulch on tall crops. The cool weather crops can go in after the August heat wave passes, for a fall crop.

I see what you decided on but I still will add the following.

You can plant peas in the early spring and Then plant bush beans in the spot for a fall harvest.

A bush cucumber with disease resistance would work out good in the plot, if you eat cukes. They will literally stay in a spot smaller than 3 foot in diameter. They grew well with my peonies. They grow great when planted to hang over a terrace, not that you have a terraced garden. I try to include stuff like this so others reading this get ideas.

This year I’m going to try potatoes again if things work out, and hope to experiment with a few space space saving maximize production methods.

62

Cost of garden so far: $2,12 - for seeds, including tax

Selection was a bit limited, but here’s what I got:
Parsley x2
Spinach x2
Radish
Beet
Cucumber
Onion
Turnip
Watermelon

And Snowcarpet sent me a different variety of parsley, mixed bell peppers, and “Akron asters” (THANKS!)

I doubled up on the parsley because, from past experience, I haven’t always had great success growing it, and it’s easily dried as well as frozen. I use parsley a LOT. Likewise, I’m sure I’ll be able to eat/freeze any and all spinach produced, and anticipate a second planting towards fall. The turnips, radishes, and beets all have edible greens as well as roots.

I think at this point I have more seeds than space so I’ll stop there.

It occurred to me, while taking the first walk-around of the property with the snow melted off, that I have a 50 foot long strip of flowerbed along the south side of the building. I let it run a little riot the past couple years and it needs some re-working. I’m thinking of doing a foot of flowers, a foot of vegetables, a foot of flowers… Or perhaps two-foot increments. That’s a fair amount of space that I don’t have to break ground on, even leaving in the rose bushes and stawberriy/random bulb patch (it started as hycaniths, but a couple of years ago some tulips showed up out of nowhere - I blame absentmined squirrel food storage)

Looks like a small thing of Miracle-Gro is about $2 or so, which may be my only other expense - we’ll see. Definitely, it’s time to fertilize the flowerbeds if nothing else, it’s been years since I worked 50 pounds of peat moss into that strip.

63

Gee, I never let that stop me. :smiley:

64

Time for a garden update.

I trimmed the rose buses last week. Let me clarify - I butchered them. They had had a fungal infection last year and there was a lot of dead wood on all of them. I got rid of it all and timmed the canes back to about 1 foot-18 inches tall. The remaining buds are juuuuuust start to swell.

My odd assortment of bulb things have sprouted.

I’m converting the flower bed to vegetables. Starting next week I’m working the first 2-3 foot section and planting things like spinach. It’s a bit risky, but if I lose the first bit to frost subsequent ones will be along and I have enough seed to replant.

65

Thanks. I was wondering how the Great Garden Project was coming along. :slight_smile:

66

I was looking at my garden pictures from last year. The peonies were in the second year of bloom and the heads were up to 8 inches across. It was encouraging, because everything looked so good. I had the August flood results burned into my mind, when the stuff looked like crap. I have the apple trees pruned. I used the mower to mulch the winter dropped willow twigs, and leaves. The mulch went in the garden beds around the house. A week ago I cut trellis wood from old planks that were a picnic table two years ago. I’m trying to get some areas finished so the peas can go in and 2 square feet of lettuce.

One thing with lettuce for getting it to sprout. It has to have sun light and cool temperatures. Prepare the bed and sow the seed onto of the soil. Lightly pat the seed onto the soil. Water the seed carefully to not disturb the soil thus covering the seeds. A misting with a spray bottle will work nicely. You can try planting a little bit anytime now. Especially since you are ahead of my area a bit and I can give it a try. Lettuce doesn’t usually die from a frost or a little snow.

67

Thanks for the tip, but I’m opting out of lettuce. Other than sandwiches we don’t ieat it much. (I’ve switched from iceberg, which was getting expensive and bad, to red-leaf, which is about the same price but seems to last longer in my fridge and the birds like it better, too. Yes, the parrots probably eat more lettuce than the people around here).

Putting in spinach, turnips, and radishes. Well, the first plot might be just spinach, since I have extra seeds of that.

68

Don’t discount the usefulness of cheap trellis. I built a 6’ high by 20 long frame for under 12.oo and strung jute twine to make the rungs and attachment points. You can make the frame from 1x2x8 strips these often come in dozen bundles at home depot or lowes. By diligently tying up your plants as they grow you can maximize space, production, and provide a secondary semi shaded area at the base for other crops. In our 2’w x 20’ long plot we have tomatoes, sugar snap peas, strawberries, eggplant, burgundy beans, peppers, and watermelon vine bases (the vines trail out into the yard) Everything except the melons and berries are trellised up and we didn’t have to eat up a lot of space to do it.

69

No need to build trellis - I can use the chain link fence alongside the south of the property for that purpose.

70

If you’d like to train melon vines up a fence without worrying about the heavy fruit breaking off, you can make hammocks for them. For each melon, tie a stocking in two places on the fence. Cut a slit, and put the little fruit in the stocking. As it grows, the stocking will hold the weight, and you won’t have any hazard of rot on the “sit spot.”

71

Wow, that’s a fantastic idea!

72

Heh Not for my mighty melons. I’m growing “Goliath” and “moon and stars” watermelons. Both varieties get over 40 lbs easily. :eek: That trick works like a charm for lighter melons though. Our melons get a wooden orchid stand to raise them off the grass.

73

Growing melons on a fence requires a variety like sugar baby, and support. I did it one year to try it. They grew better on the ground, where the vine could send down roots at it’s leaf nodes.

74

Well, I did the first plantings today.

The flower bed I’m converting to vegetables runs in a long strip along the south side of my building. The dirt passed the “squeeze-and-crumble” test and is actually in very good shape. It’s loose and black and fully of crawling things that, if I had not been wearing gloves, would have made me yell and squeal and make lots of other girly noises. Prepared a nine foot long portion and planted with spinach, radish, turnips, beets, and onions. That means not a lot of any of these, but that’s OK - I plan to stagger plantings a week apart so, ideally, we’ll be able to eat whatever is ripe before it goes bad. If I get 1 serving each of turnips, beets and radish a week out of the garden it will serve the intended purpose. I should be able to do something like this three more times before I hit the rose bushes, so that should stagger everything nicely.

I also finished cleaning up around the rose bushes. They are recovering from the extreme pruning they got after last year’s fungal infection and I think they’ll bounce back (especially the two floribundas). The soil in between the bushes is, if anything, in better shape than the flower beds thanks to … well, I don’t really know why, to be honest. Looks and smells and feels just like potting soil. I did lay down a lot of peat moss some years back, but I wouldn’t expect that to still be “working” at this point. Anyhow, there being ample space between the bushes I decided to put parsley in. I’m hoping that it will help shade the rose bush roots in the heat of summer (in the past I’ve used marigolds and alyssum for that).

Past the rose bushes I let go wild last year because things were so crazy I just couldn’t keep up. I thinking of putting the peppers and cucumbers there, with maybe a couple watermelon on the end, but that won’t be for a couple weeks I expect.

The landlord is going to a farm auction this week. If he gets the rototiller he wants (he is now gonzo on getting a garden himself, and has been asking me a lot of questions, like I’m an authority or something - well, the flower beds HAVE looked good these past 10 years…) if he gets that rototiller he said he’ll till the backyard area for me, in which case I’ll be buying more seeds and putting in things like green and wax beans, maybe some other stuff. I figure if we till along the fence line the beans can climb that. Maybe I’ll get some peas - I can’t eat them but my husband and the birds like them. But since there’s nothing definite on that front I’ll continue with the small-scale garden I know I can manage until otherwise notified. If he does rototill a garden space for me then as I harvest the first plantings I might convert those beds back to ornamental flowers.

I have no idea if any of the above is heresy or will outrage garden purists. If so, consider it an experiment. Think I’ll pick up a can of Miralco-Gro next time I pass by the appropriate store, since I’ll be planting intesively enough that fertilizing will be a good idea, but no rush on that.

75

Your planting plan sounds great. Your Miracle-Gro plan concerns me. It’s chemically based and not terribly well balanced nutrition. Consider using a natural fertilizer like this.

76

Missed my edit window.

It occurs to me you might like a little more info on “chemicals bad, organic good.” Here is a discussion at a major gardening message board that covers most of the points.

Organic is better than chemical because:

  1. Chemical fertilizers give the plants a quick blast of nutrition, then wash out of the soil and elsewhere in the eco-system, often ending up in streams and rivers, which then suffer from overgrowth of algae. Organic tends to be slow-release; the effects aren’t as dramatic, but the plant gets all the value of the fertilizer, and you don’t need to apply it as often.

  2. Chemical fertilizers tend not to be as well-balanced, nutritionally. They’re often nitrogen rich, encouraging the growth of the leaves and stalk (overall plant size) at the expense of the roots (hardiness) and productivity (fruit).

Hope this helps.

77

Your organic suggestion also costs at least 4 times as much and requires significantly more storage spce, which is very much at a premium as I live in an apartment.

Frankly, if I had my druthers I’d have a working compost pile but that may not be possible under the circumstances. In the past, I have reworked the debris from each season’s annual flower beds back down into the soil, which may have something to do with the healthy state of the dirt, but this year I’ll be extracting much more from the soil without putting back. Let’s be honest here - I could probably get away with NO fertilizer this year, but that wouldn’t really be a good thing long term.

This was discussed nearer to the beginning of this thread, and for this season I’ll be using Miracle-Gro due to price and practicality reasons. Next year may be different.

78

You’re right, I’d forgotten about that whole element of your plan. My apologies.

Given that other people – some of whom are not on quite so tight a budget – are reading along and gleaning advice for themselves, however, I’m okay with beating the “pro-organic” drum one more time.

79

And I certainly encourage people to keep suggesting things, even if they are outside my budget this year since after all other people read the thread!

My landlord was asking for suggestions for improving his soil (rather sandy, as is mine where it hasn’t been “amended”) I suggested peat moss, as it did such a good job where I’m at and it’s fairly straight forward. His soil, as I said, is a bit sandy and moisture retention is an issue in the hot and dry part of summer. There are a lot of good, quick things you can do that don’t require extensive soil analysis. The results won’t be perfect, but in most cases “noticeable improvement” is just as good for most folks.

80

Shit…[embarrassed shuffle] This blew past me the first time upthread, just realized it now. If the wall that’s behind the flowerbed has ever been painted with lead-based paint, you need to have a soil test before you eat anything grown in it, because some plants will uptake the lead. I’ve never tried to grow veg in the strips beside my 50-year-old garage for just that reason, since it’s extremely likely that back in the day, it was painted with lead-based paint.

Your county extension service ought to have lead test kits.

How old is the building? If it’s later than about 1980, you’re probably okay.