In 2021 there were 219 posts in the gardening thread. This was reduced to 133 posts in 2022 and only 9 posts in the 2023 thread.
Has everyone quit gardening?
Not I. Zone 6A. I’ve already got my cool weather veggies sown and transplanted my onions.
Planning mine now, just have to get enough stretch of dry weather so that my garden plot will till up into something decent.
I actually started a gardening related thread today in fact.
We’re increasing the flowers in the yard. I have about 2 feet down either side of our walk planted with bulbs and am expecting a delivery of 42 50pound bags of white rocks on Friday. This will cover the bedding and hopefully suppress grass, weeds and dirty digging bulb stealing animals.
We’re putting red wood chips around 4 of our young trees.
I hope to find some more periwinkle vinca to continue our front yard project between the 2 mature maple trees.
Any opinions on flowering ground covers?
Looking for one good in the sun with excellent weed control properties.
I’m thinking Creeping Phlox but interested in what others have used successfully. We’re hardiness zone 7b.
Is everyone aware that the Department of Agriculture has updated its plant hardiness zone map for the first time in a decade a few months ago?
I planted 25 tulip bulbs and 25 ranunculus corms in the fall. I ended up with about 8 tulips. The ranunculus came up stupid early and only about a third of the ones that came up have survived. I might get about 4 flowers from what’s left - that’s how many buds I currently have from that. Not my most successful gardening endeavor.
In better news, most of the Mexican sunflower seeds I planted indoors in February sprouted, and I now have some pretty nice plants that will need to be transplanted outside this weekend. And the cardinal flower and Short’s aster I planted last year are now shooting up - they didn’t grow much last year but now they seem established, so I look forward to those blooming this summer.
The Eastern columbine is off to a good start as well. I have some lupine seeds I’ll likely sow outdoors next month. I sowed some California poppies a few weeks ago and they’re coming along. I expect them to grow faster now that the weather will be more reliably warm.
I don’t know if I am going to get any tomato plants this year. No need to plant any chilis - I still have a ton of those from last year.
The blueberry bushes are doing very well and we should have a bumper crop this year if we can keep the squirrels out of them. The strawberries, on the other hand, are looking iffy. The plants are getting pretty old. I might have to rip those out and either plant new strawberries or put something else in that space.
Not precisely gardening, but market farming has some things in common.
Last week, somewhat in defiance of the weather report, I seeded parsnip and a first round of radish and spinach. Last night, the soil having warmed up a bit more and the weather forecast for the coming week being warmer, I seeded snow, snap, and shell peas. Today I moved onion transplants, parsley and pansies, and the first round of lettuce transplants from the house to the (unheated) greenhouse. And I was supposed to seed peppers, eggplant, basil, and brussels sprouts in the house, all of them except the brussels sprouts on heat mats; but other things came up and I didn’t get to it. Maybe tomorrow.
I definitely haven’t quit, in fact this year I am ramping things up. Its too early here to plant outdoors but I have some stuff in dirt indoors. I have most of my gardens cleaned up and ready to till those I choose to till. Grapevines are all trimmed and ready. I have many saved seeds from last season to add into my landraces. Its going to be quite the exciting year I think!
I dug up the ground in the garden for potatoes today. Just using some store bought that have started to sprout. I’ve had moderate success with this method in the past. The oldest blueberry bush is starting to bud. The two younger smaller bushes aren’t doing anything yet. I cleaned the strawberry patch which is still dormant.
I didn’t do a garden last year. This year I’m doing lettuce, snap peas, carrots, and at my wife’s insistence, three sisters.
The asparagus turn 4 this year. I hope to get more than the four golf pencil sized spears I had last year.
I’m trying to add some fruits and veggies to my yard, in addition to flower beds. I planted a blueberry bush a couple weeks ago, and it’s doing well so far. I bought a pomegranate tree last year. It’s still pretty small, but has really taken off so far. I’d be thrilled to see it bloom, but I’m not expecting much.
Yes, I felt the update was overdue. Seems like we’ve been having earlier last frost dates for years. Like our growing season is two weeks longer than it was 25 years ago. The USDA map revision reflect this fact. Climate change sucks on a grand scale, but I guess I’ll humbly accept the silver lining.
My gf bought a dozen big pots of phlox last spring. Her plan was to plat it on a difficult-to-mow bank and eliminate the need to mow.
We got too busy with other projects and the phlox pots got watered but never planted until very late fall. Our expectations were minimal. It looked like they all died over winter. But now they are all growing!!
We spent last Sunday transplanting a ton of pachysandra that needed to be moved due to a home improvement project starting soon. Pachysandra is great. You can literally rip it out of the ground, then put it wherever you want it to grow and it does.
(I’m at work so can’t take pics of the yard and post them. Curses! I’d like to solicit ideas on this general plan).
USDA zone 8a/8b.
We’re planning, money permitting, on doing a more-or-less revamp of our entire front yard this year. We bought the house in September of 2021 after 20 years of renting. It’s taken this long to really wrap our heads around the fact that yes, we actually can make changes to the landscape without fear of eviction. Renting from slumlords for two decades can really mess with your head.
We have two narrow flowerbeds on either side of the driveway and a front “lawn” that’s mostly/completely weeds. The general plan is:
Start by removing everything from the flower beds and turn them into container gardens. My wife has been collecting newspapers and cardboard (well, I have been collecting newspapers and cardboard for her) to use as a weed barrier. We have a local nursery that can deliver mulch and stone by the yard so what we’ll do is clear out everything from the flower beds, lay down the paper weed barrier, put something on top of that (I am in favor of river rock but she has veto power on this), and then place large planters – nice glazed or terra cotta planters, not plastic junk – filled with perennial flowers and small shrubs. I’d like something climbing next to the front porch, maybe a clematis or rose. My wife prefers the clematis idea so that’s probably what we’ll go with. We both like the idea of placing as many planters as will fit in the spaces and fill them with tall flowering plant in the rear and short cascading plants in the front so each bed will have a cottage garden look even though they’re really just simple container gardens.
The front lawn… ugh. The whole thing needs to be ripped out completely and redone from scratch. It’s about 1500 square feet, so quite small as lawns go. Like most suburban ranch houses around here we have junipers lining the front yard that have been there for decades, are uglier than sin, smell like an unholy mixture of semen and urine, and are so well established that ideally we’d rent an excavator to remove them completely. That’s not really in the cards so the general plan is to:
- Kill the junipers as best as we can without resorting to RoundUp or the like.
- Rent a 20 yard dumpster that can sit in the driveway for a week.
- Rent a sod cutter for a couple of days.
- Once we have both of those on hand, pay some local teenagers to cut out and dig up the junipers and put all that brush in the dumpster. Use the sod cutter to remove the turf and put that in the dumpster as well. Once those two things are done, 80% of the pony work will have been completed.
- Till up the now bare patch of dirt, remove every last speck of extant vegetation, and then add in any soil amendments that are necessary.
- Map out the flower beds my wife wants to add and put in edging of some sort.
- Put in an underground sprinkler system while the lawn area is accessible with one zone for the lawn and another for the flower beds.
- Order sod from the same nursery that supplies the river stone and pay the teenagers (maybe) to lay the grass down.
Other than this whole project not currently in the household budget my wife and I can’t agree on what kind of flower beds and borders to put in. I would love to have some boxwood hedges along the road where the junipers are now. They last forever and are much easier to shape and control than pretty much anything else. I also think they look quite nice. We don’t use our front yard for recreation so it would be all about the curb appeal. My wife prefers flower beds. I’m not opposed to that idea but we’d have to plant some very low-maintenance perennials as neither one of us like to do a lot of flower bed maintenance which is why we’re going with container gardens along the driveway.
Ultimately it depends on whether or not we can fit it into the budget and get the muscle to help pull out the juniper shrubs. If we can do both those things before fall hopefully we’ll have a new yard this year.
The backyard needs the same treatment but will be more involved as that will require an excavator as there are some old abandoned cement walkways that need removed, but we can’t do that because there’s no access to the backyard from the street without tearing down a fence and even then I doubt we’d be able to get anything but a mini bobcat in there as the side yards are extremely narrow and I doubt such a small machine would be strong enough to do much good. Ugh. That’s going to be a nightmare for another year.
Regarding the container idea - you’ll want to choose the material they are made of carefully. If you leave them outside all year, one thing that can happen with a rigid material like clay, glass, etc. is that it can crack during the winter when the plants are dormant. Lots of rain or melting snow can waterlog the soil, and then when that water freezes it’ll expand and there goes your pot.
That sort of material is also heavy, and a large planter full of soil is even heavier, and a real pain in the ass to move.
If you want to leave your plants in place all year it would be less work in the long run to either a) create raised beds on each side of the driveway or b) install some attractive edging to separate the lawn from the garden beds and the driveway and plant whatever you want in those.
We’ve been delayed since we replaced the fence by the main garden, and knew the fence people were going to trample all over it. Which they did. And then we left for the eclipse. I have to dig it and plant real soon.
However we planted onions in the other garden, and they are good scallion size already, and snow peas, which are looking good. We are still getting a lot of rain and good intervals, so I’m hopeful. Our lawn finally looks decent, not like it should be attached to a shed. The lawn was not made for droughts.
Our bok choy, however, seems to have disappeared.
Very busy time in the garden hereabouts.
Many of our tomato, eggplant and pepper plants, a half-dozen potted gooseberries and numerous perennials (all started from seed within the last couple of months) are out in the coldframe hardening off, and I’m keeping an eye on the extended forecast to determine when to set them out in their final locations. A new strawberry bed was planted just before this week’s rains came.
About half of the potted fig trees have been moved outdoors from the garage and garage apartment where they were in winter storage.
As usual I have decisions to make about where newly acquired ornamental and fruit trees will be planted.
Lungwort (Pulmonaria), honesty and hellebores are flowering.
We are very close to moving the plants that were previously moved indoors, outdoors. It’s about a half day of work, using a dolly for the huge ficus trees.
The move is done in stages. From indoors they go under our patio arbor for partial sun. After a week or so they move to their permanent summer spot. Once they are all moved, pruning is done.
I ended up selling my big ficus tree because it was getting too large for the space it was in. It was a beautiful tree but I am glad I don’t have to move it this year! Now all I have to move outside are a couple of cacti.
The last time I re-potted our biggest ficus I used a pulley system hooked up to the top beam of our arbor. I managed to lift it off the ground, get the old pot off, prune the root ball, and repot it. My gf was impressed, hell, I was impressed
I’d always thought of ficus as being these houseplant-sized things. Then I went to Bermuda and saw them growing wild there. That’s when I knew there might be a problem in my future …