In addition to all the tomatos and peppers, which are now enormous and starting to flower, I also recently planted sweet basil, radishes, and catnip. The radishes have already started to sprout after only two days.
Huh. Hereabouts, peony foliage gets lots of brown spots and patches after flowering and looks terrible. Couple that with the short flowering season and it’s why I dug out about half of the (mostly pink) ones the previous homeowner had planted and put in vegetables instead.
Speaking of which, this has been a hellacious season for lettuce and similar greens. I’ve harvested bags of them but I’ll never get to all of it before it sets seed. And what do I do with the swiss chard? Salad greens, sure, but should I cook it like spinach?
Another week or so, and it’s raspberry season.
Last night I peered out the front window as I was going up to bed, and saw a deer calmly strolling across my driveway. So I had to open the door and race out there to scare it off. They’re a herbivorean plague.
I guess it’s too hot down here for peonies to be commonplace as I’ve never seen them in the nurserys. In fact I only just saw my first one ever last week while visiting CO. Being Memorial Day the M-I-L’s and the neighbor’s were lookin’ good. Her one complaint though was they’re consistently infested with ants. Is there some symbiotic relationship going on?
Not much of a gardening year for us this time. Between the extraordinary drought and 100+ heat we’re just tryin’ to keep everything alive, much less thrive.
Yes! Absolutely! You can absolutely treat chard just like spinach.
It also freezes well - though, of course, after thawing you’ll want to used it to cook with rather than putting in in a salad.
I guess I take my peonies for granted - they’re like a shrub that comes back from the ground up here every summer and lives forever. They must not be heat-lovers - my peony foliage looks beautiful all summer long. It even gets a little bronze tinged in fall for some fall colour.
Peony flowers secrete a sticky, sweet substance, and ants (not surprisingly) go nuts for it. They don’t harm the flowers, though, and you just have to remember to knock the ants off before handling them. It doesn’t bother me much at all.
Just as a kind of peony aside, my old one in front is a MONSTER. We went out and bought a special, heavy-duty peony ring for it; when I put it over the growing plant, it looked huge and far too heavy - now the peony has grown all over it and it looks just right.
Well I finally got the front garden weeded and planted, just before it started to rain again. Between the weather and being so busy I’ll be lucky if I get my back garden in and have anything more than rhubarb and dandelions to eat from it.
In other news, now that the front garden is in I have discovered I am allergic to Calgary carper juniper. I spotted them at the garden centre and thought why not? Something to put in the front garden and forget about. Well I got that in, stuck in the impatiens that I got from my cousin (she gave them out at her wedding reception, thanks to another relative who has a greenhouse so I got some lovely red impatiens out front now! I’ve always just had pansies and marigolds, I really should start branching out…) and the barely started marigolds and when I finally stopped working I realized my arms were itching like mad and look to see them covered in red bumps where the juniper brushed along them as I was working it out of the pot to plant it.
So now while it drips on my newly planted garden I’m waiting for the benadryl to kick in.
Hah - I knew I was allergic to trees and grasses, but I learned last summer that I’m allergic to junipers, too, in just about the same way (planting a bunch of them, and coming away with red, bumpy, rashy arms).
I’ve got my next bed all planted up now - it’s an evergreen bed, with a mugo pine, and three different kinds of junipers, as well as some silvermound artemisia and thyme. We still have to put all the bricks around it, but the plants are in, and the mulch is down - it looks good! Next project - digging the last bed in the front yard.
OK, stupid question time…
This is the first year I’ve grown peas. They’re coming along pretty nicely (except for those two that refuse to climb the fence and are trying to mug the turnips instead). Great!
Uh… how do I know when to pick them?
You’ll be able to tell. The shells begin to fill out and you can start to see the peas. If you pick them a bit early, you’ll see that the peas are a little bit smaller than you like. If you let them go too long, they get starchier, so it’s better to err on the side of smaller. You get the hang of it after a few times.
I don’t bother planting chillis any longer. They just grow from the seeds from the previous years. Sure enough they grew and I made some chilli con carne. I have no idea what the hell did grow but it had a kick like a mule (not that I have ever seen a mule).
I used one chilli and mis=dway through the meal my wife and I gave up with tears streaming down our faces 
Hmmm… looks like it’s about time for some pickin’ then. I grow them for my husband, and he likes the small, “early” peas so I probably can’t screw up.
I’m so jealous - my pea plants are about two inches tall. I’m due to plant the next bunch in my other garden patch soon - next week if the weather allows. I love fresh garden peas - my parents always had a huge garden when I was growing up, and I took all that fresh produce for granted then.
ETA: We earned our vegetables, though - I can’t remember learning which were weeds and which were vegetable sprouts, I’ve been weeding gardens so long. 
I started half my peas indoors, and half I planted early, so my early peas were paid for by some considerable loss along the way. But I plan for that.
Right now I’m getting turnips, onions, spinach, lettuce and now peas. I need to thin the beets out, which means more greens and mini-beets, which I’ll probably make into soup.
I wound up with so much greens I’ve already frozen a batch. And we’re having greens for lunch.
For someone who is :dubious: about the health supplements and magickal diets being promoted on TV and the Internet these days, I have to struggle with credulity about popular plant supplements.
For instance, there are lots of gardeners who swear by Spray-N-Grow products. The basic stuff is advertised as a micronutrient solution that’s supposed to produce fantastic results in all your ornamental plants, produce etc., when sprayed in a mist for foliar feeding on a regular basis. I don’t know what makes the Secret Formula special, but there are very particular instructions for mixing it in lukewarm (never cold) water, letting it sit for a few minutes before spraying, not using it combined with fertilizer (except the maker’s very special own organic fertilizer, don’t you know). Controlled trials? Don’t know of any.
For years on and off I’ve used another watering supplement called Superthrive, which again a lot of gardeners swear produces great results. You add a few drops to a gallon of water or so, and zowie! I couldn’t say positively it does anything one way or another, but I like the weird bottle labeling and claims made therein (sample (paraphrased): “In 1940 municipal authorities in Bingo, Idaho planted 4,000 bare root trees in a snowstorm using Superthrive, and every one survived and produced a bumper crop of coconuts six months later!”
Also, if you visit your local [del]marijuana growers’ supply store[/del] hydroponics place, there is generally a big selection of Magic Juice products made from kelp, greensand, humic acid, gecko tails and god knows what else, selling for big $$$ and all promised to grow fantastic crops.
Do others use this stuff and have fabulous results, or are we talking about mass gardening placebo effect?
Thanks to Broomstick for the chard advice.
You’re welcome.
All I use for fertilizer is plain old-fashioned compost, basically kitchen scraps, lawn clippings, tree/shrub trimmings, and probably lots of critter poop from things visiting it looking for a free lunch (I do compost in a very casual manner).
I get good results from, basically, garbage. For free. 
I agree with Broomstick.
I went to a few Good Gardening presentations last year. Different continent etc but the message was use mulch and compost and you don’t need anything else.
In particular they frowned upon all the stuff for the lawn.
Yeah, we just use compost - partially from our own garden compost heap and partially from the city’s composting facility (they sell it on the cheap). And we really have very good results from our plants. Maybe with the super-duper fertilizers our results would be even better but it seems like a lot of expense and hassle for minimal gain.
Hello, gardening mavens–
Has anyone managed to root a rhododendron cutting? I have one at the back that I just love the colour of. (It’s a deep pink that’s almost red, but not quite.) I found some instructions online, so I took green cuttings this morning, scored the base of the stem parts, dipped in rooting hormone and put in sterilised soil. The other two cuttings I took I am just going to do my usual method–cut, stick in water, leave in sunny window and ignore for six months.
I’ve never done this with woody perennials, but the approach sounds reasonable with me. I like to hedge my bets by trying more than one method at a time.
I haven’t gotten to do much gardening this week as it’s poured just about every time that I’ve wanted to get out there to plant some more stuff. I don’t have that much left to do, but it would be so nice to get it done!
I basically just mulch the flower bed and add some bone meal when planting (I got that from my uncle) and egg shells also. Maybe I should use some compost or fertilizer but I’ve never really bothered. This is only the second year of garden, so I haven’t had much experimenting since I was my son’s age and we had a very large garden in the back.
As to the cuttings… I have no idea, haven’t tried doing that so no help from this peanut gallery. Sounds like you’re doing right though.
My tomatoes were shifted to a large pot yesterday and today they seem to have just leaped up, so I guess they needed more space. Everything looks a bit happier, so that’s good at least.