My dad came over a few days ago and dug up 2 square metres of lawn and put sleepers around it. Today we went and got a load of soil and chicken manure. So now we have a raised garden bed for me and the kids to plant veggies in. Thanks, Dad!
We have planted tomatoes, watermelon, radish and lettuce in seed trays. In a couple of weeks we will buy some seedlings, cucumber, chilli and celery, and put everything in the garden. I have never had a veggie patch before so we’ll see how it goes.
That IS an ugly tomato! And ripe, too! 
Weedy, I hope your username doesn’t match your garden. 
My Casablanca lilies are about to bloom - they were gorgeous last year, but they got really hail damaged this year. I’m hoping one or two can produce an actual bloom; the rest might be write-offs.
I’m trying to work out if I have time to plant anything here in the UK that’ll last at the allotment- I’ve been away and/or injured for july and august, so I’ve barely been down there except to harvest stuff, and all the broccolli seedlings I was given got eaten by slugs.
Any inspiration for winter crops that can be planted so late?
Beans, peas, carrots, lettuce?
Are sunflowers (I’m in the Northeast) supposed to bloom about now? Maybe it’s too early, but here it is a week into September and I am positive that last year at this time we had at least a dozen volunteers, of all sizes (from scattered birdseed), springing up all over the yard and in our deck containers.
We have a pretty good looking sunflower out front, and we’re zone 3 so I’d say yup, they should be blooming by now. Do they look like they are up to anything?
I have some beans and lettuce, the beets and peas don’t look too happy and mom planted some corn, we amazingly have some growth but I doubt we’ll see any. Nothing on the pumpkins either, but the plants look hearty so who knows.
All our sunflowers have been volunteers from scattered birdseed. They would pop up, everywhere, big and little. This year, not ONE. (Our pepper plants are thriving, but no flowers yet! They are saying, ‘we love it here! We’re going to grow and grow and grow until we’re six feet tall’. The fools don’t know the clock is ticking…)
There are sunflowers blooming all over the place here in Ohio and they’ve been doing it for quite some time (a month, maybe), so I’d say yes, yours should have at least started by now salinqmind.
Thanks for the responses. It’s odd there isn’t a one. One year, a great big orange and yellow sunflower popped up in the bushes in front of our house and stubbornly turned its face to the house, as if it was standing in the corner and sulking, lol.
Here’s a question for the masses: We had a very hot, dry July. Now most of our tomatoes have hard, green sections running through otherwise ripe fruit. I assume there is a connection, but I’m at a loss as to what is actually going on. Ideas?
Your pepper plants have not flowered yet?
I looked after a week of rain, and did spot a few flowers today. I hope there’ll be time for peppers to grow, there’s a month and a half or two months before the first frost.
Anyone here tried to grow their own mushrooms?
I decided to give it a shot and bought one a kit. The first ones were portabella mushrooms (the big brown ones). I got a reasonable crop but the great thing was that the flavour was superb- far better than any mushrooms I have bought at a store.
This time I bought a kit for the white ones (don’t know the breed). Same story again- so far not a bumper crop but large, tender and really full of flavour.
I don’t know what makes the difference as the kits are produced commercially. They cost about $15 here and for fun and a great taste I would recommend giving them a try.
I live in NY State and was out mowing the lawn and leaves. There is some horrible shrub sending up stalks of leaves. I think it’s some kind of sumac, not poisonous, no flowers or seeds. They are tough wiry vine-like things, leaves are long and oval, dark shiny green, pointed, with a very fine serrated edge. Over the years I’ve been cutting them with scissors as they grow along the fence and at base of trees, but that seems to make them grow even faster! Do you have these? I believe they grow into a big shrub with a shiny dark red-gray bark - hard as iron to cut down. I suppose I’ll go out and try to cut them down, or run them over with the mower, but again I ask, any idea what plant this is?
If you can get a pic, that would help. They could be Tree-of-Heaven (which, despite the name, are hell…horribly invasive and difficult to control). Also possibly black walnut, which is also tough to actually kill…suckers come up from the stumps forever.
Sorry, no camera. But they certainly aren’t anything to look at. They seem to be suckers sprouting up around a woody stem. There are tough wiry twigs growing straight up, sprouting from even a cut down stump. The more I cut them off, the faster they grow back. There’s one grown into a tree, the bark is like birch, but a dark red with grey horizontal streaks, the wood is hard as can be. I just wondered if anyone living in the northeast had this in their yard. (My yard is half wild, there’s goldenrod and asters in the far reaches, so I’m sure this thing can be found in abundance in the field down the road.) Today I went out with shears and cut down about 50 of them in the yard. Just something I have to live with, but I wondered what they were called.
Just to make you all jealous:
My first frost was probably 6 weeks ago. I picked every tomato that wasn’t already bad or way too green. Even though I have had to throw out probably 75% of them over time, I still have a few that are probably good to eat.
Win! Garden tomatoes in the Midwest in December!
Well, I had some little tomatoes that were quite green when I picked them, and I ate one of those today - it was not a great tomato.
I took a pepper plant and some herbs inside in fall, and I’ve got a bad case of aphids. Darn those little squishy bugs! Darn them to heck! Anybody have any tips on eradicating them? I’ve tried two different kinds of insecticidal soap so far, and neither have worked. I’m just picking them off by hand at this point.
It’s December 3rd and my chard and kale are still producing - we had some for dinner last night, fresh from the garden. Sure, there’s a bit of frost damage but the plants are still sending out leaves. Yum!
This, after 3 episodes of getting down into the mid-20’s at night (that’s sub-freezing for you Celcius types).