Okay, I just checked and my basil is seriously pot bound. That’s probably the problem. Will have to buy bigger pots.
Sadly, my corn did not sprout. I knew the ground was too cold but I had to do it so that there was enough time for them to give me ears. I’ll try again next year but I’ll cover the ground with some black plastic first-- to warm it up.
Also not sprouted-- the columbine I put in a pot.
Ah, there you go. It’s a victim of its own success!
I also planted a Coppertina ninebark yesterday. I’m hoping this one thrives - it should be quite spectacular!
When the seed packets say “Keep area moist after planting”, they must mean it.
Years past I’ve been afraid of over-watering and haven’t had much luck with seeds. This spring we’ve had a lot of rain. The garden has had standing water several times. Turns out (so far) the seedlings are doing better than ever. And this is the first year we’ve had decent radishes.
So yay for rain!
Here is my newest bed, 99% completed (just need to mulch it and finish cutting and placing the last two stones).
A new bed sure does look kinda sad - I’ll have to post pictures for the next couple of years to see how it develops. 
ETA: AuntiePam, I just finished most of my planting, and it keeps on raining here, too - my timing has worked out pretty good this year!
Dear all,
I’d just like to share a small project that my partner and I have started.
Just across the street from our house (in south London) there’s a small plot of ground outside a children’s playground. As the plot is outside the playground it is beyond the purview of the local council’s parks department; it instead belongs to the highways agency. The highways agency, unsurprisingly, are more interested in maintaining the roads than a small plot of scrub so it has become virtually abandoned.
We have decided to adopt this plot and have a go at a bit of guerilla gardening. A few days ago we finished clearing the plot of junk. We managed to collect 10 large rubble sacks full of bricks, stones, bicycle pedals and handlebars, miniature spirits bottles (which we suspect are crack pipes), heaps of junk food wrappers and weeds. This is what it looked like before we started:
If it ever stops raining I’ll take an “after” photo.
We’ve now sown a wildflower mix of cornflowers, marigolds, chamomile, poppies, campion, daisies etc. Hopefully in a few weeks we’ll be attracting some bees and butterflies for the kids to enjoy. Wish us luck!
Good luck, RobDog! (Hey, did you go to any “Chelsea Fringe” events in London last week? I like listening to the Radio 4 “Gardeners’ Question Time” podcasts, and the most recent one was about the Chelsea Fringe: it sounded like a nifty event! Are you going to be one of the Edible Bus Stop projects?)
RobDog, what a fun and exciting project! I would love to see some pictures once the sun comes out.
Sadly no. We nearly did. We checked the website for the “pop-up park” in Battersea Power Station which said dogs were allowed on a short lead, so off we set with the small hound. When we got there though the security guard refused us entry 
On the bright side, on the walk back to our house we went through Battersea Park where we met a couple of Chelsea Fringe volunteers. We told them our story and they were very sorry, so they gave us great handfuls of wild seed packets… guess where they’re going 
That’s a great project, RobDog. There are any number of houses in my neighbourhood where I’d love to volunteer to plant a bed or two for them - they’ve got a lawn and one shrub, that’s it. I suppose they just like it that way, though. Sigh.
I envy everyone with proper lawns and gardens! It’s extremely difficult to get a place in Seoul with any kind of earth. Our house does have a bit of dirt but (I think I posted about it upthread) it’s in full shade and pretty damp. I actually might try planting some forget-me-nots and let them just seed themselves. I’m also kind of afraid of digging around down there because last time I found a dead rat. o_O
On a completely different topic - does anyone have any experience with succulents? I’ve been resisting buying them because they seem to be the “trendy” plant nowadays but the flower shop near my school were selling some and they just looked too cute to pass up. I’ve seen a lot of fancy succulent arrangements on Pinterest where they’re all crowded together in a bird cage or a terrarium. They look adorable, but - don’t they eventually all choke each other and/or outgrow the container? Or are all those fancy arrangements understood to be temporary anyway?
Also if anyone could help me ID one of my succulents that would be awesome: Succulents | hazelolive | Flickr - I can’t figure out what the bottom one (the one with the slender leaves) is, the others I managed to find by googling.
I don’t know what the bottom one is, but the top two seem to be hen-and-chicks, which I have in my yard as sun-loving, drought-tolerant plants - are you sure they’ll do okay in a shady, damp yard? They don’t go crazy and take over my yard, but I’m in Zone 3 - they might go crazy in a warmer place. 
I’ve grown some succulent houseplants and they’re pretty tolerant as long as they get good light, free-draining soil, and not too much water. I would be inclined to group them
in multiple pots rather than planting a whole bunch of different plants in one container, though.
Growing some yard-long beans this year for the first time (MIL gave me some potted starts) so we’ll see what happens with those.
Cukes & 'maters are in the ground already, sunflower seeds are popping up, and I’m hoping for the same for the lovely new zinnia varieties I’ve sown - some years I have fantastic success with zinnias from seeds and other years, not so much.
I have a desert willow I started from seed years ago that’s almost as tall as I am. Bloom already, dammit! BLOOM, I command thee!
If you get that incantation to work you need to tell me exactly how you said it, so I can use it on my supposedly-yellow irises. I put a nice brick edging around the plot so the city mower can’t cut them down anymore and they still just keep sending up more leaf blades with nary a bud to be seen. :mad:
Oh, we’re going to keep them in pots on the balcony - the balcony gets lots of sun! That is where all our plants are actually.
Was just reseeding parts of the flower plots after torrential washout rains last week, and it occurred to me to wonder how much I spent on gardening stuff this year and how much I can expect to recover of that cost, by harvesting things I’d normally buy.
With mostly seeds, one plant, a bit of soil and fertilizer and some S&H costs, it looks as though I’ll have spent just about US$100 on all my gardening purchases. What would that work out to in foodstuffs picked instead of bought? (I’m assuming that all the flowers provide no monetary value in that I wouldn’t have gone out and bought any if I weren’t growing any; a bit conservative but probably mostly accurate.)
At about $4 per dry pint of organic cherry or grape tomatoes, I’d need to harvest 25 dry pints over the course of the summer, which I doubt will happen from six tomato plants, but I might get half that much. Romaine lettuce is a buck or so per head, and I should get a dozen or more of those, I hope; then there’s the chard and the edamame and the bush beans and mayyybe the cucumbers.
If I harvest what I’m hoping to, I think I might well break even financially on my garden costs, even with this stringent accounting structure! What about you? (Or does that kind of thinking take all the fun out of it as far as you’re concerned? ;))
We’ve spent about $40 for tomato plants and other seeds – cukes, melons, squash, radishes, eggplant. We do it mainly for the tomatoes, for slicing and canning. I know we’ll at least break even.
Maybe I’ll keep track of the harvest this time. It’d be fun to know.
I never count. It would be hard to figure. I make at least 5 stock pot full of tomato sauce with my own tomatoes, garlic, sweet peppers and herbs, plus at least a quart of hot sauce with the hot peppers. We never get to eat many strawberries, though and it doesn’t look like the corn experiment will pan out.
The herbs are all old plants, except for the sweet basil.
Plus there’s never having to buy tomatoes, garlic or sweet peppers for most of the summer.
Considering my veggies are my kid’s and husband’s Mother’s Day gift to me every year, I guess I make out pretty well!