My rodent problem is the squirrels - they like to dig up every fricking thing in my yard (bulbs, new plants, etc.). You’d think having a cat in the yard would discourage them, but not much, it doesn’t.
Most of my plants seem to have survived the weekend of snow and cold temperatures; I think I’m going to have to put out every sheet and towel in the house for Wednesday, though, when the temperature is expected to go down to -6ºC overnight.
Well, FINALLY got this going!
I scratched on the early planting cycle because of the whacky “spring” weather, including a decent frost mid-May so probably all for the best.
As of today I have the onions, bok choy, spinach, chard, cucumbers, and lettuce in. The lettuce is a risk, as we’ve gone straight into hot summer but I thought, what the heck, and planted in the part-shade, cooler spot of the garden so we’ll see what happens. I started with onion sets that were beginning to sprout, so they’re charging along. The cucumbers are the Seed Savers Japanese climbing cucumbers which are really yummy BUT they ate my beans and both varieties of squash last year so they’ve been sentenced to an isolated trellis (reinforced) with space around it to grow. I will try to get some heirloom squash this year.
I have a squad of volunteer dill this year. I guess some of it did survive the swallowtail caterpillars last year.
It is the first of June and I haven’t managed to do ANYTHING with the garden this year. Haven’t even dug it over. Haven’t even ordered seeds. 
:o :mad:
I did plant bulbs last fall? They weren’t as abundant as I had expected but some came up and looked nice?
I really am going to start the garden in the next couple of weeks?
Back when I have actual progress to report. Go the rest of you!
[slinks shamefaced out of thread]
Last year I tried straw bale gardening for the first time and it was such a success I’m doing it again this year (and a friend, prompted by my success, is doing it as well.) Tomato yield from the bales was insane compared to in-the-ground and yay, no digging up beds.
In a combination of straw bales, in-the-ground and containers, I have:
A ridiculous variety of tomatoes, mostly heirloom, including black and yellow plum, green striped, pineapple, sweet 100s, German beefsteak and black prince. Summer squash. Winter squash. Scotch Bonnet and Thai dragon hot peppers. Yellow and red sweet bell peppers. Rainbow chard and kale. Asparagus. Broccoli and brussels sprouts. Green beans. I share a lot of what I can’t keep up with, plus freeze so I have home-grown vegetables all winter. Next year I’m putting in a bed for root vegetables.
And herbs: three types of basil, catnip, sage, oregano, thyme, cilantro, peppermint, rosemary, parsley.
And lots of flowers! I love putting in a garden in spring time, especially after a long hard winter. It’s just magical how all the perennials come up from the previously-frozen ground, and going to the garden centers and choosing veggies and annuals every spring is one of life’s little pleasures.
Well, at least the balcony baskets of petunias got planted and installed yesterday! Balcony baskets make me feel like I’m not totally shirking my horticultural duties. 
:o
Very light on gardening this season. I think it was the endless, horrible winter that got everybody down on gardening around here. We had to shovel snow in May!
So this year we have potted plants for show. Verbena and vinca out on the sunny steps and impatiens in the shady back. The only veggies planted are one tomato of unknown variety and one zucchini and one eggplant. This was all hubby’s idea, even though I warned him that squash dies in our backyard. I think we have squash killing microbes.
Oh, and, my last year Mother’s Day gift from my son, which I thought died because I did not get around to putting it into a pot until July and it was brown and dry all last year. This year in May, despite the the snow, the blueberry bush turned green. Surprise!
I’m thinking it needs a bigger pot. We’ll see.
I feel like I finally got caught up with the gardening today. I now have my spinach, bok choy, lettuce, chard, dill, parsley, onions, two types of squash, two types of maize, carrots, and radishes in the ground. The radishes and lettuce are a bit iffy, as we’re heading into summer heat, but what the heck, I have plenty of seeds.
I want to further extend the garden but never did get a rototiller this year, so I’m using some scrap plywood to cover the extension area for a couple weeks to kill off the grass and plant life. Once that happens it’s a lot easier to till the ground by hand and start planting. So that strip will be for the mid-summer sowing of what I hope to harvest in the later fall.
Was thinning out the seedlings today and came to the volunteer dill patch. Way too thick. So I now have 5 handful bunches of dill drying in the house.
Also had some storm debris take out 2/3 of my chard, so I replanted that today, too.
I have one pot that has garlic chives and regular chives in it, one pot with a tomato plant, one pot with a green pepper plant, one pot with a sport pepper plant, and one pot with a habanero pepper plant in it. We can only garden in pots on the deck. Hopefully, the chipmunks won’t eat everything this year like they did last year. Husband put up some screening around them - hopefully that’ll work.
I’ve got strawberries, lemongrass, chives, mint, and parsley in pots. I’ve also got a Bush Goliath tomato and Yummy Snacking pepper in pots. I planted a Sweet 100 tomato in the ground, but I planted really late (Zone 8b), so I’m not sure anything will come of it.
So far, I’ve gotten two ripe tomatoes from the Bush Goliath, and there are a few more green ones on the plant. They’re supposed to be fine in 2-gallon pots, but I think I should have gone bigger. The ripe tomatoes were two inches across instead of three to four inches across, and there aren’t any more flowers on the plant.
The pepper plant has several fully-grown green peppers on it and quite a few more peppers ranging from “babies” to mid-sized. The strawberries are putting out a couple ripe berries at a time. I should have gone with June-bearing rather than everbearing; I’d prefer to have one large crop all at once. Maybe I just need more plants! 
My neighbors left a bag full of green onions, summer squash, zucchini, and plums on my porch the other day. I never have to plant zucchini or summer squash because someone is always trying to get rid of theirs. I know I’ll be getting some of their cucumbers, too.
Oh, and just wanted to add - for dinner we had sauteed vegetables (along with chicken and biscuits) and the green beans and onions were both from the garden
We live in a 3-flat condo building, and the Garden Committee seems to be mostly me with some help from Tom Scud - so I really can’t do a whole farm or anything because we just have a maybe 10’ by 15’ patch of sad-looking grass in front, supplemented by flowers and ferns bit by bit, as I can figure out what will actually grow in low light (there is a huge tree shading the front of the building entirely). It’s coming along, but of course not as quickly as I would like. I planted some clematis vines along the front fence, and so far only 2 of the 3 seem to have come up at all, and I guess we’ll see whether they manage to flower later in the summer. The Boston ivy I planted along the side fence seems to have disappeared entirely, but some of the bulbs around the side and front edges of the building are popping up now. Remind me in the fall to plant some more tulips and daffodils for next spring.
I’ve decided to see if I can get cherry tomatoes to grow in a window box on the back porch, which is the one place we have any sun to speak of. So far I have a tomato forest, and it looks like I’m going to have to thin them out. But the ones I thin out will need to be given away, because I have nowhere else to plant them. Or maybe I can plant them in the roughly 2’ x 2’ spot on the south side of the building, where I currently have some herbs growing (mint, basil, thyme, and lavender). I know tomatoes are supposed to need sun, but how much sun really? I did plant some basil seed there, but it doesn’t seem to be doing much of anything. I should really go up to my friend’s farm and get some more horse manure, because the tiger lilies really seemed to like that - apparently last year was the first time they had bloomed since before we moved here 4 years ago.
Meanwhile, the wild strawberry seeds I planted in another hanging basket on the back porch don’t seem to be doing anything yet. I planted them 2 weeks ago. Is it hopeless, or am I just impatient? The morning glories I planted maybe a month ago in the other window boxes are starting to do their thing, and I am hoping the sweet pea seeds I added last week will play nicely with them. Last year we had morning glories climbing up some plastic string to the deck above ours, which beat the heck out of looking at the alley.
Any tips on perennials that do well in planters and/or in part shade? Also, I just added some grass seed in front - any tips on making that happy?
P.S. Those of you who order seeds/bulbs, where do you order them from? I could use some tips.
I’ve got a few tomatoes and peas, plus sunflowers and chocolate flowers which appear to be taking over. The flowers produce a fine crop of goldfinches which can be heard chattering and meowing much of the day as they search for the seeds.
I get a lot of my seeds and plantlettes at Burpee Seeds. Although I usually don’t get my bulbs there. I don’t remember the name of the place I got bulbs from online.
I am convinced that I can raise forsythia on a concrete block without water. I ordered a bunch of stuff, including vegetables, from Summerstone Nursery in Tennessee – none of it survived the first or second shipments except the forsythia. (exaggeration, buy not by much. Summerstone is not a place you want to order from)
Very good places to get seeds from:
Chiltern Seeds (England, huge variety)
J.L. Hudson Seeds (California, many unusual and native plant seeds)
Pinetree Garden Seeds (Maine, bargain prices for seed packets with smaller quantities)
Johnny’s Selected Seeds (Maine, good for vegetables)
Brent and Becky’s Bulbs is a pretty good mail-order source.
My vegetables went in barely two weeks ago (after the last frost) so not much ready yet, although chard is going crazy and is on the menu tonight. 
Has anyone ever planted asparagus? I prepared a bed for them and planted 18 crowns (50:50 Jersey Giant and Mary Something-or-other) and so far I only have nine coming up. I know they arefinicky about growing conditions so I was careful to go “by the book” in preparing an asparagus bed. I can’t find any hard information about how long before the spears and ferns start emerging, though. I need to add more soil to the bed but I don’t want to smother the still-to-emerge crowns. So any info on asparagus care and feeding from those with experience would be great.
That’s the great thing about chard - it’s always “going crazy”. That thing is like a weed, doesn’t mind a light snow, doesn’t mind heat, not prone to a lot of insect pests…
Oh, and it tastes good, too!
Bit late to the thread, but since we moved to a flat with a garden last year, I’ve been building up a collection of containers in front (the landlord has it all in rocks so I can’t plant in the ground) and slowly cleaning up and redesigning the overgrown perennial bed in back. In front I have two wading pools, 1 with native bee habitat wildflowers and 1 with root veg (carrots, beets, leeks, parsnips never came up) and peas. Other pots with peas as well, staggered for ease of harvest.
Sunflowers, runner beans, more beets, nasturtiums, lemon thyme, spring onions, mixed leaf lettuce, spinach, strawberries (cultivated in pots in front, wild in the ground in back that came with the place). Pansies and morning glories. Starting some foxgloves, lupins and hollyhocks to go into the ground once they’re big enough. Two redcurrant bushes that should start producing next year or so, and two blueberry bushes that are producing now. I should have ripening blueberries soon, so I’ll have to get some bird mesh asap so they don’t get them first.