Here’s a good source for native plants and seeds.
We’ve got 3 “whiskey barrels” laden with tomato plants and a few other herbs (of the culinary variety, you deviants!).
I planted some lettuce (romaine and red leaf) plants in the back garden, in the sunniest spot possible, though it seems they are facing too much competition from nearby trees. I might try replanting them in the front, as it gets more sun, though I’m more concerned over the lawn service spraying them with something there.
And I’ve just set up a tumbling composter - as in, last night, and it’s waiting its first meal: a bowlful of shredded paper napkins unused after a recent takeout meal, the chopped up cardboard drink carrier (ditto), and two lonely apple cores, waiting for just a bit more “green” stuff to toss in. “Brown” stuff may actually be a problem for us: we’re rarely using paper napkins / towels any more, we only get a newspaper weekly (and we don’t know if its ink is safe). I could hack up the box it came in though for some reason that seems vaguely cannibalistic :D. I’m seriously considering polling my neighborhood to see if anyone has a hamster or guinea pig and would like to contribute the next cage cleanout to the process!!
Evidently I’m not the only person who’s newly interested in composting: this particular unit has a manufacturer list price of 129 bucks but had been routinely selling for 80ish; Home Depot and WalMart still list it for that but both say out of stock. Amazon and Target have it for well north of 200 bucks. I finally got mine on eBay for just a couple bucks over list price.
Just planted out five Fijian Dwarf coconut starts in my yard in Hawaii. They start producing nuts in about 4 or 5 years as long as I keep them well watered with ocean (salt) water. And the best thing is that the nuts are only about 4 feet off the ground.
IF you can get relatively cool temps and full sun yes, it will grow faster, but high temps and full sun result in early seeds. Lettuce tolerates partial shade just fine. It does not need full sun.
I used to use the cage liners from my parrots’ cages. Of course, that means using a compostable thing for the cage bottom, but the bird crap is great for composting. Anyone in your neighborhood have chickens, parakeets, parrots…?
My Strawberries are blooming like crazy.
My special wildflower mix has shot up. Black-eyed Susan’s will be the first bloomers.
The U. of Fla. extension service says that while coconut palms are salt-tolerant, they don’t need salty water.
Seems to me that watering with ocean water would poison soil and offer no horticultural advantage.
My lettuce has sprouted! Yay!
Planting a seed is confidence there will be a future. Growing things are an embodiment of hope.
I did find the marigold seeds. We’ll see if they’re still viable.
Quite a number of people around me are cutting out lawn space for gardens… and are spending the big bucks on plants and seeds. My neighbor is one. Sadly, he has a groundhog living in burrow under his deck. Ground hogs will strip gardens clean and they are immune to poisons… so he’s kind of screwed (as are all of my other gardening neighbors). Home Depot and Lowes are happy though.
So is that groundhog, who has grown nice and fat on all that expensive salad…
My chard have germinated!
That leaves the marigolds still underground, but I did plant them later. And the seeds aren’t entirely new so I don’t expect all of them to rise up.
It’s silly how excited I get when new sprouts emerge.
Not silly! Anything sprouting is always a nice surprise, even when you know exactly what went where.
I was gonna put out some hyacinth bean and more moonflower, but it’s chilly as hell down in the 40s tonight so I’ll hold off. They like warm soil. Hopefully the cool night helps the lettuce, which looks suspiciously like it’s thinking of bolting soon.
I did get some cosmos outside the other day along the fence. It’s gonna be a hodgepodge of color!
Moonflower is in the ground, along with blue forget-me-nots which I have never grown before …
Hurray! I made it to the community garden today and my patch is looking, well, OK! I was concerned as it’s been a bit neglected. The irrigation is supposed to run 3X a week, but I’m not sure how much I trust it, especially for newly-transplanted seedlings. But the bell pepper plant has doubled in size, the tomatoes look great (one has stems as thick as my thumbs!), the onions I planted back in winter are bulbing up nicely, and, wonder of wonders, two of the cuke seedlings I transplanted right before the heatwave have come back to life after their sizzling sunburn! I have some more cuke seeds in my (unsuitable) seed starting pots, I don’t have a good spot for them and I didn’t buy specific seedling mix, which is really vital. Heed my stupid error! Use a proper substrate or suffer damping off!
I also made a kind of mini worm farm in my plot. I have a Can o Worms commercial composter at home, and I dug a bucketful of castings into the bed a few weeks ago. But I also took a few handfuls of red wrigglers, dug a hole, cut the bottom out of a pot, and filled it up with weeds and other green waste. It looks great! I’ve topped up the greenwaste a few times, and it seems to be getting churned up pretty quick, and when I dig down a bit, the wormies are very apparent. Pretty much like this: How To Build a Worm Tunnel In-ground Worm Farm – Deep Green Permaculture
I spent a bit of quality time this morning strawing my strawberries, which are starting to produce at a prodigious rate. The slug is the Oregon state bird and there are a kajillion of them and they all lust after my strawberries so it’s good to get them up out of the muck and mulch. Had to have a little discussion with the gooseberries next door about being good neighbors and not trying to overrun Strawberry Manor with their aggressive brand of spiky invasive behavior. I don’t think they’re gonna listen though so the rooted branches I find will be clipped and given to neighbors or planted right next to the blackberry tangles, see who wins that fight.
I’ve got cranberries on my cranberry bush - not many, since it’s still pretty small, but it’s a start.
Peas, green beans, spinach, zucchini (courgettes, to some of you foreigners), three kinds of chili peppers, leeks, catnip, basil, lettuce, tomatoes, oregano, and thyme. All in window boxes on the back porch and in the old, no-longer-usable grill.
Looks like my marigolds are coming up after all! ::: happy dance ::::
My lettuce and chard are about ready for the first thinning.
The peas are finally starting to produce - they took forever to germinate because of our weird weather. The bed of greens and lettuce is finally starting to look like something other than a tiny bunch of sprouts. The beans are starting to climb up the ugly chain-link fence! I think I’ve only grown beans once, and not these kinds (Blauhilde and Dragon’s Tongue), so I am curious to see how they will do and how tall they will get. We just ate the first couple of strawberries, nd this week they should start producing in earnest. I have been giving away tons of mint and raspberry plants and am starting to give away a ton of volunteer tomato seedlings from our compost (2 pots of them so far an hopefully more in a couple of days). The cucumbers, melons, and squashes are starting to chug along, and someone gave me some opal basil seed. Last summer, we made a canopy over the patio by filling 4 giant planters with concrete to set some pressure-treated 4 x 4s in there, with hardware attached at the top for a shade. I left the top few inches empty of concrete and filled it with dirt after drilling some drainage holes below the rim, and planted hanging nasturtium seed in three of them and the opal basil in the fourth. Georgian food, anyone?
Last summer, the gas company ripped up part of our lawn to replace lines, and the City finally got around to replacing the sod a couple of weeks ago. They only replaced the very specific parts they ripped up, and the parkway looked kind of ridiculous - it’s shaded by a huge tree, and the rest of the grass has always ben patchy and crappy-looking. We have never done much with it, and I was about to buy some grass seed to fill in the patches, but changed my mind and decided to build a bed of some kind and do something more interesting that doesn’t require mowing. A local landscaping supply place was selling everything for 75% off last week, so I bought 410 lbs. of stone slabs for $26 (! Woohoo!) instead of just throwing a couple of 4 x 4s out there as borders, and yesterday we dug up some soil from a now-defunct Petersen Garden Project site and filled the bed with it. A couple of members of a nearby neighborhood gardening Facebook group who has given me tons of native plants gave me some more (purple allium, Russian sage, and nodding onion), and I am going to plant them there, as well as moving some white allium from the side yard. And my wildflower seed mixes from American Meadows arrived today! The partial shade mix will go in the parkway garden, and the Fragrant Mix will go in the parts of the side yard where the annual seeds that I planted didn’t take. Probably not until tomorrow, when hopefully my back will recover from moving 410 lbs. of stone slabs and the dirt to fill the bed…
Time to go outside and work in the garden, one of the few things keeping me sane right now!
Are you sure those are marigolds? Could they be peonies?
I have four cherry tomato plants (Sweeties) growing in fabric pots on a table on the sunny side of the house, and three more in hanging upside-down planters. (I am hoping that these locations will discourage the bunnies, who are everywhere in our neighborhood.) I have five small fabric pots of parsley on my kitchen table, and a mint plant in a container. I think I have defeated the massive fungus gnat infestation that these had by drenching the pots with diluted hydrogen peroxide. I’m waiting a couple more days for that to dissipate and then adding bacillus thurengiensis to the indoor pots, and maybe to the tomatoes too. I haven’t seen gnats on my tomatoes outside and the leaves aren’t yellowing, so I don’t think they are also infested. I have no idea how the gnats got in, though, unless they were in a bag of soil, so I’m a little worried about the outdoor plants, which are in soil from the same bag.
I have a dreadful purple thumb and have never been able to keep plants alive long enough to get much off of them, but we’ve been eating the mint this year, at least. Maybe this will be the year when it all works.
I have three tomato plants of this variety, two in-ground and one in a tub (our local library gave away seed packets). Looks like the first ripe fruit might be ready by the end of the month.
Two rows of beans are up, and Mrs. J. just planted a couple rows of ornamental corn, so hopefully the ears will be ready for Thanksgiving decorations.