4/22/20 Let's grow something...
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Happy Earth Day
Well, I finally got my vegetable garden planted for this year during my last off week. After hours of work with a garden fork, tiller, spade, rake, wheelbarrow and trowel, I now have:
jalapenos (destined for poppers, chipotles/chipotle powder, pepper jelly etc)
green peppers
cukes
yellow squash
zucchini
eggplant (traditional and japanese)
cantaloupes
watermelons
okra (to pickle and to eat roasted/grilled)
and of course
tomatoes (3 different types)
all growing in the backyard.
The herb garden has rosemary, oregano (regular and spicy), thyme, cilantro, parsley, dill and basil (both green and purple).
Plus, the fruit trees are setting pears, peaches, apples and figs, and there are blooms on the lemon tree, and the olive trees (2 of them)… trees not blooms smartass.
Oh… and the pecans look like they are making as well.
How about you, Do you plant a garden?
What kind? Flowers? Veggies? Fruits? All the above?
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purple loves @barney.
Have a couple raised vegetable beds. Usually only grow green peppers, pole beans, and tomatoes (cherry and full sized). Last year added brussels but those were more hassle than yield so that was a one time crop. This year thinking of adding a couple onions and some hot peppers (type TBD). Started with a single bed which is doing well. Added the second bed last year and the soil composition is poor so have to fix that before planting this year. Snowed yesterday so I have some time before planting season.
@j2 heritage cherry tomatoes? My cousin’s wife grow several varieties of heritage ones and they taste so good!
@Kidsandliz no, just whatever they had at the farmer’s market
Happy Earth Day
I kill plants.
@jst1ofknd Herbicidal maniac!
I like looking at pretty gardens and eating, if offered, the results of vegetable gardens, but given a choice I avoid yard work as I am not a fan. Had a childhood of forced slave labor helping weed mom’s extensive (flower not vegetable) efforts. And her garden was really pretty. Any plant in any yard I have had better be able to survive benign neglect. Now if someone else wanted to to extensive gardening in my yard and would take care of it forever I wouldn’t object.
Inside I don’t have plants either but that is mostly due to the cats. They killed the window box of grass (no not that kind) I grew for them by sitting in it so much the grass didn’t get enough light. They’d dig at them, knock them over, bite them… At least they had never used them as a dirt box
.
Right now I do have an Aloe plant mom gave me when she asked me to thin out her giant plant but those are poisonous to cats (which I didn’t realize at the time when she gave me one of the big shoots I had dug out of the pot). I had that hanging from a plant hanging rod from the wall but when the new owner of this building did their inspection he told me I had to take it down; no hanging plants even if the hanger is attached to a stud, no plants on shelves or a plant stand if they are in front of a window, no plants on window sills, no stained glass windows hanging in a window (so I had to take that down too)…
So then I put it on the dresser. That lasted less than a day. Two shoots each got a tooth puncture so I had to put it on the fridge and booby trap the fridge top to keep them away from it. So not worth the effort to have house plants. Somehow it is thriving despite my “best efforts” and I had to repot it recently. I plan to bring it to my mom’s at Christmas and give it to my sister whose house looks like a green house inside.
My wife is the gardener (grew up on a farm) and she has some very nice outcomes, both edible and ornamental. Me, I’m just the manual labor that helps make it happen (and enjoys the results).
I’m trying to get chili peppers to sprout from seed:
Jalapeño
Arbol
Pequin
Thus far, I have some tiny plants. Now, what to feed them…
It has snowed here twice in the last week (1 had 1/2 inch accumulation and the other you could see snow at edges of walks and in the grass, but all gone by end of next day). No planting here yet
I wish it was warm enough to start gardening (snowing, hailing, sleeting past couple day) and our governor won’t allow the sales of gardening supply’s due to the stay at home order.
We have really bad soil at my boyfriends where I grow everything (it’s all clay) I do all my herbs in pots. And something from the swamp (Muskrat or something) always ate whatever I grew. I gonna have him build me some raised beds and try electrical fences around them. I’d like to grow potatoes, zucchinis, eggplants, banana peppers, lettuce, and some others. We steal the tomatoes from his parents next door, we got a Everybody Loves Raymond thing going on. It drove me insane when I lived there of course now that I’m only there half the week now she lets up.
Harvests of lettuce radish and peas now. Growing tomatoes, peppers, eggplants squash seedlings
Wow. @chienfou, that’s impressive, and enviable, but it makes me tired just reading about it! (I’ve had weird sleep for a while lately.) I have a big yard, but the soil isn’t very good. There are a lot of old plum trees - this part of town used to have orchards, I’m told; and an apple tree that produces lots of not very good apples - so-called “Delicious.” The rhubarb plant is enormous and I don’t have to do a thing to maintain it - my kind of crop! Anything I plant I have to fight off the squirrels, raccoons, deer and rabbits for, so I’m not very motivated to grow vegetables. Also the yard gets a lot of shade, which is a good thing, but not for most flowers.
@Kyeh it’s been a long process, and I often joke we must live on an old nuclear waste site… everything grows twice as big as the label says it will… The soil is pretty good for about 12-15 inches, then mostly red clay, so veggies etc do OK. I compost, and recently got back into chickens primarily to have a method of composting that doesn’t require as much work… scraps into the pen, grass clippings into the pen, chickens (therefore chicken poop) in the pen. Hens scratch everything up, then I run a tiller in it and pull out the compost to put in the garden a couple of times a year.
Last year I let this invasive stuff take over my back yard because it’s pretty when it blooms. It’s called Crown Vetch. Not so nice later but since it’s from the pea family I figure it’s nitrogen-fixing, which I think is good, right?