Garden Thread

I made the flyer and now I'm counting down 18 days until my garden club's second annual plant swap! This year, I'm bringing more hostas, a whole box of heirloom iris bulbs, lady's mantle, 2 trays of nasturtium seedlings, and possibly tuberose and lily of the valley. In exchange, I'm hoping to score some sweet woodruff, solomon's seal, and/or baptisia. Hopefully we can raise some money for our curbside pollinator stations. Last year we made $60.

I did hanging planters for a couple years before I moved to the community garden!

www.instructables.com/id/how-to-plant-hanging-upsidedown-tomatoes/

I did tomatoes and eggplants growing upside-down. On top I planted herbs or peppers. You do have to water them frequently since they dry out fast, but maybe that's less of an issue in places that aren't California (or the Southwest in general). The commercial upside-down tomato bag products always make it look like they will actually be growing downwards, but as soon as they are able, the tomato plants will turn upwards around the side of your basket and they will eventually grow up and up and up. I guess the eggplants stayed more down because the fruits were heavier. I didn't have much success getting tomatoes larger than probably a 2-inch diameter. Cherry tomatoes seemed to do the best.



This is from June 2015. The nearer two baskets had been planted a month prior with tomatoes/basil/thyme, and the back two baskets had just been planted with eggplants and... I think a pepper plant in the 4th. Not sure what's on top in the third basket.

In the five or so days of spring we've had so far, I have accomplished much: I re-seeded and mowed the lawn (which was dug up pretty bad last year for new concrete and solar panels); amended the soil in my front flowerbed with green sand and worm casings; laid down leaf mulch in the breezeway; planted lady's mantle, siberian bugloss, trillium, and bloodroot in my 'reading nook'; planted containers of strawberry, gentians, astrantia, hollyhock, tuberose, widow's tears, marigold, ground orchid, and nasturtium; prepared pots of hosta, nasturtium, tuberose, and lady's mantle for the plant swap; put up two window box brackets, and commissioned a pergola (I took the top of a cheap arbor off and painted it, using the leftover panels as trellises) over the back window that looks onto the garden.

I think the only other big project for this season is building a fountain/water garden in the 'reading nook'. I'll do some more soil amending in the back flowerbed, potting, painting, and cleanup of areas like the compost bin, but I'm looking forward to spending more of the summer sitting out and enjoying myself.

Our garden is fully planted!  It was a perfect day for it on Saturday, and I think these are our best-looking seedlings ever, across the board.  Normally we'll have, like, great peppers but scraggly tomatoes, or so-so peppers and puny onions, or whatever.  But this year?  Everything is robust and hale and hearty.  Now we just need for it to stop raining and get the sun to come out.  Seriously, there wasn't any rain in the forecast, but since putting in the last plant on Saturday afternoon we've had over an inch of rain in the garden (per the highly scientific rain gauge).  With a ton more to come this week.  That's really okay, rain clouds!  You can stop now!

Anyway, the final tally is that we put in nine tomato plants (seven varieties), 24 peppers (five varieties), a climbing bean, three thyme plants, 12 basils (four varieties), scads of sunflowers (four varieties), 12 marigolds, direct-sowed some Lincoln bunching leeks, poppies, nasturtiums, and cosmos, and put together two pots of mixed zinnias and snapdragons.  Assuming the rain hasn't completely wiped out the remaining flower seedlings (they got dangerously soaked overnight before we transplanted them, in addition to all the rain since), now we're just waiting on the local garden supply place to get planter barrels in stock so we can replace the ones that finally fell apart last fall and fill them with more of the snapdragons and zinnias.  Meanwhile, the beds of garlic (two varieties) and onions (four varieties) are filling in gorgeously, and the shell peas are getting tendrils.  Garden 2018 is fully launched!  WOOOO!

I'm glad we're finally getting all this rain after weeks of dry dry dry. We got all the tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants in the ground late last week and all the seeds except squash and cucumbers. Now I don't know when those will get in because it's so wet. The sweet potatoes are still little and therefore not in, but they like it hot. So 85% planted.

I'm thinking about spending the time to make some wooden tomato cage/supports this year, don't suppose anyone has an unfussy design they've built/like?

Baron von Costume now (re-)using wire instead of plastic tubing

While the impact strength of PVC is 4x less at -10 deg. C than at 20 deg. C, you're not going to to be applying any pressure to them in winter. Mine live outside year-round too. The only breaks I have had is sometime when whacking them to get out the dried dirt clod from last year, but I do that in the spring and it's only happened a couple times because is wasn't paying much attention.

The first metric I saw. The point is, you're not going to have water inside them or cars running over them. You can always build an L out of two pieces of wood

It's late May and I'm having a mulch crisis.

I do not know what kind of mulch to put on my various flowerbeds this year. Usually I put Lowe's brown mulch on the front flowerbed because it's cheap and it looks nice, but I've found it depletes soil nutrients. On the back flowerbed, I first put down a weed barrier layer of grocery bags and then covered that with cocoa shells (I do not have a dog). Unfortunately, all that did was make fertile ground for violets, which have totally overrun the bed. The coconut coir mulch I put down over it is stays in place, is long-lasting, and doesn't seem to affect nutrients, but it has done little to inhibit the growth of weeds either. Finally, my 'reading nook' is mulched with pine bark, which I picked for lightness and affordability. It washed out when I tried it in other areas, but now I fear the layer I put down is too thick and its not breaking down fast enough for the woodland plants I'm trying to grow in it. I've ruled out rubber and stuff like straw is not available in my area. I'm kind of considering replacing the pine bark with river stones, which would be expensive, but permanent and it would feel nice underfoot.

Does anyone have opinions on mulch?

Any tips on dealing with a brazen and mercenary raccoon? After thrice observing the rapscallion loitering in my alley, dad's caregiver noted that it appears to live (or maybe just poop?) on my neighbor's roof. Tonight, I was outside staining some concrete blocks to make a flowerbed and the little bugger strolled in, maybe 8 feet from where I was sitting. Despite my protestations, it continued to root around my flowerbeds and sniff my containers until I finally stood up incredulously and yelled "You scoundrel! You ate my gentians! Get out!". It then beat a hasty retreat, but still turned back and poked its head through the fence, like a housecat trying to charm its way back in. Stupid cute raccoon...eating all my worms and snails.

I don't have any help to offer, but I hope someone else does, because I need to mulch (I didn't last year at all) and I never knew that about the nutrient-depletion. I was just going to buy the cheap stuff, too.

I wouldn't worry about nutrient depletion with regular old wood mulch. the amount of nitrogen that microbes will use breaking down the bark stuf is minimal and compared to the benefit of the mulch and the compost you'll get as it breaks down it's not a big issue. I've actually worked in ecosystems where wood breaking down caused a problematic nutrient suck (i.e., on mine spoils), but in a regular garden it's not really an issue.

On my own garden front:

I put out an abbreviated garden at mom's place when I was home a couple weeks ago (24 tomato plants and a dozen peppers). My mom and niece will keep them watered and weeds...eh, it'll be weedy. I just want to grow enough to have some to can.

I got a couple of raised beds built at my house out of the fence I tore down and I want to build several more. I got a few cherry tomato plants put in one of them this weekend so I'll have some to snack on later this year. I have a small-ish urban lot that's dominated by the house and a gigantic garage and I'm trying to convert the backyard to all "non-lawn" as a mixture of raised vegetable beds and perennial/shrub beds.

Yeah, this cool weather and SO FUCKING MUCH RAIN is not making my garden very happy.  Peppers were so robust when we first planted, and now are kind of like, "Is that all there is?"  They're hanging in, but they're not happy about it.  The tomatoes are getting huge, at least, and the onions are doing reasonably well.  But the basil is a mostly lost cause now, though, before it even had a chance.  The peas are weirdly stunted, having grown only about half as tall as they normally do.  But they're setting tons of pods now, and last night Boomer and I got to share our first harvest of five count of peas.  They were delicious!

In presumably non-rain failure issues, the garlic is a real mixed bag.  I cut the last of the scapes last night, and we ended up with zillions of them.  Considering how rotten and moldy the seed garlic was at planting, this is more than I expected.  But my initial optimism, sparked by the fact that any garlic grew at all in the first place, is waning a bit now that it's grown in fully.  Most of the plants are short and spindly, so I'm not expecting much from the heads.  Oh well!  Garlic is the only crop we've never had fail on us, so I suppose we were due for a bad year of it at some point.