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I have a spearmint that is the greediest plant of all time. I made the mistake of planting it in a big pot with all my other herbs last summer and it raped them all and grew till there was no nourishment left in the dirt and all its leaves became bitter and tough.
Same thing happened with my first mint plant too. Since then I've kept it seperate and trimmed it back to stop it getting out of control.
Gonna have to do the same thing with the rosemary bush too when I plant it. I've found that unless you're proactive about trimming it back, rosemary can get really woody and crappy
Secret Satan's Wishlist!
Secret Satan's Wishlist!
Secret Satan's Wishlist!
First up, my spoon-leaf sundew (D. spatulata)
Even though this plant is fairly young, it won't get much bigger than this. They're pretty small plants. You can't really see the dew on the leaves, but it's producing a decent amount.
My lance leaf sundew (D. adelae)
This one will get taller over time and the nice thing is that it's pretty easy to propagate new plants from cuttings, so maybe next summer I'll split it into two plants. You can see it's producing lots of dew.
This is my N. mikei, a highland Asian pitcher plant.
It's very young and hasn't produced any mature, functioning pitchers yet but you can see some small but growing pitchers on the two largest leaves. I'm hoping at least one of those pitchers will keep growing into its first functional pitcher now that the days are getting longer and it has more leaves. The plant will get quite a bit larger, but it'll still be relatively small compared to many Asian pitcher plants.
And last but not least, my N. truncata.
I've only had this plant for about a week but the plant is more mature than the N. mikei was when I got it and you can see it already has a good size (but still not functional) pitcher. You can see some liquid already pooling in the pitcher and I'm hoping it keeps growing and opens, but like I said I've only had it for a week and it hasn't really done much yet. If it stays healthy, this one can get to be a real monster with pitchers over a foot tall. I'm actually hoping it doesn't get quite that big as that could be bigger than we have room for.
Most of the time, reading jippee's posts feels like he's posting from another planet or even a different solar system.
But so far, I have germinating: Straightneck squash, Italian Roma tomato (heirloom), Jelly Bean hybrid tomato, Sierra Gold canteloupe, Thyme, Banana pepper, Tarragon, Bouquet dill, Bright Lights Swiss chard, Italian parsley, Dwarf Delphimium, Chinese Lantern, Cockscomb. And while it's not germinating, I did plant two horseradish roots. I also got this packet of mixed cactus seeds which should be quite interesting. There are nine varieties possible and 15 seeds randomly picked. Fun!
Dru, exactly how important is stratifying the seeds of a carnivorous plant? I have absolutely no room to do so and it certainly won't be cold enough any time soon for me to do it outside.
I repotted and transplanted about a dozen plants for my sister this evening. She was majorly overwatering it seems, judging by the root balls when I took them out. I gave her a small lecture, so we'll see how that goes.
My girlfriend lives near where the three rivers come together in my hometown (With a canal on the other side). Her garden has rich black soil and I need to cut the grass twice a week when there is enough rain. An old gas well has lined one of the rivers nearby with petro wastes (which they have been dredging out after nearly a century) and an old and very large electric company power plant and brownfield is very close by.
The area has flooded many times in the last century so I'm sure the soil has some stuff in it. My gf's mother lives next door to her and they both have large and very productive gardens. Is there any way to know what crops should be avoided or if there is no danger at all?
Satans..... hints..... I'm a mo bro!
Blake, generally these plants don't really need any insects at all but with the sundews for example they'll thrive with say only one or two fruit flies a month. So really very few insects will do wonders for the plant provided it's not winter though the sundews can certainly handle more than than a couple a month during the warmer months. At least where we live, days are short enough during winter that it's easier for too many prey to hurt the plant as it can't get enough energy from sunlight to produce the enzymes to break down prey and keep growing. I imagine your winters are milder than ours.
Have you ever seen the Toxic Avenger?
Xaquin's Manly Knitting Blog! Conquest Tactics .... a better CCG
Secret Satan's Wishlist!
They're pretty easy to care for, too! There are low-light varieties that are great for apartments.
This is the kind I've got in a small ceramic planter. Nice desktop size.
I'm hella curious about carnivorous plants. How long does it take for them to break down their prey? Also this seems like a weird question but do they leave/produce any waste like an animal would or is the whole fly eventually absorbed?
Cheers, Dru.
Have you ever done that little science experiment with a piece of celery or a flower where you keep it in a glass of colored water, then as it soaks up the water/grows it turns a shade of the color in the water? If you are planting in contaminated soil, those contaminants are not only on the skin, but in the very fruit. No amount of washing will get that off. It may be enough to boil the heck out of the vegetables, but what's the point then? However, if you really want to try it, you can take a soil sample to a pest control store or pool supply store and then can often test it for you for major comtaminants.
Does the dirt stink or have an odor other than, you know, a dirt order?
If you know the dirt is near contaminated sources and has probably been in contact with runoff from these sources, I wouldn't eat anything from the garden at all. But have your soil tested.
@Foolproof: if the grass can survive then I don't see why anything else should struggle in that soil unless its something particularly tricky to settle. But if you grow an Audrey 2, let us know!
I'd also recommend this book for people, its very good, the horticulture and my fellow floristry students use it at college.
All the information and diagrams you'd ever need.
I did have a little bamboo shoot for years that was pretty hardy though! Actually it never occurred to me till just now, but I wonder how it even grew considering it was just in a glass of water with some pebbles?
Does anyone have any recommendations for tough plants? If they smell nice so much the better!
For example, my sundews are pretty low maintenance but they do have some unusual conditions that need to be met. That doesn't mean they're maintenance intensive, it just means I need to know what conditions they need to thrive. Like pretty much all carnivorous plants, they need a medium (soil) that's low nutrient as phosphates and nitrates will quickly kill the roots. In the case of sundews, they also like very wet soil. They usually grow in bogs so if grown indoors you want the pots sitting in a tray of water a couple of inches deep so the soil stays wet all the time.
So there are plenty of plants that are pretty easy to grow, as long as you actually take the time to understand what kind of environment you can offer plants and what will grow well in those conditions.
Foolproof, seriously, have your soil tested. Better safe than sorry and all that.
And Dru, while I think I am fascinated by cactus more, I am going to not bother with the carnivorous seeds and just buy a couple from that nursery. I need to figure out what direction my window is facing. I will practice on the seeds, maybe.
Every year we try a garden, and we almsot never get anything good out of it.
Strawberries - got a few, but not many
Tomatoes - got a couple plants producing out of 6
Cucumbers - they didn't do anything until september, but we eventually got a few
Squash - never ripened
Peas - nothing
Beans - nothing
Peppers - nothing
After several years of no luck, last year we tried raised beds. Still no big difference. We water regularly, weed as needed, get good exposure, but the garden just sucks.
We also planted a mini-orchard, but after 5 years, only half of the 15 trees have grown much at all, and our fruit crop is non-existant. We got some mason bees which helped for a year or so but then the colony died.
The Kiwi vines are barely growing either, and they're suppsoed to be plant-and-forget types of plants.
The grapes are doing alright, though the best growing ones taste the worst, and the deer are generally eating all the leaves in the spring.
The blueberries bushes are still the same size as when I planted them (3-5 years in the ground now)
I've tried planting hops for a couple years in a row, and they don't come up.
We tried sprouting plants indoors under grow-lights - nope
We tried growing carniverous plants from seed - nope (though apparently this is hard)
We should probably give up, but I really WANT my plants and trees to do well. So frustrating
It isn't the e coli or anything like that that I'm worried about. I know it can permeate a plant grown in soil that has been contaminated/fertilized with poorly composted dungs. I am more worried about PCBs from the power company and anything from the natural gas wells that can linger for decades or accumulate in plants.
I've thought about testing the soil but wouldn't it make more sense to get the produce tested since it might be concentrating toxins? We have been eating out of the gardens for years so there is nothing immediately dangerous but I worry about slow poisons.
At any rate the damage has been done I'm mostly just curious. I have some understanding of toxicology in animals (from my ninja/terrorist training) and how some toxins tend to run up the food chain by accumulating in fat cells but I don't think I've ever read about plants doing anything similar.
The soil is so black and fertile that you can almost watch the plants grow. I'm amazed that people live on such good land instead of it being all farmland. If anyone has problems growing a garden then they should look into getting their soil balanced and fertilized because with good soil, moisture, and drainage you don't have to work to get things to grow, you only need to fight back the weeds.
I'd really like to learn more about raised bed gardens since they look great and I heard they cut down of weeds/pests.
Are you planting for your zone?
Do you prune regularly? Did you grow from seedlings and properly thin? Are you hardening off seedlings before you plant them outdoors? Were the plants healthy when you planted them? Remember, some plants may not bear fruit the first season, especially if planted late or if the weather is really wonky.
Mainly, fix your soil and try to plant flowers/herbs that attract "good" insects: ladybugs, bees, predatory wasps, tachnid flies, green lacewings. Extremely easy plants for this are cilantro, sage, sunflowers, zinnia, dill, calendula, and cosmos among many, many others. Water regularly, but not too much. Follow the planting instructions. Feed when needed.
Also, try getting a container of earthworms and distribute around your growing areas.
Anyway, you may have a simple problem causing your black thumb or you may just suck at plants. I am thinking it's probably just a small imbalance throwing everything else off.
I did a soil test, things were mostly normal I believe. I should probably do it again though. We put in all new topsoil with the raised-beds. We're in Portland, so we're good for everything we planted (we did try melons one year, but we're probably too cold for that). I have a green-house rack we've used for hardening off, and have tried both planting from seed as well as buying pint-pots. We have so many workms in the soil, any-time I take a shovel of earth they are all over the place. The soil is very clay-heavy, which is why we though the raised-beds may help. We use drip-irrigation through the summer, so watering should be pretty reasonable.
The trees are all either self-polinating or we have proper varieties for x-polination. I prune each spring (though I really don't know what I'm doing). We only have 15.
Anhow, thanks for the advice, I'll receck the soil this year, add more compost, and look into the 'good insect' thing. We may need to take a year off as we're hacving construction done where the garden normally is, and I probably won't be able to get into the ground till May.
Also my parents planted bamboo about three years ago, and now they're trying to stop it from taking over the entire garden. The ground has become an entangled web of bamboo roots, it's nasty.
except the colour is darker, like this:
I wish I had space for them but I really must stop buying things from work! So nice.
I used to think that wild orchids were very rare but now I see some when I hunt mushrooms and that is very early in the year. There must be many more in the summer when the undergrowth and bugs keep people away. I've looked up the rare varieties in my area and keep an eye out for them too.
Ah ha. Bamboo is an absolute bastard. The plants I have are so invasive that I can set the plants on the concrete patio for the day, bring them back inside, and two weeks later there will be bamboo trying to shoot up at the edge of the concrete. I'm becoming a little frightened of this particular strain.
We had a bamboo hedge at one house we lived at and while trying to cut it down it broke through two chainsaw chains and a handsaw. I think axes became involved, as well. It took us three days of cutting and snapping and digging to get rid of the stuff. And then probably a year of regular maintenance to get rid of stragglers.