So, this is a thread about gardening! Gardening of all types! Ask garden questions, get garden answers. I am by no means even a good amateur gardener, but I try.
We should probably steer away from substances that aren't legal everywhere, like marijuana.
There are many types of gardening such as:
Vegetable Gardening
With vegetable gardening, you grow food. Delicious, amazing food. Sometimes you get to eat it, sometimes (unintentionally) the local wildlife gets to eat it.
Some common vegetables:
- Tomatoes
- Peppers
- Summer Squash/Winter Squash
- Pole Beans//Bush Beans
- Cabbage
- Sweet Corn
- Carrots
- Lettuce/Mustard Greens/Arugula
- And many many others!
I'll add links to resources here as well, as people post them.
Flower Gardening/Landscape Gardening
With flower/landscape gardening, you grow things to improve the landscape around your domicile or just for the sheer beauty of it. Sometimes you get to look at it, sometimes (unintentionally) the local wildlife gets to eat it.
I'm pretty unfamiliar with this type of gardening, and I end up killing lots of stuff I plant. If anyone wants to contribute, I'll be happy to add it (and a link to the post) here! I'll add links to resources here as well, as people post them.
Rain GardensA rain garden is a depressed area in the landscape that collects water from roof downspouts, asphalt or sump pump discharge and allows it to soak into the ground rather than enter the storm sewer system.
I'm actually interested in putting at least one, maybe a couple of these on some of the downspouts of my house. I have a hill that is a pain to mow, so I would rather have something there I didn't have to mow. I don't know anything about making one, other than what I've read. If anyone wants to contribute, I'll be happy to add it (and a link to the post) here! I'll add links to resources here as well, as people post them.
Common flowers/plants to growHydroponic/Aquaponic Gardening
Growing stuff in nutrient water; its like The Matrix for plants. Hydroponics is done with nutrient additions, and with aquaponics you can also grow tasty fish with your tasty vegetables; you feed the fish, they poop, and those nutrients are used (mostly) to help grow your food. Can be done indoors relatively easily. Can let you grow things like tomatoes or peppers that don't do well in the winters the northern hemisphere has, ensuring a near full time supply of tasty food.
I really unfamiliar with this type of gardening as I've never done it, unless you count overwatering plants. If anyone wants to contribute, I'll be happy to add it (and a link to the post) here! I'll add links to resources here as well, as people post them.
Container Gardening
Growing stuff in pots you can move around as needed. Can be done indoors relatively easily. Like hydroponic/aquaponic gardening, you can grow things indoors to keep a full time supply of certain tasty foods.
I've done this some, but something terrible always happens to the plants. One year, I dug up my remaining pepper plants (damn deer) and transplanted them indoors to overwinter. They really liked this, as they sat in a nice sunny warm room, so pepper production kept on trucking along. Unfortunately, my brother's dog thought the red things hanging off the plants were tasty treats, instead of (at the time) the hottest know variety of habanero pepper. So the dog ate the plant, and the peppers, and proceeded to poop himself in a circle around the house. After he was done with that plant, he ate the other 2 and repeated the adventure. Not a good day for that dogs butthole.
If anyone wants to contribute, I'll be happy to add it (and a link to the post) here! I'll add links to resources here as well, as people post them.
Other Types of Gardening
There are other types of gardening I'm sure I missed; If anyone wants to contribute, I'll be happy to add it (and a link to the post) here! I'll add links to resources here as well, as people post them.
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SoggybiscuitPA
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But I am now starting to be think about some pretty native Australian flowers to go in my front garden now that there's sunlight reaching the ground again.
I also have a Kaffir lime tree in a raised stone area, which I planted not knowing that that tree wants to kill you, all the time. Every time it goes through a growth phase, it puts out branches, grows 8cm long thorns all over them, and eventually, grudgingly, puts some leaves out. It's impossible now to weed under it without having the flesh flayed from my arms, so I'm not really sure what to do with it. It smells great, at least.
I'm in a similar position; my flowerbed was a mass of weeds last week and my wife and I finally got a chance to pull most of them. I still need to remove at least an inch of soil before I can plant anything there.
I managed to make to a local store yesterday that had lots of seeds. It was nice, all the employees had masks, and I got a bunch of different greens seeds. I went outside today and pulled the seeds off of about 20 dandelions. I'm going to grow my greens inside this year.
I ask because a few years ago we tore out a ton of grass and planted lots of other plants to both be more interesting, less water usage, etc. And when they started and everything was separated I thought it looked real nice. Now that it's grown a few years and everything is overlapping, I find myself asking what the point of even having multiple plants is. There are literally some plants in our garden entirely encased in another plant to the point you can't see it anymore.
Is there some kind of ecosystem we're supposed to be maintaining that helps all of the plants stay alive? Should we be asking our gardener to be more aggressive in trimming plants back to maintain some kind of interesting design? Is it entirely asethetic (whatever looks good to us is what is right)? I mean even looking at that rain garden picture I feel like you could probably lose 3+ varieties of plants and it would look exactly the same to me.
Here's a picture from a rain garden that I made. The sidewalk/walking trail in the back caused runoff that during heavy rains would make a lawn area have flowing water and generally be soggy. I dug up a strip of the lawn and put in native wildflowers of many species - had over twenty in there. It got to be a bit jungly, but that was fine - the wildflowers can handle it, and they helped keep down weeds just by their own mass. Having many species meant that flowers bloomed at different times, so there was always something for pollinators and attention. Some flowers bloomed early and then went to seed, but while they were seeding others were blooming all the way to the first frost. Monocultures can suffer from disease problems (something that attacks a plant will attack all the same plants around, then wiping out everything) so having a diversity of plants means that even if one species has trouble thriving (I never could get milkweeds to grow for some reason) there are plenty to take the space. It's also more useful to wildlife; different plants have different seeds for different species, and also different plants are hosts to different caterpillars.
Generally, the recommendation for rain gardens is to plant native/local species. @Soggybiscuit if you wanted to let me know where you live via PM I could give some personal pointers, since these things vary by region.
So here is the spot I want to put the garden in at:
The hillside there is much too steep as far as I understand. The area at the bottom of the hill there ends up soggy AF whenever it rains because I have 3 downspouts (2 are on the other side of the house) draining to essentially the same place.
I live in SE Ohio, still in appalachia, so plants that fit that area are what I'm shooting for. On the hill, I'm planning to do some groundcover plants (like creeping phlox). For the raingarden part. I already have quite a few groundcover plants, so I'm set for the hillside. Another thing: I live across from a soybean field, so I have deer coming through all the time in the fall, not as much during the summer. So it needs to be deer resistant as much as possible.
Creeping/moss phlox is really pretty. Also, if you want to do a little more traditional gardening, you can plant spring bulbs in and around the phlox. Daffodils/tulips/crocuses/hyacinth/etc. will grow up taller than the phlox, bloom, and then die back, but the bare spots will continue to be covered by the phlox. The bulbs will likely bloom first before the phlox too, so there will be a long stretch of early color before the wildflowers of the rain garden would start blooming.
Yeah, thats the downspout outlet (well, 1 of them; the other 2 are 30ft away on the other side of the house). I'm going to redirect it towards that top area, which is nice gentle slope, and put the rain garden up top. The steep area is the true pain to mow, you can only go up it and it has to be dry completely in order to safely mow it. Thats why I want ground cover type stuff there. I'm hoping after redirecting and then soaking up some of the rain water along with a bit of fill dirt from above, I can make the soggy area not so soggy anymore. I should also mention that save for late evening (6 - on), those areas get full sun all day as my house face true south almost exactly.
As much as I would like a rain garden in the soggy area, its on the border to my neighbors property, so I really cant do much there other than some fill.
Thanks for the recommendations for plants. Now I just need to track some of them down! Also, I found this listing of native plants from the Ohio DNR so I've got some more stuff to go through.
We went a bit overboard, which culminated with a purchase of a growing tent and another light to keep our cats out of it.
Planted some heirloom WV beans, Logan Giants, Logan Giants #2, Logan Greasy Pole Beans, plus a few other non WV heirlooms. I have something like 30 tomato plants there, 24ish peppers, some tomatillos, with the rest beans. 87 peat pots.
My wife and I don't do anything small.
One side of my yard has a pretty steep slope, so I terraced it and put in a bunch of blackberry vines about three years ago. Five rows with 12 vines each, five different varieties that bloom at different times during the summer so in theory it should be continuous berries during the season.
This is a current picture as of this morning, so you can see most vines are still doing ok. The giant oak tree to the left of the field creates too much shade so the vines in the foreground are a lot smaller than the ones far away.
Blackberries are native here, so I thought wildlife wouldn’t be a major issue (apart from birds eating the berries), but I got a couple varieties with big thorns just in case. For those who don’t know, blackberries are on a two year cycle, so the vines grow year 1 and then the old vines fruit on year 2, while growing new vines so the cycle continues. Assuming nothing destroys the vines in the meantime.
So yeah, year 1 the vines are all happy (aside from a separate debacle with caterpillers) but the deer decide to pass through and eat 80% of the vines down to the ground. Thorns, no thorns didn’t seem to matter. So I put up a bunch of deer fencing, black plastic stuff. That seems to have worked keeping out the deer, and I managed to get a decent harvest (maybe about 15 pies worth, which I distributed to friends and neighbors since I don’t eat carbs anymore; side note, I found out one of my neighbors is super strict vegan and turned down a pie because I used butter in the crust. WTF).
So fast forward to this year, a couple months ago. New vines are doing great, everything looks nice and healthy just starting to sprout out for spring. Over a couple of days between my checkup visits, "... everything changed once the fire nation attacked." Something got in and just totally devastated one of the thornless varieties, taking it down to stems, and worse breaking them off so they can't even resprout.
This picture is after a few weeks so they did get a couple of leaves back, but yeah there aren't going to be any berries there this year. I look around and I find a couple small holes chewed at the bottom of the fence, so presumably a rabbit or ground squirrel. I patch those, but a few days later I notice that a different row seems to have mysteriously lost all of its leaves below 2ft, and again even worse several of the stems have been surgically broken so the rest of the vine dies (see example below, vines are in the foreground, ignore the shed).
Again, I go look at the fence, and this asshole rodent has chewed out a hole in the fence exactly in the same spot I had patched it!!!
So, as any reasonable person would do, I repatched it and ordered a bunch of ultrasonic-emitting infrared motion detectors, as well as a couple fake plastic owls and a hawk. Now these ultrasonics are supposed to be outside the range of human hearing, but damn they still hurt when I walk by them, so here I'm thinking I'm in good shape.
Narrator: No he wasn't
Few days later, I find a hole chewed in EXACTLY THE SAME SPOT, like fucking surgical, just taking out the middle of the patch fence, four snips. It does look like the ultrasonics are doing something, since I only found one damaged vine, but it was the strongest new shoot on one of my favorite vines and the asshole rodent decided to just chew off the apical meristem which means that vine can no longer grow for the rest of the year.
OK, now its fucking war. I patch it again (this was two days ago), and this time I pee all over it. Literally. On one hand, presumably human piss would have a smell to deter rodents. On the other hand, if the fucker chews through the fence again, at least I have the moral satisfaction that I made him eat my pee. I think you can guess by this point which of those occurred.
Literally overnight, I come back to another surgically cut opening in the fence. I had also moved one of those motion detectors like a foot away from the entry point, so maybe that worked because I couldn't find any damaged vines, but somehow it didn't seem to prevent the little bastard from chewing through the fence again.
So yesterday, I patched it up again, and this time sprayed a mixture of buffalo and ethiopian hot sauces (we had ethiopian for dinner last night) all over the patch and up and down the fence line. I checked this morning right before typing this up, and lo and behold the patch seems to be holding!
Hopefully you can see all the overlapping patches around the edge. I've been trying to leave them there so I can keep track of how many times I've had to do this! I still need to go walk the rest of the fenceline and make sure whatever it is hasn't just moved down the line somewhere else.
My wife says I am like Farmer MacGregor from the Peter Rabbit books. At this point, I do believe he was the true protagonist of that story and completely justified in everything he had to do.
I do also use bat guano though
After I scooped that out, I tossed 2 3-quart pots worth of green stuff in and then topped it off with some dead wet leaves that I bagged in the fall and left outside all winter
I have no clue what I’m doing with it ha
I'm just utterly lost here.
It might help to remove some of the leaves and mix them in gradually. When we first started I would throw grass clippings in but they would just clump up and not break down. It was a volume issue more than anything, I think it would be the same with a lot of leaves. Now I try to avoid overloading too much of any one thing. Grass clippings (or leaves) will do fine but only if there's enough other good stuff in there.
This has a bunch of info that rings true to me at least: https://learn.eartheasy.com/guides/composting/
I would also suggest if you just started and seeing how you have a farmer friend, you might want to ask if that farmer friend has a composter of their own and if they would be willing to give you a cup or two of their compost, since you can use that to jump start your compost.
I'd also suggest people that do composting consider a few things. If you raise things like chicken or fish, you might want to see if you can encourage black soldier flies to setup shop. The adults look a bit like wasps and don't really have much interest in getting into your home. The larva will actually eat larva of other fly species, so this is great for keeping them out of your compost. The larva will also eat things like cheese and meat, which earthworms struggle with (note, if you're not out in the boonies and your composter is near your house, don't put rotting meat into it because people will hate you). The one downside with black soldier flies, is you don't get less compost because they are mostly good at turn all the crap you throw into your composter into protein. That said, if you raise something that needs feeds, you can then setup up your composter so that you can take advantage of how black soldier fly larva behaves. The larva will feed until it reaches a certain size, then the mouth will change to add it in movement because it doesn't want to pupate in the compost it wants to find a different spot to do that in. So if you have the right setup, they will essentially self harvest because the mature larva will leave the composter and fall into a collector. Then you can feed them to your fish, chickens or what have you. I gather they are also something that some have started to use as a food source because they tend to not carry any diseases that humans have to worry about. Even if you don't need feeders and they reduce the amount of compost you have, they are still a good organism to have in your compost because it does help speed things up.
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
So far everything is growing well but the basil, which rapidly died (its known to hate Florida but we tried anyway), and we have a pair of tomatoes, a few strawberries, and one green pepper starting to produce!
Odd thing: I was just about to do a new campaign against the Encmire today. Would this be an ok place to post an update thread?
Sure. Post away.
I am working on getting a spicy margarita garden going (peppers and limes) but I also planted some herbs and a mago tree.
The mango tree is what I want to talk about. I can't seem to get it to work, not sure what I'm doing wrong...is it dead?
We just straight up add it to our raised flower beds and d9nt have an actual compost. It breaks down and nutrients the garden just fine with way less effort
1. Need to boost the output of the hydrangeas in front of the front porch and fill in around them (ligularia or ferns maybe?)
2. I planted an oak leaf hydrangea in between the magnolia trunk and living room window. Thinking of adding a second or some more rhododendrons for their evergreen leaves keeping the space full year-round
3. Think I’ll mass some astilbe around the crabapple tree, and then some heuchera at the edge of that bed interspersed with hostas
My garden is continually under assault by squirrels and rabbits. Just this morning I was watching a squirrel conduct a pretty thorough pen test of my strawberry patch. He didn't get in but it was fun to watch him try several approaches in a surprisingly systematic fashion.
Anyhoo. The best defense I've found is 1" galvanized chicken wire (aka poultry netting), buried about 3 inches deep. That will stop any critter that can't climb over it, and they won't dig under it either.
Perry Bible Fellowship may agree with you there. Though be careful since the site in general may be NSFW if that's still a thing.
Anyway, @exis Thanks for that link. If I ever get time I might try that tip about layers of dirt between the leaves to break them down faster. Haven't tried that so it might just work.
@Captain Inertia Have you considered...taking out part of the lawn for more gardening? Or removing it entirely? Lawns are bad for the environment, and a big flashy garden would have a lot more curbside appeal than yet more grass.
Yeah, I’ve ordered some hardware cloth, as well as some wiring to electrify the fence and probably run some lines between the berries just in case. Also ordered a live animal trap from Amazon, because I really want to look into his eyes to express my hatred face to face at this point. From hells heart I stab at thee!
As you may have guessed, he chewed through again. Different spot this time at least, but I’m not sure if I’m going to call that a success. Someone send help, I’m pretty sure I’m stuck in a bad Disney film.
Where do you live, geographically speaking?
The only reason I ask is that groundhogs (aka woodchucks) can be rather voracious assholes and hard to pin down. I can't tell from the size of that hole.
Yeah I’m thinking at least all along the walkway from the driveway to the front door (there’s currently a gap that’s basically just moss), and then along the driveway to the bed around the mailbox
Maybe I can plant a redbud or cherry in the NE quadrant (lower left of the pics) with a bed around that...or maybe a weeping Norway spruce for year-round interest...
My problem is I can’t edit myself with plants so I end up with too much hodge lodge variety instead of mass plants to fill up the lot
Spoiled for big variety
Were you looking mostly at shrubs for planting or other sorts of shade plants?
https://planthardiness.ars.usda.gov/PHZMWeb/
Plants have different tolerances to heat, frost, and so forth. I would not recommend a beautyberry bush for Minnesota any more than I would recommend fruit trees that need chilling hours for Florida.
battletag: Millin#1360
Nice chart to figure out how honest a news source is.
The front yard is mostly full shade to part shade, though that NE corner gets a good amount of sun
Pretty sure the soil in these beds is neutral- those hydrangeas are the lacecap type that change color based on soil pH and I get white blooms
But I do have access to as much pine straw as needed for acid-lovers from 3 fuck-off sized pine trees on the other side of the driveway
I’m looking for space-fillers, so woody/evergreen plants are my preference- this is going to be shrubs most likely.
I have a native/pollinator bed on the sunny side of the house, so I don’t need to worry about wildlife food so much in the front
Northern CA, SF Bay Area (zone 9). Definitely a bunch of ground squirrels around although I don’t know if that’s the same as woodchucks or not. I’ve also seen in the past (not this year) something creating burrows under the walkway (like bugs bunny pushing up dirt along the path so you could see where they were underground) although it never seemed to bother the vines. I figure they were just going for water and it aerated the soil so I didn’t worry about it.
Edit: these are what I mean by ground squirrel:
There's also rabbits around, used to be a couple giant jackrabbits that would hang out between my house and the neighbor, and I saw some babies, but haven't seen any so far this year.
Groundhogs/woodchucks are a species of marmot, which is a genus (Marmota) comprising the large members of the ground squirrel family (Sicuridae) of Rodentia.
Example of a good plant. Doing well.
I planted several succulents together which is a huge no no. Many however survived. Unfortunately I can't tell when they need water. I either give them water and they drop leaves or they get wilty. But I'm afraid to give the wilty ones water. How can I tell what a succulent needs? Example of wilty succulent which I think needs water to follow.
Wilty succulent.
My bonsai tree has not woken up from winter and I'm worried it's dead? Any ideas to save it?
I was able to propagate and root multiple ficus cuttings which is super neat. Finally in little pots after a month of rooting.
My bromeliads are doing well but I really want them to flower but they don't seem to thrive. Just exist. Ordering bromeliad fertilizer for their new soaks. Hoping that will help.
Started hydroponics for herbs. This is only a week after starting.