Garden thread

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Replies

  • hesn92
    hesn92 Posts: 5,967 Member
    edited April 2019
    I came here to bump this thread and saw it was already at the top of the list.

    I planted my garden this past weekend!!!! I’m so excited. I keep going out there to look at my little plants. I have missed them all winter long. I’m in 6a

    I also got some sunflower seeds just for fun. I’m excited to see how those turn out :) on the envelope it says they’re supposed to get to 12’ tall

    My husband is going to build me another trellis for my tomatoes since I keep using those stupid cages. He is also supposed to be building me a second compost box so it’s easier for me to get compost out of (right now I have to stick my shovel in the bottom and dig it out)
  • mbaker566
    mbaker566 Posts: 11,233 Member
    lost half my bulbs(iris, tulip, hyacinth), rose bushes, 2 privets, a catawaba vine, most of my blackberry vine, an arkansas black apple tree, and hydrangea due to the weather/ridiculously cold winter.

    i'll be planting in 2 weeks. veggies. maybe a rose bush. a couple of vines.
  • losingit711
    losingit711 Posts: 316 Member
    I’m in Indianapolis. I plant Mother’s Day weekend. Can’t wait too. All my starts are kicking butt.
  • lemurcat2
    lemurcat2 Posts: 7,899 Member
    See, I swear the Mother's Day weekend thing is what everyone around here (I'm in Chicago) lives by. However, I am doing some additional planting this weekend, and my herbs made it through the snow.

    I'm getting a raised box with rabbit proof sides installed soon.
  • losingit711
    losingit711 Posts: 316 Member
    A lot of people around me will between last weekend and Mother’s Day weekend. I think there planting the cold crops but can’t say for certain. I believe may 15th is like the last chance for frost around here.
  • Athijade
    Athijade Posts: 3,227 Member
    I’m in Indianapolis. I plant Mother’s Day weekend. Can’t wait too. All my starts are kicking butt.

    I am doing the weekend after due to my schedule. Too much happening on Mother's Day weekend! This weekend I am cleaning out all the pots from last year and will finish planning what I want to get.
  • kschr201
    kschr201 Posts: 219 Member
    Just started in zone 7. The tomatoes look great. Planning to get my squash, cucumbers and peppers out in the next week
  • French_Peasant
    French_Peasant Posts: 1,639 Member
    lemurcat2 wrote: »
    See, I swear the Mother's Day weekend thing is what everyone around here (I'm in Chicago) lives by. However, I am doing some additional planting this weekend, and my herbs made it through the snow.

    I'm getting a raised box with rabbit proof sides installed soon.

    Ha ha I was up in Oak Park on Saturday for the fabulous snow (and a First Communion). That's Chicago, ain't it. It's just been so miserable this spring. I get to go sit in this crap for hours at a track meet tonight.

    You want to wait for Mother's Day for the most tender, tropical plants--tomatoes, marigolds, peppers, eggplants, petunias, cucurbits, etc. If you have plants in the house that really want to be outside, you should look into getting a cold frame or some of the things Ann recommended above, but cold frames are especially fun. (And cute.) On nicer days and nights you can leave plants out to harden off, opening or closing the lid as needed, but if there will be a hard frost you can still have them in trays to bring them inside.

    Also, I concur with St. Pats for peas (although some years I just think they sit in the ground and don't actually do anything till it gets considerably warmer), and there is also Good Friday for potatoes (which is interesting since it is a movable feast, but I suspect it also has something to do with moon phases--you plant root veg in a waning moon so Easter weekend is perfect because it follows the Paschal full moon--and the religious symbolism of burying). You can plant radishes and greens outside now from seed.

    Herbs like thyme, mint, chives, tarragon, rosemary, sage are pretty rugged in a light frost but if they are tender babies you will want to protect them--cold frame or other such covering.
  • kshama2001
    kshama2001 Posts: 27,846 Member
    edited May 2019
    For those of you with rhubarb:

    https://www.ajc.com/lifestyles/food--cooking/make-cake-with-ribbons-rhubarb/JOhi5w5EmS23W3b3rNJikL/

    newsEngin.21376073_032918-inseason_rhubarb_cake.jpg

    Mom has rhubarb, but she is on an anti-sugar kick, so I'm not going to make it. My OH doesn't like rhubarb, and it would be too much work and calories for just me and my brother.
  • hesn92
    hesn92 Posts: 5,967 Member
    I planted ON Mothers Day last year and it was a little late I felt like. I didn't get tomatoes until later than most people did it seemed like. So I did it a little earlier this year (last weekend). I'm in Kansas City (6a)

    It's been raining like crazy all week and my plants seem like they are really happy. One of my plants was super droopy the first day or two and then after we got a good rain, he perked right up.
  • kshama2001
    kshama2001 Posts: 27,846 Member
    I've been offering my neighbors plants for their garden bed, which I can see out my kitchen door and when I am in my driveway and front yard. They kept saying they needed to clean the weeds out the bed. Last weekend, I offered to do that as well. (If I was going to find a home for my excess bee balm, it needed to be immediately, and I could tell gardening is not their thing.)

    Here's what I've put in so far:

    ygbfapr6xa1f.jpg

    When the soil warms up to 60 degrees I will plant dahlia, and when it is 65 degrees, portulaca.
  • kshama2001
    kshama2001 Posts: 27,846 Member
    edited May 2019
    hesn92 wrote: »
    I planted ON Mothers Day last year and it was a little late I felt like. I didn't get tomatoes until later than most people did it seemed like. So I did it a little earlier this year (last weekend). I'm in Kansas City (6a)

    It's been raining like crazy all week and my plants seem like they are really happy. One of my plants was super droopy the first day or two and then after we got a good rain, he perked right up.

    It's been really good planting weather here - lots of clouds and some rain. If it is a really sunny day I wait until the late afternoon to plant. Otherwise, they do indeed get droopy.

    Good garden centers don't rush the season much and I know I can plant whatever they have out in April after I "harden them off" for a few days. I'm prepared to cover certain plants if we get an unexpectedly cold night.

    Big box stores like Walmart and Home Depot will sell plants like basil WAY too early and I laugh when I see them.
  • French_Peasant
    French_Peasant Posts: 1,639 Member
    kshama2001 wrote: »
    I've been offering my neighbors plants for their garden bed, which I can see out my kitchen door and when I am in my driveway and front yard. They kept saying they needed to clean the weeds out the bed. Last weekend, I offered to do that as well. (If I was going to find a home for my excess bee balm, it needed to be immediately, and I could tell gardening is not their thing.)

    [clip]

    When the soil warms up to 60 degrees I will plant dahlia, and when it is 65 degrees, portulaca.

    I really love how you have expanded your fiefdom! I wonder if my neighbor would mind if I took over his front yard for a vegetable garden (and by vegetable garden, I mean something stuffed so full of "temporary" perennial flowers that veg has a hard time growing there).

    I once gave a bunch of hostas to another neighbor whose thing also wasn't gardening, and she got them put in the bed...later in the summer she complained about how they were shriveling up and looking so bad whereas mine were lush and green...turns out she wasn't watering them at all through a long, sustained drought. "But I thought they were supposed to be tough!" Not THAT tough, LOL!

    I've been leaving my dahlias that I am trying to regrow from their tubers outside in the colder weather...based on your note above, I am thinking I should probably move them back down to the root cellar in their pots.

  • meganpettigrew86
    meganpettigrew86 Posts: 349 Member
    We are autumn going into winter here and the plan is to rebuild our veg patch this winter. It is about 20m by 10m. We have it covered by bird netting and the netting has stretched and now is too low and the outside wire etc has not been done as well (we rush put it up a few years ago). The spring summer just been we did minimum veg as I was pregnant and had a baby a few weeks ago. So it's a little overgrown with self seeded brassica and silver beet. We still got more tomatoes, cucumbers, beans, capsican, lettuce than we could eat and a self seeded pumpkin from the compost has gone nuts.
    We had a terrible late spring early summer it was cold and wet so our corn and melons turned into nothing.
    We are growing Christmas trees to sell and planting the first 1000 last year but because of the unusual rain lost about 250 as it flooded longer than usual in some areas. This year we are planting in a higher spot.
    We built a new cutting/propagation area in spring but its gotten a little neglected the last few months so that's another winter task.
    We are always planting trees and expanding and mulching more garden. Mulching has re duced the work load so much! Our biggest issue are pukekos pulling out new plants or taking the tops off them. The population has boomed this year so we need to do some puke control.
  • French_Peasant
    French_Peasant Posts: 1,639 Member
    hesn92 wrote: »
    I planted ON Mothers Day last year and it was a little late I felt like. I didn't get tomatoes until later than most people did it seemed like. So I did it a little earlier this year (last weekend). I'm in Kansas City (6a)

    It's been raining like crazy all week and my plants seem like they are really happy. One of my plants was super droopy the first day or two and then after we got a good rain, he perked right up.

    If you are in 6a, you could probably go much earlier; I am in 6b/5a (climate is shifting) and probably put really tender things in the week after Mother's Day, but that was always a rule of thumb for Zone 5 I thought (where you are definitely safe). Different tomato varieties, cultivation techniques and microclimates make a big difference in fruit production too. How many and what do you have planted?
  • French_Peasant
    French_Peasant Posts: 1,639 Member
    We are autumn going into winter here and the plan is to rebuild our veg patch this winter. It is about 20m by 10m. We have it covered by bird netting and the netting has stretched and now is too low and the outside wire etc has not been done as well (we rush put it up a few years ago). The spring summer just been we did minimum veg as I was pregnant and had a baby a few weeks ago. So it's a little overgrown with self seeded brassica and silver beet. We still got more tomatoes, cucumbers, beans, capsican, lettuce than we could eat and a self seeded pumpkin from the compost has gone nuts.
    We had a terrible late spring early summer it was cold and wet so our corn and melons turned into nothing.
    We are growing Christmas trees to sell and planting the first 1000 last year but because of the unusual rain lost about 250 as it flooded longer than usual in some areas. This year we are planting in a higher spot.
    We built a new cutting/propagation area in spring but its gotten a little neglected the last few months so that's another winter task.
    We are always planting trees and expanding and mulching more garden. Mulching has re duced the work load so much! Our biggest issue are pukekos pulling out new plants or taking the tops off them. The population has boomed this year so we need to do some puke control.

    Whoa, that's a good sized garden, 1800 square feet. Is the bird netting stretched over the whole garden, or would it work to have a floating row cover over the individual rows? That might be easier than trying to stretch over such a large area. Plus dealing with larger netting just pissed me off, but a finer floating row cover you can fold like a sheet and it doens't tangle and tear on everything. I agree with you on mulching, especially for a garden of that size. At our old community garden (about twice the size of your garden) I would use a combination of broken-down cardboard boxes and straw as good, cheap, water-retaining mulch. It was amazing how well the cardboard would last from year to year, kind of slowly going away, whereas the straw was half-gone by the following spring and completely gone by the 2nd year.
  • JohnnytotheB
    JohnnytotheB Posts: 361 Member
    I love gardening. We also had snow in WI on Saturday. I'm in zone 5 as well. I normally don't plant early except for kale, spinach or lettuce but decided to do early planting of marigolds and bees friend. I covered up the seedlings with a blanket when we got the snow and they are luckily still living. Now, with the crazy weather we have had I am going to wait until mid to end of May to plant the rest.
  • meganpettigrew86
    meganpettigrew86 Posts: 349 Member
    We are autumn going into winter here and the plan is to rebuild our veg patch this winter. It is about 20m by 10m. We have it covered by bird netting and the netting has stretched and now is too low and the outside wire etc has not been done as well (we rush put it up a few years ago). The spring summer just been we did minimum veg as I was pregnant and had a baby a few weeks ago. So it's a little overgrown with self seeded brassica and silver beet. We still got more tomatoes, cucumbers, beans, capsican, lettuce than we could eat and a self seeded pumpkin from the compost has gone nuts.
    We had a terrible late spring early summer it was cold and wet so our corn and melons turned into nothing.
    We are growing Christmas trees to sell and planting the first 1000 last year but because of the unusual rain lost about 250 as it flooded longer than usual in some areas. This year we are planting in a higher spot.
    We built a new cutting/propagation area in spring but its gotten a little neglected the last few months so that's another winter task.
    We are always planting trees and expanding and mulching more garden. Mulching has re duced the work load so much! Our biggest issue are pukekos pulling out new plants or taking the tops off them. The population has boomed this year so we need to do some puke control.

    Whoa, that's a good sized garden, 1800 square feet. Is the bird netting stretched over the whole garden, or would it work to have a floating row cover over the individual rows? That might be easier than trying to stretch over such a large area. Plus dealing with larger netting just pissed me off, but a finer floating row cover you can fold like a sheet and it doens't tangle and tear on everything. I agree with you on mulching, especially for a garden of that size. At our old community garden (about twice the size of your garden) I would use a combination of broken-down cardboard boxes and straw as good, cheap, water-retaining mulch. It was amazing how well the cardboard would last from year to year, kind of slowly going away, whereas the straw was half-gone by the following spring and completely gone by the 2nd year.

    It's stretched over whole garden so we can walk under it etc. The structure holding it was a quick fix when we first developed it. We get netting from the vineyards second hand so it's very wide and long so can cover the space easily. We just patch the occasional hole with cable ties.
    Yea we are in the process of mulching the orchard, natives, and shelter belt trees its very good exercise as we do it by barrow load.