Welcome all to our fortnightly (ish) gardening group discussion!

Feel free to discuss anything related to gardening, beginner or advanced, challenge or success.

Ive moved it to a fortnightly thread, as sometimes gardening can be a bit slooooowwww motion

Welcome all to our fortnightly (ish) gardening group discussion!

Feel free to discuss anything related to gardening, beginner or advanced, challenge or success.

Ive moved it to a fortnightly thread, as sometimes gardening can be a bit slooooowwww motion

Sorry for the late posting (life got in the way).

Welcome all to our weekly (ish) gardening group discussion!

Feel free to discuss anything related to gardening, beginner or advanced, challenge or success.

‘Seed’ questions:

1. Would you like to garden in a different climate, if so where?
2. Who shares in the your gardening outcomes? Friends/family, or is it more personal?
3. What if your motivation to garden? Is it the reward at the end, the journey or something else?

Welcome all to our weekly (ish) gardening group discussion!

Feel free to discuss anything related to gardening, beginner or advanced, challenge or success.

‘Seed’ questions?

Has the weather been working out for you?
What is your favourite gardening tool, or are you looking to get a new one?
What is your biggest error this year?

Welcome all to our weekly (ish) gardening group discussion!

Feel free to discuss anything related to gardening, beginner or advanced, challenge or success.

‘Seed’ questions?

1. How long have you been gardening?
2. What’s the best pearl you have learnt?
3. What are you worried about happening this year?
4. When in the season do you enjoy gardening most?

last session

Welcome all to our weekly (ish) gardening group discussion!

Feel free to discuss anything related to gardening, beginner or advanced, challenge or success.

‘Seed’ questions:

• What are you growing this year?
• Does anyone else help out?
• What are you not going to do this year after what happened last year?

link to session 0 discussion

And apologies to anyone in the southern hemisphere or in non 4 season style climates! I didn’t consider that when I posted the title…

It’s spring time, and I am belatedly thinking about growing some plants. I tend to quite enjoy growing edible plants, but I might try a few flowers this year. Would be anyone else be interested in a regular gardening chat group where we can share our experiences and challenges in growing plants? Indoor, outdoor, all welcome!
I envisage something similar to the weekly minecraft threads, but less square potatoes or pixelated flowers, and something more tangible (not to knock the minecraft threads, I love them, and they are my inspiration for this!)

Calling to all houseplant experts,

I've had my plants for a couple of years, and they seem happy and growing well. I currently have a flamingo flower and a philodendron (here is a picture of them).

Over the years, I think I have gotten pretty good at taking care of them. One thing that still remains a mystery, though, is repotting and when to do it. I have never done it before, and info online seems confusing and often conflicting.

I live in a small space, so I would prefer not to have to do it, but I can see roots growing out of the bottom of the vases, and the plants are getting rather big: so much so, that my philodendron needs external support to not fall down. Nevertheless, they both keep growing.

So, onto the questions: how does one know when it is necessary to repot a plant to a bigger pot? What happens if I do not do it? And if I must do it, how should it be done? Ideally with minimal resources, since I am very limited on storage space...

And since we're at it: any houseplant-related pro-tips from the veterans?

Well, my tomato season is basically over, and I have to say it was pretty disappointing. I've been gardening in the same place for 25ish years, and the microclimate has definitely changed. More heat, more humidity, more rain when we get it but less rain overall.

I've been growing my tomatoes in 20 gallon metal trashcans for various reasons, and that had been working great, but in the past two years the heat has wreaked havoc on them.

Last year was basically total failure. This year I had 1 sort of success-- Rosella Purple grew, gave me a few delicious fruits early, shut down all summer but stayed alive, and then gave me a couple more in the last few weeks. I grew Floridade on someone's recommendation for it's heat tolerance and it did produce all summer but I really didn't like anything about it. I grew a cherry tomato I thought was Black Cherry (which I really enjoy) but turned out to be some other, red cherry that was OK but nothing special.

I'm hoping there are people on this site who have some recommendations? I'm supposed to be US Zone 7, but it is really pushing zone 8. I'm looking for complex flavors, lowish acid and the ability to pollinate in 90-105 degrees.
I prefer beefsteak-style or at least low acid. I prefer "black" varieties for the depth of flavor. I prefer open-pollinated for the politics.

Or maybe you could share some tricks you've discovered to help tomatoes deal with the heat?

I'm hoping to get a head start on planning for next year.

This is just a random thought I had. I don't do gardening currently and not looking for advice per se. Just thinking about how the physical world feels far behind in terms of automation compared to the digital world, and wondering what kind of possibilities are out there. I was wondering how close we are to having consumer-form-factor robots to help with various things, and growing food is a natural starting place.

I was imagining what kind of robots are needed to deal with a garden—assuming a house with a plot of land suitable for a large garden—with tasks like:

• Fetching water, either from plumbed water or a natural water source
• Getting seeds from somewhere. Maybe online shopping and then the robot knowing how to open the box. (Probably not by identifying existing plants and picking/stealing them.)
• Planting the seeds in the right place
• Watering the plants regularly
• Maintaining temperature and sun exposure
• Digging up the plant and bringing it indoors so I can inspect or smell it without having to go outside. Then replanting it safely.
• Determining when food is ripe, picking it, reusing the seeds
• Washing and cooking it

It feels like a lot of these are already available off-the-shelf today. I searched and there is a project which I hadn't heard of before called FarmBot which seems neat and geared toward enthusiasts ("prosumers") and education, and includes open source hardware and software. To be clear I'm not affiliated with them in any way.

FarmBot probably handles a lot of the important parts of gardening, but I'm sure it doesn't handle everything on my list. How far are we from a 100% automated experience?

Other than that there was some recent marketing around cheap robots like LeRobot by HuggingFace (the company where basically all the open-weight AI models are hosted). It has nothing to do with farming except that they have one shaped like a hand, so it could probably be programmed to grasp and move things around.

Sorry for the rambling post. Really curious to hear if anyone else has gone into robotics and interested in hearing your experiences and also other resources on what state-of-the-art looks like. Also I bet a lot of this is solved in proprietary solutions and by Big Agriculture, but right now I'm more curious on the consumer-grade level.