What were your gardening adventures this weekend?
I'm on day 4 of a 4 day weekend (lucky me!) here in zone 7b, so I've been spending a lot of time out in the garden. The bunnies and deer have been keeping me busy chasing them out, and have entirely beheaded my tomatoes and peppers, but haven't touched the flowers and herbs at all.
We're on week 4 of very little rain (we got about 5 minutes of thunderstorm two days ago, but that didn't do much more than make the grass wet). I set up an automated irrigation system in my garden bed so it is extremely well watered and lush, and everything else is dry, the grass is yellow and the trees are starting to look wilty. I think that's part of what is attracting the herbivores to my garden, it's like a little oasis, so I can't be too mad about it. Luckily it looks like it's supposed to rain every day next week!
My peas are done for the year, so I pulled them out, and I have lots of tiny green peppers, tomatoes, and cucumbers, but nothing much else. I'm thinking to plant beans where the peas were. Do you have a favorite crop that is harvested in June that can fill this gap? What sorts of things do you plant in June in your zone?
I've been struggling with herbivory indoors too - the stupider cat decided for the first time that transcendentia zebrina was the best thing ever, and took several leaves off. Luckily it's not very toxic, she didn't actually consume much, and she doesn't seem to be showing any symptoms of poisoning, but now I'm trying to figure out how to keep this plant in the same window but out of her reach. Any recommendations for shelves or hanging baskets that would work in front of a window in a bedroom/office?
I also gave my extremely leggy silver ann pothos a haircut, so it looks much better. I cut the trimmings into 3-4 node sections and they are all now in very damp soil to hopefully root - I got 36 sections so I'm sure I'll have at least some successes, although I'm hoping they aren't ALL successful or I will be drowning in pothos!
A local feral cat has been staking out my birdfeeders. I cleared the brush to remove his hiding spot, and put some citrus oil and white vinegar around, as its supposed to bother cats.
This week, i plan to fight the marsh & poison ivy trying to take over the base of yard. It seems to be a wellspring, its always too spongy to mow even now. I hope to plant some marshmallow and mountain mint, and eventually weeping willow.
My strawberries ripened over the weekend!
They were wonderful, maybe got about 17 or 18 in total from my little basket, a mix of medium to extra large! Me and my partner had a small bowl of strawberries and cream with crumbled meringue and our one year old got to make a mess of herself with a couple.
Other than that, everything else is still growing, spring onions and carrots are making good progress and the potatoes are looking great.
The stuff in my greenhouse is also coming along well but I might've overwatered one of my pea plants as its dying but I've got another two that are doing alright so it's all good.
Zone 6b here. I usually have everything planted mid-May. But I'm starting to admit that something got my cukes this year. They caught what looked like powdery mildew - but it was oddly early in the season for this. I neem oil regularly and haven't dealt this this before. I upped treatments, but leaves have continued to yellow. I went away for the long weekend hoping I got ahead of it - I got rid of the powder a few weeks ago and it hasn't come back, but a few more leaves were yellowing by the time I returned late last night. It's a container garden and still early enough that I can rip them up, replace the soil, and get something small in. I was disappointed in not planting jalapeños this year, so I might try to pick up a semi-mature plant from the nursery
Otherwise, I have a variety of tomatoes (early girl, celebrity, cherokee purple, pink brandywine), a variety of bell peppers (california wonder, lady bell, red knight), thai chilis, and two more cukes at the other end of the garden that is going strong. I'm also up to 6 basil plants and have three more rooting. Starting to kick myself for not planting any zucchini this year. I always think it produces way too much. But now that I didn't grow any, I'm realizing how much I normally eat!
Sorry, I don't really do indoor plants so I have no recommendations for you. I just figured I'd hop on with what I've got, share that I always wish I did something different, and wish you the best!
I actually didn't know Tucson had a wet season! That's pretty interesting, seems like it would make for an interesting growing environment. Also super neat that your cactus bloomed, those are so pretty!
This is my first year gardening, and I didn't really plan out what I really wanted and where I wanted to plant everything, but my garden seems to be doing well nonetheless. I've got peppers, tomatoes, cucumber, zucchini, brussel sprouts, eggplant, and carrots.
I didn't do much with my garden this weekend. I trimmed my tomato plants because they all had some really low leaves that I felt like were taking energy away from growing up and fruiting. I have a serrano pepper plant that is tiny, but is still giving me peppers somehow I really don't know what to do with it because I can't seem to gett it to actually grow.
I have a ghost pepper plant that keeps flowering but not giving me any peppers, which is annoyng, and I'm not really sure how to deal with it. It seems really delicate to weather changes.
Pepper plants can actually stay pretty compact, especially as annuals! Looks like a mature Serrano plant can be as small as 18 inches. That may just be the size it wants to be.
Flowering but not setting fruit can definitely be a temperature thing, or overwatering. I found this video helpful last year when I had this issue! This year my peppers were setting fruit just fine until the deer ate all their leaves...
That was a good video! Thanks for the suggestion. I may start moving the ghost pepper under the porch during the middle of the day to see if that helps.
8B here. I have 2 raised beds in my backyard. The first one has various peppers I planted back in Feb/March that the plants look to be thriving but only the Anaheim peppers are bearing fruit. It has Anaheim, large sweet and jalapenos from harvested seeds last year, and mixed hot and habaneros I planted with new seeds.
In the next raised bed are various perennials that are growing but aren't as full as I'd like. California Poppy, Celosia, Summer Sunshine Cosmos, Bachelor Buttons and Four O'Clocks Kaleidoscope. I had just installed irrigation for them tapped off the spigot.
Aside from that I potted a Dragon's Breath on my front porch to go with everything else. It seems to be doing well while everything else is varying degrees of success.
My double knockout roses in the backyard are doing well but still not filling out as much as I like. One of them randomly died (I have theories) so when I went to the greenhouse to buy a new one they didn't have a clear divide so I accidentally ended up with smaller yellow rose bush. I found out before I planted it so i said screw it, went to a different greenhouse and got the reds that'd fit right in. I'm trying to decide if I should plant the yellow somewhere else or give it to a friend.
For a while we'd been wanting to build some raised planters for our backyard. With two dogs, anything ground level gets run over pretty frequently. So I built these planters a couple weeks ago and we installed them this weekend. Had to do a small retaining wall as well. Really happy with how they turned out and the plants should love the fresh soil and not getting trampled.
Before/after: https://imgur.com/a/CrpxjHg
Ooooh gorgeous planters! And a handsome little stone wall too! Did you stain the planter wood or is it just that colour naturally?
Thank you! They are cedar, so that's the natural color. I did put on some teak oil on and will do so annually to hopefully slow the greying process. But eventually they will turn grey.
For father's day weekend, I helped my grandma in her garden a little bit with my kids. We helped her replant a couple of vegetables We also got a bag of miscellaneous bee-friendly seeds from a honey farm. we seeded and planted those as well.
My personal garden isn't much, some mint, some rosemary, some thyme and that's about it for now. My raised planter has some Zucchini and cucumber, but I don't have a ton of space to work with.
In the fall, I'll plant garlic for spring in our front garden bed.
Zone 8 Apartment Balcony Gardner reporting in! Everything we grow is potted, but we've had great success with peppers and tomatoes this summer. After great success with our snack pepper plant last year, we actually expanded the varietals this year. So now we also have Shisito, Dragon Roll, and Cayanne.
We've been routinely plucking handfuls of peppers from the group with the exception of the Cayannes which are still green. The snack pepper is by far the highest producing with ~20+ fruits on it ripening as we speak, but we've had it for about 2 years now and this is by far the best year with it. The others since it's their first year aren't producing on that level yet, but perhaps next year they will produce similarly to the snack pepper.
We're currently not growing them, but we did manage to successfully grow 6 cabbages in individual pots over the winter. They were a frost resistant variety that grew well and made for some excellent saurkraut!
That's awesome! I keep thinking I want a snack pepper pot on my deck, but I'm concerned about how to properly overwinter it so it can produce for year after year like yours.
This might depend on which zone you're in, but 8 has a relatively mild winter that can get warm with a handful of cold snaps.
We literally did no research on how to keep it through the winter and just winged it. We did keep it outside for the majority of time, but would bring it inside if a freeze was expected in our area. Only major change during this time was upgrading its pot and adding some mix in fertilizer to the soil. They're heartier than expected and are fairly forgiving. There have been times the leaves get sad and droopy on it, but we often joke its just being dramatic since it always bounces back after watering.
I highly recommend getting one because it's what inspired us to get other pepper plants due to how easy the snack one's care was!
The summer wall cutting, ladder climbing season has begun!
The house we rent has wisteria, wine, and kiwi on one wall.
Started this weekend, will have to cut about every two weeks from now.
That said, the wine has recovered and is going strong due to us following a friend‘s advice. The kiwi is doing well, finally, and we even kinda have the wisteria under control.
My mint is in a pot all the way up on a fourth-floor balcony, and it's still trying to send a runner out, even with nothing around it but the wood floor of the balcony. I totally get how it can take over yards; it's definitely determined to spread. I'm tempted to let the runner just go all season and see how far it ends up from the pot.
Second-floor balcony reporting in, my mint does the same thing. Sometimes I find it curling around itself in the pot. I actually just watered my mint, think I may let it go myself! I've been cutting it and calling it a mint whip, lol.
"A little oasis," that sounds lovely. That's exactly how I feel about my little balcony garden in my city. We have a lot of greenspace within a short drive, but it's still nice to be able to go outside and tend to my veggies and herbs in between work calls. And I'm on the second floor, so I get to look down at people walking their dogs and hear them compliment my garden :D
It's a bit of a mix out there, random things I thought would be fun to grow and just ferns and various ivies. It's been hot down here in 8a, so really just trying to keep everything in balance water-wise.
Currently growing:
Not to mention the various ferns, snake plants, succulents, aloe, etc, etc. When I visit my folks my mom usually gives my wife and I a succulent (not sure why, she just likes giving stuff away :) ). So it's a bit of a jungle out there, and I just love it. We're moving to a new apartment complex soon, and it'll be on the first floor. So we'll have to redo a lot of the setup, but I'm really excited for a reset.
This past fall and winter we grew cabbage (one head per pot, about 6 or 8 in total) and my wife (who I suspect is somewhere in this very thread, I see you) turned it into sour kraut. I've never really been a fan of the stuff, but man oh man is it good.
This weekend was a pests weekend. Last year we had noticed that we had an extremely large population of spiders in our yard, and this year they have already been out in force.
I am arachnophobic, so it's difficult for me to appreciate the service these little demons provide, but I have done my best to only spray a little bit in parts of the yard where it looks like the population is getting out of hand. Having the occasional web reducing the flies and mosquitoes is okay, but I won't be happy in spider-metropolis, so some of the yard has to be a bit more hostile.
Additionally, I raked and overseeded the yard with a new blend, incorporating some heartier fescue into the mix to survive a little better.
Finally, for growth update, my Dill skyrocketed last week and is just a beast of a plant now. My Parsley followed suit. Basil grows healthy, but the Thyme is fighting me. My Peas have started podding, our flowers are doing well. My Cayenne peppers are in full growth and bearing...fruit? My serranos are getting tall and starting to flower. My Habanero plants are steady, but slow - was hoping for some more progress by now. My Tabasco Peppers seem to hate the heat? Once a week, we get a really hot day, and no matter how much water they get, they do not look happy about it. I feel like every time they look healthy and ready to grow, 3 days later, they look horrible again.
This is our first season in the southwest (zone 8b). It’s been a bit of a struggle. We bought a house with 4 raised beds so we planted in two of them but a pack rat came along and ate/stole most of it. It literally stole two medium tomato plants.
So I built two elevated beds and wrapped the legs in metal so it couldn’t climb up, which has been working so far. This weekend I planted the second bed with zucchini, squash, and new tomato plants. The other bed we added onions, and we have broccoli and pepper plants. Our peppers are really struggling. Only one out of 7 plants is producing any fruit. The others don’t seem to be pollinating, they will produce flowers but never turn to fruit. We added some hanging flowers and added marigolds into the beds this past weekend also to try and attract more pollinators.
Despite the challenges, I still enjoy watching everything grow and change.
Today, (zone 7b) I planted out the jalapenos that I had started from seed. I am still waiting on my habanero seedlings to get big enough.