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Tildes Gardening Group: Week 24/3/26
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?
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…
@nukeman @vord @zenon @crialpaca @Aran @pistos @thecakeisalime @tyrny @pekt @rosco @dustylungs @lackofaname @neonbright @monarda @tanglisha
It’s not gone very well for me. I have done a little work around the garden, added some compost and planted a raspberry plant that was struggling in a plastic trough. But otherwise, I’ve been time limited in what I can do.
Most of my garden was planted before I moved in and is low effort. I normally concentrate on growing vegetables in plastic troughs to avoid disrupting too much of the garden and making use of patio space.
Last year my son loved eating peas, strawberries and blueberries off the plants, so I want to do those again. He also really loved flowers, so I’m going to try plant a few more flowers this year too.
Last year I mostly ignored the front garden, mostly because im too lazy to run the watering can or hose around to the front, but I will try be a bit better this year and maybe plant a few in the sunny bits in the front of the house.
My question is has anyone had success with the cheap self assembled plastic green houses? I tried one last year and it just cooked my seedlings because the weather changed too quickly for me to able to micromanage them. Is there any you would recommend, or any position in the garden you had success with?
Also, I’m not sure about tech in the garden. I have kept my gardening low tech partly to be able to step away from tech, and a lack of knowledge/outdoor power supplies. This year however I have even less time, and have potential access to power. How have other people treated tech in their gardening hobby?
For the cheap greenhouses do you mean the ones that are basically cheap shelves with a plastic wrap? If so we have used those in the past and had mixed results. Dealing with temperature swings does require some managing of opening them up on hot days to avoid cooking the seedlings. But they did mostly do their job. We also always had to tie them to a fence so they wouldn’t blow over (windy area).
The only real tech I think we are using is a garden planner that remembers what was planted the previous years so we can do crop rotation more easily. Otherwise we are fairly low tech, mostly I think because the cost benefit ratio hasn’t shifted in the favor of picking up anything so far.
The problem is when I’m at work, then when I get back, problems abound. I wondered if temperature sensors in the green house which the open a vent would be helpful, but maybe too complex.
If you decide to do something like this, I highly recommend the AcuRite temperature sensors. I a few other sensors that were supposed to be safe for outdoor use, they all stopped working after a few days. I suspect it was the humidity.
I have several of the AcuRite sensors inside my house and in the different garden areas. Lithium AA batteries will last over a year; a dead battery is the only way I've had any fail on me.
How big are the temperatures swings you are seeing from morning to mid afternoon? We generally would just open in the mornings on days we knew would get hot (or leave it open day after day) because for us the cooler morning temp wasn't cold enough to be a threat compared to the midday high.
Pretty big variations at the moment in the UK, weather is all over the place. Generally the average is usually around 10C daily temperature variation.
When you left it open everyday was there any benefit to a green house over just the plants being outside?
A couple years ago I built a cheap greenhouse over part of my in-ground garden: a simple dome frame from found materials covered with 6 mil plastic. I set it up maybe a month before last frost date (in May where I live) and planted quick, cool weather veg in it: Arugula, mustard greens, radish, lettuce.
It worked fantastically for this purpose, protecting the plants from light frosts overnight while giving them cool weather to thrive in before bolting. Too early for bugs, too. Best arugula I've ever grown.
I don't know if we're in different zones (there's still snow in my forecast), or if this application makes sense for what you're thinking. For a lot of veg, I have to start my seeds indoors for them to be grown enough by the time frosts end.
I live in the UK, so shouldn’t have any more frosts (at least generally). I’m a beginner gardener, so I’m not quite sure what I would use it for. I guess I was thinking of trying to support plants that don’t do as well in the UK like chilli or peppers, but I suspect trying anything like that would over extend me. I’ll probably try concentrate more on the basics at the moment.
Peppers are hard mode for where you live, just like they are for me. You'll be happier with the results if you start with plants that are known to do well there. The guy in the GrowVeg youtube channel is in the UK, he provides timing suggestions and different ways to be successful. His methods are very approachable.
Thanks I’ll check it out! Yes, I’ll stick with working to the areas strength.
I don't have a recommendation, but I remember my dad bought several: each one more robust and expensive than the previous one that inevitably broke. He went at least through three in 10 years, and the last one was definitely much more sturdy and did not look cheap. It will resist for longer if you place it (and tie it) against a wall.
Yes, I forgot to tie it last year and it was a nightmare. I weighed it down with some compost in the bottom row which helped until it got really windy and managed to blow it down with that as well.
I’m in zone 8b.
I got one of the pop up tent style greenhouses a couple of years ago in the hopes of getting tomatoes out sooner in the year. I put it over a raised bed and put a thermometer inside to track how it was doing.
This was yet another area that I didn’t know that I didn’t know what I was doing. The little greenhouse would indeed keep the bed warm for a bit after sunset, but then it would become colder than the surrounding area.
A LOT of the info on unheated greenhouses don’t really go over what that means. In my area, to work as I wanted I needed either a heat source or something to store heat to release it overnight.
A heat source could be a literal heater, some heat producing light bulbs, or a compost heap. Heat can be stored using something like barrels of water or a double pane, either as the greenhouse covering or something like a frost cloth cover over the plants.
Some research into what folks do in my area told me that cold frames don’t really work here, low tunnels are what folks use successfully. This year I used a low tunnel over a raised bed all winter. My intention with it was to extend the season for cool weather crops rather than warm weather crops. It did a good job of this, none of my plants got frost damage.
I’ve also been adding a lot of native plants and perennials to address the time situation. After the first year or two most of them don’t need watering in summer.
Why does it get colder? Greenhouses sound like quite a lot of work to get right.
Ugh, I'm so bad at physics.
Heat transfer always moves from warm towards cold.
My possibly incorrect understanding is that the heat is moving from a small area (the greenhouse) into a big area (outside). Just like how the outside air receives heat from the greenhouse, it also receives heat from the ground/trees/houses/rocks. Inside the greenhouse, there are only plants, maybe shelves, soil, and whatever the floor is made of. That's a smaller source of heat. So while the heat transfer from inside the greenhouse to outside of it caused an equilibrium where they were the same temperature, at some point during the night the night air will become warmer than the greenhouse.
I'm just barely getting this, which is why I'm not very confident in my explanation. If you want to dig into it further, the keywords are heat transfer, radiative cooling, and nocturnal surface cooling. I'm happy to be corrected by someone who understands this better than I do.
Spring is starting!!! The gardening projects on my property are largely managed by my mom and I, although with me pregnant this year I think I am going to enlist my husband and siblings to do some more heavy labor for me (my parents and siblings live in an out building on our property).
I ended up buying 4 new fruit trees this year instead of 3. We got 2 pears (Bartlett and Bosc), a Stanley plum, and we finally were early enough to pick up a Granny Smith apple from the co-op we buy our fruit trees from. I probably should have planted them last Sunday because the weather was great for it with a sunny day followed by rain, but oh well.
Since we are still waiting for our last frost date the veg garden work is mostly just prepping the beds and some pruning. All the raspberries, blackberries, and grapes have been pruned in the past couple weeks. And the beds are having the old stalks and such removed now and hardscaping cleaned up. We tend to leave the stalks and everything over winter for bugs to live in, but it’s warm enough now that the bugs have moved on.
Last fall I built an arbor for my front porch. I still haven’t decided which vine I will plant, but I need to pick soon.
Otherwise we also have an endless chore of mulching. We will need another chip drop soon. And after a bad wind storm couple weeks ago my husband has been hard at work dealing with fallen trees in our woods to keep them off the paths. But most of our native gardening takes second fiddle to the veg garden in early spring.
Ha, our last frost date was the 17th, but the last two nights have been in the high 20s.
I don’t have a ton to say as I need to research how to do it yet, but now that I have a house and my own yard, I want to turn much of my yard into a pollinator garden and natural “garden”. My county(?) even gives grants of like $500 to get started. I don’t care much about having a green lawn, I’d rather have natural grasses and plants for critters to use. I’ll have to do some research this week on how to get started, but I know it can take a few years to get the results I want. So this year will be getting started on that as well as planting some flowers and stuff. I also want to get a tree for my backyard as it has none, so I’ll have to research trees as well.
I should just plot out what I want to do and come up with a plan. I’m pretty new to gardening.
My county offers a lot of resources and I have a couple of nurseries in my area that specialize in native plants. I got a good start on a similar setup last year using these resources.
That’s a great idea, I had a neighbour who had a wild flower meadow and it looked great and was good for the environment.
Still in the freezing temps here, but as soon as it's warm enough we're going to start planting. Two years ago, we planted a small herb garden which as done very well. Last year we expanded and made a tomato garden, which we waaay over-planted and didn't add enough calcium to prevent blossom end rot.
This year, we'll be expanding that tomato garden and planting a reasonable number of tomato plants. Really looking forward to it!
I missed the initial post! I only have a small 4ft x 4ft "square foot garden", so there's not that much space. I'm also a huge beginner so it's probably for the best. So far I have 4 broccoli plants producing (US zone 9) and they are so much larger than I expected! They're actually overshadowing some other squares, so I won't be at full capacity until they run their course for the season. Other than that, I have 8 pole beans that just broke through, 4 brandy boy tomatoes just transplanted, and 2 slightly older cherry tomato plants that are only about 2.5 ft tall so far.
I previously had three 15 month old scotch bonnet plants that were producing nicely, but we had a very out-of-normal cold snap for a few nights (lowest hit 15F!) and even frost blankets didn't save them. I was very sad because I had babied those plants for a long time. This year I'm going to restart them (and some jalapenos) in clay pots so I can bring them in if another rare weather event happens.
I think square foot gardening is a fantastic beginner method. I also started that way at my old place, using a used copy of the book I’d picked up at a book store next to my bus stop. I had more success with that garden than I did my first year with less structured gardening at my new place.
You can always add more beds using the same method or whatever else you might want to try.
You sound more than a beginner, that’s pretty good going already! How do you find square foot gardening? I hadn’t come across it before in my ignorance!
I really like it for a variety of reasons. It's nice to have a system around sectioning off a garden and then understanding if I'm planting pole beans, I know I can generally do 4 plants per square. If it's broccoli, it'd be 1 per square, etc. The bigger reason is where I live has really sandy bad topsoil and the square foot garden acts like a raised bed garden in that capacity. So I could mix some richer soil with a variety of composts and have really good growing medium. The actual "Square Foot Gardening" books call for something called Mel's Mix, but I don't go quite that far. Some richer soil, mushroom compost, worm castings, cow manure, and perlite and then during the season I'll either top off with some new mix or use a 5-1-1 or 3-4-6 depending on which plants are fruiting.
Typically I think people keep them to a 4x4 grid because that's about as large as you can get while still being able to reach the inside squares, but you can make them smaller or in odd shapes if it suits the area which is nice.
For mine I took two 10ft pole of electrical conduit and sunk them about 3.5ft into the ground on either side of it, connected them with smaller 4ft piece of conduit and then hung trellis netting between them with zip ties which allows for the upper 8 squares to have access to it (for my current grow, the pole beans and tomatoes).
Highly recommend for beginners and people that live in areas with bad topsoil in general.
I suggest the title include the date rather than the season or a week count. Besides including both hemispheres, it'll make it easier to look back later by season.
I'm in zone 8b, in the Pacific Northwest.
Over the winter I learned about choosing varieties that are designed for your region. That's why I included where I am with my zone, zone 8b runs all along the edge of the US. Obviously conditions here are different than they are in 8b Louisiana or 8b New Mexico. I read some books by local growers, including one who developed varieties specifically suited to this area. So, I've chosen corn and squashes developed by her, along with other varieties she recommended.
I got a little over excited and ordered WAY too many different seeds, to the point I was having trouble planning out where to put everything. Finally I fed the list into an Claude along with the garden beds. This has been really helpful for the most part, it gave me a nice plan including timing. It also let me know that a lot of my "failures" last year were probably due to my mortal enemy, slugs.
The things I'm most excited about are parching corn, my yearly Sungold tomatoes, lemon cucumbers, sweet potatoes, and my new currant and huckleberry plants. I expect the birds to take some of that fruit, but the county sold those in sets of 5, so hopefully there will be enough to go around. Oh, and this is year 3 of my asparagus crowns, so I get to eat some this year!
One thing I'm not going to do this year is grow big tomatoes. The rains always start before those are ripe, so I end up with spotty green tomatoes that nobody wants.
An ongoing issue is the ancient (and gigantic) apple trees in my back yard. My county has a serious problem with coddling moths and apple maggots, which is why you can't transport fruit from here into the eastern part of the state where the commercial orchards are. Even if you control the pests on your own trees, someone down the street likely doesn't so you end up with the problem no matter what you do. The trees also have an issue with apple scab, bagging the individual apple to keep pests out seemed to make the scab worse. I'm torn because these are gorgeous old apple trees that provide nice shade in the yard and a lovely show of flowers in the spring, but the effort involved in picking up dropped apples and leaves really hasn't been worth it. My partner loves to sit under one of those trees in particular and doesn't want us to get rid of it, even if it would mean replacing it with a variety that's less prone to these issues. We also want to get cherry trees, but right now the pests we have would just spread to those from the apple tree.
Edit: I just realized I went a little crazy in this post. Sorry about that, I get really enthusiastic about gardening and all my friends are sick of hearing about it.
It sounds like you have a really excellent selection of crops this year! I’ve never heard of parching corn either.
It’s a shame about the apple trees, it is a shame when it’s just infested fruit you can’t really use. Could you net the whole tree rather than individual apples? I appreciate it might ruin the aesthetic though…
I wish I could net the whole tree, but it's huge. The top of the tree is at least 20 feet/6m meters above the ground and it's spread is close to that. I don't know if they make nets that big, but even if they do I wouldn't know how to get it over the tree. Commercial orchards replace trees long before they get this big.
I actively want to get dwarf varieties of fruit trees so that fixes like netting are actually viable and I have a better chance of finding and harvesting the ripe fruit.
No gardening experience whatsoever, and jokingly "blessed" with a northeast facing balcony that currently gets about an hour of direct morning sunlight in a tiny corner of said balcony. Not really expecting or looking for material results (though the things I've planted so far are things I could use in the kitchen), just seeing whether I can actually get things to grow and stay alive.
I have two little 16x16 raised planters that I purchased from a local woodworker and have already made the mistake of not marking which seeds I planted in which sections. I got some little sprouts in the last week but I have no idea what's what! I've planted cilantro, mint, Thai basil, and some cosmos flowers. I know I fucked up because I also transplanted some mint from the nursery in a corner of the planter, where I had forgotten I had already planted seeds of... some kind. So the poor things are probably going to be crowded out by the mint. Live and learn...
That light situation might be tricky, have you ever tried supplementing with artificial lights? My friend is trying them this year but not sure how well they work in practice.
I was going to look into whether reflecting light would work - artificial light seems like too much effort for a small affair like this one, and I don’t think I have a direct outlet out on the balcony!
I tacked some cheap mylar blankets to an east facing wall above some garden beds that don't the the last of the afternoon sun because trees block it. It seemed to help until we had a windstorm that tore it down.
I will add this to the list of things to experiment with, thank you! I’m not really upset about the sunlight situation (I hate heat) but it is kind of funny looking at the next balcony over and seeing how much more sunlight they get just because of the way the buildings are angled.
Snow is gone, chives and orach are sprouting, and the local deer are lurking around the garden. I put up the peanut butter fence again, it was 100% effective last year.
Moving transatlantically in a couple weeks so nothing started yet. Luckily or unluckily, my balcony plants are all dead, so no need to mourn leaving them behind.
My parents' place (where I'm moving) had an old crabapple tree that's been there for ages that got cut down last fall, and I'm interested in contributing to choosing what to replace it with, as the rest of their front garden is all perennials so not much work to be done beyond basic maintenance.
Yes hi hello!! I am very excited for these threads. Apparently gardening is my big undertaking this year.
We are starting ambitious with arugula, broccoli, kale, cucumber, zucchini, peas, beans, 3 types of tomatoes, spinach, parsley, carrots, radishes, strawberries, potatoes, basil, oregano, chives, chamomile... all of these are in either raised beds or containers. We're trying to figure out what grows best in our north-facing backyard. We're also trying to get some plants into our bare beds, mostly foliage and flowers, since we have a dog who spends a lot of time in the backyard. We picked some for the sunny areas and some that will be a shade garden. We got two dwarf spruces with globe growing patterns, which I think are totally adorable. We also have an espalier apple tree, which we won't be allowing a harvest from this year, but we're excited for next year!
Husband started me on gardening by saying out loud that he wanted an apple tree. I had a garden plan and spreadsheet together 36 hours later. He is a major part of the muscle and has been working hard to help us realize our dream of... not bare dirt. The cat supervises from the screen door.
We moved into our house in May last year. We haven't grown anything before! We are focusing on cleaning up some of the unnoticed hazards left behind by the previous owners, such as a couple of rotting whiskey barrels, a moss garden that was taking over everything, and a dogwood whose root crown was planted several inches below the surface... I pruned a cherry tree and two Japanese maple trees pretty hard. We're hoping to learn from our failures this year so we can focus on refining for summer and autumn seasons and plan for next year.
There's still snow where I live, so outdoor gardening isn't underway. Actually, neither has any indoor gardening.
I'm only growing veg in containers right now, but I've had limited success in the past, outside leafy things (and radishes). Does anyone have tips for growing different veggies in containers? Things like peas, zucchini, squash, maybe a tomato. Or even recommendations for plants that do well.
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I have had one overwinter success story: last year I had a couple plants left unplanted. Some I placed in-ground in their pots; fingers crossed they made it. A little pot of sweetgrass, however, I forgot on my porch well into winter after several -20°C freezes and thaws. Around new year, I brought it indoors hoping it would revive, and it has! I need to find a home for it in-ground this year.
I grow most of my stuff in containers and it worked really well last year! Peas were great, as were beans. Big positive surprises were sunflowers, tomatoes and courgettes. I’ve previously had success with potatoes although last year a really struggled. Kale is very hardy and did well as well actually, and is even better after a frost.
I’m not sure I have any particular tips, I’m a beginner gardener and just watered them regularly and made sure they were in the sun, along with removing pests.
We don't have a garden, but we have a balcony and a few sun-facing windowsills, and I'm experimenting a little with germinating a number of plants. My partner wanted something green, but also doesn't seem particularly interested in caring for the green things, so I seem to be doing a lot of it.
We bought some plants last year for the planters on the balcony- basil, rosemary, mint, lemonbalm, parsley, a curry plant, lavender, and later on, an oregano. In hind-sight, inserting the oregano between the lemonbalm and the mint was a cruel thing to do, and I'm not entirely sure the lemonbalm survived unscathed either. Just before Christmas I pulled that planter apart, and it was 90% mint root- and the mint had barely any leaf to show for it. It has now been quarantined, and I hope to encourage it to actually grow something above-ground, as well as below.
I'm glad I took some basil cuttings and a rosemary, too, because at some point, a couple of months in, the rosemary kicked it, and over winter the basil also went. The latter was described as "winter hardy", but perhaps it wasn't hardy enough. There's a lot that I'm still getting the hang of, including getting a feel for how much water each plant actually wants! All of the cuttings survived and are doing quite well, and now that it is getting warmer (highs of 19C) I've cleaned up the planters that are outside again and have replaced the dead basil branches with one of the cuttings. The rosemary cutting spent half a year doing nothing at all, but has suddenly exploded and I'm so glad.
As for new plants, I've managed to germinate far too many tomato plants of two different varieties, and it looks like every seedling will be viable. I have plans for two of each variety, but I have no idea what to do with the rest! The chives germinated well, too, and they're now in a pot with sufficient room, and have been in there for a few days without keeling over so I'm pretty confident that they'll thrive. I hear chives are fragile seedlings, but hard to kill as adults. The strawberries, however, never did anything. I believe I got them too wet when I stratified them, so I've bought a second pack and I'm trying again while we're still in the right time of year to do so. I also collected some of the seeds from the lavender last year (which is looking a bit rough now, but it'll recover), and I had an almost 80% germination rate after three weeks of stratification (which seems unusually high, from what I have read), but nearly all of them almost immediately collapsed. I'm guessing I'm running things a bit too wet again. As long as I have two or three viable plants, I'm not too disappointed, I guess. I am definitely running out of windowsill space. When I can put the tomatoes outside on the balcony with the wooden trellis things will be more comfortable.
Yeah, mint is brutal, it’s so hardy and just takes over everything! It need to just chill out…
I'll be visiting my mother-in-law over the weekend who is going to pass me some cuttings which I'll be planting at our house. I have a small planter box that I'll be using to let the cuttings start growing roots and then plan to start digging up part of the garden space to have room to grow more things and probably pick up a few more planter boxes. I might borrow my wife's Facebook account to look for people selling some pots since I could use some more of them.
Once I'm doing that and active in the garden I'll also finally germinate my basil seeds I've been sitting on. My kids love basil and I would add it in to the spinach pasta sauce that they love to give it some extra flavor or make a basil pesto.
We also have some Javanese ginseng growing that are left over from the previous owners. I harvested some for some soup, but they've been growing really well and spilling in to our driveway, so I'm planning on doing a big harvest after we get back and try doing a stir fry.
I don’t really have a lot planned this year other than refreshing my strawberry bed, and growing a bunch of lemon grass. A few years ago I started a bunch of varieties of thyme and holy basil from seed and planted out two beds. I’ve been pleasantly surprised that the holy basil continues to reseed enough to keep me in tea through most of the year. And the thyme continues to just go nuts giving more than enough for tea and cooking. So those two beds are pretty much taken care of. Strawberries are in a third, and I’ll put the lemongrass in the final one.
Our USDA hardiness zone changed from 8b to 9, so I’m going to see what new things I might be able to grow in the perennial garden. The garden is just a mishmash of things, and though I like a lot of the individual plants, it’s not really cohesive. I’m hoping this year to get more of a vision for it. I’ll finally catalogue what I actually have and draw up a plan for going forward.
I’ve heard of tulsi tea, but not thyme tea, is it good?
I really like it! I was skeptical the first time it was offered to me. Now it’s my favorite winter tea, and one of my top teas in general. It pairs well with ginger too.
I'd love to compare your holy basil to my basil, if at all possible. I have been told that it's likely a holy basil, but I cannot be sure! The flowers look similar but the leaf doesn't look dark enough. If it is, though, I can definitely see it making enough heads for tea. Ours have been pushing out flowers whenever, and often.
My holy basil leaves are lighter in color than other basils I have planted, and the leaves are flatter and serrated. Mine don’t start germinating till later in the season so I don’t have anything to show you!
There are a lot of basil species, all in the genus Ocimum. The three we use most in the US are sweet basil, Ocimum basilicum, Thai basil, Ocimum basilicum var. thyrsiflora, and Holy/Tulsi basil, Ocimum tenuiflorum. I think my holy basil looks more like Thai basil than sweet basil minus the purple stems. I’d look at photos of the three different kinds to compare leaf shapes and stems to narrow it down. Leaf color sometimes can be misleading because so many things can have an effect on it.