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Tildes Gardening Group: Week 13/4/26
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:
- Would you like to garden in a different climate, if so where?
- Who shares in the your gardening outcomes? Friends/family, or is it more personal?
- What if your motivation to garden? Is it the reward at the end, the journey or something else?
@nukeman @vord @zenon @crialpaca @Aran @pistos @thecakeisalime @tyrny @pekt @rosco @dustylungs @lackofaname @neonbright @monarda @tanglisha @Esteebestee @mimic @Zenon @lynxy @monarda @gourd @sparksbet @patience_limited @arctanh @Zorind @TheInflatableKayak @Akir
(Let me know if you want me to stop pinging you!)
Utilities finished checking my yard and my backyard is actually 100% clear, so I can dig wherever I want!
My hostas started coming back in again in the front. For the back, the plan is still to dig out a 15x10 foot space or so and start a pollinator garden. I’ll also be planting a couple of trees. I want to make sure to get the trees in this year at least.
I did make plans for an expensive vacation, so we’ll see if I get to the rest or not.
I should correct myself: I do have a sprinkler system from the previous owner in part of the back yard. I’ll have to find that, but I honestly don’t care that much about using it, so if I accidentally dig through it, oh well.
I have had a successful week! Lots of small tasks done and feeling more organised, but still waiting for seedlings to appear. I might end up buying some seedlings to give me a boost and a bit of motivation in case some of my seeds fail. I’ve tried a few random ones I’ve not tried before like Pak Choi, beets, and camomile so if they fail I don’t really mind, I’ve gone wide with my efforts rather than narrow.
I would love to try a different climate. I’m in England and it’s often wet, not as sunny as it should be, and not particularly warm. I would love to try somewhere more Mediterranean or even tropical for the different plant possibilities and also the longer growing season. Some of the gardens in India and Thailand always looked so excitingly wild.
My family share in my gardening, no one else (at least so far). My son loves eating peas and berries off the bushes so he benefits most. I also love eating fresh vegetables and also just basking in the greenery.
I think I’m most motivated by the end goal. The journey has its benefits and I enjoy working with the soil especially in nice weather but it is mostly a means to an end for me.
Aerogarden has been “planted”, and most of the seeds have started to sprout & have their first little baby leaves.
We were thinking of starting our outside plant bulbs last weekend, but it’s potentially going to frost again this upcoming weekend…(after being in the high 70s (Fahrenheit) this week), so we’re holding off until next weekend.
I would have been worried if it was high 70s (Celsius) last week… (edit or Kelvin come to think of it)
True, I guess you’d probably be dead at high 70s in any other temperature scale than Fahrenheit, hah
A bit less movement at this point as things adjust and get into the full swing of the season.
I got my first harvest of cherry tomatoes! An entire 2 of them! But the two plants have approximately 40 fruit growing now, so as temps continue to rise so will production.
In a more surprising turn of events the newly transplanted banana pepper plant has acted like it wasn't transplanted at all and it's growing much faster than expected. The other two peppers are still getting over transplant shock. This was a major surprise since, in my experience, peppers are exceptionally slow.
Eggplant is over transplant shock and starting new growth.
We had 3 straight days of light rain which stirred up a bunch of stuff for my new Brandy Boy tomatoes. One ended up with enough early stage blight that I had to completely remove it, but I still have 3 more growing nicely. All tomatoes were treated with Neem oil which has antifungal properties to help mitigate.
The pole beans have started climbing, so I expect in a few weeks to start being able to harvest. Once they start they go crazy.
Okra is about 3 weeks post-transplant and they haven't done anything. Not sure what's going on there.
The last major non-plant news is I have the T-Posts and 40% sun shade fully up and it's doing amazing. By the end of the week we're expected to start reaching 90F, so I got it up just in time!
Mostly now is a waiting and watching game. Fertilizing every couple weeks and watching out for pests.
Sounds like you have made an excellent start! What do you use for fertilising?
The soil itself is a mixture of rich plain soil, mushroom compost, cow manure, worm castings, and perlite. The fertilizers I put on top every few weeks to a month are generally either a 5-1-1 Fish Emulsion for supporting plants that aren't fruiting yet to help them grow more leaves. I just dilute it in water and then use that in place of a regular watering.
Once they start fruiting, they want less nitrogen and more phosphorus and potassium so I have a 3-4-6 "Tomato Tone" and a 5-10-10 for plants that want a lot of phosphorus and/or potassium. which is a granule/powder so I sprinkle it around the base and water it in (again in place of the regular watering cycle).
I’m pretty new to gardening. I rent so I can only invest so much, but I’ve improved the dead dirt plot into actual living soil. I recently sowed a lot of flowers (alyssum, calendula, nasturtiums, and a local pollinator mix) and (crimson and white) clover, so hopefully it will turn into a nice little pollinator garden and improve the soil quality too. I’ve also got a blue sage and a California lilac planted too. I killed some of their cousins previously since the soil was worse and I didn’t do great watering, so hopefully they do better.
I’ve also set up some potted herbs, which I’m excited about. Rosemary, mint, and cilantro are already thriving fast; TBD on basil and dill.
The exciting thing I’ve decided to do is start vermicomposting because it sounds very fun and I have some extra buckets lying around. We have compost collection already, but it will be nice to get some actual value out of our kitchen scraps!
I’m also thinking of setting up a bird feeder, hummingbird feeder, and maybe even a bird bath. My backyard is small and was previously in bad shape. It’s coming alive and I’d love for it to be a nice hangout spot for birds, bugs, and other critters!
I’m not a very patient person, so I’m hoping gardening improves that. Even with my meager set up it’s just nice to go look at my sprouts and enjoy the slow progress. It’s cool to see how in the past two years the lifeless dirt has become soil with tons of little bugs all around it. It was a lot of work weeding, tilling (which I won’t do again I promise), amending, etc but the main effort was removing all the damn rocks and trash that ended up buried in the yard from previous tenants. I should have planted clover early on to help the soil but I’m glad I did this year!
Sorry everybody, I joined this thread and haven't written at all after the first post. I love reading about everyone's work here but I don't have a real garden to write about. I've started to get pretty obsessive-excited about my pothos clippings though, so I'll give an update on those. I'll try to gild the story by referring to the plants as a distributed "water garden". I ended up with 10 or 15 glass jars of pothos plants around a year ago by occasionally taking and saving clippings from a few the mother plants. And over this past year, the water garden expanded a lot through compound interest on those clippings.
I never put much effort into these or any plants in the past. It's been luck along with patience (the resume word for laziness and neglect) and the bare minimum effort needed to keep the jars from running dry. But recently I've been trying to take it a little more seriously and, wow, the plants are really responding. I bought some liquid plant food. I've been timing the clipping of apical growing ends. I've learned a bit about root care (H2O2 and some gentle fingerwork is a nice trick). More recently, I even bought a few grow lights to use as an experiment with some of the plants growing above the kitchen cabinets.
I don't know where this is going to end, but I still have counter and bookshelf space here and there, so it could go on for a while. I think I said in my only other post that I'm also thinking about starting a "little free library" of plant clippings at work. Work has been busy so that hasn't happened yet, but it's still on the roadmap.
Also on the roadmap is something I'm really excited about. I ordered an aquarium air pump and bubbler stones to increase dissolved oxygen levels in a few of the water jars. I don't think it will do a lot for the initial phase of clipping propagation, but it should in theory help once the root system develops. The package hasn't arrived yet, but you can imagine that I'm on the very edge of my seat waiting for the delivery truck to pull up. I'll give an update on that experiment once I've rigged it up and give a few plants the effervescent spa treatment for a month or so.
This sounds really interesting!
How often do you have to add water or change out the water in your various vessels?
Thanks! I think best practice is to replace the water roughly every 1-2 weeks but I'll often stretch it to 3 or 4 weeks (depending on jar size) without trouble. The main goals of the refresh are to get rid of anaerobic bacteria metabolites and to increase dissolved oxygen levels, so I'm really excited to see the impact of an air bubbler. The smaller vessels need to have water changes more often than the larger ones though. I'll change the smallest ones every five days or so.
This week I traveled from my home in western Washington to a farm in Phoenix.
I know things were different, but this is pretty much the polar opposite of my gardening experience. It's pretty strange.
What was it like? I’m imagining massive scale with big irrigation circle systems. I always find it’s such a big difference between commercial and hobby farming, and the hobby farming just seems so much more wholesome.
It's a hobby farm, just an acre and it has a bunch of goats, chickens, peacocks, and sheep.
They get their irrigation water from some kind of flood system, still costs money but not as much as city water. I can't seen to figure out if this is an environmental positive or negative.
Because the property is mostly sand, they have started with raised beds and have put down compost made of animal waste, food scraps, and arborist wood chips where they eventually plan to plant in the ground. Last year the chickens ate all of the plants, this year they're better separated with a fence and greenhouse. I'm actually confused why they're using the greenhouse when it's been over 80F/26C every day I've been here and has recently been over 100F/38C.
That’s really interesting, lots I never knew was even a thing!
Friends for general "look what I got" / "look what happened to my poor children..." vibes, but otherwise it's just for me! The herbs I've planted are theoretically useful to me, but I just like seeing the progression of growth.
Oh I guess that's answered by the above... purely the journey, though I suppose my real reward would be getting a better sense of cultivating plants if I ever can upgrade from a set of small planters on an apartment balcony to a backyard garden.
Anyways, it was rather stormy (for California lmao, probably peanuts anywhere else) since my last update and the small separate plastic container I had with mystery seeds that I had placed on the lip of one planter, fell over and squished one of my bunches of cilantro. They do seem... fine, as in alive!?
I'm really fucken' struggling with fungus gnats. We've had them for a few months now, and I've tried a number of approaches:
Water plants less- let them dry out between waterings. This seems to reduce the number a little, but a couple of plants we have do not like to be dry. Ever.
One of the many nematode products. This seems to have very little effect on the number of flies. I have tried both top and bottom watering with this (the problem is that the flies seem to reside in both the top surface of the soil, as well as underneath the pots, within the drainage holes).
Bacillus thuringiensis israelensis (Bti). We tried these early on, after reading anecodal accounts about how effective it was, and how (in plants which do not run-off into the environment, such as potted plants indoors) safe it was. These had the most effect, but did not fully remove the problem, and when the tablets ran out they just came back with a vengeance.
Other than the flies, which are not damaging, but are a nuisance, the plants have been doing fine. The second lot of strawberries had a 4/8 germination+survival rate, and the seedlings are in the planter, which will go out when they're large enough and when the temperatures are consistently above 10c. We still have.. far too many tomato plants, at roughly 30 of them. I will probably be pestering neighbours about taking one or two when they're big enough. I have a few tiny lavender plants which I have germinated from seeds which I harvested myself, and if they survive long enough then I will have backups for if the main shrub outside ever decides to keel over. The basil is.. fine. Every time I cut a shoot off to use in dishes, and I have too much, I put it in water to keep and some of those cuttings have also spontaneously rooted. We're trying to root a sweet basil that we bought cuttings of from the supermarket for another dish, too.