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Tildes Gardening Group: Week 13/7/26
This is the restarted Tildes gardening group- I had a lot on in my life and kind of forgot about this (sorry!). Feel free to share any gardening stories or problems with the community.
Yeah, I forgot about this because life was hard and busy. I also forgot about my garden apart from a manic watering every other day. Surprisingly survived well, and did well enough for my toddler to be able to enjoy raspberries and peas from things. The tomato plants are doing well too, as are the sunflowers. Carrots did not do well, very stunted, and the beets seem to have some sort of disease as they are not flourishing at all. We had a hot dry spell in the UK and it was interesting how much worse the plants in boxes did than those in the actual ground (it makes sense, but it was such a stark difference!).
Welcome back!
I thought about making a post a couple of weeks ago but don't think I'm up to the responsibility.
Are you keeping honeybees?
I don't usually post in these because I've dropped the ball on gardening for the past few years. But this year my parents gave me an old planter cart that I threw some tomato and pepper seeds into. Just to see how that goes. Well anyway the cart is on our front porch and right above it is a hanging fern. A month or so ago, we noticed a bird's nest growing in the fern. Over the past few weeks we've enjoyed going out there and watching the baby birds grow up. It's become my morning routine before work -- go outside, water plants, tell the birds good morning, etc.
Well yesterday I went out and realized how big and feathered they'd become so I started talking to them and lamented that one day they'll be big enough to fly away and I'll miss them. Then I moved too quickly, scared the birds, and they all flew away. I laughed so hard at the irony of it. We didn't even know they could fly yet! Oh well. I haven't checked the nest this morning, but as of last night they hadn't returned, so they may just be out there living their best bird life.
I admit this is only vaguely gardening-related, but the birds technically lived in my garden area, so they were part of the gardening experience :)
For whatever it's worth, I think the birds are solidly gardening related. One of the benefits I get from gardening is being more in-tune with the flora and fauna of my neighborhood (for better or worse... I'm looking at you deer who eat the tips of every plant!). The inclusion of the birds into your daily routine is a nice reminder that there is more to the wildlife of our neighborhoods than just humans and pets. And I love watching all the animals grow up. I also feel the same bittersweet melancholy when they are grown.
That's both sweet and sad at the same time, and it feels like an analogy for much of life to be honest. Maybe they will come back next year?
I finally picked up my garden again after neglecting it last year.
Unfortunately, it's not doing much, even after more than a month of being planted. Nothing is outright dying, but nothing is really happening with it either. I have a drip watering system that usually works great, but I'm kind of wondering if it's plugged because I ended up burying parts of it around the roots of the stuff I planted. Or maybe the nutrients are drained out of my soil after many years?
I ended up upping my watering time by 15 minutes to see if that makes a difference, because I was really hoping to get Cucumbers and Jalapenos this year for pickling.
My soil definitely became depleted after a few years. Compost has helped my rose a lot, and I try do a bit of crop rotation through the years with peas/legumes. Maybe try a top layer of compost? Also, how has your sunlight been this year? My crops grow so much after a good sunny day!
My sunlight is pretty much always fantastic.
I noticed one of my peppers wilting the afternoon sun, which definitely shouldn't be happening, so I ended-up altering my watering schedule to give them some water in the morning, around 7am and then again at 7pm. I'm hoping that'll help keep the soil a little more hydrated than what I was doing (one big water around 4am), so we'll see what happens.
Maybe it is water. My sunflowers wilt in the sun, but I think it’s because I planted them too densely even though I knew I shouldn’t.
If you haven't done this already, a soil test can tell you if you need to amend the soil. They're expensive, but issues like your having may make it worthwhile.
My garden is in a weird place this year. It's another year where I'm not sure if I'll be living in the current place for another year, so I didn't go super hard on fixing up the beds and doing soil restoration etc. I've grown tired of leaving incredible gardening spaces for other people!
We've been going through a heat wave and it has been both helping and hurting the garden. My tomatoes have liked a lot of the heat and are starting to get tall, starting to bush out a bit. I grow all heirlooms, so I don't generally start getting harvestable fruits until August, so the green tomatoes currently on the vine are just pieces of excitement. My pepper plants don't seem to know what to do this year. Some of them are thriving in the heat, some of them are stunted in the heat, some of them are fruiting more than I expected. I'll see how it plays out but I'm thinking I might not get the size of pepper harvest I was hoping for. To the disappointment of many, my hot sauce batch might be lean this year. This is also the first year I tried over-wintering pepper plants. So I have some very nice, very dead pepper plants in my garden.
My cucumbers look like shit. My zucchini aren't producing. Somehow my beans aren't doing well this year. Oh well.
I haven’t done anything really new in my garden this year. But there has been some interesting things going on. Last year I had planted some calendula seeds in my perennial bed. They did okay, but didn’t really produce enough for harvest. Oddly, even though they are annuals, three of them overwintered! Didn’t even lose their lower leaves. This spring I cut them down to their green bits to see what would happen, and they are producing like mad! I go out everyday and harvest a ton of flowers. I find this super exciting :)
I love it when plants are more hardy than expected!
Last spring I planted 5 raspberry crowns. One died, so I didn't go into this year with much hope for a sizeable crop. However, I was wrong, so far I've canned around 10 pints of freezer jam and regular jam from the remaining crowns. And I already have twice the number of canes coming up as I did last year. So far the bird pressure hasn't been bad, I'm guessing it's because these are purple raspberries and they're kind of hard to see in the shade of their own leaves.
I got a little over ambitious/excited this year about corn after reading The Resilient Gardener, I ended up with 1 sweet corn (Golden Bantam), 3 parching varieties, 2 popcorns, and one polenta variety, all recommended in that book. I'm a couple of hours away from the Willamette Valley where Carol Deppe lives, their summers are a bit warmer but they also get the wet springs and dry summers. To avoid cross pollination, I planted all of the non-sweet corns at 2 week intervals, which so far seems to be working. Most of the first variety have tasseled and the silks are starting to dry up, the second variety is just starting to show tassels poking through the leaves. They're next to each other, so if the second variety does end up putting out pollen I may need to bag it until the first variety finishes.
I grow Seascape strawberries, which are daylight neutral and supposedly provide strawberries all summer. Last year there was a pause that I thought came from underwatering them, but they've stopped in July yet again, so now I'm wondering if this is part of their normal cycle.
This is year 3 of my asparagus, the first year you can really harvest! Unfortunately I was out of town when they were ready, so I only got about 6 stalks out of 24 crowns. I guess they've built up even more root mass and should be in good shape next year.
I got annoyed at how hard it is to grow watercress in a drought, but I love watercress. Some research revealed its cousins, garden cress and upland cress. I didn't have much luck with the upland cress, but the garden cress is fantastic! Highly recommended to anyone else who has watering challenges and loves watercress. I'm letting it go to seed, hopefully it'll take care of itself next spring.
Last year I let a French Breakfast radish go to seed because it was too big to eat. That thing got to be the size of a pumpkin and put out SO MANY SEEDS! I donated some to the seed library, the rest apparently self seeded in my woodchip covered yard, because all spring I had tiny radishes popping up all over. This was such a nice surprise I'm letting it happen again.
This is year 4 of trying to grow watermelons in a non-watermelon friendly zone 8b with a short summer. Blacktail Mountain was developed in Idaho so I thought it would work, but the vines are still really small. I also planted a few other squash/pumpkin/cantaloupe/watermelon varieties, so far I haven't seen a single flower. I'm also in year 4 of trying to grow carrots, the slugs keep eating them before I even know they're there. This time I got Parisian market carrots, which are small like a baby carrot and round like a ball. I put a board over them, which should serve the dual purpose of acting as a slug trap and keeping the seeds moist, but it's been 4 days and I haven't seen a slug yet, which is pretty weird because they're eating up the nearby rhubarb and beans.
Oh, rhubarb! My household adores rhubarb, unadulterated without other fruit. I got a nice harvest this spring after splitting the main plant into 5 last spring. I made a quart or so of super sour rhubarb jam that's amazingly good, I'm so happy with how it turned out.
My Marionberry (blackberry) is producing beautiful gigantic fruit, but it's so overshadowed by the raspberry harvest that I keep forgetting about it. Good thing it doesn't need much care.
My garlic harvest went considerably better this year than last year. Last year the vast majority of the heads were so small that they didn't seem worth peeling. This year I'd say fewer than a quarter were that small. I had asked an LLM for help, it had me put alfalfa meal on them in early spring, which I guess really made a huge difference.
I got a lot of bare root plants at my county's native plant sale in the spring. So far at least one of each variety has survived, some did better than others. I have red and yellow currents, huckleberries, serviceberries, and some dogwoods.
Last week I was digging out arborist chips from my big pile to try to deal with the grass and weeds around my bare root plantings. After several trips, I was swarmed by yellowjackets that had apparently created a nest inside the wood chip pile. I'm so very glad that I'm not allergic to them, but after that my summer allergies have been noticeably worse. (I did get in contact my doctor, he said I'm fine and unlikely to develop an allergy.) PSA to be careful around those things, the stings are no joke. They don't just itch, they hurt badly for a couple of days and only after that do they itch.