2021 Garden Thread

[DuaeGuttae]

I posted early in February about two camellias I had received thanks to the generosity of our next door neighbor. The white one bloomed in February just before the major freeze. The red one had lots of tight buds.

During the freeze I pushed the large terra cotta pots right up against our house and put other pots around them and covered each one with old bed sheets and shade cloth for extra insulation. I left the backs open against the walls of our house. Thankfully the plants and pots survived, and one bud on the red camellia that was probably up against the house lived, too. It bloomed today.



I’m very thankful that there is healthy new growth on both of these despite some freeze damage here and there.

 

[begreen]

I like it, begreen. Will you run drip irrigation to it? Is that gate in the background part of deer fencing that will protect it?

Yes and yes. About half of the property is deer fenced. Gardening would be futile without it. I planted some beets in the holes today.

 

[clancey]

That pink flower is just beautiful and Begreen sure do keep your property very pretty and well maintained--lots of work for you two and I sure enjoy this little thread especially with such good ideas on how to live life to the fullest through gardening.. I have wondered how does that one deer fence keep deer out? lol clancey

 

[EatenByLimestone]

Got a lot of the cooler weather stuff in yesterday. Broccoli plantlets were put in. Less than previous years... they got expensive! Spinach, kale, and beans went in the ground. Never had much luck with peas. I think we go from too cold to too hot too fast. Started the San Marzano tomatoes. A bit late, but I'll make it up in volume of plants this year. I need to change up the garden a bit. I've got a 11 year old raised bed that rotted out. As I've learned more about bed/sun placement and how I like to garden, it needs to be rotated 90°.

 

[DuaeGuttae]

I’ve got three volunteer sweet potatoes coming up. I’m surprised, I will admit, especially after the winter they had here.



I’ve got other sweet potato slips growing in the house now, and I still need to amend the bed where they’ll go with compost. I think I’ll have to move these because they’re in the long, narrow bed at the front of the garden where I’ve already put six determinate tomatoes, two dwarfs, and cilantro is growing.



We’re having nights back down into the forties this week. My tomatoes, peppers, and even eggplant have buds and blossoms. I’ve decided to let them go without protection. It will be warm during the days.

 

[clancey]

What a pretty garden...clancey

 

[EatenByLimestone]

The tomatoes will be fine unless it freezes.

 

[EatenByLimestone]

ok this is weird. All my Egyptian walking onions are mowed flat to the ground. The broccoli and chives next to them is untouched. Garlic is untouched. What the heck wants to eat onion greens. Had to ask my wife if she did it! Lol.

 

[EatenByLimestone]

It shouldn't be any long term harm unless it happens another few times, but its odd.

I've become completely fascinated with Egyptian walking onions. Does anybody else grow them?

 

[DuaeGuttae]

It shouldn't be any long term harm unless it happens another few times, but its odd.

I've become completely fascinated with Egyptian walking onions. Does anybody else grow them?

I don’t grow them and don’t know what would mow them down and leave your other stuff. Were the greens there or gone? I did have cutworm damage on my onions this spring, and I found the culprits in the soil, but there were telltale bits of greenery on the surface.

I see Egyptian walking onions mentioned a lot. Can you tell us more about them? I was going to ask for pictures (I would love pictures of your garden anyway), but I guess they’re not too photogenic at the moment.

 

[EatenByLimestone]

I have 1 plant untouched, and there were a couple pieces laying flat on the ground. But they are cut off at the ground. Its really weird.

I'll try to get some pics later today when the sun comes out. A lot of it isn't in yet, there's a chance of snow tomorrow. *rolls eyes* eventually spring will get here.

The Egyptian walking onions look like regular onions. There's 1 bulb underground and it grows above normally. Then it throws off a bunch of above ground pea sized onions up at the top! Eventually the top gets to heavy and falls over, where the small top onions plant themselves and start over. Hence the walking part. They walk across the yard.

 

[begreen]

Your garden looks great DuaeGuttae. It shows a lot of care and attention. Mine is much more casual.

 

[EatenByLimestone]

It snowed yesterday. It just didn't seem fitting to post pics of a garden covered in snow. On the plus side, my tomatoe starts finally pushed through the soil. Hopefully they grow fast and can get into the ground soon.

If BG`s garden is casual, mine is walmartesque.

 

[DuaeGuttae]

Your garden looks great DuaeGuttae. It shows a lot of care and attention. Mine is much more casual.

Thanks, Begreen. I’m not sure what is casual about your professional raised beds, but I appreciate the compliment.

 

[DuaeGuttae]

It snowed yesterday. It just didn't seem fitting to post pics of a garden covered in snow. On the plus side, my tomatoe starts finally pushed through the soil. Hopefully they grow fast and can get into the ground soon.

If BG`s garden is casual, mine is walmartesque.

That’s a whole new word for me, and I’m not even sure what it conveys, but it made me laugh.

I wonder if your mowed down onions could have been cutworms. My onion stalks are too thick for them at the moment, but I had a small cucumber just starting in the same bed, and it was cut off at soil level yesterday. The foliage was just lying on the ground.

When I had cutworms in the my lettuce bed, I sprinkled DE and surrounded the surviving lettuce and stalks with rings cut from toilet paper tubes (I actually had to open up the rings and use two spread wider to make my circles.). I don’t know which technique helped, or if both did, or if it was entirely coincidence, but the damage stopped in that area. When I put out a replacement cucumber, I think I’ll just shove a small stick in the soil beside it.

We had another nice harvest of lettuce yesterday: a head of Rouge D’Hiver (not a well formed head, but good eating) and a bunch of leaves from Crawford. I put in some dill, parsley, and green onion tops, and it was great. We have enough for a second salad for six today.

 

[EatenByLimestone]

That’s a whole new word for me, and I’m not even sure what it conveys, but it made me laugh.

I see such nice gardens on the board! I have the Vozelgang box stove version of one, lol.

The sun came out between flurries for a little bit. Here are the active beds so far. So far the active stuff is:

Rhubarb
2 beds of garlic
2 beds of broccoli plantlets
1 bare, but planted bed of spinach, kale, and beans
1 tub of lettuce
More rhubarb and horseradish.
A bare looking bed that has gnawed off onions, lol.

 

[EatenByLimestone]

Looks like some uncut raspberry bushes made their way into the pics.

 

[DuaeGuttae]

Thanks for going to the trouble of taking the pictures and posting them. I think your garden looks just fine, just a bit older than mine, so it has a bit more age showing. I also have the ”advantage” of drought. The weeds do grow but less vigorously than they would otherwise. You can see that even the area around the garden isn’t overgrown, and we haven’t done any trimming there in about nine months. I particularly like how you have the little beds up against the fence at the end of your paths.

We miss rhubarb. We had a few plants back in our little garden area in Virginia. My third child was just five when we moved, and she was so sad to leave behind her “Rubikins.” Yes, she had named her plant. I bought some rhubarb seeds last year just for her, but we never got any germination in our fall garden. We direct sowed the seeds and that doesn’t work well for me here. We’ll try again at the end of the summer inside and see if we can get a winter crop of rhubarb.

Your garlic looks great. Mine failed to come up at all this year, the only time I’ve ever had that happen. (Well, actually there may be two puny plants out of a whole bed.)

How many beds do you have? How big is each? There must be some more available space because you mention having a lot of San Marzano tomatoes started.

 

[EatenByLimestone]

Oh, there's always more beds, but they look horrible before I plant. The bed that's all bowed out and literally falling apart is the one I wanted to replace this year. With the silly lumber prices I'll wait. I haven't done much with that bed in the last couple years. I had about 1/2 of it volunteer dinosaur kale. I'm going to plant all of it in tomatoes this year. I bought a Squeezo a couple years ago and haven't had the chance to dirty it, lol.

I made the mistake of amending with some weed filled compost a couple years ago. I need to smother an asparagus bed and restart it. The 2 new parallel beds surrounded with hardware cloth were a product of this soil. I think I'm going to have to plastic them. They were once strawberry beds. The weeds choked them out and I planted onions there last year. I'll be putting tomatoes in the plastic here too. Weeds are a horrible thing.

 

[begreen]

Nothing to apologize about with those beds. Ours look tired before I start working on them in spring too. They're definitely better than the walmartesque, vogelzang variety. More like an older Avalon stove I would say. And better looking than our old beds that are heading into retirement.

 

[DuaeGuttae]

It was a big work day in the garden today. I had hoped for some good rain yesterday, but most of it missed us, so I spent a long time giving the beds a good soaking (with my watering cans). I also shoveled out some partially decomposed wood chip mulch that I didn’t want to bury in the bed where I was going to put sweet potatoes. My husband picked up some aged manure compost for me, and so we put that down where the mulch had come out.

I planted two varieties of sweet potatoes (both unknown). The palmate leaves are ones that grew too early in Virginia for my mother to plant, so she mailed them to me. The cordate leaves are slips I grew from a grocery store potato. The slips look pretty droopy because they were still getting afternoon sun when I put them in, but I think they’ll perk up fast. When they start growing, I’ll try to put the mulch back on. (It’s sitting in a cart outside the garden.)


While my husband was hauling buckets of compost from the trailer to the garden for me, I broke the bottom-most leaves off of most of my tomatoes to give them a bit more air. The two sweet million plants were showing some tiny fruit.



I also put in six seeds of Heavy Hitter Okra in a different bed. If it comes up well, it means that almost all of my crops will be planted for now. I did soak and sprout the seeds before planting. Heavy Hitter is a recently released type that is supposed to branch heavily and produce lots of pods per plant. We enjoyed our okra last year, but I really wanted more than I was able to grow. We’ll see if I can get Heavy Hitter to yield well. I’m sure it will take lots of water.

I had hoped to weed around the two olive trees that survived our freeze. All the top growth was killed, but these two are growing out from the roots. A third hasn’t grown out yet. I need to prune the dead branches and get the weeds out to make sure that they don’t compete with the olives. It will have to wait for another day, though.

 

[begreen]

Looking good. No okra growing here. Do you get enough fruit to harvest the olives?

 

[Montanalocal]

Here are my cabbage family seedlings. There are 72 pots of cabbages, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, and cauliflower. I seeded them April 1, and plan to plant them out around May 15. Mt garden is still covered with snow and my last frost free date is June 15.

 

[EatenByLimestone]

I have 2 packs of okra that need to go in. I'll have to wait until it stops snowing, lol.


I'm jealous of your growling setup! That looks great!

 

[Montanalocal]

Yea, I have developed a system over the years to grow my own transplants. I like to start with 42mm peat pellets. They come in a small wafer that expands when wet into a nice one inch starting medium that just fits 4 rows of 4 each into a 9 X 9 aluminum cake pan.

I cover them with foil and set them on a heat mat and the first sprouts appear within 2 days. Then they go under the lights, as close as you can get them.

It is important to always keep the tops of the plants as close to the lights as possible, as the light diminishes 4 time with every doubling of the distance away.

After 2 weeks the roots start to come out the sides of the peat pellets, so I transplant into 4” pots. One great thing about the pellets is there is no transplant shock.

The other thing I do is to leave my grow lights on day and night. I think it helps them grow better and not get leggy.

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