2024 Garden Thread!

[EbS-P]

Tis the season. We have lots of lemon and already picked 3 GIANT oranges.

 

[begreen]

That's great. Something to look forward to once this little fellow has a few more years growth.

 

[kborndale]

It's the middle of November and I'm still getting tomatoes and peppers. Insane!

 

[begreen]

It's the middle of November and I'm still getting tomatoes and peppers. Insane!

Yes, we are too, but not a lot now. We had a cool damp end to summer which definitely slowed things down and introduced powdery mildew and late blight into some of the tomatoes.

 

[kborndale]

Looks like I may be getting my first frost tonight, time to pick the last tomatoes and bring the citrus inside.

 

[begreen]

Last week's pepper harvest. There are still some ripening outside but I don't know how well they're going to do.

 

[stoveliker]

We took the last tomatoes, bell peppers, banana peppers, and parsley yesterday. It's done here.

 

[begreen]

Winter gardening hydroponics this year. The lettuce is ready for a second picking. The basil has already been picked once. When mature, these two plants will fill the gaps completely I hope.


I got a great deal on the second Amorning unit, just $32 which is about half of what I paid for the first unit last year. The left one has strawberry starts from our garden and the right one has tomatoes, Tiny Tim on the left and and Siam on the right which just got planted and is starting to sprout. I'm giving them a lot of room to grow based on last year's experience.

 

[begreen]

Looks like we may finish out the year without a frost. I planted these peas in early August and the are producing a handfull of peas a week. We still have carrots, beets, spinach, tatsoi, chard, kale, lettuce, and cabbage growing outside. Inside we have basil, lettuce, dwarf tomatoes and we have our first strawberry bloom.

 

[EbS-P]

Here is the extent of my egregiously neglected “ garden”. It’s been a super busy fall semester. It ran dry a couple times for a few hours and has been down to 19 a couple times. I need more of these.

 

[begreen]

This is the "farm" currently, strawberries on the left and tomatoes on the right. Lettuce is on its own. It's been harvested 3 times so far. I didn't include the basil because I did a big harvest yesterday so it's just stem and bottom leaves for the next couple of weeks.

 

[DuaeGuttae]

I've not been attending to the garden this fall ever since we moved as I've been busy with other things. We had a lot of rain at the end of September [starting the day after we moved; it was bad enough to wash out a number of roads in our county and close public schools for a few days]. That killed a number of our plants, particularly the cucurbits which struggle anyway in our soil, but also tomatoes for the most part.

The peppers did fine though it, and my mom and I had lots of big harvests this fall. I'm not sure that these photos are the actual last harvests I did, but I was very pleased with the pepper crop. I made paprika out of the Beaver Dam peppers and the Txorixero. I love the flavor the Beaver Dam. The Txorixero were the most prolific, so that produced an abundance of deeply flavored sweet paprika. The Hot Sunset banana peppers I cut into rings for the freezer and also made about a liter of fermented hot sauce. The kids have been enjoying that.




My mom harvested sweet potatoes for me and got a good crop. She's still eating salad from the garden with lettuce, parsley, cilantro, and dill. We've had hard freezes, but so far those plants have survived. There's also mustard growing, and my little guy and I snack on leaves of that when we go to Grandma's. It can be a kick to the sinuses, though.

My oldest daughter asked me to help her start tomato seeds over Thanksgiving, so we have about three dozen seedlings growing. She's taking a greenhouse management course, and these will eventually move to the greenhouse, but that's not for a few weeks yet, so I really need to get a grow light set up for them. They've spent cloudy days under our piano lamp and sunny days in our sun room, but even sunny winter days in Virginia aren't enough light, so I need to make it a priority.

I have not set up our Aerogardens yet, though I'd like to soon.

 

[begreen]

The peppers looks great. Our Beaver Dams didn't produce well this year. They were behind all of the other peppers in spite of being planted at the same time. I'm going to get fresh seeds for next season. It's great that your kids like the hot sauce. My oldest son didn't grow to like it until in his late teens and my younger son still can only handle light to moderate doses of hot stuff. His brother keeps challenging him to hot pepper challenges, but he is now in the nuclear class of tolerance and above me even.