Gardening 2009

Everything else
1

There was a gardening thread last year here and there have probably been others. But it’s a new year and I wanted to start a fresh thread.

I realize it’s early in the year for this topic, but we’ve had a warm weekend here, and I was outside yesterday daydreaming a bit about gardening. (Yeah, that’s what happens when you’re 39 - less daydreams about sex and more about gardening.)

Anyways, my garden is about 6’ x 16’ or so, and I’ve allowed the strawberries that started at one end to take over most of the space. I could chop them back a bit or content myself with just a bit of space for the other stuff, but I’ve been eyeing spots in our yard to add another garden patch or do other garden-related things.

We’ve got a fairly big yard, but part of it is wooded, and there’s lots of trees, a deck, and fencing casting shadows on much of the rest, and the bits that ARE fairly sunny I mostly want to keep open for the kids to run around in.

My neighbor had a lot of luck with a strip down the side of his house that doesn’t get a lot of sun. I think part of the reason is that this strip is up against the concrete foundation of his house, and the light-colored foundation reflects a lot of light back into the garden strip, and also holds heat. Basically, I think it makes the area a sort of pseudo-hot zone, magnifying the sunlight that does reach the area.

I’ve got a strip along my house where I could do that.

I was also thinking about putting up a simple small greenhouse. You can order various small greenhouse kits on the internet for a few hundred dollars. A bonus of a greenhouse is that it might extend my growing season. I’m in St. Louis County, Missouri, so currently I can grow veggies and such from mid-spring to early-fall (roughly, depending on the crop.) Has anyone from a similar latitude used a greenhouse, and if so, can you grow year round?

Anyways, assuming I don’t do the ambitious greenhouse thing this year, I’ll probably have the strawberries, plus tomatoes and probably pumpkins. Given enough space, I’d add peas and perhaps some kind of underground thing (onions or potatoes maybe).

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So, whatcha gonna grow this year?

2

Assuming the temperatures here are in fahrenheit, you won’t be able to grow stuff all year round in a greenhouse, unless you buy a more serious model and put in heating and lightening.

Do note that your strawberries need replacing every two years. They’ll give a lot fewer berries and be prone for sickness if you keep them longer. New plants evey two years is the rule.

I have no idea how old your kids are, but mine love stuff, that you can pick yourself. My garden is really small, but we still manged a lot of tomatoes outside against a sunny wall and picked the last in september. Chillies in small mine greenhouses, lots of herbs, where the last mint was kiled by the frost and I picked my last rosemary yesterday.

We managed some potatoes, carrots and peas in a small patch that lies mostly in shadow, but only the peas reached a good size - that may also have to do with me putting the dirt in wooden sandboxes atop of my driveway without removing the stone driveway first, so there was really only about 30-40 centimeters of dirt for them to grow in (I’ll make a more permanet solution later, but this was just so my kids could experience food growing on a very small scale).

3

I can’t speak for MO, but I did have a greenhouse when I lived in London, and I couldn’t grow year round there either. However, it broadened the range of fruit and veggies I could grow, and was awesome. I think you should go for it, if you like gardening. I grew tons of great cucumbers in the greenhouse, and tomatoes, leeks, radishes etc out in the main garden. I think peas are a bit more cold-tolerant so you might be able to start them earlier than the other stuff (IIRC).

I have lost the free time to do any gardening these days, but luckily my garden came with several mature fruit trees, so I will just pick fruit from them and pretend I had something to do with the growing process :)

4

Yeah, I looked around the internet and it sounds like you’d need a heated greenhouse for cold weather, and it would take a fair amount of electricity to heat it. Plus, as I think about it, there’s probably not enough sunlight from November-February to grow much anyways.

I think I’ll probably add a second small garden along my foundation. It should be hot and sunny there - good for tomatoes.

5

I am trying my first ever vegetable garden this year. 4’ x 14’ in full sun. Just turned in 4" of soil conditioner, since 5’ down I had to bust up (by hand) some mighty thick clay.

Planning on the basics; onions, carrots, green peppers, cucumbers, tomatoes, brocoli, spinach and swiss chard.

Basically this is a test year to see if I can move my house plant green thumb off of the patio and into a garden.

Starting onion seeds tonight in a little cell-pack thing so they can go out after the frost free date sometime in early April.

edit: Also, 36 and spending more time daydreaming about gardening this past year than sex.

6

I’ll be a bit jealous of those with a garden, but I’ll toss in that my wife and I planted 200+ bulbs in the courtyard of our apartment building last fall, and I’m looking forward to seeing them pop up. Soooon.

7

snowcrash - Good idea to plant a lot of stuff the first year - see what works.

But even that is not foolproof. The first year I planted tomatoes, I got huge plants, lots of green tomatoes, but very few ripened. The second year, I switched to mostly Roma tomatoes, and had a bumper harvest. The third year, I planted Romas again, but the plants didn’t do well, I think due to an over-wet spring.

One thing you don’t have on your list is peas. They’re fun to grow and tasty when fresh, even if, like me, you’re not a huge pea fan.

Then again, with a 4’ x 14’ garden, you’ll use up your available space quickly.

8

I got the gadget of the week from Barron’s for V-day for the missus. If it works, I’ll let folks know but it seems pretty killer. http://easybloom.com/learn/overview.html

Going with okra, tomatoes, cukes, herbs a plenty, peas, beans, peppers and a few other things. Okra is very easy to grow and a high reward on the space.

9

I’m moving in the middle of spring, so I can’t put anything in the garden. Anyone have a recommended vegetable that does well in pots?

10

wahoo - That gadget DOES look pretty neat.

But I see some problems. If it tries to detect available sunlight based on a 24 hour cycle, it needs to know what time of year it is and what latitude you’re at. You’ll get a lot more sunlight on July 1 than an Dec 1, and your latitude will make a difference.

Similarly, information on moisture seems of dubious value. Even over a full 365 days, moisture information may be skewed by a particularly wet or dry year. Adjustments could be made if the system compared the moisture detected by the monitor against what would be expected for the time frame in question, given, say, information from the National Weather Service or whatnot, but even there, localized variation would make things tricky.

Soil quality does not seem to be accounted for.

So there’s a lot of potential issues, and yet, it still seems like an interesting gizmo. I’d be interested in your report.

11

Cat Master - tomatoes or peppers maybe?

You can also plant stuff post-spring. Last year, after a very wet spring, a lot of stuff in my garden was wilted or hadn’t come up. IIRC, I nuked much of it with roundup, waited a bit, and planted pumpkin seeds relatively late (June or July maybe?) I got some huge pumpkin plants and some modest actual pumpkins.

12

Last year, we tried to get a vegetable garden going. Unfortunately, critters (rabbits and racoons) managed to ravage all the seedlings. Beets - eaten as soon as the tiny leaves were visible. Sweet peas - all the shoots were gone the day after planting. Green peppers - these managed to struggle past the initial show down but the plants didn’t do well and we wound up with a couple of peppers the size of my thumb, and they were not good eats. The things that did survive were tomatoes which thrived, and garlic which also did well. We planted fennel which did not get eaten, but I think we plated them too close together ass we didnt’ really get the big fennel bulb base developing.

We plan on trying a vegetable garden again this year. Are there any plants that critters don’t like to chow down? I’d tend to grow those rather than trying to fight a losing battle with a wascally wabbit.

13

Phil, will you take some pictures? I’d love to see what it looks like even mid-winter.

I’m thinking of trying some of those upside down hanging planters for tomatos this year. We have just had terrible luck with our vegetable/fruit gardening.

14

Peppers are a given. I had a huge success (as was mentioned last year) growing habaneros in pots, so I’ll switch to something a little more versatile this year. The first time I ever tried to grow tomatoes was in pots, and they got blossom end rot. I’m a little gun shy as a result. I may as well give them another go. The worst I could lose is a couple bucks in soil and some time.

15

FWIW, I had better luck with Roma tomatoes than the larger kind I tried another year (big boy?) Consider it one data point.

jp - An invitation to show off my garden? I accept! I’ll try to take and post some pictures at some point in the next few days.

16

OK, I took these shots today, a few minutes after noon (relevant because the shadows will tell you which direction, roughly, is South).

The scrubby plants you see over about 75% of the garden are strawberry plants (mixed with a lot of tree leaves). They should come back strong in the spring, but unless I whack them back a lot, I won’t have much space left for other stuff. I might extend the garden down the fence line a bit, or I might put in a secondary, small garden at a different location.

You can see that the bed is elevated. The soil under my backyard is awful - clay and rock. I could have tried to dig down about 6-12 inches, but that would have been a BIG chore. It was easier to build a frame above ground and dump a bunch of topsoil in.

Until about a week ago, I had a green plastic fence extending about 18" or so above the frame all around the garden as a rabbit barrier. But it was ugly, and after 3 years, the plastic was deteriorating. I decided to take it down and hope that the rabbits in the nearby woods don’t do much damage.

17

Here’s a potential location for a mini-garden extension. Again, the picture is from shortly after noon, and you can see that it is already starting to fall into shadow, and will remain so for the rest of the day. But it gets pretty much full sun UNTIL about noon, and I think the light foundation as a backstop would possibly increase the effect of the sunlight it does get.

This area is about 8 feet wide, and if I used it, I’d probably build an elevated bed that comes about 2 feet out from the wall.

18

That is a wonderful garden design. Did you build it yourself? It looks like it might not be too hard to make?

With a strawberry patch that size, what kind of yield are you getting?

19

It’s a simple design - just some stacked lumber nailed together (with big nails/spikes). I think they’re 4 x 4s. My dad helped me build it a few years ago - good father son bonding time - he likes projects like that.

Last year, the strawberry yield wasn’t all that big - enough for maybe 3-5 strawberry pies or so. One issue is that while there are a lot of strawberries, they’re smaller than the jumbo ones you get in the store.

Either last winter or the one before I’d done a lot of dirt moving and such in the garden and messed up the strawberries. This year, they’ve been left relatively undisturbed and probably cover a somewhat larger area - I’m hoping for a big harvest.

20

You people and your green grass in February bother me.