Gardening 2014

Hooray!

Posted just now on the old thread from Branwell:

--

Just spend the morning planting HERITAGE APPLE TREES on the common. It was AWESOME. I planted two whole trees and shall now forever think of them as MINE.

I like chasing about the common with pitchforks and stakes. I like digging and removing turf. I don't like whacking in stakes so much, that was all a bit neubauten with the clanging and stuff.

I may go back to learn how to be an APPLE WARDEN. That would be awesome. Heritage apple varieties and rootstocks have the best names ever.

― Bipolar Sumner (Branwell Bell), Sunday, February 23, 2014 6:31 AM (20 minutes ago)

As for me, this is a month old, but gives you an idea of what's coming up for the new year. Will hope to have another proper update in March; I haven't had a chance to go out for a bit, but my gardenmates are taking care of things.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=730xTz-Lovw

I've been feeling really kinda weird about not drinking and then having nothing to do on Sunday mornings and it being strange. So joining the community garden in my neighbourhood, which does gardening things, on Sunday morning, this feels like a really positive and great thing to be doing.

Also... APPLE TREES. Hooray indeed!

<3 <3 <3 <3 <3 what a great thing to do!

Oh god I am so fing envious of people whose gardens aren't still under two feet of snow. I am going to start my indoor seedlings this coming week, I think. So looking forward to spending as much time in the garden as I can this year. Last year's harvest was pretty pitiful, really - just a few cherry tomatoes and a small amount of chard and kale. And I think 3 tiny carrots. This year I have more time to devote to it.

Apple tree planting sounds awesome. There are some apple trees on a public foot/bike path here, whose fruit never gets picked and ends up all over the ground. I think this year a neighbour and I will take a couple of ladders and do some picking. I hope they are decent to eat.

There is a community garden here that exists solely to provide the local food banks with fresh food. We are going to start volunteering there as soon as our kids get big enough to come with us.

Been up to check on the orchard, and discovered that I got the names of my trees completely wrong. Apple tree update: my trees are named RIBSTON PIPPIN and PEASGOOD NONSUCH. Aren't those the best names ever?

Learned also (yesterday) why windsewn apples are such a mixed bag, in terms of varieties and how they don't breed true and wow who knew there were so many pollinating groups and some really good apples require THREE parents. But, do remember, even if your apple trees don't produce good eating apples, they may still be good for cooking or chutney-making.

But, do remember, even if your apple trees don't produce good eating apples, they may still be good for cooking or chutney-making.

Is there a way to know in advance? Last fall I was given a couple of bags that had been picked from public-land trees and they were terrible. I cooked them up into apple sauce and it was basically inedible - they were tough and rubbery and not sweet at all.

I will ask when the apple-expert-man comes back next month, but my instinct would be that tasting is probably your best bet. But mixed bag = mixed results and if you don't pick them you don't get to learn which trees to avoid. That's a shame.

(I am not an apple expert! I am just an idiot who went to a good talk yesterday. I want to learn much much more about apple trees, myself, basically.)

Wanted to plant more apple trees this winter myself, but I never got round to getting an order in (you need to order early to get some of the more unusual varieties on the right rootstock). Think at the moment I have 6 or 7 diddy little apple trees on my allotment that all do pretty well, plus a pear that has never produced anything edible and a victoria plum that fruited like crazy one year, then hasn't produced anything at all for the last two. It's great growing fruit trees though cos they needn't take up that much space and they don't really need much maintenance at all if you're not trying to train them into some fancy shape. Picking and biting into the first fruit of the year is awesome - trying to wait until the fruit is properly ripe and then just picking one anyway cos you're impatient and half-worried you'll leave it too late, that major tongue-shrivelling taste explosion from the acids, so good. Enjoy yr community growing cos that sounds cool!

Does anyone know any good books on growing fruit trees, like the history of the cultivation of the things?

Kinda like the walnut chapters in Roger Deakin's Wildwood, but more specific for apples/pears/quinces?

It's so weird going to gardening every Sunday afternoon. Because I so much think of Sunday afternoons as "rehearsal" time.

Today I built CAGES for forcing rhubarb. I'm getting really good at engineering projects and building shit out of just wire and twine. It's really awesome. Really really hard not to keep humming Aphex Twin songs while working with rhubarb, though.

I keep trying to think of ways to combine gardening with dronerock but beyond singing to my rhubarb, I'm not really getting there... "We are TWIIIINE we are GRO-BAGS, we keep the WEEDS from around your PLANTS..." *one note guitar solo* um yeah.

Next week there's a big project to rebuild the rookery, so that should be actually awesome.

Too sunny to garden today; skived off to the woods.

Today I am going to an Orchard Workshop to learn all about how to become an ~Orchard Leader~.

I will elucidate you all soon as to what this means. Sure you are waiting with baited breaths.

Have I left it too late to plant Padron Peppers (in the UK)?

Gardening isn't as fun when the state is in a massive drought.

Sorry, I have only been trained on fruits. I don't know vegetables.

Okay, a long overdue update -- a number of changes for the good in the garden this year so check it all out...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouZaWoxeqH8

I had a brilliant run this summer season - excellent sauce tomatoes, eggplants, chard, capsicums, basil by the ton, herbs, beetroot, beans of various sorts. so good! now that's mostly ending and I've just planted out broccoli and more beets. yum.

So the new garden setup we have has been going gangbusters:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MlwhmEaocE

God, I would kill for that much garden space.

I think you've convinced to grow artichokes, and I love your wildflower section, although it's funny to see wildflowers in such a structured context.

convinced me

The wildflowers weren't my contribution but while organized they definitely add a lot to the place, really lovely. And yes, with artichokes, give 'em TONS of space, but the results are wonderful.

Ned, what kind of vid camera do you use? Smooth as shit.

Just my iPhone. I forget whether that or YT smooths it out.

Here (Ontario) the tomato plants are no more than 6 inches high. Ned's video makes me desperately want to move to a nicer climate - this last long winter made everything worse, but really our growing season never starts before mid-April.

So busy! So much replanting and thinning out and weeding. I have replanted something like 60 baby lettuces.

Next weekend is our big open day thing, it's called The Big Eat - basically people are supposed to bring picnic lunches, and the Community Garden will provide the salad. Pretty much my whole bed for the past 2 months has been dedicated to growing salad veg for it, so I'm being all house garden proud and "ooh, must get all the weeds out because people will be looking at it." (I just hope the slugs don't get the salad before we do.)

Finally getting food out of it is feeling very rewarding. Last weekend was ~mystery potatoes~ (no one remembers putting potatoes down in that particular patch, yet potatoes by the score were dug out of it!) for dinner. This weekend it is broad beans. I did not know you could eat fresh beans raw; they taste amazing!

In the other hemisphere, but I want to join in.

I'm still getting use dot the climate, it's the southern equivalent of the end of october here and I still have peppers ripening on the balcony. Things are looking a little dull but I'm still astounded by how late in the year things grow here, the olive tree keeps putting on new foliage although annoyingly, because of how the shadows are cast, it is more vigorous lower down on the trunk where it seems to get a couple of hours more sun right now.

And both video and photos from yesterday -- just amazing how our garden's been going:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsF0zKIpH0g

https://www.flickr.com/photos/nedraggett/sets/72157644535577560/

(This second link is for the rolling set of photos from this year.)

Big Eat went well! Slugs ate almost ALL of the lettuces that I planted out in the main garden, but there were enough in the protected bed that we had lettuce and radishes and it was great.

Wow, So Cal garden looks so different from South London garden! Really shows how different the climate is.

It definitely helps. I suspect whatever soil blend came in played its part; we used two separate kinds, one organic, the other Miracle-Gro. Both doing the same good work, though, so just maybe all that sun is the trick. Having no nearby shade helps too, but having said that one small yellow rose is currently being covered over by the tomato plants, so we're planning on transplanting it to the gap in the main rose row. After that we're golden -- next year should be a comparative breeze since all the big infrastructure changes had to be done this year.

But with all that sun, how on earth do you do the irrigation?

In Britain, with all our rain, we only have to water once maybe twice a week if there's a ton of sun. We have a walled garden to keep out the wind, and which provides heat (we're growing figs and grapes in the most sheltered bit!) But I look at how exposed your garden is, and just think... jeez, that must be murder to keep watered.

Being coastal helps -- there have been hot days requiring daily watering, but generally speaking twice to three times a week does the trick. It helps that the current gardening team (five all told including me) regularly visits at various points during the week, so it's pretty easy to keep an eye on how things are doing. The beds themselves hold the water very well, and while the explosive growth this year means some extra watering, we normally get through with about twenty minutes of watering per visit, so let's say an hour all told for a week. Handy, that.

Anyone recommend a fruit tree that could be bought *now* as a present? (UK)

Fruit trees are funny about when they like to be transplanted. You might be better getting something that is in a pot, if it needs to be delivered now?

Today, though...

So. Many. Lettuces.

Today was London open gardens day so we had like 10x usual amount of visitors. I was trying to thin out the lettuce bed YET AGAIN because these things are monsters and will take over the whole bed if I let them. So someone had the bright spark of selling the extras to the garden visitors. I have literally had grannies coming and taking the lettuce off the prong of my gardening fork and skipping off saying how perfectly fresh they are! So great!

We made, like, a hundred pounds, though, which is super awesome news for our greenhouse fund

But now I am really sad because the garden is closing for three weeks while they resurface the paths. I am terrified that the weeds (not to mention the slugs) will all be waist high, and my vegetables will be gone by the time it is open again. :-/

Finished up our lettuces Friday. Will post photos/video later...

My lettuce situation is rather embarrassing...tried to grow some from seed this year, but my garden patch is infested with weed spores from previous years of non-weeding. I went out the other week and the weeds were covering the whole patch, so Iweeded, keeping what I *hoped* were the lettuce seedlings/baby plants. But it looks like I just saved a different kind of weed, because what grew out there isn't looking too much like lettuce. Next year I'll start the seeds in a container and learn what the seedlings actually look like.

Haha, oh god. I have definitely had those days where I've weeded out the wrong thing.

I have one row of mixed "speedy salad" (which is mostly herb salad) but because it grew in so thick and fast, I didn't get to weed around it before. So today when I went to weed it, I basically had to taste all of the things that were growing there to establish "yup, that's peppery, that's lettuce-y, that's herb-y, that's UGH I THINK THAT WAS A DANDELION" but I sure had fun doing it.

Yeah I think recognition of what your seedlings are going to look like is really valuable knowledge when direct-sowing. All my container-sown stuff is doing relatively well and it's mainly because it's fresh soil so I don't have to worry about weeds.

My baby arugula went to seed already, though. I don't remember it happening this quickly last year. I barely got one salad out of it. Boo.

Also, they sell dandelion leaves at our grocery store produce section. Has anyone here tried eating them? I assume you cook them like spinach or kale? Because man I have some fing GIANTS in my lawn and if they're edible, I could probably just live on those all summer :)

Arugula is rocket, right? I think I managed about 4 weeks of sandwiches out of mine before it went to seed, but then again, I have been sowing it in waves because it tends to spend itself quickly. Like, put in a second lot of seeds when the first lot start putting out their second set of leaves.

I don't think I've eaten dandelion in a salad or anything (and wouldn't, if those weeds were anything to go by) but I have definitely drunk dandelion and burdock drink.

(Also, there are about 8 billion different sub species of dandelion, it may be only certain varieties that are edible? I do not know.)

Whats likely to be eating nearly ripe cherries?

birds

It was. A very happy young thrush.

Can you get netting to stop the birds gobbling your crop?

Yes, have done. Was surprised by the way the cherries survived for ages and then suddenly the birds were interested. I kind of don't like to over protect stuff, too. Birds are in important part of the garden.

Our netting all paid off. Redcurrants and blackcurrants harvested today, om nom nom nom! (Am going to put what's left of them in my Eton Mess.)

Also, while banking the later potatoes, we saw that the Shetland Blacks were ready to come up. Raising potatoes is the weirdest operation. Especially as these potatoes come out of the ground bright blue. Can't wait to eat them and see if the blueness affects their flavour at all. (Or even my perception of their flavour.)

We're building another tent like thing to try to keep the birds off the brassicas.

My plot totally went to seed over the 3 weeks the garden was closed. But I've been amused to see that bolting lettuces can turn into little pagodas! Very weird. I should have taken a photo of them.

Still debating the best form of slug genocide. I step on them; the teenager has a game of throwing them at the wall. It's funny how quickly even the hippiest of "must show tolerance for all living things" organic gardeners become DIE YOU FUCKING SLUGS DIE ALL OF YOU DIE.

Good vegetable stories!

It looks like we're going to be approved for an apartment with a private patio, which opens off of my room, and it's going to give me space to container garden like I've never had before. I may hit you up for advice!

WE ARE THE BLUE POTATOES (we lived in a field, now we live in a tin...)

Once peeled, they really are the most extraordinary colour:

https://38.media.tumblr.com/3866d4a8408cc8c27f2b88b4005f77a6/tumblr_n8pvqviLjg1rjw8sqo1_500.jpg

Unfortunately, once they are peeled, that colour washes off in the boiling! (Unpeeled ones retain their hue):

https://38.media.tumblr.com/61e035d1f6d3e446995aa7dd19bc9a2f/tumblr_n8pw58BuNZ1rjw8sqo1_500.jpg

On the inside, they have concentric rings of blue-purple around a tan coloured core. It took some mental coaxing to eat anything that colour (the iPhone photos really don't show how vivid they are) but once you overcome that, wow, they are ~delicious~

https://38.media.tumblr.com/63295b73a3b6d0289c838fb16d510f2e/tumblr_n8pxc9DIp41rjw8sqo1_500.jpg

We have 3 other heritage varieties to try in the upcoming weeks, but I don't think any of them are going to be that shocking colour, unfortunately.

My Shetland blacks have another couple of weeks in the ground to go yet. Bizarrely, three plots of potatoes have produced a grand total of TWO flowers.

Trying to coax another crop out of my peas but not convinced it'll happen. I should get another from the broad beans but I'm definitely not doing them again, you just don't get enough produce for the ground space they take up. 3/4 of the pumpkin/squash patch has flowers although the courgettes are just confusing the hell out of me and male/female flower production seems too random to make them worthwhile.

All the greenhouse is finally coming together and there is fruit on nearly all the tomato and chilli plants ripening. Later than I'd expected, especially the tomatoes, but they're getting there.

The only real failure has been cauliflower - only about half of them got established and then all of them bolted except one. Which has had something bore into it. Oh well.

Asparagus is super-crazy when you let it grow out in the planting year. And next year I can only get about two weeks of cropping from it. But then 25 years of lovely asparagus all season. Om nom nom.

Not gardening, exactly, but backyard food production nonetheless: a coop and two hens are being delivered to me next week! From rentacoop.com lololol

I had never seen potato plants *fruit* before! I always thought they just reproduced by tuber propagation! But they were covered in things that looked so much like tomatoes, I was all "did someone put a row of tomato plants in here by accident?" (People do keep sticking tomato plants in all my beds, and the fuckers kinda take over. Grrrrr.)

I hope the fruits don't actually seed, because I didn't catch them all when they went rolling everywhere, and that might be the source of our ~mystery potatoes~ in all the other beds.

Too hot for gardening today; came home early after nearly dying digging out the next row of potatoes.

However, my big discover today... OMG WHY DID NO ONE TELL ME THAT MULBERRIES ARE THE MOST GORGEOUS AND TASTY FRUIT ON EARTH?!?!?

We have this 300-odd year old Mulberry tree which got hit by lightning a few years back and now instead of one giant Mulberry tree, it is now 5 slightly smaller and very crooked Mulberry trees, but we got someone in to do some work on it and now it is producing bumper crops of mulberries again and OMG I was totally unprepared for what they taste like! They're just amazing!

"To do some work on it"?

Pruning bits of it that were really out of control (no one had used the space where the community garden is for a number of years when the group took it over) and staking bits that were falling down, removing whole branches that had died. You know, general tree surgeon stuff. (And one of the members is a wood-turner with a lathe, so they made some beautiful wooden implements out of the bits that were removed.)

Mulberries are awesome and thanks to the Jacobite failure to establish a silk industry (wrong species of mulberry) there are loads in England.

Our lime tree started flowering last week but we had to take off all the flowers to stimulate root and foliage growth, which it is dutifully doing but keeping the blossoms would have been nice especially as the banksia is failing to send up any bottle brushes.

I discovered on the "herbal medicine walk" the other week that lime flower tea is apparently exceedingly relaxing, and not habit-forming like valerian tea. (Did not have chance to try it as all our limes are helicoptering now.)

Lime flower tea is very nice, I remember gathering lime flowers as a child on holidays in France. Different lime though, ours is a citrus rather than a Linden.

I really want a fingerlime but I'm not sure how well it would do in a pot.

sooooo the back garden in the house we've moved into is apparently about 2 inches of topsoil over a good foot or so of builders' rubble

it also slopes down from the back fence toward the back door, i.e. totally uneven

my gut instinct is to take a spade to everything and fill up as many rubble sacks as i can, and get it as even as i can, and then figure out what to do (short-term plan: grass; long-term plan: grow vegetables around the outside of it and have grass or paving in the middle)

what would YOU do, o gardeners?

maybe terrace it by building raised beds, then you can fill those with good top soil to give you some flat areas and at least some depth of a decent growing medium? there will be a limit to what you can grow though with a shite substrata of hardcore etc. anything particularly hungry or deep rooted might struggle unless you excavate holes for them. or you could go the other way and plant stuff that enjoys poor soil?

when i say raised beds, it needn't be little beds either - you could slap a retaining wall in built out of sleepers or similar a couple of feet or so from your house, and then just fill in with a couple of skips of topsoil beyond that. or do a couple of parallel runs depending on just how big the drop is.

Yeah, +1 on raised beds.

is it a dream that i can ever get rid of this fucking rubble? that i can have a verdant lawn ringed with cheerful tomatoes and wildflowers?

You could try sea grasses or the like that are tolerant of poor, rubble-y soil?

Or rather, Alpines or whatever.

you could dig it all out, but it would be a lot of hard work (or you get a digger in). a compromise maybe would be to excavate certain areas and use the spoil to build yr retaining banks

is it a dream that i can ever get rid of this fucking rubble?

All it takes is sweat (dig it out yourself) and/or money (hire someone to do it). Terracing a sloped area does look great.

xp

in order to cut costs, the local council here have stopped doing their regular pavement/roadside herbicide spraying so looking at some of the exotic blooms sprouting up through the cracks in the kerbside, you get a good idea of the sorts of things that would flourish on rubble: the usual weedy things like oxeye daisy and field poppy; garden escapees like snapdragon, verbena bonariensis, campanula, sedum, alchemilla mollis and erigeron daisies; mini buddleia bushes and the big furry leaves of mullien. chuck in some geraniums and you'd be well away - all pretty good wildlife plants that wouldn't need much looking after either

Is that why there has been such an amazing profusion of wildflowers in city streets this year? I was wondering about that.

probably! a lot less mowing of grass verges too, much to the disgust of correspondents to the local paper. i'm all in favour though, let the plants run rampant on our city streets!

all good fun until an old lady at a bus stop gets mauled by a tiger hiding in a thicket of cow parsley

NickB i am in awe!! bringin the knowledge - thanks everyone else too

I think i will do some more digging. I have already pulled out some rebar-reinforced concrete and about 8 shattered paving slabs and countless half-bricks and pieces of concrete.

will see if i can get about two levels going on - a lower one near the back door that i can set a table on, and then a step up to a higher level where the little vegetable plots can be

There's been a lot of complaining locally about buddleia bushes invading the Central Reservation on our high street, but me, I actually love buddleias. And alkanets and all those escapee ~terrible weeds~.

iirc the thing about buddleias is that they grow about a foot a week so if you have one in your garden your garden quite quickly turns into "buddleia holding pen"

I have promised to keep ours below the fence (neighbour hates it) and I can tell you exactly how fast they grow. Still love them.

Any recommendations on where to buy inexpensive copper slug rings?

And has anyone got one of these???

http://mantis.uk.com/mantis-cordless-extended-reach-hedge-trimmer.asp

I don't know but I've never heard of slug rings before and now I'm fascinated!

I've used copper tape before (around the top of plant pots and along the edges of grow bags) and it has seemed to work. I've a couple of brassicas growing that could do with protection but not sure I can bring myself to spend £20 for six rings.

You can get a pot of slug-goo to smear around the base of plants to stop slugs climbing them. We used that to good advantage on our fig trees! (Haven't used it on brassicas because it was birds that were ravaging them, so we put netting up.) I don't know what the proper name for slug-goo is, but it's like Vaseline but greeny-black, and you smear a 2-3 inch boundary around anything with a thick enough stem?

sounds like anti-climb paint for gastropods

but yeah, it's the pigeons that are the real enemy, especially once it gets coldr and all the slugs disappear

I've heard that diatomaceous earth works as well (for slugs)

we are steam-juicing our best grape crop ever, 53 quarts and counting.

what is steam juicing?

I thought about reviving this thread yesterday. We didn't do much vegetable-wise this year, but an annual tradition is a couple of lantanas and a couple of hibiscuses by our back walkway. This year they've all gone crazy -- one of the hibisci is 6 1/2' high, and the two lantanas have converged into a single mass about the size of a big car. The white-blooming rose of sharons shot straight up without taking a couple of years to develop thick trunks (like the purple one did), so when they filled up with blooms and got top-heavy, their branches drooped over and are mostly pointing down. The redbud that wasn't supposed to get higher than 8-9' tall is up into the phone and internet cables leading from the utility pole to the house. Benign neglect really suits all this stuff.

Well, this time last year the thread had been going a month ...

The last of our snow just melted late last week. I have not planted a goddamn thing yet, but plan to get radishes, greens, and snap peas seeded this week. I also ordered some strawberry plants, which I'm putting in a different spot (sunnier) after last year's failure.

Garden related: reserved two hens from rent a coop dot com for May-July! I only had them for a month last year, and they were a blast. Gonna put them to work turning the compost pile for me.

it's autumn here, so just getting the last of the season's strawberries ripening (though my alpine strawberries seemed to have died a death) and early season apples have reached the edible point

and on the chicken tip: hopefully i'll have the run i've been putting in all set up and ready for some real live chickens by the time spring arrives

& xposts to the slug debate, there's always the beer and saucer option! (never tried it but was recommended by my permaculture-inclined hort tutor)

I have had some early potatoes in for a couple of weeks but with no real signs of life, but then ground temps have been unseasonably low with a couple of late frosts. Thought they were gone so planted out some onions over the weekend. Oops.

Quite a lot of things germinating in the greenhouse - caulis, rocket, radicchio - so I decided to move the chili plants I overwintered out yesterday and repotted them. Again, time will tell whether the frost makes that a mistake but at least 4 of them have a decent bit of growth so I have reasonable hopes that some of them will make it. Herb garden refreshed and some of the woodier plants replaced.

Weekend after Easter will see the beetroot/carrot/parsnip/radish seeds going in. Desperate for signs of life from the asparagus, but there's time yet.

Also we are experimenting with nematodes to kill the slugs, will update if/when there are any results.