Gardening 2014

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.