Gardening 2021

Bonsai oaks sounds a good thing.

we now have nasturtiums & a few herbs growing around the pieris japonica & everything seems to be coming along swimmingly now! ladybugs present & chompy crawlers less so

we also planted a bunch of wildflowers elsewhere that are starting to come up now too

I just had the first lettuce and spinach from the garden with my lunch.

I planted a new bed with a random bunch of stuff last autumn and I have what I think is a foxglove nosing its way up the fence and a big old 2-metre teasle looming at the back like a triffid.

Carnations keep getting burned, too much sun!!

Dianthus doing great, and I'm going to do a big harvest of lavender later today— it is starting to crowd out other plants!

What lovely updates from all of you! China, my neighbor has a foxglove that's at least 6' tall! I'll try to get a pic of her standing next to it later. They are so fun and weird looking and I like watching the bees climb all the way into the flowers.

Dianthus and lav are so dusty in the best possible way. My dianthus is getting crowded out by pentstemmon and some kind of hyssop, unfortunately--glad yours are in a happier place.

Veg I spotted my first nasturtium bud this morning! Ahoy salad flower season!

Oh, I should also mention that the other herbs and greens we planted are doing tremendously— lots of kale (both lacinato and regular green), as well as heaps of dill, rosemary, thyme, and basil.

lol our poor dill is getting roasted, weather is too hot for poor baby (same, dill, SAME)

We planted lots of nasturtium this year and had great luck with it. Although it seems to have a shorter life cycle than I expected. It flourishes and puts out tons of big green leaves, then the flowers come out and it looks beautiful, then one day the stalks turn yellow and look as if they’d tried to pull themselves out of the ground, the new leaves start coming out tiny, and it’s time to replant and start over.

We’ve had mixed luck with our raised bed garden; I don’t think the soil drained well enough for certain things (I’m looking at YOU, green beans that stopped growing and withered!) I thought beans were supposed to be easy. And then we had aphids wipe out our cucumbers after we only got one fruit! The tomatoes have required almost constant watering (too much direct sun!) so I am building a shade to filter the light during peak sun hours. But we have tons of tomato plants in pots as well and they are getting big and hard to manage! Can never have too many fresh tomatoes imo.

Butterfly garden in the front doing really well (except for one fire bush that got aphids). Lots of Florida friendly and Florida native flowers and we even managed to get a standing cypress to grow and flower. Tried to get some ground cover to take over the easement between the sidewalk and the street, but we’ve found that what grows and spreads best is what was here naturally- Spanish needles and pink purslane which I rescued from a dry and desolate patch next to the house. The Spanish needles are what the bees love best here, but it spreads a little too aggressively and needs regular “pruning”. The pink purslane is a lovely little succulent when given good soil and water- a far cry from the little withered, dormant patches I found along the house in the driest part of the yard.

And the oak bonsais are coming along nicely!

For no reason other than I have read you are creating oak bonsais, I transplanted a very young cherry tree (a hazard of the next door neighbour having a massive tree) into a bonsai dish. I'm amazed that it is still alive but it is.

Gardening wise, it has been a bit rubbish this year (UK). Loads of seeds haven't germinated or have been devoured by mice and I've missed the sunny work windowsill (where I'd normally grow things for other people - that being half the fun). The raised bed seems a bit feeble compared to most years.

garden share : this summer I've tried growing a salad/ herb wall. It's a simple felted wall hanging with 50 pockets, quite well made, most things are doing well. However, the top rows are drying out so quickly in warmer weather, challenged to rig up some kind of irrigation I'm watering night and day...I have a lot of houseplants and a busy small plastic greenhouse already ...growing five x types of tomatoes, san marzano- delicious, some ordinary vine ones, a yellow banana variety and a beef tomato called 'olga's finest', not as far ahead as I'd like them to be, but established.

Sounds like a great move with the cherry seedling! I like “rescuing” plants that are otherwise doomed to a rough existence of getting mowed on a weekly basis or withering in a bad growing spot. If it’s a fruit or nut tree, even better! Hope it stays healthy for you. If you can feed it some compost it might like that.

Herb wall sounds cool, and your tomatoes sound great! We’ve got a couple heirloom varieties growing- bought some organic heirlooms from Whole Foods and planted some wedges directly in the garden- got tons of seedlings! And then we also started some “Everglade tomatoes” from seeds and they are coming along nicely. They grow bunches of blueberry-sized tomatoes. We’re starting to get lots of green fruit at this point.

we didn't do tomatoes this year because last year we were getting roughly two pounds a day toward the summer's end— we couldn't give them away or eat them fast enough.

That's just showing off! My tomato crop last year was so poor that I reckon it cost about three quid per tomato, by the time you accounted for seeds and compost.

Well, we were using our own homemade compost and we also live in what is known as "the green dome," aka the mid-Atlantic of the US, so prime tomato-growing territory.

lol at tomato per hour unit price, I never think of gardening in a strict cost analysis, heavens!! let's just say, I've have accrued some losses from things I've tried, in the past. This year my disappointments have been limited to a couple of non germinating w3ed seeds and some very miserable melon attempts, I also managed this year to plant a ton of seeds in one day and, at the end, miss one set of seeds in a tray I had prepared, but ticked it off in my mind as 'done', I'm still watering that seedless tray, it's barren soil, mocking my paltry attempts of efficiency

Monday evening mooch around the garden, too hot to bother with doing much. Raised beds so scrappy - some squash plants that are too big, dribs and drabs of herbs, some slightly pointless fennel, pulled up the cavolo nero before it gets devoured by creatures. Dahlias starting to appear - one of those plants that I'd have thought too "blousy" a few years ago. Some of the nasturtiums have taken a hammering this year but still enough alive to bring me some joy. The cat mint is flowering - the cat doesn't normally give it chance. Bought a pack of marigolds but bored of them.

We recently did a bunch of work— ripped up a spurge that had been overwatered and killed by a friend (not talking to him right now), and I finally started trimming the lavender again. It's been coming up like gangbusters, can't understand how prolific it's gotten over just two years.

Our fig tree needs lots of tending so that it doesn't grow horizontally rather than vertically, but it's also just shooting up like crazy. And the wisteria had become unmanageable until my partner finally took to it with the shears— now it looks much better.

Hot peppers doing well, herbs doing well, much too much kale but okay, and so on.

Wondering if any ilxors have experience with growing bamboo, paricularly in the UK (or similar climate countries)?

A friend has started a business selling various products using bamboo, but currently has to source this from China. So we're going to experiment with growing our own Moso here in the uk. I've heard it can take months to germinate. any advice welcome.

Not grown it from seed but I have had to remove large clumps of the stuff from people's gardens as it can be pretty invasive. It has running rhizomes that have a pretty hard and sharp tip on them so think very carefully about where you'll be planting it. Would suggest surrounding the planting area with metal panels or similar sunk about ten inches into the soil, or if not, make sure it has wide strip of lawn all the way round it because mowing can keep if from spreading too far.

yeah for sure keep it ~truly~ contained at like supermax levels because that shit will spread everywhere otherwise

Thanks, yikes didn't realise they were that invasive. Seems we need to do a lot more research here.

afaik growing bamboo from seed is quite a specialised process. The seedlings will need to be kept in a greenhouse for a couple of years before planting out

You'd be much better off just buying some young potted plants. There are less invasive varieties out there but yeah, as noted above, tread carefully

I think she specifically requires Moso for the fabrics she uses. Her whole aim is producing ecologically beneficial products, but unfortunately it sounds like it would be better to just keep getting them from overseas.

Even if growing them were possible, and I'm sure it is with the effort she'd be more than willing to put in (her boyfriend is a park ranger and competent gardener too) there is still the process following that to extract/harvest whatever is needed for her materials. That is of course a different issue.

Do not— I repeat, DO NOT— grow bamboo. It is impossible to get rid of, spreads like crazy, and really shouldn't be grown outside of its native zones.

^^^yes to all this... otherwise i'd suggest investing in a very sturdy mattock, but even then it can be backbreaking work just to clear small patches of it once it's established!

have recently put a couple of feijoas in the ground which will hopefully fruit some day & propagated some gooseberries for later planting out.

bamboo is a good screening plant and very attractive - difficulty of removal less of a consideration if that's your use case. if you are going to grow running varieties, you need to make sure it's controlled properly (with a root barrier.) if you're going to grow clumping varieties, that's less of an issue. it can also be grown very successfully in containers.

Except from what I can tell from Ste's post, they're in the UK, where it isn't native, and root barriers are no guarantee against spread. "Use case" doesn't matter if one person's "use case" means allowing bamboo to take over their neighbors' gardens, too. Also, "use case" isn't a good way to think about gardening from an holistic, ecological perspective. Sorry!