Annual gardening thread

[Silverlady]

I winter sowed a lot of flower seeds this past winter - red poppies, california poppies, baby's breath, black-eyed susans, dianthus, rose campion, gaillardia, snapdragons, and oriental poppies.  I've recently potted up some into 4 inch pots to let them get larger before I plant them in the garden around the end of May. I also started some morning glorys and mexican sunflowers inside to get a jump start on them since they take a long time to bloom here in northeast PA.

I also started garden peas and lettuce outside in window boxes back in March.  I never grew veggies before, and so far they are doing all right.  We already eaten some of the lettuce already.   

[Jack]

Finally got about half the garden tilled up - a shovel and rake are my version of "tilling".  It's not supposed to rain for a couple days so hopefully I'll get some stuff planted.  We've got plenty of seeds - peas, beans, onions, lettuce, spinach, egg plant, Fennel, beets and Pak Choi (Chinese cabbage).  Can you tell my wife did the shopping?   

All I've got planted so far is the Jalapeños and some salsa peppers.  And a whole ton of flowers (with another ton to go) and the herb garden.

[Jack]

Everything is planted.  Even got the tomatoes and an additional pepper plant.  Nothing to do now but sit back and water them once in a while.  And weed everything.

Oh, plenty of flowers left to plant I'm sure.  

[Leah]

I have a type of cacti (don't know the name of it, looks like it has tentacles) that toads loves to be in don't know what to plant, rosemary bush is out of the question (dad hates it), tried peppers- they died, just don't know.

[Jack]

Our little sweet basil plant in the herb garden died   

Other than that I'm just watering the dirt and hoping to see some little green sprouts one of these days.

[Mr. DS]

Well...here's my current status on the gardening front.

I planted 3 various cherry tomato plants at the house.  Figure that'll give the kids something to munch on in the summer time without having to go too far to get them.  I got a bit artsy fartsy and built a little rock border around the plants. 

In the corner of the yard I put 6 broccoli plants.  I'm sure with my neighbors forest of oak trees they'll be invaded with worms.  Oh well, I'll deal with that when it happens.

As for the big plot I usually do, I have plans of cutting back a bit.  Though cutting back for me includes 36 tomato plants, onions, beans and maybe corn.  I plan on planting tomorrow, I need to do some shopping after work today.

[Newt]

If all goes as planned, we should be planting today. Man, the plot looks huge when it is tilled and empty!

[Newt]

   Everything is sprouting!  We didn't get the seeds in until last Wednesday, so this seems early.  It has been very dry, so I have been watering rather heavily and the heavy layer of manure we put on has added a lot of mulch, so the soil holds water well.  That must be it.

Twenty-four (I think) tomato plants, of four varieties.  Planted half a pound of sweet corn seeds (also four varieties) and one row each of broccoli, carrots, two kinds of cucumbers, three kinds of squash, beets, radishes, green beans, yellow beans, peas, snow peas, two varieties of sweet peppers, lettuces and celery.  About half in nursery plants and half or more in seeds.  There are shoots coming up all over so now it's a race with the weeds.  I plant densely so there is less room for weeds to thrive once the crops get going. Oh: also watermelons and musk melons.  I threw a LOT of pumpkin seeds that we kept from last year on the manure pile.  That should get interesting.

[Andrew]

We're doing pretty well here overall.  The peppers (red, yellow, orange) are all over a foot tall and healthy.  I just mulched them.  The beans (both pole and bush) are looking good, and the pole beans are starting to climb the twine lattice I made for them.  The carrots look good.  The spinach and lettuce are full - we've been picking and eating that.  Going to pick some of the beets this weekend to go with either Saturday or Sunday's dinner.

The tomatoes are huge.  I'm working on training them to a single vine each that will climb a long pole.  Goofed up two of them by removing the main sucker (main vine), but I've gotten the hang of it now and one of the plants has produced a new main vine.  It's funny when you remove the main sucker because the plant is no longer able to grow in height - they get all thick and gnarled.  We have nine plants, all of different varieties.

My squash and zucchini are looking awesome too, with huge leaves.  The cucumbers are about ready to start climbing the trellis I made for them.  Most of Katie's flower beds are filled.  The Gladiator Alliums already flowered and seem to be done (we thought they bloomed all summer).

Our disappointments were in the strawberries mostly.  They produced a huge crop, but many went soft and bad quickly.  I'm wondering if that was due to the sudden hot weather.  It went from the 50s to the 80s this year in about a week.  We' haven't been too happy with these strawberries (Ozark Beauty) so we're going to pull the present plants and replace them with Tribute plants that sound promising.  Another day-neutral strawberry we might do is Evie 2.  There is a June-bearing variety called Allstar that is another possibility.

Andy's blueberries - some look very good but one of the four set a huge number of fruit and now appears to be dying.  Maybe it set too much fruit.

We removed a lot of bushes from the front and side of the house last weekend.  That's something we've been meaning to do since we bought the house.  We replaced them with Knockout Rose bushes, azaleas, a camillia, and a rhododendron.  Should be very nice-looking in two or three years.

[Jack]

Our little garden's doing okay.



My peas are by that little fence kind of to the left.  About half of them came up, but they're looking pretty good.  Then there's 4 rows of lettuce and a couple of spinach.  Don't know what that stuff in the nearest row is - either Chinese cabbage or some sort of onion thing.  And yeah, I need to mow the lawn   



Tomatoes look about like they did when I planted them.



Peppers seem to be doing well.  Six of those are Jalapeños, and then there's 6 salsa peppers or something like that.  Don't know what the last one is   



Something ate my beans    Bugs of some sort I'm assuming.  I ripped up two-thirds of them and replanted, and the remaining ones I've sprayed with bug killer.  Sprayed most everything in the garden with bug killer.



This thing's doing quite well   

[Newt]

OH - I forgot the permanent stuff:  we have been eating asparagus since early April (it has been that kind of year) and are letting it rest now.  I don't expect much from the cherries this year as the weather pulled a switcheroo (from cold to hot and back again) on them at the wrong time so they did not set much fruit;  the apples (MacIntosh and Mutsu/Crispin) look promising as long as they get enough water (and the darn horse stops breaking limbs off with his back-scratching); the pears are doing well; the strawberries are going NUTS and the red currants and gooseberries are bearing heavily.  Something took out a wide swath of our raspberries during the winter so this year will be minimal, but the growth we are getting now promises a huge yield for 2013.  The wild grapes and the elderberries are yet to flower, so we'll see.  Even so, I anticipate making a LOT of pies and fruit jelly this fall.

Seriously considering putting in some rhubarb again and replacing our two plum trees with peaches.  Next spring maybe.  Wish I had a place for blueberries too.

[Mr. DS]

Jack do you get beatles where you're at?  They probably gnawed the leaves.

Oh and stop reading this and get on that lawn already.

[Jack]

Jack do you get beatles where you're at?  They probably gnawed the leaves.

Oh and stop reading this and get on that lawn already.

We've got Japanese beetles around here, I bet that's what's doing it.  I was reading about them:  "They chew leaf tissue from between the veins, leaving a lacy skeleton."  Sounds kind of familiar   

That spray I used is supposed to kill them.  If not I'll go out there at night and kill them in person   

Oh and it's raining today so I unfortunately can't mow the lawn   

[Mr. DS]

The beatles traditionally hatch and do damage for about a week or so.  Usually when stuff is just sprouting unfortunately.  They should cease soon.

[Rev. Powell]

The beatles traditionally hatch and do damage for about a week or so. 

Paul, or Ringo?