In the garden

I did my first garden last year, about 12' x 12'. I grew radishes, carrots, russet potatoes, roma tomatoes, crookneck and pattypan squash (all of which did spectacularly) pumpkins, cucumbers, zuchini and watermelons (which either failed to grow at all or were consumed by rabbits). I'm gonna expand the garden by another 5' on a side, and will probably skip the crookneck/pattypan squash and try corn this year. And I may take more definitive measures against the rabbits:

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I yearn to have a "real" garden, but as I am living in an apartment right now, I only have room for a balcony herb garden. I have rosemary, basil and mint so far. I like it. The mint especially just makes my mediterranean salad. There's a huge satisfaction on sharing food with family and saying, "I grew these ingredients." I look forward to reading how your garden turns out.

Gardening notes will be welcome.

Love to garden. Since we are renting right now I am doing container gardening on the deck. Haven't planted so far this year but we usually do tomatoes (both heirloom and not), bell peppers, banana peppers, cucumbers, basil, and zucchini. Every year I try and experiment with something I haven't done before. Can't decide what to do this year. I love sweet peas but think I should have already planted them so they grow before it gets too hot.

We don't have bees, but that is something I have wanted to get into for a while. I have heard it is a lot of work and with kids, and well work, it has just fallen to the wayside for now.

I'll hang in as long as I can, but a 4 story condo is going up next to our two story , and I expect to be transitioning from square foot organic gardening, to having a nice shady zen garden by july : (.

Otherwise I'm game
Viva la bradywine

Again , mocking us in the northern Midwest with your images of green and growing things. *grin* As we get yet another couple of inches of the white stuff.

My mama is a mad gardener who plants almost everything: tomatoes, potatoes, cucumbers, vegetable marrows, carrots, black and redcurrant, cherry, plums etc. Since May till October she is there every weekend. She makes attempts to exploit me at her plantations, i yield reluctantly because i don't like the process, the only thing i enjoy about gardening is gathering crops. I like the smell of tomatoe branches when you squeeze it, eating young pea pods and strawberries straight from the ground.
This year the seeds of tomatoes are already planted on the window-sills, in May they should be replanted into the open ground. (last year tomatoes grew worse than cucumbers).

blossoming tomatoe: img137.imageshack.us/img137/5267/p2ra2.jpg
red currant: img137.imageshack.us/img137/3839/c2aq5.jpg
little grape: img137.imageshack.us/img137/1600/grhn1.jpg
strawberry crop: img223.imageshack.us/img223/3336/p7100137as8.jpg

some flowers
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img86.imageshack.us/img86/6358/rozn8.jpg
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We do lots of different peppers, several kinds of tomatoes, beans,peas, Zucchini,usually one kind of squash, watermelon (need some room for these), carrots, sometimes potatoes and lots of herbs (still looking for that cilantro that doesnt bolt when I dont look at it for 2 days). We have a peach tree and had an apple tree. I think most modern fruit trees arent worth having unless you are good about spraying them though my farmer neighbor disagrees.

I do a bit of ornamental gardening also and have a fish pond. My friend is trying an experiment with raising trout in his pond after he first created a small artificial creek into it. He is trying brown trout first. I helped him transport them after snagging an O2 tank from work. If it works Ill probably try that also. I have about 3 acres and my son and I (inspired by Salatin) have sketched a portable chicken coop for 2 chickens in a wire cage of about 8 feet diameter. Our neighbors already think we are nuts so its time to confirm it. We dont have cowpies so I think we will need some supplemental feed but Im hoping to get some good eggs. Old hens that stop laying stew up very nicely also.

Steve

I live in the north of England, so we're not producing much yet (it snowed all this weekend), except for spinach and rocket, which grow all winter - English winters are dark and dank, rather than really cold like northern USA - we only get the odd few days of frost. However, I've got in all my seeds, etc., for the spring and early summer crops.

I've got a sizeable suburban garden, and I dug up part of the lawn a couple of years ago (about 15 by 20 feet), but I haven't got the soil right, so it's not all that productive. This year I've planted potatoes (supposed to be good for smashing up rough soil) and broad beans. I've also got a strawberry patch (trouble with slugs, though), and apple and plum trees, and gooseberry, redcurrant, blackcurrant and loganberry bushes.

I've also got an allotment (a British system - I'll explain if anyone's interested), and that's all planted now, with potatoes, broad beans, snap peas, lettuce, spinach, rocket, asparagus, moolis, gobo (a Japanese vegetable), chard, onions, spring onions, garlic, rhubarb, and Chinese artichokes.

The summer here being cool and wet, I have always failed with tomatoes, cucumbers, pumpkins and soya beans, although some people, better gardeners than I no doubt, seem to succeed.

This is exciting stuff! I just got back from ECHO where our class focused on sustainable agriculture. It's so very cool to see it implemented on such a small, sustainable scale.

Keep up the good work in Dallas... and check out ECHO.

htto://www.echonet.org

Been following your blog for a short while now, and especially the Reluctant Vegan posting (being a fellow southerner and Orthodox reluctant vegan myself). As for gardening, while I can't take credit for the actual work (as my husband and children do most of the gardening labors) I am so looking forward to the beginning of a new growing season. Last year was our first year to plant corn, and I don't think I have ever in my life tasted anything sweeter (apparently neither had the racoons, because they wiped out the crop overnight, and our first meal of home grown corn was to be our last that summer). We usually grow squash, zucchini, carrots, and of course lots of tomatoes, and hopefully some corn again this year! I do have my own personal garden which contains herbs (rosemary is an amazingly hardy herb, survived the winter this year, and is still growing) and the "pretty flowers". I am so hoping to add strawberries this year, and to plant some lettuce container gardens - very easy and rewarding, just have not got around to doing it the last few years.
Good luck with your gardening!

I'll contribute when I can, but up here in da nort' we got 6 inches of new snow and the ground will be frozen solid for at least another month.

I usually grow several colors of tomatoes and lots of basil and oregano. We've also got many native prairie perennials - - kind of a crunchy thing to grow, no? One of these days I'm going to attempt a rain garden, to keep roof runoff out of the storm drains and hence out of the nearby Mighty Mississip.

Your post inspired me to try a garden again this year. It brought back memories of years ago, when in a rental house in grad school, we planted a "square-foot" garden, by the book, against a fence -- 2 or 3 feet wide by 12 feet long. Soil was very clayey, so we amended it with sand, ashes, bone meal, and lots of (two-year-old) horse manure. (The "old" is important. The new stuff apparently has so much nitrogen that it "burns" the plants.) Dug it all uniformly down to about a foot and a half deep, following instructions in the book. I spaded and mixed it throroughly four times before planting, let it sit for a few weeks, then planted things close together. We were amazed at how fast and lush that garden grew -- and how good the veggies tasted. Truly amazed.

So thanks for the reminder. I'm looking forward to trying it again -- this time in large containers. We have a lot of trouble with fungus here in the Seattle burbs, so I'll probably end up using some kind of fungicide this time. I'd rather not, but don't know what the alternative would be. This time, also, we don't have friends with horses, much less ones that take the trouble to store and age their horse manure. So we'll be depending on sacks of designer compost from the garden store -- at least for this year. Even with what the stuff costs, it should be a net saving over the price of fresh tomatoes.

Happy gardening, all! Looking forward to hearing how your efforts turn out.

Square foot gardening is the best! I don't do much now, but used to have quite a large garden when my kids were small. They loved to help, and yours probably will too. If your soil has that many worms, it's probably in pretty good shape.

Two tips for you:
1) Compost all your vegetable matter, including raked leaves in the fall, except cruciferous (broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage etc) and nightshade (eggplant, okra, tomatoes etc- I know, it seems arbitrary, but these are really not good for the compost pile). You will have less trash to put out and you will spare the municipality filtering the leavings from your garbage disposal. If you don't want a compost pile, there are easy snap-together plastic bins available, or build your own compost bins- I'm sure there are plans on the 'net somewhere. We have the smallish snap-together kind, and even with a family of 5 it has never been brimfull. Be sure to turn it often; if you turn it often and it "cooks" fairly rapidly, you can also add thick-rind fruits (citrus, bananas).

2)Plant marigolds, any variety, around the base of your tomato plants, 2-3 marigolds per tomato, to keep the tomato worms away. This really works- in all the years I grew tomatoes, I had only one tomato worm- and adds a nice bit of extra color to the garden.

Composting: I go for the low-tech approach, just big wooden boxes built out of old warehouse pallets, hardly bothering to turn the compost, yet everything composts down well. I ignore rules about what's good and what isn't, and put everything in, including table scraps and even a lot of newspaper.

If you're interested in the more high-tech approaches, the Ecologist has a lot of adverts for hot composting bins. Some of them are so good that, apparently, you can even run them indoors without a smell.

If you get horse manure from a stables, mostly straw, I think it's reasonable to dig it straight into the soil. Pure manure, and waste from other animals, which is richer than from horses, definitely has to be composted.

The best natural manure of all is said to be wool, as it's so high in nitrogen. When England had a big woollen industry, farmers used to spread mill waste on their fields, and got the best crops (interestingly, there was also a whole flora of exotic weeds out of the wool), and when we have woollen clothes to throw away, I dig them straight in.

Again , mocking us in the northern Midwest with your images of green and growing things. *grin* As we get yet another couple of inches of the white stuff.

I spent a year or two living in Texas. Please, let Rod enjoy his spring. It lasts about 2-3 weeks, and then he'll be wilting until Thanksgiving.

I have a lot of flower gardens, but I don't grow vegetables. Too many critters like them. I don't like ugly fences. The biggest problem(from my perspective) around my area is that the farmers are all selling out to developers. I've committed to buying produce only from the local farmers. It's the next best thing to growing your own, and in some ways, it's better for the environment because farmers are less likely to sell their property if they can make a living selling produce.

I can't wait to see how my flower gardens look this year. Some posters, at this site, gave me the ins/outs on composting last year. I added compost to most of my beds from a pile that I had started last year. Really, the compost had been started years ago because the neighbors and I had been throwing leaves and grass clippings(she bags her clippings/we don't)in the same spot. I decided to forget about containers and bins and all of the fussing, and just use the leaf/grass pile as the compost pile. I have a feeling that weeds might be a problem since we weren't real particular about what was thrown into the pile before it became a source for garden soil.

Anyway, my perennials are showing signs of life. The bulbs are shooting up out of the ground. And I've started my indoor annual seedlings that should be ready to plant in a month.

I'm interested to hear how your concrete-lined garden turns out, I've often heard how nearby concrete can hinder the growth of tender or young plants. Keep us informed, I wonder if it's just an excuse for a bad crop or neglected garden.

We started out last year with a 5x20 plat of garden, but this year i'm prepping for a 5x40 garden. I've built it along the chainlink fence to use as a trellis for the cucumbers and peas (which usually make so many cuke's that the neighbors enjoy picking off the produce from their side of the fence). Tomatoes are the most popularly grown vegetable (read: fruit) in these United States, because it's so expensive to buy them at the market and nothing tastes better than the one picked right outside your backdoor.

I struggle with the rabbits eating the leafy vegetables and the squirrels getting the pick of the 'maters, but I think I'm going to get a havahart trap and a pellet gun and try some mammal-execution; my neighbor practices "squirrel relocation" where he traps them and takes them to a nearby park, and I'd kindly suggest all the neighborhood squirrels to entreat themselves to his yard instead of mine. This year I'm going to try a little rabbit fence to see if that will save my spinach from Peter Cottontail, hopefully that'll work; it's so hard to dispose of those rabbit bodies...

Watsy: I spent a year or two living in Texas. Please, let Rod enjoy his spring. It lasts about 2-3 weeks, and then he'll be wilting until Thanksgiving.

Preach it, sister. We've had two extraordinarily beautiful spring weekends here in Dallas. Kids running around and playing barefoot in the backyard while Julie and I do spring cleaning and gardening stuff. Yesterday I was kicked back in my Adirondack chair taking a break, and told Julie that we needed to remember this fleeting pleasure when it becomes too hot to be outside like this, until the sun sets, at which points the mosquitos drive us all inside. Hello, West Nile virus!

Texas weather is horrible. I'm much more able to take cold than heat.

Betty Carter, do you read http://www.thecompostbin.com?

It's good compost-nerdy stuff for rotter's like us!

We made our first garden last year, just 8'x8' using the cul-de-sac shape from Gaia's Gardens. This year though we're using more of the Square Foot Gardening method and doubling our space. The biggest chore is removing the old grass. Last year we planted just corn, strawberries, carrots, beans & squash (oh and watermelon, but it didn't grow--not hot enough here). This year I'm skipping the squash and adding in onions and potatoes and a few herbs. I'm hesitant to try tomatoes again--I bought a few starters in mid-summer but they just died no matter what I did. Happy gardening! Look forward to more posts.

Lisa -
"Ah, one benefit of urban gardening. No deer.

Don't know how you all are fixed for groundhogs, possums and raccoons, but may you harvest more than the critters do."

Easier said than done - my neigbor's AC unit is surrounded by bushes where the rabbits have a colony. I tracked them all winter, and I expect them this spring. fortunately, I have a few tricks up my sleeve. Planting onions/garlic around the outside helps, and putting wide boards (1 x 8" boards) beneath the garden fence has worked okay so far.

We're fortunate enough to have a disused city fire lane (it was used back when the house was built, I think) between us and the neighbors. We already have an agreement with the neighbors to make a sort of community garden when it gets warm enough to do so. Teach their little ones the benefits of gardening, and work in general (their two are maybe 3 and 5 years old, respectively). About 8' x 20' is usable, and I'm sure will be loaded with watermelons, peas, and tomatoes.

We had the usual break from the rain that we get in NW Oregon around early March, so I was able to get out and get the tilling done. Spring greens are in, along with peas, both shell and snap. Onion seeds are quietly germinating in the garage, shortly to be joined by tomato and pepper...if the long-awaited seed order ever gets delivered. This year the front yard gets tilled and put into production, too. The maritime NW has a mild enough climate to make fresh salads possible even in the dead of winter, as long as one has a cold frame, and I'm digging pits for cold storage barrels of root veggies and onions and celery and...well, I do tend to go on about my garden. Good luck to all this year!