Nature and Gardening

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All things green, outdoors, and nature-y. Whether it's animals in their natural habitat, hiking trails and mountains, or planting a little garden for yourself (and everything in between), you can talk about it here.

See also our Environment community, which is focused on weather, climate, climate change, and stuff like that.

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How's your garden doing? What did you learn this year? (beehaw.org)

submitted 1 year ago by doogiebug@beehaw.org to c/greenspace@beehaw.org

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This was only my second year gardening, and first year with my own yard 😤 Everything is in containers. I struggled a lot with figuring out a good place to put containers that got enough sunlight. I was trying to avoid the front yard because I was worried about car exhaust and grossness getting onto veggies, but when I finally caved and moved everything to the front it started growing much much better. Lots of things also got chomped by deer and groundhogs in the backyard. I had hoped that big containers would keep the groundhogs out but I caught one climbing up onto the top and eating all the seedlings. Lots of failures, lots of dead plants. I tried to plant some native flowers in the backyard hoping to get them to spread to the empty lot behind us, but no success. A lot of seeds got eaten by birds.

I had better luck with both veggie and flower starts that I bought from the local farmer's market. I was SO CLOSE to getting sunflowers, the flower heads were coming out but then we had a big windy thunderstorm that knocked them over and they got all crispy after :( My only harvest this year are a couple of jalapeno peppers. I didn't start anything indoors this year, but I definitely see the value in it now and I'm hoping to get a rack with grow lights set up over the winter.

What about you guys??

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[–] LallyLuckFarm@beehaw.org 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

We've had an incredibly wet spring and summer, and many of our plants are leggy and behind schedule for it. Things in the ground have fared better than the few hundred potted plants we have, but we just don't have enough space under cover to house everything. We have a friend who's going to lend us their greenhouse jig soon so we can build another larger one, thankfully. Luckily all the plants we're growing in air prune boxes don't appear as chlorotic.

A porcupine has chewed down nearly all of a new-to-me raspberry cultivar ('Anne', in case anyone is curious) patch, including all of the cuttings we took when we planted it. We're burying the tips to make even more, which is okay, but I had some last year and was really looking forward to eating them from the yard this year. The wet weather and a late hard freeze caused most of the early fruits to fail, so we didn't get cherries, apples, or blueberries either. Though, the legginess of all of our tea plants has meant a bumper crop of those. We're so far behind the season that we don't even know if we've been hit by "peppergate" yet.

OP, I'm going to tell you what I've been told by my master gardener friends: you're not a real gardener until you've lost track of your death toll in the garden <3

[–] whelmer@beehaw.org 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

My raspberries are spreading more than I can even handle so I don't have the same problem, but what does burrying the tips mean? Like your bending the shoots over and burying the tips as a method of propagation?

[–] LallyLuckFarm@beehaw.org 3 points 1 year ago

Yep, you got it! Many Rubus family plants will self propagate when their growing tips reach the ground by sending out new roots from the point where it contacts. With a little extra soil or fine mulch like chunky sawdust or fine wood chips and a weight, you can even get a whole cane to root out. Once you see a few roots at a length of an inch or so they'll generally be able to support themselves when cut into individuals and transplanted.