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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[–] ivanafterall@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I bought a single tulip from the store. "I can't possibly kill a single flower that's halfway bloomed," I thought.

Lesson learned: when you read about coffee helping plants/adding nitrogen, it turns out it's not a "more is better" situation.

[–] whelmer@beehaw.org 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yeah very much so, it's quite easy to kill plants by over-nitrogenating them. Compost is a good way to safely feed plants, as not only is there a diversity of nutrients in good compost but they are released more slowly over time and so less-likely to do damage. Not the case with manure. Also some compost has excessive salt so watch out for that.

Otherwise a good rule of thumb for giving plants fertilizers is "weakly, weekly". It's also good to keep in mind that plants get the vast majority of what they need from the sun.