Gardening and Plant Thread

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Lichen Bark said:
Can confirm the "loathsome stinking wind." Maybe if you eat them regularly you develop a resistance to the gassyness? Would the farts be morale boosting in a survival situation?
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@Anonymus Fluhre said (in the Potatoes thread) that if you cook sunchokes for a long time, you reduce the gas effect. He recommended frying like potato chips.
 
ReasonablyRetarded said:
Any suggestions on (edible) plants that do well grown this way?
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Depends on what you like to use. A bud of mine grew peppers year round in this manner.
Some things you should keep in mind though:
  • Does my crop need polination and how will I do this? You can polinate by hand with cutips if you really want, take them outside for nature to do it's job for you, or intruduce some type of insect to them but that's annoying inside.
  • What plants are best suited for this enclosure? Some plants will do in most situations and wouldn't really require this, for example growing herbs you can probably do in just potted plants just fine. Personally I'd grow peppers or maybe something leafy like spinach in this manner.
  • Drainage! You may want to tap out holes into the enclosure, this fucks it from ever being an aquarium again but it obviously will entrap the water at the base which can cause shit like root rot. It's better to have it setup in a way it'll drain especially if you can't build up the soil with drainage layers in it.
Personally I'd also opt for peppers, but I just love peppers.
 
Half of my garden is doing great (peppers and tomatoes are going gangbusters due to a mini greenhouse I used to get my plants in the ground weeks before our last frost which gave them a very nice head start) as well as my alliums and strawberries (I am not passing judgement on my peas, lettuces, and carrots because we're in a hot spell, but they're still seedlings and I hope cooler weather will come by the time they will really be affected by heat) but I worry about my squash and melons.

The watermelons are growing, but it's very slow going and they seem very stunted for this time of year. That said they don't seem to be suffering from any disease or pests, they're just... small.

As for my squash, while I don't live in an area with vine borers, we DO have squash bugs and I've found a few lurking about (as well as some clutches of eggs on the leaves). I'm kind of squeamish so I knock the bugs off and step on them when I can and I cover the eggs (and leaves) with diatomaceous earth. Is there anything else I can do to rid myself of these turbulent pests that doesn't necessarily involve me squishing them with my dainty fingers?

:optimistic:
 
I have no intention of posting photos, but i currently have the following

-8 Blueberry bushes of different varieties
-6 grape vines, half muscadine and half concord
-1 large patch of thornless blackberries (with many tipped into pots)
-3 apple trees of different varieties, including a hardy local variety
-1 pear tree (i plan to get more)
-1 fuyu persimmon tree
-2 plum trees
-1 fig tree

In addition to two large garden patches where i'm growing okra, cucumbers, squash, zucchini, radishes, and lots of tomatoes.
I also want to get a mulberry tree and some kind of nut tree, maybe pecan, but they get huge.

I use a mixture of 10-10-10 fertilizer, lawn lime, elemental sulfur, epsom salt (magnesium sulfate) and wood ash to fertilize just about everything.
It contains all the essentials, and i've got it mixed so the soil acidity change eventually balances out to neutral.

I use a mixture of worm castings and peat moss to fluff up my local soil, which is hard, rocky and often full of clay.
Adding in ground charcoal from the wood ash helps bolster beneficial bacteria, along with water and nutrient retention.

You can add iron and copper to your soil by tossing old rusty bolts and nuts and chopped up wire to the fields before tilling it.
Just be careful you don't end up stabbing yourself in the foot with a nail on accident.

For the short-term, you can buy dried pig's blood and charge your field with that.

Let me knows if you have any tips to generally improve the soil, or anything special i should be mixing into my dry fertilizer.
Any suggestions as far as pollinator-attracting plants would also be welcome.
 
Punished Wankula said:
Any suggestions as far as pollinator-attracting plants would also be welcome.
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As far as pollinator attracting plants go I've always been fond of lavender. Butterfly bushes are also nice but by far what seems to attract the most bees in my experience is holly.

Bees absolutely go wild for it, at least here. Only issue with holly is that it only is in bloom for so long and additionally there are both "male" and "female" holly bushes. Obviously you'll want some of both if you intend to use them but by the sound of it you've got the space for a good row of the things if so desired. The one holly tree literally gets swarmed to the point you can hear the buzzing of everything from about 10-15 yards away on a quiet day.
 
Raspberry flowers aren’t much to look at but I was just out in the berry patch and the whole place is crawling with bumblebees and honeybees.

I’m always planting pretty flowers for them but they will skip everything for the raspberries. Should be a good harvest this year!
 
Bought a house and .36 acre yard. Soil is compacted nutrient starved sandy loam, heavy on the sandy. Little to no organic material. Drains well, but being sand, drains to fast and doesnt retain moisture. My goal is to remove as much turf as I can, because fuck turf grass. Made a few beds, scraped what leaf litter I could find and half ass mixed into the soil. Combined 3 old packs of "wildflower" seeds, scattered them in the beds and bid them godspeed. I got around 30% germination to survival, not bad for old seeds. What thrived is Zinnias, black eyed susan, thread leaf coreopsis, and sunflowers.
Okra and black eyed peas are doing well, they are ok with droughty conditions. Minimal money and minimal water. Survival of the fittest.
 
Flan Handler said:
Raspberry flowers aren’t much to look at but I was just out in the berry patch and the whole place is crawling with bumblebees and honeybees.

I’m always planting pretty flowers for them but they will skip everything for the raspberries. Should be a good harvest this year!
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There's a bumblebee reporting site that, keeps track of bumblebees as they're in dangered.
https://www.bumblebeewatch.org/
 
Sadly, I have no bumblebees yet. However, coincidentally, I plan on planting native raspberry in blackberry plants. As I want to increase the bees, my neighbor, on the other hand, says that he has seen some bumblebees.
 
If you live in the US and want to find out what type of soil you have, I recommend using the Web Soil Survey. Its a great survey map app that breaks down the soil layers and can aid you in determining what you can grow in that area based on the components of that soil, and helps you determine what you need to alter it to grow a specific type of plant. Its completely free, and Here is the post I made about how to use it.

Another good free resource is The Garden.org Plants Database, which holds 794,426 plants in their database. It 's very useful for finding information regarding plants, and has its own forum for popular plants and topics, such as herbs, greenhouses, soil and compost, ect.
 
Punished Wankula said:
Let me knows if you have any tips to generally improve the soil, or anything special i should be mixing into my dry fertilizer.
Any suggestions as far as pollinator-attracting plants would also be welcome.
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I turned some shitty clay into a nice garden by adding lots of dried leaves as a mulch and then just letting the worms do their thing (I never mixed them into the soil, just watered them).

As for attracting pollinators I'd go with chives, sage, and borage. The chives bloom in the early spring and the bee's go nuts for them. Shortly after that that the sage will bloom, and then following that the borage will produce flowers for a good two months at least. Chives and culinary green sage are perennials, so once you get them going you're good to go. Borage tends to reseed itself in the same area. I usually mulch heavy-ish around the borage with grass clippings and then the following spring the new plants are pushing up through the old mulch. Chives make tons of seeds that tend to spread, and sage just becomes a nice large bush, also great tasting in your stuffing if you dry a bundle or two in the fall. The borage flowers are edible, and make nice garnishes for whatever, if you're into that girly stuff.
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(from left to right - chive flower, sage flower, and borage flower)
 
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Lichen Bark said:
I turned some shitty clay into a nice garden by adding lots of dried leaves as a mulch and then just letting the worms do their thing (I never mixed them into the soil, just watered them).

As for attracting pollinators I'd go with chives, sage, and borage. The chives bloom in the early spring and the bee's go nuts for them. Shortly after that that the sage will bloom, and then following that the borage will produce flowers for a good two months at least. Chives and culinary green sage are perennials, so once you get them going you're good to go. Borage tends to reseed itself in the same area. I usually mulch heavy-ish around the borage with grass clippings and then the following spring the new plants are pushing up through the old mulch. Chives make tons of seeds that tend to spread, and sage just becomes a nice large bush, also great tasting in your stuffing if you dry a bundle or two in the fall. The borage flower are edible, and make nice garnishes for whatever, if you're into that girly stuff.
View attachment 6166665 View attachment 6166684View attachment 6166643
(from left to right - chive flower, sage flower, and borage flower)
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Very pretty. Also: if you have plants that deer like to munch on, plant chives around them, the deer do not like the smell and will stay away unless super hungry.
 
Punished Wankula said:
I use a mixture of 10-10-10 fertilizer, lawn lime, elemental sulfur, epsom salt (magnesium sulfate) and wood ash to fertilize just about everything.
It contains all the essentials, and i've got it mixed so the soil acidity change eventually balances out to neutral.
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I'm curious about this- you have enough plants that like acidic soil (berries, grapes, pear), why balance to neutral?
 
Sperg_rancher said:
I'm curious about this- you have enough plants that like acidic soil (berries, grapes, pear), why balance to neutral?
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The fertilizer mix contains lawn lime and sulfur, one of which raises and one of which lowers the soil ph.
If my soil ph is where i want it to be, then i don't want it changing.

The lime and sulfur change the acidity at different rates, but in the end it goes back to about where it was.
 
Anyone else make their own dirt?
I don't mean just compost. I mean you put scraps and stuff together as you would composting, add things like fungus, and let it self-perpetuate, you just need to stir it occasionally. I started doing it by accident one day and I'm happy it's still going.
I love my dirt.
 
Oh shit, I should link this one to my wife. She's been wanting a nice thread to sperg about gardening in :biggrin:
 
NoReturn said:
Anyone else make their own dirt?
I don't mean just compost. I mean you put scraps and stuff together as you would composting, add things like fungus, and let it self-perpetuate, you just need to stir it occasionally. I started doing it by accident one day and I'm happy it's still going.
I love my dirt.
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How may one do this if all one has for ground is gravel, clay, the lawn, and the occasional tree?
 
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