Gardeners of AW, unite

I completely failed at gardening this year. Due to the heat and allergens, I wasn't able to tend to my garden this year. Everything looks terrible. Even the tomato plant quit producing. I'll be pulling everything next week when it's cooler.

Next year, I think I'll make some changes to what I typically plant. That means no tomatoes, no beans, maybe I'll stick to early spring veggies and peppers for the summer.

Garden is winding down overhere. Still got some beans, but after that it's all cabages.

Le sigh. After a whole summer of bad weather, at least I was having huge success with late-season tomatoes.

Until last night, when a deer jumped the garden fence and ate ​everything.

The worst season for tomatoes in memory. Everyone is complaining. Only the Jet Star and the Juliet are bearing. A friend is getting only Arkansas Travelers. Even the German Queen is a bust this year. I did get 2 Cherokee Purples- terrible fruit-- cracked, stunted, scabby. I decided that I would not plant them again but even in this condition they tasted great, so I'm looking for a new location.

No one can explain why this season is so bad here. It has rained more, but this is Western Kansas. A Noah style flood would only move us to mild drought on the climate tables. Peppers are better than ever. Last year was bad for peppers. This year they are everywhere.

I am looking through the bulb catalogs, thinking of next year. --s6

Well, I'm moving into a place where I can finally establish a vegie patch. It'll have to be well-defended from...well...everything, because it's in a small rainforest clearing. But I'm prepared to give it a damned good go.

Hey, has anyone ever used the LED grow light strips? My plants are looking a bit sad with the short, gloomy days. I'm thinking about this light bar set, but I didn't know if LEDs for grow lamps worked very well.

I haven't used them on plants but they keep my corals alive [saltwater fish tank] not the same light bar but it looks decent.

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I haven't used them on plants but they keep my corals alive [saltwater fish tank] not the same light bar but it looks decent.

Today was warm and sunny in eastern Pennsylvania. It got me thinking about my garden this year. I think I would like to put in a blue and white garden this year. Maybe just a little bit of another color to break it up. Maybe pink? Or yellow?

I planted my first veggie seeds today, indoors of course (still a foot or more of snow on the garden). Yellow zucchini, sweet peppers and grape tomatoes.

Too early for all of them, really, but - I don't care! Something needed to be planted, and they're my victims. I put them in big pots, so maybe they'll be okay, if I use cozy coats and whatever else to get them outside sooner...

mrsmig, have you tried planting bulbs like daffodils? My understanding is that they can deter deer and rabbits away from nearby plants.

We have deer in our neighborhood, but most of my plants are on my back deck, so I've never had a big problem with them, myself.

Buy a Jack Russell Terrier. They cut down on yard traffic--s6

I planted Siberian Iris and a few Lily of the Valley pips. The Lily of the Valley came from my childhood house. My parents dug them up in Iowa when they brought me home from college. When they took me to college there were acorns all over the campus. We never saw acorns in our part of Kansas so my folks immediately filled their pockets with acorns and planted them in our yard. Some made it and now we have LOTS of oak trees, descendants of my college campus oaks. That spring I showed them Lily of the Valley growing in a shady spot behind my dorm room. I'd seen it on packets of bubble bath but never in real life. It looked and smelled just like the bubble bath!

Yup. They dug pips there on the spot, wrapped them in a napkin and paper cup and took them home. As luck would have it they are invasive. They took over big shady swathes of our yard. A couple of years ago my brother tried to eradicate a big clump by the garage. Nothing else blooms there, don't know why he even tried. They bloom and smell like heaven in a wet year. and stay green in a dry year. Anyway my brother's nefarious plan failed. They are growing to this day, thumbing their noses at him.


My family was always starting stuff, sharing and swiping seeds, cuttings. I sometimes wonder if there is a botanical gene in our DNA. We still have my great grandmother's horseradish. My grandmother's Seven Sister's Rose still blooms in her neighbor's yard where she started it for him. Hollyhocks by the back fence came from seeds my dad and stepmom found growing by an old school house. --s6

Hubby likes shrubs and trees, not so much small flowers or veg. He was a Master Gardener for a while. His cohorts would ask if I gardened. My answer was: no, I got the cooking gene and the crafting gene, but I didn't get the gardening gene. My mother could grow anything.

MM

shakeysix said:

I planted Siberian Iris and a few Lily of the Valley pips. The Lily of the Valley came from my childhood house. My parents dug them up in Iowa when they brought me home from college. When they took me to college there were acorns all over the campus. We never saw acorns in our part of Kansas so my folks immediately filled their pockets with acorns and planted them in our yard. Some made it and now we have LOTS of oak trees, descendants of my college campus oaks. That spring I showed them Lily of the Valley growing in a shady spot behind my dorm room. I'd seen it on packets of bubble bath but never in real life. It looked and smelled just like the bubble bath!

Yup. They dug pips there on the spot, wrapped them in a napkin and paper cup and took them home. As luck would have it they are invasive. They took over big shady swathes of our yard. A couple of years ago my brother tried to eradicate a big clump by the garage. Nothing else blooms there, don't know why he even tried. They bloom and smell like heaven in a wet year. and stay green in a dry year. Anyway my brother's nefarious plan failed. They are growing to this day, thumbing their noses at him.


My family was always starting stuff, sharing and swiping seeds, cuttings. I sometimes wonder if there is a botanical gene in our DNA. We still have my great grandmother's horseradish. My grandmother's Seven Sister's Rose still blooms in her neighbor's yard where she started it for him. Hollyhocks by the back fence came from seeds my dad and stepmom found growing by an old school house. --s6

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My mom does this, too! I think maybe it's a result of being a Depression baby - anything she doesn't have to pay for is much sweeter!

When I bought my first house, she scavenged plants from all of her friends, which was fine, but also started taking long drives in the country with a shovel and plastic bags in the trunk of the car, and when she found something she liked in any situation that wasn't right in someone's front yard, she'd tromp out and dig some up. She has a country property herself and when I asked her how she'd feel if someone came by and started digging up her plants just because they weren't close to the house, she said it would be fine as long as they didn't take ALL of them. It would save her the trouble of having to divide them. I think she was serious.

Now that I have a new house with a hard-to-mow slope, she's undertaken the project of ripping up the grass and replacing it with periwinkle. Every time she comes for a visit there's a garbage bag full of plants ripped from her own garden plus yogurt containers full from her friends' gardens.

She's in her eighties and I'm honestly not sure she's ever paid for a plant in her life. Seeds, yes. A plant? Not that I can think of.

I'm in a real psychological quandary. We here in Anchorage, Alaska, have had an exceptionally mild winter, way warm and with almost no snow. Ordinarily we aren't advised to stick things in the ground until the end of May, but I always cheat by about three weeks, because the growing season is so short. Sometimes I get away with it. But this year, it's really going to be tempting to get things outside by late April. So what I'm doing is starting some stuff indoors, hoping to nurse it along until I can take that chance, and if it doesn't work, starting other versions of the same stuff a bit later, so I can replace the ones that get killed by late frosts, right after I swear a lot.

And my wife wants me to grow Brussels sprouts this year. I tried those several time, years ago, and they did well right up till the moment the mooooose got into the garden and ate them like lollipops. But I suppose I must try.

caw

Periwinkle? My landlady used to grow periwinkle. Her house was a peachy pink color and the blue periwinkle grew along the foundation. My daughter was just toddling. She would always bring me the little flowers--no harm, it was just periwinkle, pretty and everywhere, my landlady would say.

My landlady was Madge, a very kind, interesting person, a retired music teacher in her mid sixties. She used to host stringed quartet rehearsals. She married late in life, had her first child at 40! She was married to an old grumpy bachelor who really was nice but a tightwad. Madge always hung her geraniums in the basement to overwinter. She and her husband started everything from cuttings and seed, but one year (1974?) the nurseries were showing those salmon colored geraniums. They were all the new thing then and Madge wanted some so she tossed her old red geraniums straight out of the basement and into the garbage. Then she went out and bought a dozen salmon geraniums and six white! She compounded this by buying an entire flat of dark blue lobelia! She knew she was in trouble and like she said, big trouble is more fun than little trouble, so she bought new pots and petunias too! The pots were a soft putty color, textured and heavy. They must have cost a whole dollar apiece!

The back yard had a patio that led into a sun/music room and Madge put the geraniums and lobelia all around the patio, right where John couldn't miss them. And he didn't! He accused her of ditching the perfectly good red geraniums on purpose and she said he was exactly right. She was sick of looking at them.

Blue periwinkle, dark blue lobelia, salmon and white geraniums, a little coleus -- the patio was stunning. Hannah, my daughter and I, used to spend an hour or two playing on the patio, one of my favorite places ever. To this day I am a sucker for coleus, lobelia and geraniums.

My husband's and my bedroom was just over Madge and John's bedroom. They bitched back and forth about the geraniums for the whole summer. Funny how a long dead person's garden can bring her back to life. -

Cherish your mom Captcha. -s6

Fight that moose for those sprouts. They make delicious pickles! Brussels sprouts, not moose. Pickled moose? Sounds like an episode of Northern Exposure! --s6

I'm sorry I laughed when I read about the moooose, blacbird.

My Mom used to have to defend her garden from deer, elk, squirrels, rabbits, chipmunks and ground squirrels. Dad built a two foot high field stone and cement wall around it. That didn't do the trick, so he topped it with two feet of corrugated iron turned so that the ridges were vertical. Kept eveything out except birds, and they weren't much of a problem. After she could no longer garden, due to arthritis in her back, he took the corrugated down. The stone wall is gradually crumbling away. About ten years ago he went out at dusk to walk some friends to their car, there were six deer in the garden.

MM

We moved into a new apartment last November that came with a YARD and a GARDEN and hoo boy am I pumped. There isn't a ton of either space or sunlight (and I actually have a terrible black thumb) so I am trying to be conservative and am sticking to mostly herbs and some greens--arugula and spinach. Possibly snap peas if I can rig up a trellis.

shakeysix said:

Fight that moose for those sprouts. They make delicious pickles! Brussels sprouts, not moose. Pickled moose? Sounds like an episode of Northern Exposure! --s6

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I've never heard of that! (picked Brussels sprouts, not pickled moose, though I haven't heard of that either... ) I grew sprouts last year. I got a ton of growth, but not much in terms of production.

For the last two weeks, I've been feeling like a slacker for not having cleared the community garden for spring planting. We've had a very mild winter by our New England standard. We've even gotten up to the 70s!

Just as I was starting to feel exceptionally guilty (and like I should run and plant something at any moment) the forecast calls for a nor'easter Sunday/Monday, with up to 8" of snow.

I am now feeling marginally less guilty. Wait it out, Blacbird!

So I have a question about a hibiscus shrub, oh much more experienced gardeners.

A few years ago I inherited my mother's lovely hibiscus when she moved out of state. It was in a huge ceramic pot and content to hang out on my patio at my apartment. Now that I have a house and a huge yard, I'd like to put it in the ground (near a lovely red-bloomed one already on the property). BUT, the roots seem to have grown through the drainage in the pot. Like, it was starting to put roots out through the brick patio when we moved it.

So how possible will transplanting it be? It's going to have to lose a good bit of root and branch to get it out of the pot and I don't want to traumatize the poor thing if I don't have to.