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Gardening has been on my mind recently; this is the first year I'm going to be doing it, and at my household, we're starting our early-season crops within a week or two. (Once we're pretty sure the New York winter won't surprise us again.) It's gonna be hard work, but I'm still excited.

So I thought I'd ask you guys, since I don't see a topic already: Are any of you planning a garden this year? Or maybe you've already started, or have a perennial bed? Potted plants? Landscaping? Heck, maybe you farm for a living. I want to know the details! Maybe even a running report or pictures as the season goes on; it all seems pretty interesting to me.


As for myself, I'm going for all-food this year; fresh vegetables/herbs have intrigued me since I ate a salad made of my mom's home-grown lettuce. (Perfection! And I don't even like salad!) In particular,

Spinach
Mint (possibly potted--I don't want the mint taking over everything else)
Basil

My boyfriend's dad tried to convince me to do Swiss Chard, too, and I guess I haven't ruled it out, but . . . I'd never even heard of chard before he mentioned it; I don't know that I'd like it. He's going to plant a garden, too, so maybe he can work it out for himself.


All right, your turn! Do we have any other gardens planned around here? I wanna hear about it.

Alas, I have a brown thumb

Not even a potted plant in my life...

My mom grows LOADS of roses in India. and quite a few other plants. we have loads of tree's, many of them fruit bearing like guava. lemon, This one thing with large purple grape like fruit that is very nice but seems to suck the moisture out of your mouth. Crab apples too.

And a few ngiht queen bushes. Oh i love the Night Queen plant.

I try my best in England's crappy climate and the restrictive space of my back garden to grow what I can. Mostly I resort to using grow bags for tomatos and last year I tried to grow butternut squash in them too. That didn't work as none of the flowers seemed to get pollunated...

Despite that for the last few years I've managed to have moderate success with growing chilli-peppers in the little greenhouse I've got, including the infamous Naga peppers from Dorset England, which are renowned for being the hottest in the world. I grow those most just for fun though and my main crop is Jalepenos and sweet red peppers. I also tend to grow lots of seed trays of salad type veg... lettuce, french cress, raddishes and spring onions. Tried beatroot last year too, but they didn't turn out too well as I think I placed them too close together.

On the other hand, managed to grow some truely massive outdoor cucumbers, litterally about 18inch's long after the recomended growing period for them, got 7 off just one vine that size. Aubergine (eggplant) didn't turn out well as we had a very raining summer last year so the fruits were small.

Great successes I've had though were rubarb, strawberries and a good variety of herbs... Chives, parsley, basil, rosmary, thyme, sage, mint etc.

The plan for this year is to get some more rubarb and strawberries as when there was enough ripe and harvestable, it was never enogh to make anything big with, so hopefully with more plants we'll be able to make better deserts with them. I'm also going to expand the herb selection and try a few new things like growing my own garlic and potatoes. The successes of last year will be staying and hopefully when I go around the garden centers and plant nurseries I'll spot something new and interesting to attempt.

That the vege side of the garden... on the other side of things I'm going to be rearranging and rebuilding the rockery part of the garden and possibly getting a dwarf cherry tree.

Before we got our last dog [so about 8 years ago] we had a 15x15 (ft) spot where we'd plant veggies. We had someone come till it, though if you're ambitious you could turn the soil with a shovel and aerate it with a rake to get it started. He had zucchini (or squash), cucumbers, tomatoes, broccoli, and green beans; they always seemed to come out well.

When we planted, we prepped fist-sized mounds of soil with a finger poked hole in the middle to toss the seeds in, and spaced them a finger width or two apart from each other. Drop a few seeds in each mound, because you never know how many are actually going to come through. Close the finger-holes up and you're good. I think the best way to water them is with one of those lazy arcing sprinklers, that you can set in the middle (not the rat-tat-tat ones). The trick is to not water them -too- much. Always test the soil before turning on the sprinkler. Usually you can get away with half an hour or so of the sprinkler, at most. I'll attach a quick diagram of what ours looked like.

Take MS's advice, as his climate is most like yours

But, under any circumstances, DO NOT PLANT zuchinni or cucumbers!!!!! They will sprout. They will multiply. They will do this repeatedly. They will take over your garden. They will become Pod People. You will not be able to bake , pickle or give away enough of them. Even garbage disposals are afraid of cucumbers.

That is all. Captain Carrot, out.

I've thought about it.

Back in the day, used to have a garden with snow peas, jalapeno peppers, leaf lettuce and green onions. Haven't done so in years, and can't really this year, seeing as how someone has parked a bunch of cars all over where I used to have my garden.

Still, I am thinking about getting a flower box or something, and maybe planting some herbs.

I have to agree with that warning about zucchini. Plant one and only one zucchini plant.

Planting two or more will make you one of the hapless folk increasing piles of zucchini in blocking the view to their house with a cardboard sign saying,
“Free zucchini! Take some! Please! We’ll pay you to haul it away!” It all ends with a sad obituary: “…zucchini squashed…”

Check Midgetshrimp and see if he has a belly button, or a dimple on top of his neck....

or spots behind his eye lids.

We had some sorta palm papaya tree growing, a few of them infact. But these tcertain types grow old fast and die.

At our place in india. Most of the tree's around are older than me. Some many times over. I know at least the old [and huge] tree [ i think its a fern tree] is more than a 100 years old. Its visibly aged now though.

we used to have this enormous fig tree. but its fruit was...well not consumeable.

Goodness, I haven't gardened since I was at least 14... I miss it so much. I suppose I could get a decent sized planter to put on my balcony, but it wouldn't be enough. I love BIG spaces! With TREES! Of my OWN!

... I can't wait to buy a house...

oh and hte night queen is truly a wonderful experience.

a vine plant which grows a distrinct extra vine with rows of flowers on it. THey odnt look like much.

But at night, they bloom.

And the scent reaches quite far.

the only way i could describ is the fragrance of freshly cut lawn grass and honey.

Hah, I can even post in this thread!



Well, this is not really my garden. It's a view from my balcony. In the lower left, you can see a barbecue grill, there's a table and benches hidden there. In the lower right a bit of the little pond is visible. Goldfish live in it, frogs breed in it, ducks land there... Going roughly across the middle of the image is the fence, behind that are what the dictionary tells me the English call "allotment gardens" - little graden plots with huts where people spend their free time.

As you can see, lots of green.

In the middle distance, you can see a vertical white thing. That's an electricity mast of the street car line, right in front of it, hidfden by the greenery, is the main exit road from town to the freeway. While a ridiculous amount of cars drive on it, not much noise comes over here due to the screen of trees and bushes.

In the far distance are the hills on the other side of the Saale valley.

All in all, a pretty place.

I'll be posting piccies of mine when I've finally gotten it tidied up enough.