Gardening, Part 2

I had those (and their parents) last year, all over my sad tomato plants. Creepy buggers. Maybe they were going after whatever was plaguing the tomatoes, though?

No sign of them yet this year, and the tomatoes are mostly thriving so far.

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Totes creepy, but good predators. Also, no touchy!

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Daily raspberry haul. We’ve been picking this much every day this week. And I’d wager most of them are making it into the container!

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Then you’re doing it wrong!!!

bite takin GIF

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How many bushes? Do you end up eating them all fresh or make them into something?
Also, yum!

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Two clumps of bushes, one one each side of the air conditioner. So about 15 feet of bushes.

The berries are generally eaten as-is but I do throw a few cupfuls into my summer IPA.

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I found this growing as a volunteer on a scrubby lawn behind my mom’s retirement community. What is it? These are very pretty little flowers

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Bird’s Foot Trefoil, according to Seek at iNaturalist.

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Hops are stalled. They were growing really well, then just stopped. I had hoped for a lot more bushiness.

I checked the soil temperature and its a whopping 82 degrees f! That’ll put the reins on any growth! There’s about 2" of mulch on the soil but I’ll have to add a sunshade to the flowerpots I think.

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Rodents found my beetroot. Grrr.

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Pepper apocalypse :frowning:
Last night’s storms snapped off a branch of the habanero plant with at least half the peppers on it. Any suggestions for green (unripe) habaneros?

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That sucks! They’re still going to be hot, so still good for hot sauce or freezing for later use.

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oh noes! tragic, yet not a total loss. as @IronEdithKidd says, freeze 'em and add them into sauces/ salsas along with the fully ripened ones to come later. the flavor is still very good, a little sharper, not as fruity as mature ones, but still quite good.
there is a commercial sauce on the market called El Yucateco that offers an all green habanero sauce that is really good!
late edit to add: they will continue to ripen if you pick themm, then leave them out on the counter or someplace that gets a little sun, turning yellow, then orange. they will still have a little green, but taste good.
good luck!

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Oh no! Good to know that people here recommend keeping and using them even though they aren’t ripe.

Your post reminded me of this news story from Minnesota last year. A farmer lost his habanero crop to a hail storm (it was four days from harvest at the time), but the damaged peppers were salvaged and made into a special hot sauce which was bottled and sold to benefit the farmer. (I may have posted this at the time in another topic, can’t remember.) Very heartwarming for lovers of good deeds and lovers of hot sauce!

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Been wanting to post in this thread for a while, but just hadn’t been logged in much. Anyway, here’s something i started in two batches.
About 28 eastern redbuds started from seed!
Last fall i gathered a ton of seeds from around the area and planted 25 in tree pots to overwinter immediately. The remainder, i scarified and then stratified in the fridge over winter. The tray on the left are those that overwintered outside, the ones on the right were in the fridge. Clearly artificial scarification and stratification increased the germination rate significantly!
I’ll let them overwinter in the pots this year and maybe through to the next (depending on how they are doing). Then I’ll have to decide what to do with them all. I guess we could just be ‘that one house with all the redbuds’ every spring :grin:

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So I tried an experiment with my areogarden, just basically throwing a bunch of different things in to see what would work. I managed to get some leafs from the kale plant, some tomatoes… but not much luck with the peppers until today! I did two kinds (hot and sweet) and one of the hot peppers has sort of taken over the thing, kind of crowding out everything else (so next time, i know - peppers by themselves or just use the aerogarden to start them and maybe think about moving them outside…). But so far, no hot peppers were growing (just lots of flowers). I was doing some trimming and look what I noticed!

There is one more nearly this size (not big - maybe an inch long?) and a couple of more starting to grow (but are kind of too small to see).

But I know next time that some plants should have the whole thing to itself, peppers being one of those.

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If you live on a block with other houses, you could offer 2-4 to each house so that there is a swath of purple in the front yards every spring!

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Recently there was a post on petrichor / rain smell, specifically about desert plants. I think it was a type of sage and a fungus and how it has beneficial health effects? I live in a mostly-desert anyway and my spouse loves the petrichor smell, so I’m hoping to plant some… but I lost the link. Should have bookmarked it! I’m hoping a kindly mutant more practiced in bboing bbs search will help me out…

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Pickles! Pickles!

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wow! such a bounty!
my cukes are so lame! and my mini ghekins never produce… :frowning_face:
hoping for pepino melons in the fall

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