My seedlings have not been doing all that great this year. I started a new job in January and haven’t been able to give my plants the attention they deserve. Additionally, my daughter who would normally water my plants while I’m travelling is away at college now.
Many of these seedlings should be a few inches tall by now. A lot of them just started out, then inexplicably stopped growing.
A bunch of them will need to just be tossed I think. I will set what I can today, but I will be overseas for a week and the weather will have swings from 80 degrees tomorrow down to 30 degrees on Tuesday night
A nice article. You can get away with less space if you do sequential plantings. Also overwintering crops can allow you to get more out of the garden and grow through the winter (even in Chicago!)
Theres a great channel called “RED Gardens project” , an experimental farm where six 10mx10m plots are grown in different ways, the idea being that many suburban households have access to about this much space. He does ALL the math, measuring yields every year, accounting for how much time and effort is necessary to get the yield etc.
Orchard doing it’s thing. Apples, pears, peaches, plums (although they have black knot and not long for this world) persimmons, pomegranite, goji and goumi berries, che, grapes all busting at the seams. I love springtime!
Ah, you grow as much stuff as I do! I need to grab a pic tomorrow, but I only have peppers, tomatoes and marigolds going right now. I need to start sunflowers this week, and hope to have an OK enough forecast to direct sow corn, beans and peas this next weekend.
@Wayward: hopefully this doesn’t come too late, but the Hav- a- hart repellent is basically pelletized mace and works great against the little garden fiends. It’s not inexpensive, but works without you having to engage in a full-on war.
@anon29537550: what do you do with your Goji berries? We have a plant that grows in crazy ways, but they seem like a PITA to do anything with.
I dry them and add them to yogurt, oatmeal, etc. They are fiddley to pick, but i approach it as an exercise in Zen to work on peacefullness through work. That said, they produce extravagantly and the flowers are lovely.
An underappreciated one is the goumi berries. Also great for pollinators, extravagant producer that I use to make juice and mead, and is also a nitrogen fixer that has been shown in studies to increase yield of surrounding fruit tress by as much as 10%. I hate having to fertilize and use nitrogen fixers as much as I possibly can, since around here that seems to be a limiting nutrient. And they are pretty and useful, so win-win-win.
They just grow up so fast. The weather has been really mild up here the last few days, I know we’re not past last frost but it’s no longer dipping below freezing… I took the plant babies out of the nursery and now they are hardening during the day on the back deck. We have squash, beans, a bunch of kale varieties, cress, broccoli, beets, radish and spinach The chard didn’t really grow that well, I might end up getting some seedlings versus trying to start seeds again. I know the trays are a little bit crowded, but I’m only about a week away from being able to put them in the ground so I’m just dealing with it and hoping it won’t be too hard to transplant them.
Yes, the deck is falling apart. It is being replaced this summer and I can’t wait.
Potting up seedlings today. Tomatoes and peppers have new homes. As usual I planted way more than I need. In Aurora IL (Zone 5b) I dont dare to put them outside until memorial day. There’s som Zinnias and Echinacea in there too
Also set all the curcurbids today as well as the eggplant and beans. I also had to restart some herbs because they got put into the sun while I was away last week and promptly died.
Kale and kohlrabi that I had in the garden over winter have gone to seed. The kale is still edible so i topped the flowers but the kohlrabi is a loss. The kohlrabi stems are edible but taste pretty bland
I’m growing four varieties. The pole beans are the most prolific producers in the garden in terms of mass of food grown per unit area. The garden beans (bush beans) I use in place of shrubs, along with the zucchini.
If for some reason my seedlings perish I’ll buy seedlings at the store but thats not common for me. This year I bought some artichokes as seedlings because I couldnt find seeds. I also bought some brussel sprout seedlings because the ones I started died when someone moved my seedling trays into the bright sun, killing them (and a bunch of flowers too).
It’s my birthday and the main not-big-box nursery just opened for the season. I fought my way through all the people getting hanging planters for mother’s day and got a bunch of perennials for my new garden.
It’s going to be on a side of my house that gets some morning and a lot of afternoon sun, with shade in between. It used to be a bunch of raspberries that I ripped up and transplanted elsewhere.
ETA: everything’s a perennial minus the snapdragons, they’re annuals!
Most years, I have at least one snapdragon that survives the winter. I’ve had dianthus survive 5+ winters. Sounds weird for Michigan, but we don’t rake in the fall (chump’s game, raking - mow what falls on the grass, let the leaves in the flowerbeds alone until spring).
The chard didn’t really grow that well, I might end up getting some seedlings versus trying to start seeds again. I know the trays are a little bit crowded, but I’m only about a week away from being able to put them in the ground so I’m just dealing with it and hoping it won’t be too hard to transplant them.
