Gardening

Do you eat your nasturtium or do you have it to attract good bugs?

BTW - lovely piece of land you have. Beats the pants off my tiny urban parcel.

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Thanks :slight_smile:
Both, I like salads with some eatable flowers and hidden herbs added, bees and other nice insects love them, and a third reason. Also the greenfly loves them. More than some other plants (like my roses or some greens) where I donā€™t like greenfly.
Letā€™s say, win-win, in lots of ways. Because I also like the plant, blooms till far in fall and still germinates late in the year. So I sew them when a place is bare to keep the weeds away. (covers the soil).
But there are more plants I use for that purpose.

At a tiny urban parcel lots of nice things are possible. Do you have sun? Curious also, pick?

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This is from last year:


We intend to build more raised beds this year, but with the kitchen under construction, we might not get it done this year.

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Looks nice! Not that small. :wink: Also a bit wild, what do you put in the hanging baskets? Nice tree at the far right end.
Wich plant is at the middle left?

Raised beds, I thought about it, but getting soil over here is kind of a pain, or very expensive. But it seems to be a very nice, friendly way of gardening.

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With everything else going on in my life so far this year, I havenā€™t planted anything this year.

I think I still have time to plant some Capsicum annuums, but itā€™s too late for any other chillies.

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We just planted our seeds, which we are going to keep indoors for the next month or so; a variety of tomatoes, and several kinds of peppers. Weā€™ll plant peas, lettuce, and kale. Maybe cucumbers, though we havenā€™t had much luck with those in the past.

Our tomatoes are our biggest crop, but the challenge is to keep the pests away - squirrels, and possibly a raccoon, usually take a significant portion of our tomatoes. Iā€™m desperately looking for a way to keep them out this year - something that isnā€™t too expensive, can either be bought or is easy to build, and durable. Movable would be nice too, since we try to rotate our crops. Anyone have any good suggestions/designs for a cage?

I should mention that Iā€™m an urban rooftop gardener, and I use 4ā€™ x 2ā€™ planters - probably growing tomatoes in 2 of those, right next to each other. So the ideal cage would be 8ā€™ x 2ā€™.

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So many questions! The hanging baskets are pure decoration, just flowers. The purple thing at the back is a bush thatā€™s probably been there 50 years (long before I owned the place). Almost everything outside the raised bed is tomatoes, at least 50 plants. A few bell pepper plants in the front. Everything in the raised bed is hot peppers, ranging in heat from poblano to scotch bonnet (canā€™t see the huge planter full of scorpion peppers hiding under the purple bush). There are some morning glories climbing up the neighborā€™s arbor vitae on the left of the photo.

About half of the soil in that raised bed came from the rather short raised beds that used to be there, the rest came from Ann Arborā€™s compost facility. Itā€™s mighty fine stuff, weā€™re fortunate to have it available at $15/cubic yard.

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I donā€™t know in which climate aerial you are living. But if you can find the time, the moment and the inner peace. Maybe you can sew some annuals? Not that difficult and/or time consuming and can give great joy.

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This year my garden is on an Ikea dresser :smiling_imp: And Iā€™m still gonna take pics. Hopefully next year or the year after Iā€™ll have some dirt to get dirty with.

In the mean time, spam away.

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I tried growing peppers on a apartment balcony in SD (Thatā€™s San Diego, not South Dakota) once. I feel your pain.

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Are you using the Ikea hydroponic system?

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I built my own a couple times, but I just donā€™t have the room here. Next year I hope :smiley:

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For as ubiquitous as squirrels are in my neighborhood, theyā€™ve not bothered our tomatoes to any noticeable extent. I plant marigolds at the garden perimeter every year, no north american critters care for how those flowers smell. When critters get curious about the food, we sprinkle concentrated capiscum pellets around the perimeter. Itā€™s not terribly inexpensive, but works really well.

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Iā€™m in Oxford, UK so Iā€™m in zone 8, possibly a 9 because of the local micro-climate (not shown on the linked map). The biggest problem is that Iā€™m at 51Ā°45ā€²N, so winters get very dark. I tried to overwinter some chillies last year, but only one survived.

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Short, cleaning up and packaging to go to: 51Ā° N
4Ā° E. From nearly the same, just 300km down. Will come back later.

Busy day also, sorry.
This I use to overwinter some chillies, and my father in law overwinters his, with success, the same now.

Its cleaned up up for the seedlings a have now, light from behind is also a good idea for them.

I hope you can see it, its just a banana-box, cut for fitting (at a window stil, or for me fitting between the ground radiator and the window) and aluminum-foil glued into it. Kind of ā€˜KISSā€™ but it works, most of the time. The thing you need to be aware off, I need to, if you put it really close to the window it can be also very cold during the night.

About the annuals, why not some marigolds, some salvia, low growing sunflower, verbena? I can send you some seeds if you like. No idea how I can send seedlings, I suppose thatā€™s not possible? (This year I do not do chillies, but have already to much peppers and tomatoesā€¦)

(Edit: maybe itā€™s possible, let them grow a bit. And .nl to .uk is not that long a travel).

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#All hail my magnificent garden!!!

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Thatā€™s an impressively large pine cone on an impressively tiny pine treeā€¦your bonsai skills are off the charts! :wink:

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Iā€™m thinking about painting it :smiley:
I really kinda wanna go look for those enormous pinecones. Maybe Iā€™ll get off my rear and do something this weekend.

Edit

Coulter pine and sugar pine. There are groves less than fifty miles away. Anyone smell a weekend adventure!?

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That rosemaryā€™s going to need a larger pot in a couple months. We lost a 2 year old plant last summer when a EF1 tornado almost touched down in our back yard. Poor thing was almost 4ā€™ tall.

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