I would like a place I can talk about the random happenings in my garden that don’t justify a stand alone post. Exciting things like my tomato plant finally growing, or the sadness that my snow peas seem to be dying off prematurely.
Would anyone else like to share their gardening snippits? If there is enough interest I can set up a regularly weekly thread (@[email protected] I presume that will be ok?)
Pic is just for interest - this is the collection of gardening pictures I put together to illustrate my garden design goals for a recent assignment.
I was nursemaiding my seedlings a lot at the beginning but am kind of letting them do their own thing now they’re a bit bigger. I’m still letting the damping off spinach sink or swim as I haven’t yet got more potting mix to dump out and restart that pot
I don’t have a lot of success with spinach - the seeds don’t sprout well, if they do the seedlings don’t grow well, and the few I manage to get to the stage to go into the garden tend not to grow well either. I keep persisting, and hope to work out what conditions they prefer. I have managed to get a couple growing ok in the garden at the moment, but a lot of their comrades died along the way.
My previous lot were doing fantastic over lockdown in cheap windowboxes (continuous sow baby spinach, Lazio F1) until they died in the heat (I forgot to water).
This lot (Viking?) were doing well until the continuous heavy rains flooded their self watering window boxes, and I didn’t remember to go pour the excess out of the bottoms. So they began dying off from fungal rot
The carrots are taller and bushing up but haven’t started thickening too much yet. A couple of tiny ones looked damped off?
No 😨
I’m just going to let them do their thing with periodic waters and they should be fine. But I’m going to have to thin them a lot so with the small container I won’t get many
Edit: What I’ve done different this time is used self watering pots with bottom reservoirs (in rainy weather), and also used heirloom seeds instead of F1 hybrids. Both of those could be contributing to suddenly having fungal issues this time around
Possum got to some of my tomato seedlings overnight :(
Guess I’ll be spending some of today reconfiguring the wire mesh fencing.I think my dog keeps most of the plants protected from possums, but the apricot tree along the fence gets a free possum pruning service. Last year the snow peas (also along the fence) were completely eaten too.
I’ve had two lots of plants bought online delivered in the last two days so have been busy planting and mulching those. Four variaties of citrus (Tahitian lime, Eureka and Meyer Lemon and a Thorny Mandarin) a couple of dragonfruit, plus a white sweet potato, white flowering rosemary, red and green kangaroo paws and a lavender. I’ll now have blue, pink and white flowering rosemary. The citrus are all small (not much more than cuttings) and will hopefully give me some type of citrus on the tree for most of the year.
My dwarf bean seeds have (finally) sprouted. I also planted some climbing beans and snake bean seeds - I’ve never had snake beans before, but they look interesting.
The parsley is really happy, upright and bushing out. Subjecting everything to benign neglect, letting it dry out a little and pouring out the reservoir after watering seems to help. Some of the spinach plants are cactus but others are still alive somehow. Carrots looking good.
The cat grass is still growing shamefully slow though.
I had to pull a bunch of self-seeded parsley out of the garden as it was taking over. Now the curled parsley has all gone to seed and the remaining flat leaf are growing very slowly, perhaps in protest at what happened to their friends and family. Now I have a parsnip that seems to be planning world domination, and as it is now taller than I am I don’t think it’s a good idea to argue.
