Gardening: (2016– )

[Senior Sea Kayaker]

10 minutes ago, FauxPas said:

 

Do you use hormone rooting powder or anything like that? 

 

I don't use any additions to the water (which is non-chlorinated well water) which is changed every 2 to 3 days.

 

 

 

[Senior Sea Kayaker]

The current state of the window herb garden (the jalapeno, habanero and Carolina reaper pepper plants have been harvested and the plants into the composter).

In no particular order: Thai basil, basil, rosemary, green onions, chives, garlic chives, cilantro, dill and flat and curly leaf parsley. Some things recently reseeded.

This is a great location, at least when the sky isn't clouded over, with southern exposure.

I've also put up a white backdrop to increase light exposure.

 

[chromedome]

The snow melted from my garden today, under the warmth, rain and wind. Can confirm that I still have broccoli and two kinds of kale doing their thing, and I will take advantage of the thaw to re-cover them a little more securely (a couple of the coverings blew off or collapsed under the snow load).

 

[chromedome]

I took the opportunity yesterday, while temps were above freezing, to harvest a decently large bowl of kale and what will probably be the last of the broccoli florets. We'll see how things go.

[chromedome]

Like last year, I harvested some greens from my garden for yesterday's Christmas meal. 

 

This is my late-planted lacinato kale, under its protective cover. The snow of course is great insulation, but poor for photosynthesis!

 

Here's what's going on "under the hood," so to speak:

 

The smaller hoops and mesh covering had protected them from cabbage worms back in the autumn. I have a pic of the larger bed of curly kale too, but the forum insists on turning it upside down when I upload it. I saved a flipped version of the photo, thinking that would do it, but nope... still shows as upside down once I upload it. Go figure.

 

...and this is my harvest. It's rather small, but that's not the point. The point is being able to say I'd harvested fresh greens from my garden for Christmas dinner!

 

It also shows you how hard it was snowing yesterday, because that's how much fell into the bowl during the few minutes I was cutting greens.

[chromedome]

I took a break from working late to hit the Gardening feed on Bluesky as a sort of mental palate cleanser. I encountered a post there which described that exact activity as "bloomscrolling," which utterly made my evening.


 

[FauxPas]

1 hour ago, chromedome said:

I took a break from working late to hit the Gardening feed on Bluesky as a sort of mental palate cleanser. I encountered a post there which described that exact activity as "bloomscrolling," which utterly made my evening.

 

 

Oooh, I must do some of that myself! I haven't got beyond some of the news feeds and the cat feed, ha. 

 

One of the things I really missed during the Canada Post strike was receiving seed catalogs in the mail. I know it's all digital now also but for me there is no substitute to having a hard copy show up and sit in a chair with a cup of coffee or hot choc/cider and peruse the blooms/veggies. 

 

After the strike ended, Mike brought mail in one day and handed me a couple of seed catalogs and said, "Well, I guess you'll be busy for the afternoon." Oh yes. Bliss. 🌱🌱🌱

[chromedome]

[TicTac]

Love it.

 

Got my Richter's seed catalogue in the mail last week.  It's my favourite....*ahem*.....bathroom reading material.  That, and Lee Valley catalogues! 💌

 

 

[rotuts]

or

 

 

 

Wallace & Gromit

[dcarch]

You may find this interesting:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtsJ5m6C7dU  

 

Enjoy.

 

dcarch

[FauxPas]

10 hours ago, dcarch said:

You may find this interesting:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtsJ5m6C7dU  

 

Enjoy.

 

dcarch

 

Those are pretty awesome! I don't have enough time right now to watch them all, but I love that he has a list with timestamps in the description so you can pick and choose. 

[dcarch]

 

As of today, at least 25,446,444 people have viewed this video since Jun 16, 2024.

 

dcarch

Edited February 12 by dcarch (log)

[chromedome]

[Shelby]

8 minutes ago, chromedome said:

I'm hoping all of our cold is killing the damn squash bugs.  Probably not, though.  They're like roaches and will rule the earth after we're gone.

[KennethT]

 

I had been growing turmeric for the leaves (hydroponically, indoors under artificial lighting) and it was going great but lately, it stopped putting out new leaves and the old leaves were turning brown. I was wondering what was going on - thinking there was possibly root rot or something so I pulled the plant out of the fabric pot and started to dry root it to see what was going on.

 

 

Evidently, it's time for harvest!!!!

 

 

All of this came from a single 3 inch long piece of organic turmeric that I got from my local Indian grocery store.

 

I assume turmeric freezes well - especially since I always crush it into a paste anyway. So I'll freeze most of it and replant one of the ones with a lot of sprouting sites to get a new plant and start all over again.

[BeeZee]

Email from our town for upcoming Spring activities and they now have a community garden which costs $50 for a plot. No mention of the plot size, but I appreciate the effort to provide it, as there are a fair number of townhomes and condos in town whose owners would benefit.

[chromedome]

56 minutes ago, BeeZee said:

Email from our town for upcoming Spring activities and they now have a community garden which costs $50 for a plot. No mention of the plot size, but I appreciate the effort to provide it, as there are a fair number of townhomes and condos in town whose owners would benefit.

There's a community garden on the grounds of my mother's nursing home, consisting of individual 4'x8' planters. Those were originally made of wood, but were replaced last with recycled plastic faux-wood manufactured by a local company, which should be much more durable. They seem to have good uptake, with the majority of the beds tended diligently until the end of the season, though a few inevitably end up going wild as the summer wears on (people tend to underestimate how much work even a small garden can be).

 

I see a nice mix of flowers and vegetables among the plots. A few grow only one or the other, but a surprising number mix-and-match within their single bed. It's a win-win for the community and the nursing home, because a few of the residents still love to garden and for those who don't it provides a lot of seasonal interest to do along with the facility's own landscaping. Whenever the weather cooperates, I'll usually wheel my mom around the grounds for at least an hour a day so she can enjoy it (she still walks fine for short distances but tires quickly, so our long walks are long rides for her).

 

I've talked shop with several of the gardeners, and was surprised to hear several of them grumble that people seem to genuinely believe that "community garden" means "free for anyone in the community to help themselves." The nursing home isn't open to fencing in the garden area (it would utterly spoil the aesthetics of the grounds), so some of the gardeners now put protective mesh around their individual planters, and have put up discreet signs explaining that they pay to have a plot in this garden, and that it is not for public consumption.

[chromedome]

I haven't started any vegetables yet for later transplant, because it's still a bit early for most things, but we did get our mushrooms underway a few days ago.

I've spoken about this a couple of times in recent years. You can buy mushroom kits consisting of a suitable substrate (sawdust, for example), which has been inoculated with spores of the desired mushroom, and maintained in conditions that encourage the mycelium to grow. The normal way to use these is simply to poke some holes and mist them, which prompts the mushrooms to fruit through the holes in the package.

 

We've been a bit more ambitious than that. To maximize the value of a kit, you can prepare a larger quantity of substrate on your own account, and then crumble the substrate from your kit and mix the two. Some do this in baskets, some do it in ordinary plastic 5-gallon/20-liter buckets with holes drilled through them, and some do it in open beds in their garden. We've tried all three.

So far the best one-season yield we've had was from the open bed of winecap mushrooms, which gave us 25-30 pounds. It didn't do as well as we'd hoped in the second year, giving us only a handful of mushrooms. It's still there, and we'll revamp it this year and hope for better, but we've also gotten another kit. This year we'll be doing all eight varieties using the bucket method, which my GF believes will give us the most controllable/reproducible results. This project is her baby, so I'm just following her lead and providing the muscle as needed. 

 

The kits are neither especially cheap nor especially costly, averaging $20-$25 ea (CAD), but with eight varieties it does add up. So establishing them as a self-sustaining presence in our garden is the longer-term goal. For context, we go through a lot of store-bought mushrooms, and ordinary button mushrooms here typically cost $3.99 for a 227g (half-pound) package. So that 25 pounds of winecaps, for example, corresponds to $200 dollars' worth even at button-mushroom pricing. When you allow for the higher price or outright non-availability of specialty mushrooms, their dollar value goes up. Our Superstore chain has "gourmet" mushrooms currently (morels, enoki, etc) at prices ranging from $8.99 and up for the same 227g size.

 

So this year we have five buckets set up with sawdust substrate, and another three where the substrate of choice is chopped straw. We have another kit for winecaps (Stropharia rugosoannulata), as mentioned above, as shiitake, lion's mane (Hericium erinaceous), chestnut mushrooms (Pholiota adiposa) and four different kinds of pleurotus/oyster mushrooms.

 

...and yes, if you're wondering, we are indeed Blue Oyster Cult-ivators (Pleurotus ostreatus var. columbinus, which varies in color from a steely blue-grey to genuinely blue, depending on the strain). 

 

[chromedome]

It's a beautiful day, today, so I took the opportunity to assess what survived and did not survive out in my garden. In the herb bed, the picture is much more positive than last year, probably because we had a normal quantity of snow to protect the plants. My thyme, oregano, sage and parsley all survived, this time, which was not the case last year. The lovage, mint and Egyptian walking onions all did as well, though I had no qualms about any of those. They'll survive just about anything short of nuclear winter.

 

     

 

 

  

 

 

I also found my newly-established strawberry bed in good order, along with a few carrots that were too small to bother with last autumn. I'll let them run to seed, and then save the seed. The curly kale is still doing fine under its cover, but the lacinato kale, after over-wintering successfully, has been eaten to the stumps by some pest or other (grrr). It's too early for insect pests, I think, even at the larval stage, so I suspect rodents. On a happier note, I was surprised and pleased to see that last year's late-season planting of spinach is bouncing back quite happily.

 

 

 

In my area we don't traditionally put out transplants or direct-seed most vegetables until mid-May or thereabouts, but I'm encouraged to see all of these things popping back up so readily.

[chromedome]

It's almost that time of year again...

[TicTac]

Seeds have sprouted and are under the big 300W LED in the tent (turned down to 150).

 

Mostly Tomatoes, some hot peppers and ground cherries.

 

Everything else will be direct sow.