Gardening

I see many guides online which start with a new plant. This is what mine looks like and it's been here for years, so I'm not sure if i can guide it into a tree anymore. If so, i guess now that it started budding would be a good time to trim everything but the leader?

I've had this guy in a pot for years. We're finally getting some fat juicy lemons off of it!

So last year I had tried using row covers to save some of my kale, spinach, broccoli, and cauliflower from bugs. I cut conduit tubing and hammered it securely to the ground and slid pvc over it making hoops. I draped the meeting over and secured it with clips as well as bricks.

Well, the wind just wrecked it all, leading to decimated and futile attempts to secure my row covers.

It seems like bunnies and the bugs leave my tomatoes alone, so this year I'm going to clip garden fencing and cage the kale, spinach, and broccoli to encircle square foot sections and then drape netting over reach individual cage. This way the netting has less free material to be caught by the wind. The only thing I haven't figured out is how to tie the netting to keep it snug around each cage. I could do the mesh drawstring bags as an alternative, but that would cost more than a fool of netting from what I've seen.

When I asked this community two weeks ago if I should prune or pinch my avocado tree, I was expecting maybe one or two of the meristem bits to start growing. Instead I got five.

I have a feeling this plant is going to outgrow the ring light I have above it before the year is over.

It's roughly 6 weeks till the final frost here in 7b.

I have a spot of grass and ivy that I want to turn into an annual veg garden. I'm waiting on soil nutrient results.

My current plan is to silage tarp all the grass and ivy for 3-4 weeks. Then cover with any needed amendments, 2 inches of compost, 4 inches of wood chips, then tarp again for the remaining 2-3 weeks. When the final frost passes, transplant out my annuals.

After the growing season I'll cover crop with peas, clover, vetch, oats. Repeat next year.

Does this make sense? Am I missing anything?

Zone 10B. I forgot the variety of these, either Velvet Queen or just a generic red sunflower variety. The only red sunflower I managed to grow successfully so far compared to the regular kind.

Also learned how to harvest these seeds so I'm looking to keep a sunflower patch growing indefinitely. Just need to squeeze in another spot in the garden 😅

As nicely as this avocado tree is growing, it does need to be prompted to start branching out at some point.
If I prune off those top baby leaves and leave the two nodes intact, will it start branching from both, or only one?

Current height is around 14 inches tall.

I was a participant in the 'other site' when there was an active seed trading sub. Is there a Lemmy equivalent or is that something we could do in this group?

So stoked to see my tomatoes coming through. These are the beefsteak variety as I'm waiting for my Black Krim to sprout. I decides to go hard on producing more veggies and fruits since I been lollygagging on getting around to starting up my raised beds. Got a no til plot that should be ready to plant in, just undecided if I should give that plot to my tomatoes or to corn? What would y'all do? Growing anything juicy this season?

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/24076439

This is the entrance to the "wild" part of our garden. I'm lucky to have access to woodland close by that the council haven't maintained, so there were lots of branches from past storms this winter. The plan is to grow honeysuckle either side and hope it covers most of it, providing food and shelter along with the hedgerow I've planted on the left behind the ladder. The pond I posted earlier last year is made out of an old water tank someone was throwing out.

For my fellow US Mid-Atlantic gardeners, what and when do you start prepping for the growing season?

For annuals I'm curious what you feel is worth growing from seed and when do you start it?

For perennials I'd like to know what if anything you do mid to late winter.

As for myself I plan to take some cuttings of elderberry and root them indoors. Hoping I can plant them by spring. In later February I plan to prune a peach tree and then attempt my first ever graft using the pruning.

Just got and planted my Christmas gift from work yesterday. A dwarf pear tree, can't wait for spring to plant lavender, rosemary, strawberry and other flowers around it. But the rest of the garden is still a bit messy

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/17801651

Hey all,

I've been using my fertilizer now for a year, and it's the only one I've used up until now, because I alway was satisfied with it, because it's both very inexpensive and well formulated imo.

I'm using the Masterblend set, with the solutions pre-mixed for short term use.

I have mixed two "stock solution" bottles, which last me a few months in winter (only for houseplants and my small indoor grow tent) and a few weeks in summer (balcony gardening + house plants).

You can see the ingredients on the bottles on the picture:

They are always stored in complete darkness.

And then I have a diluted solution, with an EC of about 3-4 mS and a low pH, which I adapted to exactly match my tap water and houseplants when diluted to ~1/3. This pre-mix lasts me a few days maximum.

I've already noticed a few floaters in summer here and there, but didn't mind them too much. They looked like small jellyfish or something floating around, but I thought that they might be some precipitation from minerals or whatever.

They got a bit more after some time, and a few weeks ago, I soaked everything in hot bleach water and mixed everything from scratch, because I already had the feeling that those might be amoebae or other microorganisms.

But now, everything is way worse. Just take a look:

Those specs are even in the normal nutrient solution!

A few of my plants have a reoccurring spring tail "infestation". More like constant house mates.

I even got the chance to take a picture of them fucking. I feel like a pervert now...

No wonder they have such a good time. They're probably feasting on those mold specs. They're pretty much harmless and easy to manage, so I just don't care as much.

Anyway... What I wanted to ask you: What shall I do? Desinfecting clearly doesn't work.

The root cause seems to be the water. If I wouldn't pre-dissolve everything, nothing would get moldy.

But of course, I need it to be in a liquid form for proper handling. Other fertilizer manufacturers are able to manage this too, so why can't I?

Shall I add preservatives to the concentrate, like Isothiazolinones?

Or should I just switch to another fertilizer? If so, which one would you recommend, that is also cheap?

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/23339189

We moved into this house about a year ago. I've been making an effort to have a mix of wild and cottage vibes for the garden, as this was our first winter I've been able to get some decent designing down. Last year was a bit of a panic as we didn't know how the sun would lay and with moving in, our planting was done really late. But this year is the year I establish hedges as even though we're in a wood no one has anything in their front gardens and not much in the rear including mine.

I put a pond in last summer after liberating a water tank out of a skip which lives in the wild part of the garden. So the plan is for the native hedging to run the length of the garden, with intermittent decorative ones like the sweet briar for the parts closer to the house.

The front of the garden is going to be the nepeta as it'll be easy to control it from spilling onto the path. It also allows people to see the front garden while giving us a bit more of an established boundary that grass alone doesn't really do.

Are there any tips or suggestions for anything I might be missing?

I have the chance to acquire some green coffea arabica beans and I am looking for suggestions and pointers for a low-effort (but successful!) guide to germinating them.

cross-posted from: https://aussie.zone/post/16582015

It says ‘January’ but I have no idea if it’s a link that updates to the current month when clicked. Oh well.

Popping it here anyway

Activity seems low as winter has started in the Northern hemisphere. Are there people here living on the other side?

pic 2:

This is actually "Pimentão Cascadura"; it's an "improved" green bell pepper variety here in Brazil, i think it's more resistant to plagues, sickness and all that

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/23224596

More pix first. Then explanation.

So this is going on the fifth year I'll be farming Vanilla. My operation is microscopic but it's a work in progress. I've got maybe 300 vines all in. I got some Vanilla off this planting 2 years ago, and this was the first vines I planted. Which is some what typical for Vanilla. Usually 3-5 years before they really become productive.

I fertilized these back in May/ April. It's a tiny yield but next year I expect to have maybe 5-20x this amount, which means if I can sell some of it, I'll finally be able to cover some of my costs.

Right now I have about five varieties. All from either trade or from hiking to old plantations and looking for feral populations. This one is a variety of Tahitiensis and I made a vanilla bean whip cream a few months ago with it. It's a very distinctly 'bourbon' flavor. Like i ground it up in a mortar and pessle and it straight up smelled like whiskey.

So not close to enough to sell (again) this year. But next year and the following years, maybe this hobby will finally start paying itself off.

Outside garden is asleep til spring, but I still grow a few herbs and lettuce for our pet rabbit

It's tiny but it smells amazing. Can't wait to try it.

I decided to plant some old potatoes and an onion to see if they would grow in the late autumn and early winter. We also take a look at some Christmas cacti, a giant Christmas tree, make some hot sauce, and play with Cam!