The Gardening Splinter Thread

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chris_notts
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Re: The Gardening Splinter Thread

Post by chris_notts »

ol bofosh wrote: Anyway, here's a link with info that inspired my experiment: http://libarynth.net/masanobu_fukuoka
It comes from Fukuoka's book "The One-Staw Revolution".
I've become quite enthusiastic about planting perennial food plants and more or less letting them get on with it as much as possible. We've just moved, and I've been busy planting fruit trees and bushes... so far I have apples, pears, plums, cherries, medlars, blackcurrants, redcurrants, gooseberries, raspberries, blackberries and goumi in the ground. I just need to wait til spring to see if they've all survived transplantation or not...

Perennial veg that likes the UK is a bit harder. I have this book which I'm going to try some things from:

http://www.greenbooks.co.uk/how-to-grow ... vegetables

I do have some Udo and Caucasian Spinach ready to go in, plus seeds for various things like Good King Henry which I've grown in previous years but somehow never seems to get planted in a permanent spot in the garden.
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Re: The Gardening Splinter Thread

Post by Radius Solis »

It being the dead of winter here, I have little to say about gardening, other than that I'm looking forward to the beginnings of spring. But what you're doing is pretty cool. We have raspberries... and blackberries, but oh god I would not plant those. No, I spend dozens to hundreds of hours per year on trying to destroy them. They are pest plants, here, like nothing else. One seedling sprouts from bird plop and a decade later you've lost four acres of land to it. I've seen from the road multiple-square-mile stretches of nothing but blackberries, in many places in this state, and it is actually now not only illegal to deliberately cultivate them, but you can be fined for failing to eradicate them from your property - which reduces the problem to a matter of law enforcement. Yet still the fucker spreads.

Mint, I don't know, I've heard horror stories, and so I would never let it out of its pot. It certainly appears to be quite aggressive - every year I have to cut off three-foot arching stolons that attempt to take root outside the pot.

We also have apples, but sadly they are inedible, as our area is infested by apple maggot. You cut one open and you see little brown flecks and channels throughout the flesh of the fruit, and occasionally the squirming little larvae that made them. I wish we could just cut down the damned tree.

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Re: The Gardening Splinter Thread

Post by ol bofosh »

Here's a picture of my veg patch. On the left there's some straw, which covers radish, rocket and spinach. On the right (no straw) there is garlic, lettuce and more radish, hidden by the grass that's already there. It'll be interesting to see how the two lots of radish compare.
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Re: The Gardening Splinter Thread

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Radius Solis wrote:It being the dead of winter here, I have little to say about gardening, other than that I'm looking forward to the beginnings of spring. But what you're doing is pretty cool. We have raspberries... and blackberries, but oh god I would not plant those. No, I spend dozens to hundreds of hours per year on trying to destroy them. They are pest plants, here, like nothing else. One seedling sprouts from bird plop and a decade later you've lost four acres of land to it. I've seen from the road multiple-square-mile stretches of nothing but blackberries, in many places in this state, and it is actually now not only illegal to deliberately cultivate them, but you can be fined for failing to eradicate them from your property - which reduces the problem to a matter of law enforcement. Yet still the fucker spreads.
I have brambles/wild blackberries in the hedges, but they're not that bad as long as I cut them regularly. To get an impenetrable thicket I think I'd have to leave them alone for a year or two at least. And the ones I've planted for berry production are cultivated thornless varieties which are supposed to be a bit less vigorous than the original wild plant.

Other invasive weeds that I have in the new garden, or at least the ones I know about: bindweed, ground elder, ground ivy... but the worst, by far, has to be the neighbour's sumacs. The bloody things spread like crazy via the roots, and when we first moved in I had to spend several days removing a thicket that had sprung up in the course of less than a year while the property was on the market. By the time I was done, the closest tree on the neighbour's side of the fence was looking a bit sickly, which was probably because I'd chopped up half its root system in the process. I'm expecting to have to constantly dig up its attempts to re-establish itself on my side.

Are brambles native to your part of the USA? It often seems to be the foreign species which are the most annoying.
Mint, I don't know, I've heard horror stories, and so I would never let it out of its pot. It certainly appears to be quite aggressive - every year I have to cut off three-foot arching stolons that attempt to take root outside the pot.
I do like growing lemon balm, which is a clumping plant in the same family. It does seed very freely, but I don't mind self-seeders because mostly if you catch them young there's no problem. It's plants that spread aggressively via roots that are the most frustrating weeds to deal with.
We also have apples, but sadly they are inedible, as our area is infested by apple maggot. You cut one open and you see little brown flecks and channels throughout the flesh of the fruit, and occasionally the squirming little larvae that made them. I wish we could just cut down the damned tree.
Aren't there any pheromone traps or similar that you can use? There were some larvae in the fruit of an dwarf early-fruiting apple I have in a pot this year, but it wasn't too bad because I spotted them early. I just picked the apples a few weeks early, cut out the holey bits and ate the rest... they were a bit sharper than if I'd left them to mature, but perfectly palatable.

EDIT: so basically, the sumacs out-competed the brambles in thicket-forming.
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Re: The Gardening Splinter Thread

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ol bofosh wrote:Here's a picture of my veg patch. On the left there's some straw, which covers radish, rocket and spinach. On the right (no straw) there is garlic, lettuce and more radish, hidden by the grass that's already there. It'll be interesting to see how the two lots of radish compare.
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And even if you get less, if you also put in much less effort you might still consider it a win. If your girlfriend has a bad back from constant weeding, while you've been putting your feet up all summer, maybe it's worth it if you only get 70% of her yield. Since presumably you have other sources of food, you don't have to maximise production if you don't want to.
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Re: The Gardening Splinter Thread

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The corner where the ground elder is growing is quite shady and not ideal for growing most things. I have been vaguely tempted to just plant all the aggressive but useful plants and supposedly shade-tolerant plants I can think of in that corner (e.g. ramsons, members of the mint family, jerusalem artichokes, bamboos, ...) and see what wins in the end.
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Re: The Gardening Splinter Thread

Post by ol bofosh »

chris_notts wrote:And even if you get less, if you also put in much less effort you might still consider it a win. If your girlfriend has a bad back from constant weeding, while you've been putting your feet up all summer, maybe it's worth it if you only get 70% of her yield. Since presumably you have other sources of food, you don't have to maximise production if you don't want to.
That's the good thing, we're just doing it for personal consumption, so we don't need to think of high yields, but we've got enough land to gives ourselves a lot of food during the year (if we plan it well).

My girlfriend, though she digs, she doesn't weed so much, just puts mulch down. We've had strawberries that have been in the same place for two years, and we've only be covering it with mulch.

Basically, I'm going to experiment, and if it goes well for me, she'll do the same.
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Re: The Gardening Splinter Thread

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chris_notts wrote:
Izambri wrote:
Torco wrote:I understand your pain... lettuce is incredibly vulnerable to being eaten by bugs...
Mint too... T_____T
Mint?? Mint is practically indestructible... at least in the UK. People carefully keep it in pots because if it escapes it will spread by root and take over large areas without constant cutting back. I think it does like a wet soil though, so maybe in dry areas it's less of a weed?
I don't plant my mint in a garden but in a flower bed, so it has little chances to escape and spread. If a bug finds the plant and I don't stop that lil' bitch the mint will have all its leaves holed in a few days.

Here, mint that grows in the nature also does it aggressively and, if attacked by bugs, doesn't suffer too much.
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Re: The Gardening Splinter Thread

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chris_notts wrote: Are brambles native to your part of the USA? It often seems to be the foreign species which are the most annoying.
We have native brambles as well, but indeed, they aren't invasive. It's the Himalaya-type blackberries that invade and destroy everything if allowed; left to themselves, they will win out over absolutely everything that isn't a full-grown tree. And ours aren't very amenable to just being cut - it only encourages them - so it's really a choice between digging out the root crowns and letting them go.
I do like growing lemon balm, which is a clumping plant in the same family. It does seed very freely, but I don't mind self-seeders because mostly if you catch them young there's no problem. It's plants that spread aggressively via roots that are the most frustrating weeds to deal with.
Definitely. Buttercups are a pretty aggressive weed here, by that same mechanism; half our "lawn" is buttercups, not grass (and half the rest is moss), and there's jack we can do about it - but at least it's mowable. Lemon balm we do have, though, down in the back area next to the woods that we don't maintain other than to periodically rip out brambles. For a couple decades it has kept a roughly stable population that needs neither maintenance nor control measures, while being a delicious addition to dinner. The perfect plant!

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Re: The Gardening Splinter Thread

Post by ol bofosh »

Pictures of radish, spinach and rocket starting to show...
Radish

Rocket and some spinach (if you look well)
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Re: The Gardening Splinter Thread

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Treegod's garden in a few weeks:
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Re: The Gardening Splinter Thread

Post by ol bofosh »

After just a couple of days the rocket is noticeably bigger.

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Re: The Gardening Splinter Thread

Post by ol bofosh »

Today I sowed seeds of leak and some sort of Japanese mustard spinach (don't remember the name). I'm getting obsessed with seeds, I keep asking my girlfriend things like "We can plant peas now, do we have any to plant?" or "Hey, that seed packet looks cool, can we plant it now? Oh, wait, March. Okay, I'll wait."
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Re: The Gardening Splinter Thread

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ol bofosh wrote:Today I sowed seeds of leak and some sort of Japanese mustard spinach (don't remember the name). I'm getting obsessed with seeds, I keep asking my girlfriend things like "We can plant peas now, do we have any to plant?" or "Hey, that seed packet looks cool, can we plant it now? Oh, wait, March. Okay, I'll wait."
If you want to sow lots of things now, you should buy some seeds that need to be stratified. I've got the following in pots right now enjoying a bit of cold:

Smilacina racemosa - False spikenard
Zanthoxylum schinifolium - Szechuan pepper
Filipendula ulmaria - Meadowsweet
Myrrhis Odorata - Sweet cicely

Sweet cicely, by the way, is my favourite herb. I love that anise taste, and the stems and seeds are so sweet as well. The seeds taste like especially crunchy black jacks.... I have some in pots to plant out but I want more to scatter around the garden.

In a few weeks I'll plant the following, which also potentially need some cold for good germination (I'm less sure about the strawberries, although some sources say cold helps):

Alnus viridis - green alder
Fragaria moschata - musk strawberry
Fragaria vesca - alpine strawberry

Most other seeds I'm planting this year don't need any stratification really.
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Re: The Gardening Splinter Thread

Post by Gulliver »

I've got alpine strawberries right in the middle of my vegetable patch - they're pretty hardy and pretty tasty.

I just bought a load of seeds actually. Mostly boring everyday things like leeks and beans and the like. After last summer's crappiness, I think I should stick to boring northern European things that can survive the weather being crap all the time.

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Re: The Gardening Splinter Thread

Post by ol bofosh »

All the seeds planted the "wild way" so far...

December
10 - rocket, spinach, radish
20 - garlic, radish, lettuce
28 - wheat (as a bit of a shield against the summer sun)
29 - lettuce, brussel sprouts
30 komatsuna (mustard spinach), leaks

January
2 - onions, beetroot
5 - minowase (japanese radish), french climbing beans, rocket

The rocket, spinach and radish from the first day are doing very well. The climbing beans I planted today won't be climbing, I'll just let them grow over and up themselves. Perhaps in the future I'll use corn to support their growth.

I'm planting on an area where we'd dumped a huge amount of compost. I remove a bit of compost where I want to plant, spread the seeds, then sprinkle some compost over them, enough to hide them from the birds.

And I'm getting impatient.for what it'll look like in the spring.
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Re: The Gardening Splinter Thread

Post by ol bofosh »

Found some out-of-date seeds today, mixed them together and threw them all on the veg patch to see what would happen. Now I have more lettuce, endive, radish, cauliflower, onion and exactly 2 beans.
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Re: The Gardening Splinter Thread

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I spent the day digging in more of the plants which I brought with me from the old house (mainly ribes, e.g. currants and gooseberries). I was going to wait until early Spring, but winter so far has been relatively mild here and a number of the shrubs I have in pots look like they're about to start leafing out a couple of months early. They're in for a shock if the temperatures plummet...

Also, since I spent the day digging, I was wondering: what type of soil do people have? My new garden is a bit different to previous gardens I've had, because while the topsoil is a clayey loam (or maybe a loamy clay???), the subsoil below about 30 - 40cm is reddish and very sandy. In other gardens with heavy topsoil that I've worked in, normally the subsoil is a pain to dig as well. I've been wondering if the reason is related to the fact that a small river runs just to the east of the town I live in. Perhaps a long time ago, the river ran through where the town is now, and that explains the sandy subsoil? In any case, I'm hoping that the clayey loam + sand combination will work out, because the topsoil will retain moisture and nutrients but the subsoil should drain freely. So far that seems to be true, since I've left deep holes for weeks and despite heavy rain there's never been any standing water in the bottom of them.
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Re: The Gardening Splinter Thread

Post by chris_notts »

Gulliver wrote:I've got alpine strawberries right in the middle of my vegetable patch - they're pretty hardy and pretty tasty.
I always think that alpine strawberries have the same amount of flavour as "normal" strawberries, but packed into a much smaller fruit. That makes the flavour per gram much more intense - regular strawberries are the same thing diluted with a lot of extra water.
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Re: The Gardening Splinter Thread

Post by ol bofosh »

Planted fava beans and tomato seeds today. Same method. The radish, rocket and spinach from the first time are doing very well. Everything else seems to be waiting for the spring to start.

We took straw from the goat house and spread around the strawberries.

And my girlfriend did a small green house (small wooden structure covered with plastic shower curtains).

Soil quality - sandy clay loam or clay loam, I think. Drainage and water retention I'd say fairly balanced.
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Re: The Gardening Splinter Thread

Post by chris_notts »

Things showing signs of leafing out right now (in January!!!):

- Some raspberry canes (1 month early - usually Feb in my experience)
- Japanese quinces (could be normal, they were very early last year as well)
- Goumi (I've never grown this before, so I don't know)
- Hawthorn hedge, or at least one or two of the individual plants in the middle (almost certainly very early)
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Re: The Gardening Splinter Thread

Post by chris_notts »

We took straw from the goat house and spread around the strawberries.
One of my neighbours owns a horse. When I buy manure in bagged form it usually says "well rotted". I've been wondering - does this mean that if I get free manure from my neighbour I need to leave it to rot for a while before digging it in? Do you do that with your goats? I would naively expect that fresh manure would be just as useful to plants as old manure, but I've never had access to a source of the fresh stuff before in bulk quantities.
And my girlfriend did a small green house (small wooden structure covered with plastic shower curtains).
Can we have a pic of the DIY greenhouse?
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Re: The Gardening Splinter Thread

Post by ol bofosh »

chris_notts wrote:
We took straw from the goat house and spread around the strawberries.
One of my neighbours owns a horse. When I buy manure in bagged form it usually says "well rotted". I've been wondering - does this mean that if I get free manure from my neighbour I need to leave it to rot for a while before digging it in? Do you do that with your goats? I would naively expect that fresh manure would be just as useful to plants as old manure, but I've never had access to a source of the fresh stuff before in bulk quantities.
I think the "well rotted" stuff is good for a bit of instant fertiliser, and works a bit better for dug gardens. Fresh stuff is good for permaculture gardens, as they suppress weeds, but eventually break down and become soil, but it's a process and not for "instant results". Also it attract worms and other decomposers, which is good for the soil. If manure is pre-decomposed, then worms won't be so attracted to it.

For the strawberries it doesn't much matter. We've just put grass cuttings and straw from the goats and chicken straight on. We don't have to do any weeding, just a pile of mulch on top (leaving the strawberry plants exposed). It'll break down eventually and fertilise the soil. They've been there several years now.

Hay and grass cuttings may need to be left longer to rot if you want to make sure they don't contain weed seeds. With straw you don't get that.
Can we have a pic of the DIY greenhouse?
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Re: The Gardening Splinter Thread

Post by chris_notts »

ol bofosh wrote: I think the "well rotted" stuff is good for a bit of instant fertiliser, and works a bit better for dug gardens. Fresh stuff is good for permaculture gardens, as they suppress weeds, but eventually break down and become soil, but it's a process and not for "instant results". Also it attract worms and other decomposers, which is good for the soil. If manure is pre-decomposed, then worms won't be so attracted to it.
I looked it up, and too much fresh manure dug in can "burn" plant roots. I guess it's not actual burning, but it can harm them somehow.

Your DIY greenhouse looks good. I would call it a cold frame though - not sure if that's general English now or just me. Traditionally, the difference was that green houses were heated (and mostly owned by rich people) whereas cold frames were the same thing without the heating. Since green houses were mostly a rich person thing, they tended to be big, which probably explains the semantic drift to my usage of the terms. For me, a green house is bigger, typically high enough to walk inside, and a cold frame is something small, usually with a top that opens.
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Re: The Gardening Splinter Thread

Post by Melend »

Soon it'll be time to plant indoors the seeds that benefit from an early start.

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