The Gardening Splinter Thread

[Torco]

it sometimes is, when I leave the hose on

[Izambri]

I plant mint and tomatoes, and I had a plum tree, but it was removed. Besides, near my house there's an orchard where a few neighbors plant vegetables, so it means free and natural peppers, chards, zucchinis or lettuces in my home.

[ol bofosh]

considering planting some motherfucking BEANS

also, here's pics of my housefarm [cause garden sounds like stuff old ladies grow]

Veg patch? I always say veg patch.

Nice veg patch you have there.

Our tomatoes are coming to their end now, so we'll have to get rid of those soon. Got a shitload of... well... shit from the chicken coop. And been planting up some beds. Got spinach growing. Is good.

[Torco]

a spinach spontaneously started growing in my patch the other day... I don't really like spinach, but it might be good for like soup or stuff?
also, oregano... I have a plant of oregano growing... fresh oregano is kewl

celery is kind of slow to grow, innit?

[Thry]

celery is kind of slow to grow, innit?

Quite ironic.

[linguoboy]

Fucking mildew, ruining our sage. Must remember to pick the verbena before we get a hard frost.

[Torco]

celery is kind of slow to grow, innit?

Quite ironic.

how so ?
*fuck, I literally understood this joke while I was typing "how so"
it was pretty good xD

[Radius Solis]

Man, it's November and I've still got tomatoes gradually ripening out there; tomato plants would normally have dissolved into rotting mush by this time of year, from all the rain we start getting about the beginning of October. Instead, it's in the greenhouse I built last year, and thus stays dry - and since we have not yet had a freeze hard enough to penetrate the greenhouse, it continues to be slowly productive. Although we're forecast to get our first serious freeze by the end of the week.

[Torco]

soo... anyone know how to kill the worms that eat leaves ?

[linguoboy]

Man, it's November and I've still got tomatoes gradually ripening out there; tomato plants would normally have dissolved into rotting mush by this time of year, from all the rain we start getting about the beginning of October. Instead, it's in the greenhouse I built last year, and thus stays dry - and since we have not yet had a freeze hard enough to penetrate the greenhouse, it continues to be slowly productive. Although we're forecast to get our first serious freeze by the end of the week.

Climate change has been pretty much a win for us so far, too. Thought I have my doubts the mesclun will keep producing up through December like last year.

[Gulliver]

Well, the tarp has gone down to kill off a patch of rocket and weeds ready for next spring. The mulchy patch has hardly any weeds! Definitely going to get mah mulch on again next year.

[Gulliver]

And it begins again!

I've got chilli pepper seedlings going, and over the last two days my boyfriend and I ploughed about half a cubic metre of compost in that we made ourselves in our compost dalek. It was oddly satisfying using compost that we made out of kitchen scraps... it felt all proper. I'm going to save my tomatoes, courgettes and artichokes until the Easter break, and we might try a couple of bean varieties.

What are your garden plans for this year, fellow Northern-hemispherians? Or Southern-hemispherians who live far enough south for everything to not just die over the next few months.

[Torco]

Mediterranean climate plus gardenhose means winter doesn't really kill all the plants here in Santiago... I'm growing leeks and ciboulette [though i made the great decision of planting them mixed, so i can't tell which sproutlings are which], as well as corn and taters, I'm planting the taters next month.

As for harvest, I have chili peppers, peppers, tomatoes, and I just harvested a LOT of sunflower seed... what do you do with sunflower seeds, btw??

Celery, a slow crop if I've seen any, continues to grow. some branches are becoming white.

[Radius Solis]

And it begins again!

And so it does!

As I'll be having more surgery Monday, I will have to go for a whole month without bending over, lifting anything much, or any heavy exertion. Until mid-April, say. But that's rather late to be starting on soil preparation, and that is the heaviest and lift-iest set of gardening jobs there are, so I've been trying to do as much of that as I can in advance. (But it's better than last year, when I had to spend all of April and all of May without doing any significant physical work! Ugh.)

So: I got planter 1 weeded out; the soil quality looks good, so I will only apply some commercial compost (I don't do my own) and call it good. Planter 2, which is my greenhouse, has heavily degraded soil because the roof isn't removable so it gets no rain, plus I always plant it full of heavy feeders. So it is all dry, sterile, powdery grit. So far I've worked in an entire cubic foot of peat moss, a little dolomite lime to cancel the peat's acidity, a very little high-nitrogen fertilizer because plant-matter decomposition removes nitrogen from the soil rather than adding it, and.... sodium bentonite. Sodium bentonite is sometimes used commercially to improve highly degraded soils; I haven't tried it before, but we'll see how it goes. The granules of clay are supposed to hold moisture to keep the soil more evenly moist, but also become reservoirs for nutrients, preventing them from leaching out when the soil is repeatedly watered. The stuff is widely available under a different name: "cat litter", the clumping kind. You're supposed to find non-scented cat litter if you do it, though. I looked around but could not find any such, so I just used some of ours, and now I'm afraid there's a strong aroma of cat-litter-scent coming from the planter box. Even though I didn't use very much. We will see how this goes - hopefully it will dissipate and not turn out to be an issue. Still to do in that planter: work in a bunch of compost, and a good bucketful of earth from somewhere else in the yard that's got healthy soil - so that planter can have appropriate soil microfauna again, as these have presumably all died.


My intended lineup this year is rather more ambitious than last year's. If I get everything done that I want to, I will be growing:
- tomatoes
- anaheim peppers
- jalapenos
- bell peppers
- black turtle beans
- corn
- garlic (already up and growing)
- potatoes
- carrots
- leeks
- lettuce
- arugula
- snow peas

But I need more garden space to do it all. I'm not sure yet what I'm going to do about that. Dig up more of the front yard, maybe.

[Radius Solis]

So I made a little line-drawing schematic to show you my garden. Mostly this is how it stands; the herb pots are elsewhere but will be moved where shown, and some parts of the main pathway aren't laid in yet - I'll have to finish that this summer.

rad_garden1.gif (7.91 KiB) Viewed 5452 times

Now, I have no good photographs showing the whole thing, or even most of it, even though the main part is only a 20x20 foot square. But, Google's current imagery on satellite view, from last spring, gives the general idea. The big black area was covered with black plastic. Most of it still is, but when I get around to it I'm going to replace that with weed-barrier and bury it in bark.

rad_garden2.jpg (135 KiB) Viewed 5452 times

You can see that the whole land area is sloped downward to the right. The exception is the area between the two banks I drew in on the line drawing, because sometime around 1988 my parents surveyed and regraded the slope flat, creating the banks. The layout of the garden has evolved repeatedly since then. Both planters were built by my father, but the greenhouse covering the one on the right was my own work.

[linguoboy]

I'm growing leeks and ciboulette

*scratches head*
*searches Wikipedia*

In my country we call them "chives".

[Torco]

I'm growing leeks and ciboulette

*scratches head*
*searches Wikipedia*

In my country we call them "chives".

xDDDD faux amies for the win. it's funny, but I can talk in english with no problems about philosophy, technology, news, sociology, languages, blablabla... but when one gets into fruits and vegetables, sweet nothings, cuts of meat and the like, it all comes a tumbling down and you're reduced to constructions like "well, you know that thing that's like an onion sproutling but small and softer in flavour, and that... you know, the french call it ciboulette... the castillians cebolleta o cebolla de verdeo" I'd never heard chives as a term xD

[Astraios]

faux amies

Fausses amies, please.

[linguoboy]

xDDDD faux amies for the win. it's funny, but I can talk in english with no problems about philosophy, technology, news, sociology, languages, blablabla... but when one gets into fruits and vegetables, sweet nothings, cuts of meat and the like, it all comes a tumbling down and you're reduced to constructions like "well, you know that thing that's like an onion sproutling but small and softer in flavour, and that... you know, the french call it ciboulette... the castillians cebolleta o cebolla de verdeo" I'd never heard chives as a term xD

I'm kind of foody, so I know a lot of names for vegetables. But try to talk to me about gardening implements and how you use them and watch my speech fall apart.

I had a roommate from South Texas who was like this. He'd done all his gardening in Spanish, so it was one thing he couldn't really discuss in English, despite being unmistakably fluent otherwise.

[Torco]

fausses? merci, man

and I'm sure you know a lot of food names, but surely people call veggies and meat cuts differently along dialectal lines: for example, just across the andes, no piece of the cow is called the same; we call filete what the argentinians call lomo, and our lomo is their whatchamajig, and they have silly names for some cuts like lagarto and tortuguita [lizard and small turtle]

[Astraios]

Nope. It's either faux amis, or fausses amies. Not both! And it's not fausses amies unless you actually mean ladyfriends who are false.

[linguoboy]

and I'm sure you know a lot of food names, but surely people call veggies and meat cuts differently along dialectal lines: for example, just across the andes, no piece of the cow is called the same; we call filete what the argentinians call lomo, and our lomo is their whatchamajig, and they have silly names for some cuts like lagarto and tortuguita [lizard and small turtle]

Not just that--they don't even have the same cuts. In St Louis, the preferred barbecue meat is "pork steaks". Every supermarket sells them. Here in Chicago (300 miles away, but y'all know that's like a day trip to us Americans) they don't even know what those are--a butcher could probably cut them for me if I could only explain what part of the pig they come from, but I haven't the foggiest idea.

Same with plants. Vinca major and vinca minor are extremely common groundcovers in the US. I grew up calling the smaller one (I didn't know about the larger variety) "myrtle", which is properly the name of a Mediterranean shrub which doesn't even grow around here, but I knew that they were also called "periwinkle". My partner, a Californian, calls both species "vinca". (He grew up with the larger one.) "Ivy" meant English ivy (Hedera helix) to me, but I know people who use it for creeper (Parthenocissus sp.) or indiscriminately for any climbing plant. My sister-in-law calls "honeysuckle" what I call "trumpet vine" (Campsis sp.) and "tulip tree" can mean either a tulip poplar (Liriodendron tulipifera) or a deciduous magnolia (subgenus Yulania), depending on whether "magnolia" in your dialect is restricted to evergreen magnolias.

It can all get very confusing.

[Izambri]

Plant names can be a nightmare. In Catalan vinca is the generic name for the genus Vinca, but the most common plant (and name) here is vincapervinca and viola de bruixa (Vinca difformis). Vinca major and Vinca minor also grow here but aren't as common as the first one, and they have various names: Vinca minor is also known as vincapervinca, although vinca petita is another possible name. Vinca maior doesn't follow the 'vinca pattern' and is named herba donzella, but this name can be used for any plant of the Vinca genus.

[Torco]

No wonder biologists had to come up with the binomial system! folklore is all well and good, but still.
I expect as globalization and internet english become more commonplace, we'll have a unified naming system for plants in 400 years or so, even if that system is lolspeak. "i mead best recepi; i tuk teh leekz and fread them, was best sos ev4r"

Nope. It's either faux amis, or fausses amies. Not both! And it's not fausses amies unless you actually mean ladyfriends who are false.

ooo, rite, I thought it was the plural, which struck me as weird because -ux is a plural form, but since french is weird i believed what i thought you said.

[Torco]

Planting lavenders in the one moderately sunny spot in the garden... hope they end up growing