The Gardening Splinter Thread

[Radius Solis]

So today, I harvested my garlic. It was Time. And guess what? I was right: having planted them in the proper season this time, I got a fantastic harvest. About 20 bulbs that reached full proper grocery-store size, some of them having some very fat cloves. I could not be happier with it!

...oh god, we're going to be eating so much garlic over the next few months.

[Gulliver]

...oh god, we're going to be eating so much garlic over the next few months.

That sounds like last year's chard and courgette explosion. Apparently, one courgette plant yields enough to feed a thousand mouths for a thousand days.

At least garlic keeps... and you can give it to people?

[Torco]

Happy birthday Timmy! from uncle Tom, a toy train. from aunt Sarah, a book about dinosaurs... and from uncle Bob, some... garlic.


kidding, garlic's a great gift.

[vampireshark]

So today, I harvested my garlic. It was Time. And guess what? I was right: having planted them in the proper season this time, I got a fantastic harvest. About 20 bulbs that reached full proper grocery-store size, some of them having some very fat cloves. I could not be happier with it!

...oh god, we're going to be eating so much garlic over the next few months.

Awesome! From experience, garlic does keep rather well, not to mention there are so many dishes that garlic can be employed in.

How fare your tomatoes, if you don't mind me asking?

[Gulliver]

My tomatoes are turning red, and, more amazingly, I have a confirmed artichoke sighting.

The physallis (cape gooseberry?) plants we have produce fruit that unfortunately tastes like hawai'ian pizza. Pleasant enough, but not what I was aiming for.

[ol bofosh]

I'm getting my tomatoes now, and very nice they are too!

Had some sweetcorn, but they didn't turn out so good.Some plants were good, and most weren't.

We're cultivating on land that hasn't been used in more than ten years, so we're experimenting with it a lot.

Courgettes were planted in a "proper" place, but there they aren't doing so well. In the place where we cleared a huge pile of mulch and planted some just to see "what would happen" are coming out monsters. Sometimes the unplanned stuff works better, lol.

[linguoboy]

Oh, well, so much for our experiment with growing our own fennel. It was taking over, hogging light from the other herbs (especially the verbena), flopping over, and generally being a nuisance. So I dug it up, visions of tasty broiled fennel dancing in my head. But there was no bulb, just a fibrous root mass that was impossible to clean. I thought maybe we could at least grate a bit of it off, but the smell was more like celeriac than anise.

Now the question is what to put in the hole. We still have parsley seed I never sowed, but maybe that's not the best place for it.

[Radius Solis]

Awesome! From experience, garlic does keep rather well, not to mention there are so many dishes that garlic can be employed in.

How fare your tomatoes, if you don't mind me asking?

My tomato plant has grown enormous. Is that normal for Roma? Or did I just use too much chicken manure? As far as fruit goes, however, I have not yet spotted any. Lots of flowers, but they just don't seem to be setting fruit. I've never tried Roma before so I don't know what to expect, but it's almost August and there's still no fruit so I'm starting to become concerned.

Bell peppers: plants healthy and blooming but no peppers forming. Damn it. Anaheims: only just now recovering from near total destruction by slugs; I'll be surprised if I get many. Jalapeños: healthy and producing peppers, some are already useable. Peperoncini: healthy, blooming, no peppers yet.

Cucumbers, after three months of slow and sickly-looking growth, have abruptly switched into overdrive and grown into long vines with huge leaves and more importantly, already half a dozen cucumbers in various stages of maturity with clearly a lot more to come. I had been thinking "maybe I'll get a tzatziki or two out of this" and now I'm considering pickling to handle the excess. Go figure.

Another happy development: my corn might produce a crop after all! I now think that the starts I bought were mislabeled and of a variety I'm not familiar with; they had appeared to be developmentally disabled, due to extremely early tassel appearance, but emergence of silk has magically shown up just in time for the actual pollen release.

[ol bofosh]

Getting some very good crops: chard, bell pepper, courgette, tomato. We're getting whole meals! Yum...

[Torco]

my garlic is growing! it was a bit of garlic, and now some are.. like... plants! with leaves and roots and crap. isn't that awesome?
yes it is awesome! never mind that its a process which has obviously happened boatloads of times, but there's something pretty nice about it.

So I decided to plant some other stuff, like motherfucking lettuce and motherfucking rabanitos... how do you call rabanitos? turnips, that's it!

also, winter is a good time to plant celery.

[ol bofosh]

So I decided to plant some other stuff, like motherfucking lettuce and motherfucking rabanitos... how do you call rabanitos? turnips, that's it!

We grew rabanitos, but they're radishes, not turnips. We grew a Japanese radish this year, but they grew really big, so we decided to call them rabanazos, lol.

[Torco]

radishes? they're this pink, tear-shaped thingamajig. anyhow, they shall grow as well... mehopes.

[ol bofosh]

That sounds like radishes to me. Small? Fit nicely into salads? Slightly spicy?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turnip
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radish

[Torco]

the hell should I know, they look like little seeds, cause they are little seeds.

but the photo on the envelope looks more like a turnip

[zompist]

My tomato plant has grown enormous. Is that normal for Roma?

Quantify enormous? My dad's tomato plants (I don't recall the variety) would grow to six feet tall. (They'd also be full of tomatoes by mid-August, but that's Illinois and back when summers were cooler.)

[Radius Solis]

My tomato plant has grown enormous. Is that normal for Roma?

Quantify enormous? My dad's tomato plants (I don't recall the variety) would grow to six feet tall. (They'd also be full of tomatoes by mid-August, but that's Illinois and back when summers were cooler.)

It's approaching 5 feet tall, but just as notable is the great number of vines (30-40) that densely pack the tomato gate and sprawl out of it like suburbs of LA, spanning a good five feet. The interior is impossible to see into.

Some googling does suggest that this is larger than expected and that overfeeding can cause excess foliage at the expense of fruit; that appears to have happened, although I have not actually fertilized it since planting.

[Gulliver]

Prune the top foot off each one and add some tomato feed when you water them.

[Radius Solis]

We have cucumbers, jalapeños, and corn coming out the wazoo. I've caved in and made pickles; we've had corn on the cob for three nights and we will again tomorrow; and I don't know what's going to happen to all those jalapeños, they're on the strongish side so they're hard to use large numbers of.

But that problem may be solved when the tomatoes get ripe: salsa!

[Gulliver]

I don't know what's going to happen to all those jalapeños, they're on the strongish side so they're hard to use large numbers of.

But that problem may be solved when the tomatoes get ripe: salsa!

Make chilli sauce! Boil up a load of chillis in water and vinegar and some golden syrup and a bit of salt hey presto - liquid awesome.

[ol bofosh]

We've been getting lots of tomatoes. I used to not like gazpacho soup, now I'm very accustomed to it... yum!

[chris_notts]

Tomatoes did really badly here this year (Nottingham, UK), or at least the ones of people I know did. We had such a cloudy wet summer, even by British standards, that the only thing that really prospered was the damn slugs. When you live somewhere that has sufficient water anyway, you don't get much benefit from more rain but you do lose out from less sunlight and lower temperatures. Luckily the weather improved a bit later on when the jet stream shifted North again, but it was too late for a lot of things to catch up.

In terms of things that went well... I got an average yield from my raspberries, which are well established and mostly trouble free. I grew the following from seed successfully:

- Good king henry
- Red veined sorrel
- Lemon balm
- Comfrey
- Bird's foot trefoil

In the case of the sorrel, I was a bit too successful and ended up with vastly more than I actually wanted. I also bought some plants from various garden centres to put in to my small front garden, mostly small to middling sized shrubs and ground cover plants:

- Blackcurrant
- Redcurrant
- Gooseberry
- Wild strawberries
- Periwinkles
- Wild Marjoram
- Elaeagnus × ebbingei
- Japanese (Flowering) Quince
- St John's Wort
- Bay Tree
- Salad Burnet
- Chicory
- Blueberry honeysuckle
- Hostas
- Chokeberries (Aronia)
- Thyme
- Grapes (grown up pillars holding up the roof over the window)
- Oregon grapes
- Thyme
- Lavender
- Curry plant

I may have gone a bit over the top, and space might become a problem at some point without taking something out. My goal was to plant things that are useful in some way and more interesting than the small stretch of weedy grass that was there before.

[Torco]

considering planting some motherfucking BEANS

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


mint and ciboulette


lettuce, happily growing


motherfucking TURNIP [or radish, I guess]

I also have some celery and some unsprouted peppers... the bag said yolo wonder.

I wants to eat this vegetables

[Radius Solis]

Congrats Torco! You sound well on your way to being hardcore enough to do old-lady stuff without insecurity! (Of course real men can grow color-coordinated flower gardens and sit in them doing needlepoint work and making babytalk to their cats without masculinizing any of it, because they have the cojones to do whatever they damned well want to.)

Also, looks like you've got some homegrown food coming, so congratulations for that too.

Jalapeño count today: 68 still out on the plants. This is after three weeks of heavy use. Some of them are starting to turn color! Now all I need is a smokehouse and I'll have me some chipotles. Got tomatoes starting to turn color too. Finally!

[Torco]

Congrats Torco! You sound well on your way to being hardcore enough to do old-lady stuff without insecurity! (Of course real men can grow color-coordinated flower gardens and sit in them doing needlepoint work and making babytalk to their cats without masculinizing any of it, because they have the cojones to do whatever they damned well want to.)

masculinity doesn't work like that... having perfect self-confidence is kind of the opposite of being manly... Siddhartha had perfect self-confidence, and so did Jesus, and neither is especially masculine.

Also, looks like you've got some homegrown food coming, so congratulations for that too.

homegrown food is awesome! I'm routinely using garlic and ciboulette leaves for cooking, and its really really cool.

And those lettuces, I just took a leaf from one [baby lettuce eating for the win] and its da best lettuce ever, seriously.. pesticides suck, apparently.
Also, my mum's giving me a lot of baby plants she bought somewhere, so that's nice.

[din]

Is your garden underwater ?