Do you garden?

[skip]

I had one when I was a kid. I successfully grew white corn, tomatoes, and green beans, but that was in coastal California. The last few times I tried to grow anything in the desert it was a disaster. There's a good seed bank within driving distance so I'm going try again. We have to have above-ground gardens around here because of the thick layer of caliche. I'll be building one out of cinder blocks.

Do you garden? What do you grow? Any pictures? Tips?

[Anon]

Like you, I had one when I was a kid and it was wildly successful. Tomatoes, green beans, zucchini, and bell peppers. That was just in some patch of ground next to our fence. The next time I tried, I was a teenager, and I tried making a raised herb garden. I constructed the planter boxes, bought the soil, bought the herbs, and watched in sadness as they all died miserably.

One of these days, I'll try again.

[pensive_pilgrim]

I thought it would be cool a couple years ago. I spent a couple days churning up the dirt in these big outdoor planters my mom's husband built before he died, mixing in fertilizer and everything. Spent like fifty bucks on seeds and seedlings and tools and supplies at a gardening store. It was more of a challenge because it was in the high desert of oregon where it's dry and the soil is really acidic and there can be frosts at night for pretty much the entire year. I tried to get around this by putting blankets over everything at night, but I also had to put up mesh fencing to keep the deer from eating stuff and it was kind of a pain to deal with. After a couple weeks I got bored with it and pretty much everything died. The only real success was the cat grass I grew in a pot. He loved it and I still grow it in cottage cheese containers on the windowsill for him.

[LordLatch]

I garden like a madman considering how much space I have. The main garden is a step garden on a hill by the house I built from Windsor wall blocks. We grow mostly tomatoes but we also have cucumbers, bell peppers, carrots, jalapenos, rhubarb, lettuce, cilantro, leeks, chives, parsley, peas, green beans, and mint. One year, I built raised bed square foot gardens and we attended a class for it. We mixed soil, peat, vermiculite, and sheep manure. Sadly that didn't turn out well as our plant shot right out an didn't bare anything and died. I mixed that soil into my other gardens and used it the next year. I have tiller and I've used it to get rid of my grass to use that for garden space, but the step garden does the best. Half barrels hold the herbs. I'll have to look around to see if we have pics.

[Light Leak]

I would like to garden. I used to grow potted tomatoes on the balcony of an old apartment that got a lot of sun. Currently I live in a townhouse. I have a very small yard that doesn't get much sun. I tried to grow some things the first year I lived here, but nothing did very well and I haven't bothered to try since then. I think the problem is the lack of sun and there's really nothing I can do to fix that.

[jigglypuff]

my mom's really into gardening, and i wanna learn more about it. she says we have 13 different fruits in our backyard, and many of them are considered "exotic" here (basically asian), like wax apple, longan, goji berry, persimmon and dragonfruit. she also grows tons of veggies and herbs. i don't even know everything that's back there. i'm raising chickens right now so we have a good supply of natural fertilizer, and i take them outside every day to pick at bugs and weeds. i'm mostly managing the chicken stuff. i wanna learn how to compost more effectively. having a yard suitable for gardening/farming is one of my top priorities right now when planning for my ~future home~.

i'm in LA so the climate's pretty good for growing stuff.

[Delilah]

I did, and I loved it. It was back when I was a sahm and when I was working pt, but the DH had a bad habit of mowing things down and as the kids got older and I started working ft I just didn't have the time or energy to fight his scorched earth attitude towards yard care, which the kids inherited when they took over mowing duties, so I just gave up.
The green beans, cucmbers, pumpkins, sunflowers, strawberries, herbs and tomatoes did very well, as did the roses, but our soil is sandy so root veggies never did very well. The carrots were always so sad and tiny! I tried asgaragus, but every spring the DH would mow it down so it never really took , and the dog loved to trample the roses, but they were absolutely stunning before he made the rose garden his runway. We rarely had enough green beans for an actuall meal because kid #2 ate them off the vine as fast as they could grow, same with the strawberries.
Companion planting worked well, like planting onions in the rose garden to help deter insects that would eat the roses, and it also kept the plants chemical free so the kids could eat whatever they wanted right off the vine like the feral little fucks they were. The DH hated that. Always shrieking that they were going to get poisoned by eating the wrong thing, despite the fact that there was nothing super toxic out there and they were being raised to recognize which plants were which and where they were planted. He's such a fucking tool. To irritate him up at the lake I am always showing the kids, nieces and nephews what kinds of wild foods they can eat, which nearly gave the DH a heart attack one day when kid #2 walked into the marshy portion of the shore, yanked out a cattail root, peeled off the outer layer and started chomping away. I laughed so hard at the DH's bluster I nearly spilled my beer.
I still help my Mom with her gardens at the lake but I am looking forward to the day the kids move out and I kill the husband and use his body to fertilize the most glorious garden......

[Fitz]

I've been messing with orchids almost exclusively for about a year now and I really wish I lived in a better climate for their survival. I'll probably plant a vegetable garden but this year is going to be awful in socal. I need to automate a watering system to keep up with the watering if anything's going to survive through the coming hellish summer.


I'd really like to start growing weed to experiment with the 'genetics' but laws and shit.

[gator]

Used to. At my old house I had a lot of space and very good soil. Things grew very well. When we moved we dug up the soil and took it with us. I've got handfuls of ribbons from the fair, and a few best in shows though I can't take full credit for them because my mom helped a lot.

There's a backyard plot where I am living right now. For a couple years I tried to make it productive but that would take far more time than I'm able to invest in it. My roommates weren't much help. I'd ask them to water it when I was away over the weekend, which was often, and every time I returned the thing would be parched. One year Waxy decided to help by putting a layer of bricks and garbage directly on top of my bean rows. I gave up after that.

I'd like to take it up again but I'm planning on moving this summer. The place where my boyfriend lives has community garden plots and they're looking for new people to work them. That's part of the appeal.

[Robcore]

My house was built in the 50s, and the people who built it were well known for their gardening...flowers and vegetables...I actually used to walk through the yard on my walk to school as a kid...it was gorgeous, and the lilacs always smelled great. Anyhow, after they died, some old lady bought the place, and gave away a lot of the plants and such...and she basically left the greenhouse to ruin. We bought the place in 2011, and we did a few years of planting tomatoes and peppers and celery in the greenhouse, expecting the building to collapse on itself each winter due to rot and general deterioration. Last summer, I tore it down and built a new greenhouse and some raised planters...had a good crop of tomatoes, and one of the types of cucumber that I planted did great (the long English cukes didn't seem to take very well though). In my raised planters I've got a good sized strawberry patch, and some very resilient rhubarb...the idea is that I will get a few pies worth of goodies from those each year.
I also did herbs in the greenhouse, and the parsley and basil did well...and the chives too...but I wasn't so successful with dill or rosemary. The dill started off well but shriveled up before there was enough to pick, and I don't think the rosemary even germinated.

This summer, I'll probably do cucumbers and tomatoes again. I'm also building a few new raised planters out of salvaged material from the old greenhouse, and I hope to transplant a bit of the remaining flowers and such before I have to dig up around my house to put in new drain tile. First planter is getting a lilac tree in the middle that I plan to prune into a nice medium-sized bush, and it'll be surrounded by this cool creeper-plant that grows around the one lilac tree currently...it'll drape over the edges of the planter and look awesome...especially when it blooms in mid-late summer....

I'd also like to get some berry bushes going...a red huckleberry bush for sure...probably a blue as well, and maybe blueberries too. I quite like currants as well, but they tend to attract a lot of ants, and we've had ant issues on the property in the past. Raspberries would be great too...
Eventually I'd like to add a few fruit trees in addition to the golden plum tree that's already here...but that'll be a few years away probably...after I build a nice deck and fire pit...
In fact, I may even wait to do the berry bushes until I put up a new fence...but again, that could be a few years away still.