What are you doing "in the garden" this month?

Even if only in the garden of your mind.

Perusing the seed and plant catalogs?

Preparing soil?

Starting plants?

In a zone where you're pulling weeds already and harvesting something?


As for me, I am waiting for a nice day to start moving dirt and horse manure, looking at seeds I want to buy, and waiting for a nice day to feed irises, daffodils, primrose and other spring bloomers.

There is so much to do but you gotta start somewhere, right?

I'll check back later :hi:

About 1/3 of my backyard was flower and veggie garden and the rest was grass. As I wrote in a thread a while ago, I can no longer figure out why grass is such an important crop that I have to tend it and then harvest it and throw it in the compost!?!

So I'm trying to imagine my entire backyard as a garden -- kind of like a European small urban garden. I'm taking up all the grass in a few weeks and digging out some old diseased rosebushes that harbored under them a pernicious infection of morning glory weeds. I'm going to remove them and dig down to the "dead man" and kill the morning glory once and for all.

At the center will be a circle with some perennial and annual flowers (but eventually a small espalier'd fruit tree). I'm mentally carving where the walk ways will be and whether to get wood chips from the local parks dept to mark out the walk ways. I should have about twice as many veggies and herbs and I'm trying to figure out where it will all go.

I have paths in the "backyard" here, but it's mostly shade paths and growing conditions make choices limited. Medicinals do well, especially native to this area, and I am able to collect them from my own property. Also ferns, which I have tons of down at the creek.

I am slowly busting out the sawbriars to let the blueberries grow and let them decide where paths will be.

So my gardens are shaped by nature. I don't mind. The blueberries are tiny wild ones that are delicious. But, how nice that you can shape this garden yourself, allowing useful plants to create screens and beds. That must be fun, imagining the possibilities.

I agree about the grass. Except I have horses and I need a few grassy areas for them. My last farm had acres of pasture. Now I am in the woods where growing grass has been difficult.

Anyhoo, where are you getting inspiration?

Cleaned and weeded the raised beds.

Cut the strawberries back ground level and separated the plants, moving some of them to another box.
We are planning on another June Bearing variety this year, and will either give them another box, or build one of those cool pyramid things for the new Berries.

We planted a bunch of Garlic last Fall. It all looks good and will be ready for harvest in a couple of months.

We also planted some broccoli last Fall, and it survived the Winter with little help from us.
The stalks are thick, and they are starting to make little bunches of broccoli, so we are optimistic about harvesting some soon.
Some Spinach survived the Winter, also some arugula, mustard, chives.
Looks like some herbs are going to sprout.
We just weeded the beds where those are and left them alone.

We planted a bunch of Blueberries, Raspberries, Boysenberries, and some fruit trees over the Winter, and we are watching them for signs of growth.

In general, we will be planting fewer tomatoes & melons, and more leafy greens and herbs, squash, eggplant, cucumber, beans/peas, and even a little Okra.
:)

You've been busy.

What strawberry are you trying? I have had good luck with a couple Tennessee Beauties and plan on getting more this year.

My "strawberry bed" is full of a lot of stuff that isn't strawberries :blush:

(And for any curious, I don't grow anything illegal on my little farm. I like my farm too much!)


Keep working and pics are always nice...:)

...and it IS getting late.
The Everbearings we have now are Ozark Beauties:

We get a modest, very tasty harvest in June, but after that, they just sit, simmer, get black spot, and produce a lot of runners, but little fruit.
Local Word of Mouth says Everbearings don't do well here, but nobody says why.
We are going to experiment with thinning/pruning (to keep more distance between plants) and deeper Pine Straw mulching (to keep fruit off the ground) this year.


We would love to put in some Homegrown Herb, but like you, we love our place too much.
Industrial Hemp would be great, and we have about 2 acres that would be perfect.
We would start our own little Textile/Spinning/Weaving and Oil Extraction cottage industry if we were allowed to grow it.

Gotta have lots of tomatoes! :9

Pawpaw R.I.P... always wrote down what he planted on calenders. I found one all the way back to 1992. He used to plant 20+ tomatoes each year and a lot of other good stuff.

Since I've got the torch passed down to me, I'm gonna keep the garden going like he tought me.... It's still gonna be Pawpaw's Garden!

...just fewer than last year.
It really is possible to have too many.
Everybody grows tomatoes here, so it is even hard to give them away.
The Farmers Market in town always Sells Out of tomatoes, but it is so far to town that it would cost us more in gas money and Market Fees than we would make on the surplus tomatoes.

We will grow more than enough for us to eat and put away for Winter.
We want to allocate more space to leafy greens, squash, and herbs.

You know, we said the last thing last year, but wound up with MORE tomatoes.
This year we will plant:
2 Creoles
1 Brandywine
1 Arkansas Traveler
1 Cherokee Purple
1 Cherry
3 Romas

...so we will have plenty.
:)

;)

I harvested my broccoli yesterday. :9

Anyway, the previous owner had put in this 5'+ brick square around a then-dying (now dead & gone) pecan tree. I paid someone to clean it all out & since then dumped about 6 cubic feet of landscaper mix on it (local soil being really bad). I put in 6 roma tomatoes last week & planted 2 tomatoes from seed. I also have some strawberry plants going (they need to be transplanted though), as well as 2 rosemary bushes that survived the summer & winter. I cleaned out & prepped the bricked-in flower bed & put in 2 blackberry bushes on Sunday. I've got some peat pots of cilantro, squash & corn going & picked up a sad-looking dill this morning (which perked up quite nicely once I got it home & watered it).

I also planted a chayote squash that sprouted before I could use it. I had an empty container & thought "hmmmm...." THEN I looked it up on the web & found out it needs to climb (no problemo, I've got a trellis that needs some cover) & can grow to 30'!! :o

dg

We get the break you don't, I'll just look at it that way. You never get one. How nice to have veggies for such a long season, though.

Of course, now is a good time up here to see where you want stuff to go. The green is all died back, but it was just too windy/cold today to spend much time outside for me.

So I do envy warm days. They're coming soon, I hear.

Keep up the good work :hi:

when it's just too damn hot to grow anything. :) Just keeping what I've already got going alive is the thing to do then.

:hi:

dg

Perfect time to kick back with a cold adult beverage, that July and August.

Our breaks come when it's 5 degrees out and you are bundled up drinking hot toddies!


But I'm glad to see you do get a window of respite ;)

except watch the cold-weather veggies, but this year has been so spring-like already. It's already hit 90 twice. :o

dg

where we are going to put the garden. Our first in 23 years, got the fencing for it (to keep my goats out) going to start tilling in my horse manure that I have aging since last spring and have already bought some seeds and planning on what plants we are going to buy. Getting excited.

It's hard to imagine a bare place being full of plants in a few months. Such a gamble; you never know what's going to delight and what's going to perform less admirably.

But that's half the fun and learning of it.

And goats. Ah yes. They will be eyeing those veggies and drooling. Good luck and speedy fencing to you.

Keep us posted on your progress, too. :)

but I found green sprouting from a garlic clove today, and wondered if I should plant it, just for the heck of it! I'm near DC.

It's a start, right?

Find a little spot, dig a hole, throw in a little good potting soil and see what happens.

Garlic is a good thing to plant near roses; helps keep pests away.

Here's to your green thumb :thumbsup:

Will Do!

Home alone at the moment, have made chicken soup; gets better by the day, and by each bunch of dill I add! SO, I think I'll include dill in my 'garden,' such as it is!

I finished putting in the "spring" veggies this week.

Hopefully over the weekend I will build another planter box, do some weeding, put some plants in the ground, finish pruning the roses, and plant more bulbs. Hopefully. :)

I feel so behind. I should have already had some stuff in as well.

Just a small line of Kale still growing.

Sounds like you're on top of things, spring's not going to sneak up on you, no ma'am!

Good work :)

collards, lettuce, broccoli, onions, and asparagus. :shrug:

That is our first set. We have 5 types of tomatoes, several types of onion and leeks, a ton of garlic, parsnips, two types of eggplant, bell peppers and a couple of herbs. Several of these are from saved seed.

The next set will be the carrots, turnips, shallots, pumpkins, watermelon, beets, potatoes, luffah and a first grouping of cauliflower and broccoli.

The third set will be several varieties of lettuce, spinach, peas, beans, yellow and zucchini squash, more cauliflower and broccoli.

:hi:

edited to add...we are trying to grow extra of the more commonly used foods so we will have some left to donate or share. Times being what they are and all.

It's too wet and frozen to even spade the soil over.

thinking about it. Our garlic is looking prolific so that's good. I've been letting the chickens roam the garden while nothing else is growing (I had to put protection over the garlic coz they were eating the sprouts. :eyes:) But anyway, I bring home salad bar scraps for them and have been throwing them in a couple of the boxes and let them eat and scratch and poop in them. What they don't eat gets shoveled under to compost. They will have to leave the garden once we plant. They didn't do us any favors in there last year. Don't believe anyone who says they'll leave the plants alone once they've grown bigger and more established. It's a bloody lie! LOL

Trying to pin down the other half to decide what seed we need to order and get him over the fence to the cow pasture next door for some manure. I see it sitting all over the place over there in numerous large clumps and have been coveting it.

Plan is to get the hay I need, and start laying it all down. I'll put down chicken wire first to deter the gophers, then the cardboard, then the newspaper, then the lucern hay or whatever substitute I can find, along with some of my compost, and the rest of the stuff. That is the plan, anyways.

I'm in SoCal and I think it's time to get started.

Picking oranges and limes. Trying to grow beets and turnip but it's not looking good.
We turn over the vegetable beds in April for the summer season.

I need to do a heavy amount of weeding in my perennial beds soon too.

I'm Zone 8b. I've discovered in the last few years I can't kill wild raspberries, azaleas, roses, rosemary, oregano, and any number of unnameable weeds lol. I've started cleaning out the beds and cut the rosemary down so it's manageable. I've planted pansies, onions, parsley, lavender, cilantro, lettuce, peppers, and strawberries. I've got potatoes, sweet peas, and two climbing roses to plant this weekend. The garden centers have tomato plants out now, but it still feels too early for them to me. We've had a pretty cool winter for us so I'll probably wait a couple weeks before I do tomatoes and cukes, probably some more peppers and beans too. And I'll be getting the pool ready for summer, too, very soon! :)

Hopefully that will be melted by the weekend, when I plan on moving a bunch of "mt poop" from the chicken yard area to the garden.