This was only my second year gardening, and first year with my own yard 😤 Everything is in containers. I struggled a lot with figuring out a good place to put containers that got enough sunlight. I was trying to avoid the front yard because I was worried about car exhaust and grossness getting onto veggies, but when I finally caved and moved everything to the front it started growing much much better. Lots of things also got chomped by deer and groundhogs in the backyard. I had hoped that big containers would keep the groundhogs out but I caught one climbing up onto the top and eating all the seedlings. Lots of failures, lots of dead plants. I tried to plant some native flowers in the backyard hoping to get them to spread to the empty lot behind us, but no success. A lot of seeds got eaten by birds.
I had better luck with both veggie and flower starts that I bought from the local farmer’s market. I was SO CLOSE to getting sunflowers, the flower heads were coming out but then we had a big windy thunderstorm that knocked them over and they got all crispy after :( My only harvest this year are a couple of jalapeno peppers. I didn’t start anything indoors this year, but I definitely see the value in it now and I’m hoping to get a rack with grow lights set up over the winter.
What about you guys??
This is my first year with an in-ground garden in Zone 6a! Here’s what I’ve got:
-Plant more peppers, I eat a lot of peppers and could use more
-Plant beans/peas earlier
-Plant okra later
-Only ONE cucumber plant!!! Just one! No one needs more than one!
-More ground cherries, they did great and I love 'em
-Wouldn’t bother with celery again, probably
-Would give radishes another shot, they did okay. I’d do kohlrabi again too
-Planted too many types of lettuce
We gave up on celery and have instead planted one or two individuals of lovage (Levisticum officinale) for the times we need some additional aromatics beyond the carrots, onions, and parsnips.
Ground cherries are the best! Homegrown ones are so much better than grocery ones (although this is true for many fruits and vegetables)!
I have two cucumber plants and three zucchinis so imagine what my diet is like.
I live in an apartment so my gardening is limited to containers on my balcony as well as a million tropical houseplants. I finally figured out what grows best in my conditions of scorching hot in the morning and nice and cool in the afternoon out there. I’m growing a fig and a dwarf citrus as well as a blueberry bush that is finally not hating the spot I put it in! Otherwise it’s a bunch of succulents out there.
I’m hoping one day to have a real garden but for now I’m having fun with what I can grow both indoors and outdoors.
oooo I should try a fig tree too. I didn’t even know that dwarf citrus was even a thing but I def need to look into them more.
We have some “Chicago hardy” dogs that supposedly came from ones around here which comes back even though we’re apt to see lower cold temps than you’re likely to see. You should totally give it a try, just remember that “Chicago hardy” encompasses a number of different cultivars. Maybe try reaching out to your area master gardener program to see if a member has some they do cuttings of for fundraisers, or try searching your area on a site like PermaPeople to see if someone is growing them locally. Varieties shipped to you from other regions may be like rolling the dice but something grown in your region should give you a higher likelihood of success.
For few years I try permaculture gardening. It is sometimes good sometimes bad. This year was dry and not much things grow. I am looking for next year, my asparagus will mature and could be harvested.
What aspects of permaculture have you been incorporating into your garden?
I plant multiple different kinds of plants on same plot, no-till and I am trying to have more permanent veggies in the mixx. But no exact methods, just trying what might work.
Health problems have been acting up, so my yard has become an untamed jungle. The birds are pleased.
Sounds like habitat restoration to me 😁
That’s basically what I’ve been doing with my yard, but I prefer it to be at least slightly maintained…
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My garden got away from me, too. I’m totally overworked at the moment and never got around to putting anything in. It’s a gigantic mess of weeds, thistles, volunteer flowers, overgrown herbs etc. It’s crawling with bees and insects and birds.
Here’s some thanks for considering the birds, and my hope that you’re feeling well again before long so you can play in the garden.
Wu wei
My garden is going awesome. Third year gardening, first time managing a pretty sizeable garden myself. I’m currently eating probably 50-60% of my food from the garden. Right now I’m harvesting eggplant, tomatos, beans, carrots, beets, kale, kohlrabi, basil, oregano, dill, cucumber, a variety of peppers, and a preposterous amount of zucchini. The zuchs are finally starting to chill out but I’ve got like 7 huge zucchinis taking up all my kitchen space and I eat like 3 a week. I’ve got a bunch of different types of squash coming in. I’m just finishing eating the last of my summer peas. I need to harvest my potatoes, might do that this weekend. The corn will be ready soon but so far I’ve been real bad at getting the timing right for corn.
My cauliflower is not looking so hot. Dunno if my climate is good for it or if I just haven’t been giving it enough attention. Aphids are starting to make their prescence known on my kale, but I find especially with dyno-kale that they don’t really detract too much from the food value, just takes some time to wash them off.
I need to do some work putting down straw mulch around plants and reinforcing the bark mulch pathways I’ve started putting in. Long term I would like to replace or at least supplement the overhead sprinkler irrigation with a drip or even micro-sprinkler system.
I never pruned my tomatoes and so they are kind of a big mess. Getting lots of fruit from them now and they are so good, I didn’t used to like tomatoes but I’m just eating these bitches salad style. Lots of damage from quail and whatnot on the tomatoes but not to an extent that’s really bugging me since I’m not selling the things.
Peppers seem to be taking forever but are finally starting to turn colour. Got lots of green bell peppers, lots of what I think are hungarian wax peppers that are just starting to finally turn orange and get flavourful. Got some habaneros finally coming in, and some kind of skinny chillis. I’ve also got some purple ones that I can’t at all tell when to properly pick. A few that I’ve tried have seen premature.
Got sunflowers all over the place, mostly self-seeded. Garden is also full of self-seeding calendula and dill, which have been filled with pollinators of various types including my own bees.
I really like my garden. Inherited it from my grandmother in law, but she would be really horrified to see how many “weeds” I allow to persist.
Pumpkins are big.
They’ve taken over the garden, half the yard, and show no signs of stopping. We don’t even have pumpkins yet, it’s just the vines.
Our singular broccoli is also massive, and so far has its leaves above the pumpkin plants (plural! What happens when plants 2 and 3 get as big as the first!?), but we shall see if it stays that way.
With any luck, we’ll be decked out for halloween.
I planted some broccoli before I saw a video showing how big it gets and immediately had to pivot to a much bigger planter lol
My array of cactii and succulents continue to look great, despite us being on year 2 of a drought. I have a painstaking reigeme of upkeep which is mostly looking at them and saying to myself “yep, that’s a plant alright”.
So, all in all I’m happy with my garden.
the birds and squirrels ate all my tomatoes, haha. at least my rosemary and lavender are doing well. i’ll likely transplant them to the front yard (currently in containers) before fall.
We’ve had an incredibly wet spring and summer, and many of our plants are leggy and behind schedule for it. Things in the ground have fared better than the few hundred potted plants we have, but we just don’t have enough space under cover to house everything. We have a friend who’s going to lend us their greenhouse jig soon so we can build another larger one, thankfully. Luckily all the plants we’re growing in air prune boxes don’t appear as chlorotic.
A porcupine has chewed down nearly all of a new-to-me raspberry cultivar (‘Anne’, in case anyone is curious) patch, including all of the cuttings we took when we planted it. We’re burying the tips to make even more, which is okay, but I had some last year and was really looking forward to eating them from the yard this year. The wet weather and a late hard freeze caused most of the early fruits to fail, so we didn’t get cherries, apples, or blueberries either. Though, the legginess of all of our tea plants has meant a bumper crop of those. We’re so far behind the season that we don’t even know if we’ve been hit by “peppergate” yet.
OP, I’m going to tell you what I’ve been told by my master gardener friends: you’re not a real gardener until you’ve lost track of your death toll in the garden <3
My raspberries are spreading more than I can even handle so I don’t have the same problem, but what does burrying the tips mean? Like your bending the shoots over and burying the tips as a method of propagation?
Yep, you got it! Many Rubus family plants will self propagate when their growing tips reach the ground by sending out new roots from the point where it contacts. With a little extra soil or fine mulch like chunky sawdust or fine wood chips and a weight, you can even get a whole cane to root out. Once you see a few roots at a length of an inch or so they’ll generally be able to support themselves when cut into individuals and transplanted.
I got a greenhouse from multiple family members as a combined birthday and Christmas present. Some plants like tomatoes and chili love it there. Some others die because of the heat. Others again love it too much and grow too quickly, becoming too long and thin to support their own weight.
Also, a “problem” I’ve had for the two years I’ve been trying to get some vegetables is being pessimistic about how many seeds will sprout and getting WAY too many. And once they’ve all happily sprouted I don’t have the heart to throw them away, so I end up having a hard time finding enough space for everything. Luxury problem I know 😅
This is exactly how I ended up with so many tomato and pepper plants… I just can’t bring myself to cull the extra babies 🤦♀️
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They are. They’re just little babies 🥺
Until they grow up to be delicious and then all bets are off lol.
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I bought a single tulip from the store. “I can’t possibly kill a single flower that’s halfway bloomed,” I thought.
Lesson learned: when you read about coffee helping plants/adding nitrogen, it turns out it’s not a “more is better” situation.
Yeah very much so, it’s quite easy to kill plants by over-nitrogenating them. Compost is a good way to safely feed plants, as not only is there a diversity of nutrients in good compost but they are released more slowly over time and so less-likely to do damage. Not the case with manure. Also some compost has excessive salt so watch out for that.
Otherwise a good rule of thumb for giving plants fertilizers is “weakly, weekly”. It’s also good to keep in mind that plants get the vast majority of what they need from the sun.
I just picked up hydroponic gardening within the last year and I’m in love! I live in a desert climate so gardening has always been kinda off my radar because of the heat. The only plants I generally want in my yard are native plants and wildflowers that don’t need my help and support the local ecosystem. I started hydroponically with lettuce and herbs which were shockingly easy and did very well. I recently branched off to buying a bigger grow light and I’ve got my first baby tomatoes coming in just this week! I also had to learn about stratification but I figured it out and my strawberries/catnip are turning into little bushes! It’s all actually SO easy. No bugs, no smelly fertilizers, no bad weather, no desperately trying to shade plants from the sun, and no animals messing with my garden.
I’ve always joked that plants come to my house to die but now I have a whole farm in the spare bedroom and it barely needs me to do anything other than monitor the nutrient water levels and check the PH occasionally. I’ve also started some houseplants in their own jars and I only have to refill their nutrient water like once a week if that.
Overall I think the biggest surprise to me is how much food I’ve wasted in my life. So many veggies from the grocery store can be plopped in a jar with some nutrient water (or even just water) and then keep growing/producing or at the very least stay fresh much longer. Green onions especially just keep growing back.
Also, unless it’s heirloom planting most grocery tomatoes will result in a sad vine that does everything it can to die and will never produce a single tomato lol. Then you’ll end up feeling bad for it because it’s not the tomato plant’s fault so you’ll just keep the stupid thing alive out of weird misplaced guilt. That last one might just be me though…
- not that good
- invasive slugs suck
This was my first year growing salad greens. I figured they’d mostly be cut and come again, but no. Need to plant a new one every 2-3 weeks and harvest the whole thing otherwise the lettuces get pretty bitter.
Overwatering killed a lot of my house plants. But once i started using an app to remind me of when to water and drained the water using clay balls, they suddenly stopped dying!
Once you become more accustomed to the needs of your specific plants, I’d recommend you start watering them on a case by case basis. Each plant has its own needs and will dry out itself and its soil at a different rate. Learn to finger test soil and look for signs of dehydration in plants. People almost always over-water instead of the opposite.
