Gardening

I design functional artwork planters and an internet friend told me that Orchid planters kind of suck. They suggested I design one in my own style to apply some engineering and art to compliment the flower.

This is what I came up with.

If you like my designs you can follow me on Substack: https://substack.com/@imakethingsforu or on Instagram: @madebyferguson

If you have a design idea let me know! If you want your own orchid planter, hit me up at: https://www.etsy.com/shop/Imakethingsforu

I have about this much left again still to pick too :)

Manzanita reminds me of my grandfather, passed on years since. There was a lot of it on his property and as a kid it was the only place I ever saw it. I’m happy that my current climate allows me to grow a couple. They help me remember.

Up until very recently, I've never lived anywhere where I had the space to set up an outdoor garden. I've been fortunate to finally own a property where I can, and I'm really enjoying it. So far I've set up an 8 x 25 garden plot, planted 4 fruit trees, and have a thriving wildflower garden in front of the house. I have a lot to learn, but I'm certainly enjoying the process.

One of my recent projects has been to install gutters on my workshop; it's a 25x50ft building. That got me thinking; why not collect the water from the gutters? I live an area that gets near-constant rain in the fall, winter, and spring, but it turns into a desert here during the summer. We haven't had more than a light mist in about a month or more. I have a roughly 60x20ft section of property hidden behind the shop, and it would be a perfect place to set up some IBC totes to collect the water.

For those of you who collect rain water for your garden, how much do you find you need/use? Based on my water bill, it looks like my usage went up by about 75 gallons per month since I've started gardening. I figure round that to 100G just to be safe; for 4 months with little rainfall, that would mean I need about 400G stored. I tend to over-engineer everything I build, so lets double that to 800G.

I'd enjoy hearing from anyone who harvests rainwater for their garden. How much water storage do you have? Do you find it's too much, not enough, or exactly what you need?

So many tomatoes.

I was trying to create my own seedling starter mix but got confused between perlite and vermiculite. Are they inter-changeable in gardening pots? Or is one better than the other?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/1803373

Man, if you ever want to eat 10,000 tomatoes in a season, plant yourself a Spoon Tomato.

I made the mistake of growing two of these last summer, and each grew up, over, and across the length of my trellis arch, about 20' in length. To keep them from utterly smothering their neighbors required pruning fistfuls of vines literally daily.

It's insanely prolific in fruits too, I gave up harvesting them all when I was picking hundreds a day. That sounds great, but each is the size of a pea or smaller, and they had the tendency to split at the top rather than keeping their caps, so they didn't store well at all.

The flipside is they do have a great tart, intense tomato flavor. I mostly ate them as garden snacks, or sprinkled on salads or focaccia.

[Image description: a small metal spoon holding a dozen tiny, bright red round cherry tomatoes. Green tomatoes and flowers are seen on the vine adjacent to the spoon.]

Bought this home three years ago and don’t think we have seen flowers on these yet. If we look back at listing pictures they did have flowers. We did cut them back one year but that was the first season. Neighbors have flowers already. Wife wants to replace them but I’m sure these aren’t lost forever. Thanks.

Our daikon crossed with our watermelon radish. We saved the seeds and planted them. Here is the result.

Very new to gardening. Very happy my garden hasn't died with all the crazy rain we're getting here!

Any friendly advice for these crazy cucumbers? They keep expanding! (2 squash on the right, 4 cucumbers to the left of them, then lettuce). Definitely going to give everything more room next year.

It aint much, but its honest work.

First Harvest

shiso

(we eat a lot of sashimi)

Japanese cucumber

Hello all, A few months ago I transferred about 12 bromeliad pups to their own pots and they are taking up a lot of room. I wanted to move them to my indoor greenhouse cabinet with pink grow lamps. I know that they are meant for indirect light so I am wondering if its a bad idea to give them exposure to LED lamps.

It would be useful to know this for all "indirect-light" plants.

Thanks!

If anybody has a guide they like better, please share.

These poppies have just been propagating naturally in my yard. I don’t do anything except leave them alone. We got so many this year that we spotted several people stopping to take selfies with them :)

This is the first year I actively gathered these seeds and spread them around my yard to places that poppies don’t just spring up on their own. If we have any kind of rain this winter then spring will be insane.

It’s pretty fun trying to gather these seeds because by the time the seed pods are mature, they’re also bent and flexed, which makes them split and POP and spread their seeds everywhere as soon as you touch them. So you have to grasp the whole pop in your hand quickly to get hold of any seeds. My kids had a blast with that.

The wet winter and spring really made for a wild year here. It’s dry usually so only hardy, opportunist plants tend to survive. But this was such a year of plenty that everything green just WENT FOR IT. Man I hope we get more like that.

I saw a video on a NC garden and he said his garden was almost done producing in mid-July.

My Rhode Island garden is just taking off.

What is your growing season like?

I have room and soil for an in ground garden, but raised bed seem to be all the rage. Should I just go in ground because I have the space? I also should mention o have a bunch of spare wood from a fence teardown that I can use for raised bed gardens.

Our cucumber plant is going bonkers.

Northern Rhode Island

Beefsteak tomatoes