Gardening

[Image description: a curly-leaf kale plant in a raised bed, with voluminous radiating leaves that kinda look like the afro of said Simpson's character.]

In this bed, for starters we have San marzano, brandy wine and love gourmanson sunrise tomatoes, and some pollinator flowers.

For seeds we have sage, iceberg lettuce and Lebanese cucumbers, scatter planted we have red radishes and rainbow carrots.

Getting time to start thinning here soon.

Do you guys cut or pull when thinning?

Getting mixed opinions on my Google-fu, some say to give the tree only a few spots to grow, others say to leave them. So what’s Lemmys opinion? Thin at all? If it’s clustered leave one per cluster?

I have two, they are mixed species trees from HD, there’s September ruby red, battleford and good land apples.

This is the first planted bed out of them all, from left to right, we have tomatoes, sunflowers, peppers and marigolds.

For seeds, basil, kale and cucumbers, as well as autumn carrots and watermelon radishes scatter planted through the bed.

Last week my landscaper mowed down the mostly perennial, but a few annual wildflowers I was growing from seed. The landscape thought they were weeds because they were mostly not flowering yet (and there were a few weeds in there as well). So now what do I do? I have been watering it every day to see if I can grow some of the plants back. I put a lot of seed down, I hope something will last.

In this bed we have Russian cukes on the right, and some taller tomatoes on the left, there is snap peas in the smaller pots.

In between the tomatoes there is kale, and there is touchan and ice radishes scatter planted in the entire bed. It’s covered with straw to keep moisture in due to local watering restrictions from a main break.

And some marigolds

I thought this would be a fun but useful post.

If you had one piece of advice for gardening, what would it be? Like that one thing your discovered or learned that to your results to the next level.

Mine: Mulch your fruit trees well. This will help retain moisture and also keep grass and weeds from popping up which could compete with the tree for nutrients.

I’m struggling with my yard, blackberry vines have pretty much taken over, does anyone have any tools they’ve found efficient at removing them? Looking for inspiration since search results are filled with such junk

Most seedlings seem to making their way through it!

I’m hoping stuff like the radishes can get through though, beans are going gang busters with it though, seems to have helped the peas as well. Generally everything since the tops been kept moist!

Obviously the bought plants have bulbs and blooms, but these are MINE.

On the left we have one of my Campfire Roses.

On the right we have I believe an oriental type Lillie, its smaller in height and has more headed and smaller blooms than some of the others.

I got tired of remaking my sisal trellice every season, and didn't like using nylon netting, so I went with something more long term. The downside? Vine removal in the fall will likely be a slog.

Trying to get in the habit of taking more pictures for work stuff. An abandoned sunflower bed that is gonna get planted with various squash. Hand weeded with a hori-hori and some shitty knee pads. I also forgot my gloves today

So here I have a bunch of the row open - I counted something like 12 flowers open and at least 25 more to go just in this row! I'm pretty sure I'm going to have to expand my lily garden at the end of the season.

The whole row:

🥰

The heat is starting to climb, so the early season stuff is starting to struggle a bit. Looks like terra cotta beats plastic and big beats small. There you go, empirical evidence of a fact everyone already knew: plants prefer the expensive pots

The unfortunate thing is, I don’t really have a place to put it for wind without it being right on the public fence, and being on a 20 foot pole to be the same height as this. It’s sheltered by the house from the east and will get a wind tunnel effect from between the houses, but other than that it should be ideal here.

So long story short, I’ve been thinking about doing this anyways, but the city had to put its worst water restrictions into place with an unprecedented water main break. The cities Largest main break which is a 2m pipe (6 foot 6 inches for the neighbours). This means zero outside watering, it’s a great thing I recently installed water barrels.

BUT they are out already trying to keep my top inch moist for my seedlings, so here we are, straw mulch and trying to use as little water as possible to do my part.

Interestingly, only this one still has the purple. There used to be yellow, white and pink too. They’ve been slowly losing colours when they come back. I do deadhead them when the bloom is spent.

This year I also added some more bought seeds around them, and I might just let some late season blooms seed as well.

Any recommendations?

Installed some new rain barrels, so just wanted to see how it compared to tap. Just using some HM Digital meters to test.

The beans, salads, tomatoes and others are finally growing a bit quicker. With the fourth or fifth start of spring, I hope this time the temperatures keep staying up.

Tomatoes are still small but growing nicely.

The new raspberry bushes produce first red fruits.

Bonus: Happy chicken sharing some leftover melon.

Just the one so far, but I'm glad any made it this far!

What the deer has been eating instead:

As I was taking this picture of my lilies that are showing some reds, a deer ran from the side yard of my house, and through the back yard, and out the fence in the back! I was actually out there to check damages from the deer that was out there 3 hours before!

I'm getting a little tired of them eating my pansies, but at least they've been leaving the lilies alone. So far. And it helps a little that a mama deer brought her baby to the yard and they didn't eat the lilies, just the Jacob's ladders and sand cherry tree's um… cherries?