A Garden Thread for Furare's Peace of Mind

Can has pictures please?

I literally do not have any idea what a real garden looks like. Sue me, I live on a dot.

Ha. Give peas a chance?

I'm headed out to check ours tonight. We've gotten some of our Yellow Taxi tomatoes as well as some cherry tomatoes. Something has eaten our Romas before we can get them picked. We've gotten some eggplant too, and 2 serranos. Our other peppers have peppers, they just aren't ripe yet.

Better make it Tae's. All the grass and random weeds that sprung up are a bit of a demotivator.

Not the garden, but the fruits thereof:



Romas, Yellow Taxis, Black Cherry Tomatoes and Sweet 100 Tomatoes, as well as 2 little finger eggplants.


Seriously, tomatoes are good.

Here is some tomato propaganda:

That kind of air is poison to people, but plants kind of like it most of the time.

Here's some quick snaps of my garden...they won't be winning any photography awards, but they ought to give an idea of how things look.





The big bed in the middle has the corn and beans, and the one off to the left has the tomatoes and peppers. The little beds are for squash and melons. The work, she is still in progress.

I have Opinions about them, too, which I will quite cheerfully share if/when you're interested.

Our big issue for the garden at home is figuring out the sun. We have a shady property. Great for Texas weather, sad for veggies. The community plot is full sun. And as 100 degrees is forecast to come this week, we need to start looking into that shade cloth stuff for it.

Depending on what you mean by 'string' it could be: For the viney stuff to climb (depending on the peas and squash she chose), or if you mean the mesh over the top of the beds, that's to keep critters out.

We had a trellis here for canteloupe. It keeps them off the ground, so you don't get that bad spot. You snip off panty hose, tie it to the vine above and below the fruit, with the top tie tied to the trellis for support as it grows. It was a cool project, but the landlord sucks, and we're not really supposed to dig, or put things in the ground, so it went away. The kids like growing peppers and tomatoes in containers. They got to make homemade salsa one summer. Well, they grew it, I got to sit and chop it all up. Yay me and my poor burned fingers.

I feel like from reading this thread I might actually develop some sort of culinary skill

Wow. That sounds efficient. And also like a lot of research went into it. Can't wait to see the end results!

Well, last year's garden was a total bust. I got a bunch of stuff planted, it all sprouted in time for us to have a week of unseasonably hot weather that would have been more at home in Texas, and half of it burned to death in our unrelenting sun. The following week, we got a shipment of Seattle weather, and the rest of it drowned.

I didn't bother to replant, because there shouldn't have been enough growing season left. Naturally, it went a month longer than it usually does before the first freeze, so if I'd gambled on it, I'd have had plenty of time.

This year's garden has been keeping me busy. I started nasturtiums, lupines, echinacea, lemon balm, alpine strawberries, zucchini and tatume squash, two kinds of cucumbers, kale, Nero di Toscana cabbage/kale cross thing, and Swiss chard on my plant table at work several weeks ago. They just came home tonight and will go in the ground tomorrow. I picked up two broccoli plants (one romanesco, one early purple) and a magenta yarrow at the garden club's annual plant sale, but somebody beat me to the last flax by virtue of having one fewer person standing between them and the table. They went into the ground yesterday.

Carrots, beets, two kinds of radish (Saxa II says it only takes 18 days; I'm counting -- the other is a purple variety), several kinds of lettuce and a few kinds of salad greens went into the first bed a little over a week ago and everything's sprouted but the carrots. Carrots are pokey slow like that.

Two kinds of peas and green beans went into the second bed a little under a week ago and are starting to show signs of sprouting. Cilantro, kohlrabi, spinach, and turnips followed in that bed a couple days later.

I also ended up with a really awkward sunburn despite painting on the sunscreen, having not realized that neither my shirttail nor my waistband were quite up to the task of bridging the gap created by leaning over the garden, so if nothing else, I'll have a new crop of freckles out of the garden this year.

I haven't done anything with it, yet, since this is only the second year I've tried to grow it and the first year, it got fried. Mostly, I've planted it for the bees, but I figured I'd throw a leaf or two in my tea sometimes if it grows or use a few to garnish a lemon cake. There are a bunch of cosmetic uses of it all over the interwebs, though, which might be the thing for using up large quantities.

In case it's an issue for anyone, eating or drinking very much of it can inhibit thyroid function, so it's probably best avoided by anyone with hypothyroidism, at least until talking with a doctor.

That's one I've never encountered. The internets tells me it tastes kind of like tarragon...does it have that licorice-y scent to it?