Gardeners of AW, unite

Sophia said:

We planted garlic one winter. We dug them up around July and then hung them up in the shed to dry until August (filling the shed with an aroma of yumminess.)

We tried a few varieties of garlic, partly to spread the risk of doing something wrong, and partly to try the different flavours. We tried German Red, Solent Wight and Purple Wight. They're all very tasty, and are suited to the cold and damp weather typical of Britain. The German Red produced just two bulbs. They were fairly large. All the rest of them fell to mould. About half of the Purple Wight bulbs fell to mould, and the surviving bulbs were of middling size. The best performer by far was the Solent Wight - only a very few fell to mould or slugs, and the bulbs were nice and big. So I'd say Solent Wight is the way to go, if they are available!

Edited to add: This was in soil that was rich in clay, and very alkaline.

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I'm reading that as Soylent White, which I'm mentally converting to Soylent Green... and I'm not feeling like eating any garlic right now.

LOL, Cap!

Since you are planting actual (unpeeled) cloves, Mac, check around for a local grower (or "Locally Grown" bulb at the grocery store). This would give you a leg up vis-a-vis finding a variety that will do well in the ground where you are.

I mostly use wild Allium, but this page has reliable info about cultivating garlic:
http://www.organicgardening.com/learn-and-grow/garlic-growing-guide

Mmmm...scapes.

Ooo...you know. The other place I'd check for sets would be an established, independent garden shop. Not a national chain that will sell you Whatever Brand they're stocking this year, but someone who has an established personal stake in their customers' success.

If they don't have what you need on hand, they may be the kind of retailer who will find it and get it for you.

I've planted from clove, and had decent results, but only softneck sorts. I know someone in our garden managed to get scapes going, since I was all excited until I realized it wasn't in my planted. The guy didn't know what to do with the scapes, but I was dumb and told him, instead of taking them off his hands...

The softnecks that I grew were really lovely, but the neighborhood kids pulled them all up before they were ready. Bah.

Another vote for soylent wight in clay soil. Just pulled up my year's crop here. Some of the bulbs are on the small side but that's probably my fault for letting them be overrun by weeds!

Mushroom compost.

I thought about starting an entirely new thread on the subject of composting, but decided it would go better here in the gardening thread.

First, keeping a compost bin is an extremely useful thing for anyone who gardens. Any kind of raw plant waste can go in it. I keep one of these for kitchen and garden discards.

But, a couple of years ago I saw bags of "mushroom compost" being sold at a garden store in the spring, and the light bulb went on in my brain. We have fantabulous numbers of trash mushrooms growing in woods and lawns and parks all over our area. I could make my own mushroom compost bin.

So last year i did that. End of summer, I went out strolling around in the woods across the street from my house, and gathered bags full of mushrooms. I had a couple of discarded, but not yet disposed of, garbage cans, with holes in the bottom from being dragged in the driveway, and which nested together. I dumped the mushrooms in one, and used the other as a lid. This whole apparatus I set atop a short (~8 inch high) circular wire frame my wife had thrown away as a useless fixture in her store.

I let it sit all winter, covered in snow. Come spring thaw, I went out to see what I had. What I had was thoroughly disgusting and gardeningly wonderful: it smells like Satan's septic tank not having been pumped out in a millennium.* Which is exactly what you want in compost. Stink means the teenyweeny composting organisms, bacteria and their ilk, have been busy doing their job.

I have a big veggie garden consisting of six raised beds, and dumped all this mushroom compost on just one of them, the one that had performed worst the year before.

The results have been astounding. I have the best snap peas, lettuce and mutant kale I've ever grown, from that bed. I have cabbages, not yet ready to harvest, but looking good, and some nice-looking swiss chard as well.

So this year I'm trying to do much more mushroom gathering, to see if I can't get enough for all my beds. We'll see. But the exercise is good, and the results are great.

caw


*Three things no serious gardener can be afraid of: 1. Bad smells. 2. Dirty hands. 3. Dirty clothes. The last two are why God, on the eighteenth day, created soap.

well there's some tomatoes out there but good grief they are pathetic looking. Otherwise fall is coming and soon.

Hi everyone,

I am growing orange plant in from the seeds. I put the seeds in a glass of water for one night, then I placed it in a moist handkerchief, and folded the handkerchief, placed it in a plastic bag and kept it in the window sill.

Now, after a day, I see some sprouting. I googled for the next process, it told to wait for two weeks. Does anyone have any experience with growing orange plant from trees?

I have a very, very small garden behind my house.
The people living here before us did not take care of the lawn at all.
It was a sort of uncut wilderness. So, we cut the grass.
Now, I have 2 dogs. They both like to play with frisbee and balls, obviously... and so there's a lot of 'stop and go' going on.
Obviously they're digging into the grass while playing.
The grass is now mostly dead. Brown patches everywhere.
And many, many earth patches with no grass, mostly where the dogs tend to start running and stop again.

Is there ANY way I can get nice grass growing that will withstand the dogs running around on it? (If it was a bigger garden I could alternate between spots and put less stress on individual patches, but it's just big enough to be able to throw a ball.) Or shall I just not bother and make peace with my bad looking lawn?

Re: compost

I'm intrigued by the mushroom compost, although I disagree that good compost smells - a well-aerated compost pile doesn't stink, to my nose.

What DOES stink? Is the bin I've got in my basement, trying to get vermiculture (worm composting) going. I thought it would be great for vegetable scraps from the kitchen in winter time, when my outdoor composter is covered by three feet of snow and/or frozen shut. Also, I like pets!

So I bought a pound of the special vermiculture worms (Red Wigglers, the Cadillac of Worms!), made them a nice little shredded newspaper bed, added a wee bit of topsoil, added some kitchen waste, and sat back. Everything seemed good at the start, but as I added more kitchen waste, it became VERY apparently that the worms were not able to keep up. I had to keep adding shredded paper to balance out the moisture, and I really didn't add that much waste - I eat a lot of vegetables but I'm one person!

Anyway, what I've got right now is a smelly, fruit fly infested MESS. I think I should be turning it more regularly (I've been making myself do it once a day plus whenever I add more waste) but it's SO DISGUSTING it's hard to make myself do it. The smell is... appalling. I'm not usually a delicate flower, but whatever I've created in my basement is not meant for human noses.

So... damn. Has anyone had more luck with vermiculture? Is a pound of worms really too few to keep up with the kitchen waste of one person?

Hi, I'm trying to grow an orange plant and from net I found out that at the stage where I have reached I am supposed to trim 2 of the 3 ends of the growth in the picture. Does anyone have any experience with orange plants? What do I do now?

Consider the one in the center with 2 green leaf like ends and 1 light white central shoot pointing upwards.

Does anyone know what to cut now?

I was away for a couple weeks due to a funeral, a convention, and then an illness and being promoted to full time (on one hand, yay! on the other hand, when does sleep happen?). So on Thursday I finally carved out a few hours and dragged myself the whole way across the yard to my garden.

The little tomatoes are finally ripening (yay!), and the Brandywine Pinks are getting so big and heavy that they're breaking some of their own branches. I tied and propped up what I could, and we're seeing if we can get some of the damaged-beyond-repair ones to ripen if the end of the stem is in a cup of water. Somehow, the peas and peppers and baby asparagus survived being taken over by tomato (I'm making a new raised bed next year for the tomatoes), and are happy they can see the sun again. My sweet potato is big enough that I'm eating leaves, and it just started flowering! I don't know if I'll get potatoes from it, but I got it as a decorative, and will keep getting them for the tasty tasty leaves.

My squashes did not do well, though. There is only one live pickling cucumber plant, the zucchinis are hanging on... mostly, and the pumpkins are huge and wonderful but I can see the mildew spreading. I sprayed all the leaves quite thoroughly with milk and water, hopefully that'll help.

And the Chicken Coop Beautification Project continues. The gladiolas are just starting to bloom, and they are huge and bright and wonderful. The heritage sunflowers are opening, they're a wonderful rusty-red color with multiple blooms per stem. I'm going to spend the winter researching flowering vines, and in spring plant something that will grow over and cover the chicken wire portion of the fence in plant, so that it looks like a coop made of flowers. We'll keep it pruned from the west and south sides, so that there is some sun for the rooster.

I didn't know you could eat sweet potato leaves! Raw, or cooked, or...?

I learned about sweet potato leaves from someone else a few pages ago in this thread (I think, I do a lot of link hopping and discover things that way). My favorite way is any place I would use cooked spinach. They are apparently edible raw, but I just like them better cooked. Preferably in this lovely little "breakfast" bowl I make (I only eat it for dinner) where you put a piece of toasted bread or english muffin on the bottom of a bowl, then top it with spinach/sweet potato leaves cooked in bacon fat, then put the bacon that produced the fat on top of the greens (crumbled), and then top with a raw egg and a touch of cream and cook at 400 until the egg is done.

Captcha said:

I didn't know you could eat sweet potato leaves! Raw, or cooked, or...?

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I didn't know this, either, since I've never grown sweet potatoes, and probably never will. That's not a knock on sweet potatoes. I love them. But where I live, in the far short season North, they are just an impossibility.

BUT, for God's sake, never eat regular potato leaves. They are seriously poisonous. Regular potatoes and sweet potatoes are not closely related plants.

caw

Captcha said:

I'm intrigued by the mushroom compost, although I disagree that good compost smells - a well-aerated compost pile doesn't stink, to my nose.

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A standard compost heap (I keep one of those, too, separate from the mushroom stuff) doesn't generally smell very bad. But trust me, the mushroom one will. So you probably don't want it up next to your doors or windows. But, as I said, that odor is nothing more than a signal that the leetle tiny composting organisms are hard at their industrial task.

We have several really big woodland parks in my city, and mushrooms are a huge natural part of the forest compost ecology. Beginning about right now, they get so aromiferous that you can smell them when you drive past.

I leave my bin out in the garden, ziptied to a fence to prevent wind problems, and let it sit all winter. It gets covered by snow, which is great, because it insulates and allows the work to continue. By spring, it's a wet, gelatinous pile of vile odoriferous goo, but as soon as you dump it out and let it dry for a few hours, the stink largely goes away. I just rake it into the soil at the beginning of the planting season, and this year's results were magnificent.

I'm going out tomorrow on another foraging expedition, hope to bring back three or four big bags of otherwise useless fungi.

caw

We get a lot of mushrooms (some enormous ones too) in the garden after a rain, Blacbird, I'm going to see if I can give composting them a try.

I'm pulled up the lettuce, in favor of another round of radishes and carrots. The Brussels sprouts and decently sized, and the tomatoes are finally reddening. I'm still drowning in cucumbers - last week, I had six sitting on the counter with nothing to do. I think spinach and kale will go in for the fall, but I'm not sure. What's everyone else fall-planting?

I'm still pretty much the only person in the garden. There's another woman who has one of the edge-beds who has started coming around... I just don't understand people.

I just pulled out the last of my pea plants - they were great for a few weeks, but then got spindly and stopped producing - and slapped a bunch more seeds in - we'll see if they have time to produce anything before the cold comes.

I've been harvesting loads of green beans (and the purple variety, which I prefer because they're easier to find through the foliage and taste the same), cut-and-come-again lettuce, rainbow chard (so pretty!) and a few carrots and beets. I've only gotten a few tomatoes so far - lots of green ones, but they just aren't ripening! Very frustrating to see them all sitting there, waiting for... what?

My sweet peppers were a bust - didn't do well after transplanting, even though I hardened them off much more carefully than my other plants. Basil also didn't do much for me this year. The asparagus roots I planted in the spring have come up delicate and beautiful - another few years to wait for them, though.

And speaking of waiting... I moved to a new house last winter and planted fruit trees this spring. Peaches, plums, sweet cherries, pears, and apples. It'll be a while before they produce anything, but they're all growing well, and some day, I'll have an orchard!

Then when the zombies come, I'll have lots of food!

CoffeeBeans said:

... I think spinach and kale will go in for the fall, but I'm not sure. What's everyone else fall-planting?
....

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We basically have a single growing season here (~May through September). Hence my evil experiment with a covered plot this fall/winter.

I've gathered up some old 4x1s, so next phase is to measure the plastic I've got and set the stakes accordingly.

If I can achieve and maintain a 10-15 degree differential for at least a couple months, that'll be shiny!

Plants in that section include: green onion, wild spinach, garlic mustard, swiss chard, sweet potato vines.

I am giving away grapes by the bucket. My daughter juices what i gave her. A couple of teachers at school will make jelly with theirs. I am thinking of making wine with what is left but they are green table grapes, not wine grapes. My great grandmother used to serve "Czech" wine when I was a kid. It tasted a lot like Mogen David but someone made it. Does anyone know what I am talking about? Any home wine recipes? --s6