I love gardening. I have switched most of my garden to a BTE garden. A BTE garden is a garden based on thick mulches and no tilling. I have tomatoes and peppers started and I am going to plant Savoy cabbage, late season cabbage, and broccoli soon. Anyone else like to garden? PS. I also plant ornamental plants and shrubs.
Gardening is my bette noir (whatever that means? ), and it's the secondary reason I sold up a house to buy this apartment. After the removal vans had loaded up and pulled away to come here, and as I drove away with my beloved, the two sprogs, and the few small valuables I didn't want to entrust to the removals guys, I took one look back at the garden and thought to myself 'Never again!'
Sounds nice... spring vegie garden, it's autumn here now so will likely wait out winter and replenish the soil with manure till we hit late winter in August. I love gardening, just don't have much time for it these days, apart from mowing the lawn...I hate a lawn untidy. Which reminds me what I'll be doing on the weekend.
But what's to love, Witchy? When I used to be mowing my lawns, which surely must be the most brain-numbing activity a sentient being can waste their life doing, I was always thinking 'Bloody hell, I'll have to do this again in a fortnight; and then a fortnight after that . . . ' I actually found the prospect really depressing. Actually when I was negotiating to buy this flat the builder's agent asked me if I wanted the 7 big plant pots which were strategically placed on the balcony. To paraphrase my reply, I said 'No, thank you.'
I have two raised beds for vegetable gardening. I just planted onions, carrots, a lettuce mix, tomatoes and rosemary. I will plant peppers in a couple of weeks, and squash.
No, I don't really like gardening. I would only do it as a matter of survival. My parents had me work in the garden as a child, tilling, hoeing weeds, planting, picking vegetables. This work was not as bad as cleaning out the barn, digging post holes and picking up rocks---but is was just another form of slave labor.
I would like to learn how to make pickles so I suppose I should learn about cucumbers. I'd one day want to can my own pickles.
Gardening is right behind fishing in my favorite things. (altho both are WELL behind sex) I like to propagate trees and shrubs by taking cuttings and rooting them. I recently moved from having nearly 8 acres to under 1 acre - my goal is to have no grass -- plant/shrub beds with mulch and paths only. I take neighbor's grass clippings and compost them. Not really into growing food, except for Hazelnuts, blueberries, and raspberries. At my old house, I had an incredible variety of plants, trees, and shrubs - "green thumb" visitors would always find at least one thing they'd have to say "what's that?" One tip - I read up on Japanese Beetles - the best thing is "milky spore" - a bacteria that kills the beetle larva - but it's expensive. Sooo, whenever I find a grub (beetle larva) I throw it in a pail with sand and "milky spore" - so now a have pail-fuls of sand with the milky spore bacteria - free.
Hi, I live in a 3rd floor flat with no garden and know zilch about the subject, but as a matter of interest how many people could a typical temperate-climate garden like this feed all year round, year in year out? (I'm envisaging a survival scenario after an apocalyptic catastrophe that wipes out civilisation and 99% of the world's population, and the survivors have to grow their own food) PS- I also posted pics of 1-acre and 5-acre smallholdings in the 'Survival and Sustainability' thread here- http://politicalforum.com/index.php?threads/smallholdings.499133/ and would welcome input on them too..
I could make what you showed work for me - because I would hunt the deer that would come to eat the corn in the upper right corner, and hunt the rabbits that would come to eat much of the rest. I would draw the line at eating Squirrels (but I would hunt the tree rats). The vegetables would be used in making stew for some of the tougher deer cuts and as sides for roasted rabbit. YUM!
Your expertise is largely lost in this "Members Casual Chat" thread mate, we need you (and other gardeners/farmers/hunters etc) over in the "Survival and Sustainability' thread to help us stay alive.. http://politicalforum.com/index.php?forums/survival-and-sustainability.100/ Could be rough times ahead-- "And I saw a beast coming out of the sea. It had ten horns and seven heads, with ten crowns on its horns"-Revelation 13:1 Multiple warhead ICBM
obviously the smell of freshly cut grass is wasted on you my garden is mostly ornamental, I have flowers that only flower once a year, pamper them and wait all year long for this momentous occasion... so beautiful. My dining table indoors display fresh Asiatic lilies all year round (I buy them mostly, I can't grow them all year round) I don't know how you do it Cerb, without plants and trees I would surely die.
I have canned my own pickles and I also pickled green beans, peppers etc. It is fun. The hardest part for me is keeping the pickles crisp.
It is hard to say how much a garden will produce. I depends on many things. I did notice plants growing under the drip line of the apple tree. That spot will grow little. The drip line on a tree is where the water drips off the leaves in summer. I would hate to depend on any garden to sustaine me. I would also have some livestock. Gardens have good and bad years.
One dabbles. I'll be growing a few things this year, hopefully more successfully than last year. One problem is my yard is very shady due to all the trees.
Yes I grow a substantial amount of my own food. Whether or not one could call that "love" is arguable. I love it for the most part when I have just harvested something. Up until that point, it is largely a bane. I have had greens and a bitter lettuce all winter outside. Will be so glad when I get to plow all that under, but then comes all the work that follows.
I love gardening. We live off the produce of ours. Potatoes (sweet, kipfler, waxy yellows, creamy whites), kale, spinach, broccoli, squash, red lettuce, cauliflower, cabbage, tomatoes (about 6 varieties), carrots, beets, zucchini, rosemary, cucumbers, snow peas, beans, parsnips, chilli (several varieties and strengths), basil, thyme, sage, mint, garlic, spring onions, chives, lemons, oranges, limes, locquat, macadamias, 4 apple varieties, pears, plums, raspberries, blueberries .... etc etc etc. Mind you, I only love it for 9 months of the year. I loathe it in summer ... when my aversion to heat means I can only garden at 6am or 7pm.
This is a good way to describe the relationship one has to a food garden. But I think there is some additional love there ... just in being outdoors and getting dirty hands.
Yeah that being outside and getting dirty hands can be done in ways a lot less frustrating. I am always experimenting with new varieties and types of crops that one doesn't normally find around here growing which is the only part of it I truly enjoy I guess when it works out. I prefer my outdoorsing and dirty hands in the winter on bigger projects than planting a row of little seeds in holes.
No, not at all, provided someone else has cut it? As a matter of fact, when I was out walking a week or so ago I caught the smell, and it reminded me spring isn't so far away; I love the smell of fresh-mown grass. I do as well, Witchypoo. One of my greatest joys is to walk through our local glens (extensive areas of woodland and wild flowers - especially when there are carpets of bluebells? What a sight!) first thing in the morning, when the only sounds are the rustling of the trees and the birdsong. Your garden sounds lovely.
I like ornamental plants too. I have roses, hydrangea, angel trumpet, and many others. I am starting peppers, tomatoes, coneflower , zinna, and even some large gourds.
I tried raised beds and I like them so much I now have 7. The soil prep, the weeding (almost none), and the reduced bending can't be beat. We have lots of voles so my beds have 1/4" "hardware fabric" (screen) on the bottom and ground cover between them to control weeds. I grow kale, carrots, pole beans (not in beds), chard, onions, beets, snap peas, spinach, and butternut squash (not in beds). You can't beat the quality of home grown. Green beans are a breeze here with no pests. We grow and freeze enough to last us all winter until the next crop is producing and it's easy as falling out of bed. I live in Oregon and I grow kale all winter. When a freeze or snow comes I put clear plastic sheeting over it. With a touch of frost kale gets sweet! You can't beat it December - April.
