What do you grow in your garden?

[Kolijah]

Garden time is my favorite time of year! I love to get home from work and run straight out to the garden to see what grew and rescue my potatoes from the little potato bugs (it's a daily ritual... come home from work, grab my little can, and pick all the potato bugs off my plants).

What do you grow in your garden? Anything you'd never grow again or will always grow? For me it's the potatoes... can't believe I'd never grown potatoes before. They're AWESOME! And we made it a family activity come digging time... everyone went barefoot and sat down in the dirt and dug up potatoes.

Last year I did kennebec potatoes, broccoli, green bell pepper, hot hungarian wax peppers, habanero peppers, tomatoes (big boys), pop corn, sweet yellow corn, silver queen corn, yellow zucchini, green zucchini, cucumbers and green beans. There was also a row of marigolds at the front of the garden and a row of sunflowers at the back of the garden.

Still deciding on the garden for this year...

 

[chicmom]

Hello there!

I love all your pics and I also love gardening. I keep a small flock of chickens and my husband and I are also beekeepers. So glad you posted here!

I plant a garden each year. I've been successful with sweet corn, peas, cucumbers and green beans. I have really bad, hard soil that is full of clay, so each year I add some bull compost to it, and the soil is gradually improving. I also use miracle grow.

Last year, I changed my vegetable garden into a flower garden, with about 1/4 of the garden being a strawberry patch. It's done very well. I tried to plant flowers that really attracted honeybees and butterflies. I also put a nice bird bath in there so the bees would have a water source. The garden was just stunning! It did look a bit wild though, because I threw a honey bee flower seed mixure in it and I had flowers grow that were taller than I was. I'll have to upload some pics but I'm not the most computer saavy person.

This year I may change my garden again. There are bulbs for spring--tulips, daffodils and crocus, and a few others that I forget the names of, and then I still have the strawberries, and there are perennials, like a blue fountain clematis, mint, daylillies, pink sedum, coneflowers of several colors, Russian sage, Veronica Speedwell, a few butterfly bushes, a few types of coreopsis....Gosh, I can't think of everything! I may move some of the flowers to different locations so that I can put some more vegetables in there. I'm just not sure. LOL

Oh, I also have two exotic birds in the house, a Rosey Bourke (picture a little pink parakeet), and a Lutino Indian Ring Neck (picture a HUGE bright yellow parakeet with a red beak). I have two dogs too, a little mutt Gigi, and Fionna, who is an Irish Terrier.

Nice to meet you and we should keep in touch! Looks like you must have great soil! I'd LOVE to grow potatoes. Tried once and failed......

Sharon

 

[chicmom]

OH, and I love you sunflower pics. I grow them each year!

 

[Kolijah]

Bee keeping would be interesting! Do you do it to sell the honey or just personal uses?


I've never tried growing peas before! Thanks for the idea! I don't think I'll ever not grow potatoes now. Did it for the first time this year and I'm hooked! I'm terrible with flowers. My sunflowers and marigolds are the only ones I ever try to go since they're pretty hard to kill lol!

Your birds sound beautiful! I've got three kitties in the house- so we have a general rule of no house pets the kitties could eat... because my guys like to think their little wild cats. But I do have three dogs as well! A long haired weimaraner (Silas), an English Pointer (Jericho), and an Australian Cattledog mix (Duke). We certainly should keep in touch! I love meeting new people.

 

[lazy gardener]

Awww! Puppies! I've been dogless for over 10 years now. For easy flowers, absolute must have's in every vegetable garden, try calendula, and nasturtiums.

 

[nayeli]

I have a brown thumb but the plan this year is to use the worm castings (I started vermicomposting last year), and some free compost from our city to create raised garden beds. The plants I really want to grow are: peas, carrots, bell peppers, pepperocini's, tomatoes (a few different varities), romaine lettuce, cucumbers, strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, cantelope, and green beans. I'd like to do some fall plants too like pumpkin and squash and at least two fruit trees (apple and cherry)!

 

[Rosa moschata]

I live in a city, and I share the yard, so I can't be doing much in the way of veggies. My garden is fairly new (started putting it together in 2013) and purely ornamental. I started with 80 own-root band-sized roses, about 2/3 of which are antiques. In 2014 I added companion perennials, and clematis to fit accompany the roses climbing the side fence.

It's been an interesting endeavor, being as the yard (and soil) here were in such poor condition. In the Summer of 2013, while the baby roses were growing-on in their new pots filled with my own soil mix, I severely cut back an overgrown Callery pear to bring in more sun, and sawed its limbs into logs, which I used to build the edging for the raised beds. Cardboard was laid out over the grassy weeds, and that was topped with snipped up leaves and twigs from the tree. Then in October everything was covered with about 6" of composted mulch -- 15 cubic yards were delivered, taking me three days to spread out.

Over the next few months of Autumn, Winter and early Spring, I kept an eye out for online nursery sales and placed orders for anything that would fit into my "plan" and which was also marked down (most were 50% off). In Spring, a lot of composted manure from the local university's agriculture extension, as well as bagged organic fertilizer, was worked into the mulch to start the process of it becoming "soil" ready for the perennials. Then they got planted, and as they started to grow, I experienced my first rose flush from the roses planted the year before. Everything continued to grow and bloom in its time. By their second Autumn, it was hard to imagine my roses arrived in 3" pots only a year and a half earlier.

Then when the days started becoming cool, my order of bulbs arrived -- hundreds of bulbs. For early Spring, the low-growing mix is 100 each of Crocus tommasinianus 'Lilac Beauty', Iris reticulata 'Pixie', Chionodoxa lucilia 'Alba', and Anemone blanda 'Blue Shades. Poking through that will be 100 Narcissus 'Fragrant Mix'. Under some shrubs I planted 50 Hyacinthoides non-scripta (English Bluebells), and in a sunny bed went 100 Ipheion 'Starry Nights Mix'. For fragrance after the main rose flush, 25 each of Oriental, Trumpet, and Orien-Pet Lily mixes are dotted in the beds.

After the bulbs were planted, my last bit of gardening before Spring has been "putting the beds to bed." First I collected tree leaves as they fell on my street, and put a nice thick layer on the beds. Then my daily trips to Starbucks began -- I leave an empty 13gal kitchen garbage can with them, and return the next day to pick it up full and swap out another empty can for the next day. And repeat -- daily -- since Nov 14. It just so happens that there's one a few doors down from my job, so it's not going out of my way to make the trip. I dump the grounds in a wheelbarrow, pull out the filters for the compost area, and scoop the grounds onto the leaves about 2" thick. I think I need another two weeks to finish the last of the beds, then I'll take a break until Spring.

Used coffee grounds is simply too good to end up in the garbage. It has an N-P-K ratio of 2.0-0.36-0.67. True, that's "weak" as a fertilizer goes, but it makes great food for all the worms in the garden, adds bulk organic matter, and does add up as far as nutrients when applied as a thin top-layer of mulch. And the employees at Starbucks are more than happy that I'm taking it off their hands -- their garbage cans are much lighter these days.

 

[Honey Maid]

Wow, Long haired Weimaraner, I have never, ever, heard of those.
In my garden I like to plant vegies that freeze well. I've done pretty well with broccoli and cauliflower, bi-color corn. I have not had the best of luck with cucumbers, or tomatoes, or celery. Kale does real well, spinach so-so. The stupid squirrels got my green beans, and a lot of my snow peas. Haven't had much luck with bell peppers either. I love potatoes, and plant them in "potato bags". All the red and yellow onions come up really good. Tried okra once, but it did not do well at all.
The very first year I had a garden I planted pumpkins. I was worried that some of the plants may die, so i planted a bunch, what a mistake :-o. One year I planted trumpet squash, they almost took over the whole garden, they just grew and grew!

I love your garden. I think it is so cool to have a garden surrounded by lawn.

I also have bees, along with chickens, and soon ducks.

 

[TXchickmum]

-love gardening! -and to the original poster, I love the pics!! We grow the following in our garden: two varieties of green beans, crookneck squash, two to three varieties of tomatoes, jalapeno peppers, cilantro, basil, oregano, rosemary, mint, Mexican tarragon, lemon balm, sage, strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, and usually a few varieties of sunflowers as well! Our perennial beds also have a number of herbs mixed in. -love lavender and rosemary providing fragrance in the perennial gardens. (The chickens are currently working sections of the garden and utilizing them for dust baths.)

 

[Kolijah]

Wow, Long haired Weimaraner, I have never, ever, heard of those.

I met my first long haired weimaraner when I living in Australia. Apparently they weren't really bred in the United States since AKC considers the long hair a disqualifying trait. In the past few years though they've allowed the long hairs to be shown in field events and such (still can't show in confirmation events) so they are growing in popularity. I got my guy from Drehbar Weims in Michigan and he is SO wonderful. My dad always had short haired weims and now I'm hooked on the long hairs!

-love gardening! -and to the original poster, I love the pics!! We grow the following in our garden: two varieties of green beans, crookneck squash, two to three varieties of tomatoes, jalapeno peppers, cilantro, basil, oregano, rosemary, mint, Mexican tarragon, lemon balm, sage, strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, and usually a few varieties of sunflowers as well! Our perennial beds also have a number of herbs mixed in. -love lavender and rosemary providing fragrance in the perennial gardens. (The chickens are currently working sections of the garden and utilizing them for dust baths.)

Awesome! I'm going to try crookneck this year, and we finally got a pressure canner so we're doing three times as many green beans and corn (i hate both of them frozen... love both canned)! We're also going to try an herb garden this year... cilantro, basil, mint, (maybe rosemary... i heard it was hard to grow?), chives, lavendar, sage, lemon grass... I'm sure more! Hubby wants to try strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, red raspberries, and to plant a couple apple and mulberry trees. The neighbor down the road has gooseberries... and they were not that great raw but were AWESOME jams.

I don't have much of a green thumb in the flower department though. They seem more temperamental than the veggies lol. The marigolds and sunflowers were able to take care of themselves for the most part!