Gardening

I figured as much but wasn't sure if they were hybridized to survive some sort of brutal temps.

Pablos excellent Craftsmanship! Looks great! My only fear is that it is literally raised off the ground and therefore doesn't benefit from the geothermal temperature of the natural ground. So that raised ground bed will be cooler then if you had just built it on the natural ground. If its not cold where you are and you only need it for regular Summer planting you are fine however if you wanted to say grow a fall winter crop of say spinach,broccoli etc...The soil temp will be to cold.

Really looks good though kudos!

I just built a hoop house green house 15' x 18' I will post pictures later.

As for tomatoes there are many pest factors with tomatoes. One year can go really well then the next year you may get hit with a stink bug infestation or blight. This year I have a Colorado potato beetle problem had no idea they ate tomatoes but evidently they do.

My peas are ready and my two year old is constantly asking me to open them up for her. I swear my finger tips are green right now from all the peas I've been opening.

My strawberries unfortunately, never had a chance. Kids have been picking them as soon as they notice one growing, eating them when they have the barest hint of red (ew!).

We've got peaches on our trees! We should get a decent harvest this year, provided they get larger and soften. None of these hard, mutated to ship well peaches from the grocery store! Also, our potatoes exploded over the last week. My russet plants must be a foot tall all of a sudden. We've been eating peas, radishes, lettuce (when the blasted deer don't eat it), and we're about to have a glut of tomatoes from a couple of our plants.

I'm planting about 30 raspberry bushes this summer, can't decide on which variety(ies) to get. Anyone in the Great Lakes region have particularly good luck with raspberries?

Finally identified the one weed in our garden that we can't get rid of. Canada Thistle. This fucker is a nightmare and it's root structure looks like an underground spiderweb. Going to have to use herbicide on it which pisses me off since we eat stuff from our garden but at least I can apply the stuff only to the leaves of the plant. Still it's going to take 2-3 years of treatment to kill this thing.

Fucking eh... Just hope this year the Milky Spore we have been putting down for the last 2 years will finally keep the Japanese Beetles at bay. Grape vine struggles every year.

We put our tomatoes out late, so we are just now having plants putting on fruit. I want ripe tomatoes now, damnit.

My apartment has a pretty big balcony which is currently completely empty. I'd like to plant some edibles, but I've been watching it the past few weeks and the problem is that the balcony literally receives zero sunlight; not even so much as a single ray of light at all throughout the day. Are there any fruits/veggies/spices I could plant in such a shady area that would actually grow, or am I out of luck?

If you're really interested, you could put in a couple of full spectrum floodlights and direct them right at the plants all day (not at night, so you don't piss people off). There are also other things you can do, like use reflective mulch, or some other reflective ground covering. It will help, and it's easily found online, if not in your local stores.

But, in general, you're going to have a hard time growing anything in there. Various varieties of lettuce will probably do okay, here's a list of highly shade-tolerant produce:

Best Shade-Tolerant Vegetables - Organic Gardening - MOTHER EARTH NEWS

Thanks. I had already stumbled upon that link after some initial Googling, but even the most shade tolerant plants there (according to the site) require at least a couple hours of sunlight a day. I might give it a small try with some reflective mulch and see what happens. I don't really want to deal with lights, and I'm not sure my complex would be too happy about that, anyway.

Maybe I'll just start a bad ass moss garden.

Try some tomatoes in a pot right out at the edge of your deck. Won't cost much, might grow you some delicious tomatoes. Indirect sunlight can work sometimes. Can't hurt to try.
Good luck.

I know most of the folks here are not in socal but we got some nasty clay soil at home that I really want to get fixed. Shits hard as fuck and new plants with smaller roots have a hard time taking root because of this. We are considering getting a landscape company to come in and rehabilitate the dirt but its kinda of iffy right now. I did some research and heard that plenty of gypsum salt and a mix of sandy topsoil and mulch/compost should help. But it looks like for us to do add this to the soil we would actually need to get rid of some of the old soil.

Question is, what the fuck do we do with the old soil? Hire a dump truck to haul it away to a landfill? Would love to hear from people here who have had success rehabilitating hardened clay soil.

Depending on how your garden is set up, you might not have to get rid of any old soil. The dirt around here is VERY hard and full of clay as well. When we started our garden, instead of just marking off a large section of yard and tilling it up, I built a box around it with 2x10s, so that way I had some extra height to add better soil, mulch, and other additives and THEN till it up. I think all the extra topsoil and mulch ended up raising the bed of the garden up roughly 5 of the 10 inches that I had to work with, but just having that little bit of a containing wall made everything so much easier, and didn't cost hardly anything. It doesn't look super fancy, but it works.

Fixing clay soil for gardening is a multi-step process. What I'd do is first add a good, thick layer of sand, and work that into the clay soil well. Then I'd add peat moss. A LOT of peat moss. Many inches of peat moss. Work it deeply into the soil, and you should be good to go in the spring.

Mixtilplix_sl said:

I know most of the folks here are not in socal but we got some nasty clay soil at home that I really want to get fixed. Shits hard as fuck and new plants with smaller roots have a hard time taking root because of this. We are considering getting a landscape company to come in and rehabilitate the dirt but its kinda of iffy right now. I did some research and heard that plenty of gypsum salt and a mix of sandy topsoil and mulch/compost should help. But it looks like for us to do add this to the soil we would actually need to get rid of some of the old soil.

Question is, what the fuck do we do with the old soil? Hire a dump truck to haul it away to a landfill? Would love to hear from people here who have had success rehabilitating hardened clay soil.

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We have clay soil here and we used the very advanced technique of adding earthworms to the soil and waiting a year. They proliferated like you wouldn't fucking believe and that helped but even so I still had to rent a tiller and mix the planting area with bags of gardening soil from our local store. STILL on our third year I built simple raised beds with 2x4's that cost like $1.24 each for like $24 total for 7 raised bed boxes. Then I ordered a special compost gardening soil mixture from local supplier for $200 or so delivered and put it in all the beds. It's been gravy ever since.


My suggestion to you is go straight to the raised beds + garden soil. Renting a bunch of equipment to make an area plant ready is going to end up more expensive anyway.

We've been getting Early Girl tomatoes for a couple weeks now, maybe a month, but our Beefsteak tomatoes have just started turning. Had the first one tonight... sooo good.

Yes we were late planting.

We've been getting roma tomatos and other smaller varieties for several weeks now, but our Beefsteak tomatos are a goddamn mess. Tons of like cracks and fissures in them, they look horrid. A neighbor told me that happens when the weather(heat) fluctuates wildly during the summer, which we have had here so far. A few days here and there in the 90s, but most days in the high 70s and low 80s, with nights dipping down into the 50s occasionally. Stark contrast to last summer when we had something like 12 straight days over 100 degrees by this point in the summer, and almost no rain to speak of. This year everything is still lush and green as cool and as wet as it has been.

We are having issues with tomatoes here, too. The issue is that it's a Mediterranean plant, and if it gets to 55 degrees, the tomato's metabolism stops completely, and takes several days to get going again. That means the fruit can grow some, stop, grow some more, stop...it never ripens, and the plants start to shrivel. This winter was bloody hard on things, the late frost killed a lot of fruit production (peaches especially), and now the cool summer is shitting on growing food, too. Produce is going to be wicked expensive this winter...

joeboo_sl said:

We've been getting roma tomatos and other smaller varieties for several weeks now, but our Beefsteak tomatos are a goddamn mess. Tons of like cracks and fissures in them, they look horrid.

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I'm no expert, but I've heard cracking comes from variance in watering. Dry to really wet, the insides of the tomato grow faster than the outside. Could be an old wives tale. We mulch with old newspapers, and it helps keep the ground moist. Looks pretty hillbilly though if your garden is in a view-able area.

Mixtilplix_sl said:

I know most of the folks here are not in socal but we got some nasty clay soil at home that I really want to get fixed. Shits hard as fuck and new plants with smaller roots have a hard time taking root because of this. We are considering getting a landscape company to come in and rehabilitate the dirt but its kinda of iffy right now. I did some research and heard that plenty of gypsum salt and a mix of sandy topsoil and mulch/compost should help. But it looks like for us to do add this to the soil we would actually need to get rid of some of the old soil.

Question is, what the fuck do we do with the old soil? Hire a dump truck to haul it away to a landfill? Would love to hear from people here who have had success rehabilitating hardened clay soil.

Click to expand...

This is an easy cheap way to fix your soil but it may take a year or two before you start seeing results but if you are willing to try you can't argue with the results. This is a youtube channel I watch he can get a little heavy handed with the organic part but he does have some good ideas.

Funny you post that because that is exactly what i started doing based on stuff I was reading around the net. I got some really good results immediately, not soil quality wise but moisture wise. Plants started getting their color back. I was finally able to dig holes and start planting after doing some heavy mulching. I am not really planting veggies but more for landscape use. Most plants that I dig holes for, I end up doing sharp drainage.