Yeah, part of it is that there are a ton of garden centres within a 5 minute drive that have crazy amounts of inventory.
Yeah I noticed the Walmart garden center had plenty of inventory of the "normal" garden starts and some were a little cheaper than mine. Also, a lot of people don't appreciate heirlooms. I grew extra heirloom beefsteak and red cherry because they are recognized names but didn't bother with mortgage lifters, purple Cherokee, etc this year. If I had more space I would grow a good variety of different tomatoes just to try them out, I think there are some wild and interesting cultivars out there but the plants take up a lot of space. A lot of home gardeners are happy with whatever common hybrid with uniform, red round fruit.
A buddy of mine reports on my site a bumper crop of pepper plants. He said all he did different was a grow light and heat pad. I thought, “I have some friends on another site he may like.” I planted my basil the other day, which leads me to ask: Any tips for keeping it nice and lush, not tall and scraggly? I understand there’s a way to clip and use it in a way good for continued growth.
@walt every time you clip or cut basil after a growth node, it will branch off at that closest remaining node. After my basil starts had about 3 sets of leaves/ growth nodes, I cut the tops off. They will keep branching as much as you clip them. Otherwise they grow branches straight up and eventually flower. The pot of basil I sold today was quite full and bushy. I think I chopped it 3xbefore selling it.
+1 to that. Yeah I was lazy with finding a fan. Knew I needed one but kept forgetting to place one. I ended up with leave edema all over my peppers when they were small.
What does a fan do? My newest plants are outside in my herb bed, but I’m not opposed to buying more and keeping it potted.
It causes resistance to the stems and forces them to fight harder to grow, and makes things bigger/stronger.
Kale is the winner in terms of greens so far this year. The swiss chard did not like my mix of neem and theracide bt. It's growing out but I really damaged the leaves on it so it will be another couple weeks before I can harvest anything, and I had a grand total of 1 spinach plant come up. You can eat the scapes and bolts of various plants. Dinner tonight with kale, a few peppers, green onion scapes, a bok choy bolt, a kale bolt. This big bunch of kale was just a tiny portion of what is out there. I'm super impressed with the kale plants. I won't forget to plant garlic this fall. I am looking forward to garlic scapes, yum.
I had a neighbor who I had offered zucchini plants to awhile back take me up on it, and he took some of my other odds n ends too. Which means I have a very small, manageable number of extras to be planted. I do want to have some space for rutabaga, turnips, and some greens. It'll be interesting to see how the season ends and if I'll be able to reuse some spots currently taken up. I'm really interested to find out how many lbs of potatoes I'll yield in my bag planter situation. I probably planted 1.25lbs of red potato seeds.
That's a really impressive setup you have there... really makes me want to do some potatoes like that next year. I have a whole fence line I could do that to that I think would work out well. Saturday is the big "plant stuff outside" day for me. Weather is finally here, and it's finally warm at night. Found a HUGE infestation of insect larvae on all of my pepper plants though... thousands of eggs... so I sprayed them all down before anything could hatch, but if I missed that, it could have been UGLY. As it was I only saw a few small things crawling around with no real damage to any of the plants. That soapy insecticide did a great job though... spritzed everything and you could almost watch the few live ones die in front of you. And speaking of peppers, they are all flowering right now, so definitely time to get them outside.
Thank you! I try to maximize my space and have more things I want to grow than area. The bag planters are an inexpensive container solution and the dirt is the most expensive part of them. I'm still trying to figure out the logistics of running a wicking bed along that entire fence to act as a replacement fence and planter combo. My neighbor suggested repurposing bathtubs. Not sure they are deep enough but I'll simmer on that idea. That is a fuckton of aphids. Does that room have an outside door? Good thing you caught it! Happy planting this weekend. Spending time outside digging in the dirt is so satisfying.
No outside door... it's the laundry room. That being said we have an unscreened window not far from there that the cats go in and out of. The first time that happened a couple of years ago I swore that I'd never let it happen again, so I put a small bug zapper in that room that comes on for a few hours every night (2-4am), and every morning I spend some time watering, pruning, and just inspecting the plants, for exactly this reason. I want to stay aware of what's going on with them. Needless to say it seems to have paid off. Yep... I had some blood work done this week and while I was waiting for them to stab me there were signs that were saying "gardening helps prevent some cancers" or some shit. It's a bit of a stretch, if you ask me, but still, I'm all for it. Looking forward to getting dirty in the hot sun this weekend. Will also be welding up a new herb rack as I trash the original cedar wood trough thing I made a few years ago.... making it more portable now. So yeah, transplanting, watering, and welding... should make for a fun weekend.
Pft. Maybe. I assume they are not including skin cancers. I have to finish up whatever I'm doing early or I can feel my forehead burning by 10am. I have a redneck Riviera hat that helps but I forget to wear the damned thing 75% of the time.