This was only my second year gardening, and first year with my own yard 😤 Everything is in containers. I struggled a lot with figuring out a good place to put containers that got enough sunlight. I was trying to avoid the front yard because I was worried about car exhaust and grossness getting onto veggies, but when I finally caved and moved everything to the front it started growing much much better. Lots of things also got chomped by deer and groundhogs in the backyard. I had hoped that big containers would keep the groundhogs out but I caught one climbing up onto the top and eating all the seedlings. Lots of failures, lots of dead plants. I tried to plant some native flowers in the backyard hoping to get them to spread to the empty lot behind us, but no success. A lot of seeds got eaten by birds.
I had better luck with both veggie and flower starts that I bought from the local farmer’s market. I was SO CLOSE to getting sunflowers, the flower heads were coming out but then we had a big windy thunderstorm that knocked them over and they got all crispy after :( My only harvest this year are a couple of jalapeno peppers. I didn’t start anything indoors this year, but I definitely see the value in it now and I’m hoping to get a rack with grow lights set up over the winter.
What about you guys??
This is my first year with an in-ground garden in Zone 6a! Here’s what I’ve got:
-Plant more peppers, I eat a lot of peppers and could use more
-Plant beans/peas earlier
-Plant okra later
-Only ONE cucumber plant!!! Just one! No one needs more than one!
-More ground cherries, they did great and I love 'em
-Wouldn’t bother with celery again, probably
-Would give radishes another shot, they did okay. I’d do kohlrabi again too
-Planted too many types of lettuce
For few years I try permaculture gardening. It is sometimes good sometimes bad. This year was dry and not much things grow. I am looking for next year, my asparagus will mature and could be harvested.
What aspects of permaculture have you been incorporating into your garden?
I plant multiple different kinds of plants on same plot, no-till and I am trying to have more permanent veggies in the mixx. But no exact methods, just trying what might work.
I live in an apartment so my gardening is limited to containers on my balcony as well as a million tropical houseplants. I finally figured out what grows best in my conditions of scorching hot in the morning and nice and cool in the afternoon out there. I’m growing a fig and a dwarf citrus as well as a blueberry bush that is finally not hating the spot I put it in! Otherwise it’s a bunch of succulents out there.
I’m hoping one day to have a real garden but for now I’m having fun with what I can grow both indoors and outdoors.
I got a greenhouse from multiple family members as a combined birthday and Christmas present. Some plants like tomatoes and chili love it there. Some others die because of the heat. Others again love it too much and grow too quickly, becoming too long and thin to support their own weight.
Also, a “problem” I’ve had for the two years I’ve been trying to get some vegetables is being pessimistic about how many seeds will sprout and getting WAY too many. And once they’ve all happily sprouted I don’t have the heart to throw them away, so I end up having a hard time finding enough space for everything. Luxury problem I know 😅
We’ve had an incredibly wet spring and summer, and many of our plants are leggy and behind schedule for it. Things in the ground have fared better than the few hundred potted plants we have, but we just don’t have enough space under cover to house everything. We have a friend who’s going to lend us their greenhouse jig soon so we can build another larger one, thankfully. Luckily all the plants we’re growing in air prune boxes don’t appear as chlorotic.
A porcupine has chewed down nearly all of a new-to-me raspberry cultivar (‘Anne’, in case anyone is curious) patch, including all of the cuttings we took when we planted it. We’re burying the tips to make even more, which is okay, but I had some last year and was really looking forward to eating them from the yard this year. The wet weather and a late hard freeze caused most of the early fruits to fail, so we didn’t get cherries, apples, or blueberries either. Though, the legginess of all of our tea plants has meant a bumper crop of those. We’re so far behind the season that we don’t even know if we’ve been hit by “peppergate” yet.
OP, I’m going to tell you what I’ve been told by my master gardener friends: you’re not a real gardener until you’ve lost track of your death toll in the garden <3
My raspberries are spreading more than I can even handle so I don’t have the same problem, but what does burrying the tips mean? Like your bending the shoots over and burying the tips as a method of propagation?
Yep, you got it! Many Rubus family plants will self propagate when their growing tips reach the ground by sending out new roots from the point where it contacts. With a little extra soil or fine mulch like chunky sawdust or fine wood chips and a weight, you can even get a whole cane to root out. Once you see a few roots at a length of an inch or so they’ll generally be able to support themselves when cut into individuals and transplanted.
