Gardening Thread - Show me your gardens!

well help you.

remember. dont give up if your first season or two are a fail.

it took me two seasons of practice to get nice results on my third season

 

Yeah, it's been bad. Can't imagine what California's like. Of course, it doesn't help that my garden soil is only 2 growing seasons removed from being moderately clay-ey plain-jane topsoil. It hasn't built up the tilth it needs yet for prolonged dry spells.

Welcome to the thread! Nothing wrong with being new; we all started somewhere.

X2
If you plant chilis in the same bed as squash or zucchini, they'll get crowded out. The Squash and Zucchini will even grow out of the bed and spread across your yard. As an example, I have a bed that's 8X36, and it's got 8 squash plants in it, with room for them to spread up the bank behind the bed.
One option would be to get a couple of the 5 gallon buckets from home depot and put your peppers and herbs in those. Just drill drainage holes in the bottom. There's a bunch of articles online about bucket gardening, and for plants like peppers that like a lot of sun it can be handy to have a bucket or two in the sunniest part of your yard rather than a full-sized garden bed.

Yep. We're here to help if you've got any questions!

Nice! Not sure if I've told you before or not, but I like that bed layout. Looks good for a stand-alone garden plot; better than just a regular 4X8.

 

Pics or it didn't happen!!

Just kidding. Good for you! More people should do it, I think. Glad we provided some inspiration!

 

If you look in my post above, the big pot in the back has my zucchini in it because otherwise it will take over.

It was supposed to kind of look like a qbert layout, with multiple levels, but the wife killed that idea and this is what I ended up with.

 

That would have been an awesome garden.

 

Heirloom everything.

 

Cukes, assorted herbs, okra, yellow and white onions, garlic, sweet potatoes, assorted peppers, a dozen different tomatos, zucchini, yellow squash, cantaloupes, water melons, pumpkins, spaghetti squash. Plus we put in a fifty foot patch of asparagus. 7 dairy goats, 2 pigs(bacon on the hoof), and about 35 chickens. We just put a dozen chickens in the freezer. We like to eat good food.

 

Lol. My whole front yard was supposed to be garden w/mulched (and eventually stone/brick) pathways between the beds, so that I wouldn't have to mow. GF killed that idea

Mine's all heirloom too. I'm going to try saving my own seeds this fall, and see if I can get away with just buying root crop seeds next year.

Reminds me of my parent's garden, in a way. They have about an acre of garden, the house/yard sit on an acre, and pigs and cattle get the other 98 or so. Theirs is a mix, though. My mom's side of the garden is all raised beds that my dad built for her about 35 years ago, and his side is level because he works it with the tractor (corn, beans, & squash in a trinity setup, plus potatoes on a fairly large scale)

 

WOW

 

alright ladies. take your pic.

 

If she goes for that one on the far right, she's kinky.
And she'll probably eventually end up trying to talk you into a devil's threesome.


What variety of cukes are those? They're a much paler green than the variety I usually grow.

 

They're suppose to be straight eights. I think the goat manure took care of that 8 inch max length

 

Don't let word about that get around, or men everywhere will be rubbing goat manure onto their...cucumbers.

 

Or you could advert it in the back of car and gun mags. Apparently that crowd has a lot of erectile dysfunction, if the ads in the back of my Car & Driver and Guns & Ammo mags are any indicator.

 

Thank you. Yea I actually started the chili plants in some gallon buckets to keep in the yard. I think I can manage these and trying a tomato plant on the side. With some confidence Ill definitely build a box and try some new vegetables.

 

We let the new batch of birdlings out of their coop for the first time last night. Took them quite a while to build up the nerve to actually step through the door.


And then once they finally did get out nobody wanted to stray very far from the rest of the flock.

 

Do you have a separate coop for the youngins'? When we get a new batch, we put them in a sectioned-off part of the coop so that they're exposed to the hens but don't get picked on.

Oh, and we started fermenting our first batch of pickles/cukes last Saturday, theyre almost done less than a week later. We are getting a little overrun now so we're going to do some regular canned pickles this weekend. Summer squash and zucchini are coming in quick too.

 

Yeah, I have two coops. One for the layers and one for the broilers. They have adjoining runs, so the new layers are in the broiler coop until they get socialized (and large) enough to move in with the older girls. Now that they're outside the girls should be able to get acquainted without attacking each other, haha!
The broilers come in today, but I'll keep them in a box in the cellar under a heat lamp for a few weeks before they get moved out to the coop. By the time they're old enough to move out to the coop the new layers should be old enough to move in with the older girls.

 

Sounds like you have your hands full, but fun too. We only started raising chickens 3 years ago and had 8 layers for a while (4 the first year and 2 each following year), so small beans compared to your operation. Its fun watching them explore the world for the first time, everything is so darn interesting!!

 

Argh. Tell me about it.
We've got 25 broilers coming in this year. We'll keep 15, and a few people have asked us to raise birds for them this year as well.