Gardening Thread - Show me your gardens!

We've had good luck with Parsnips; the critters seem to mostly leave those alone. But the garlic was always spotty in the spring, and we'd find a bunch of chewed-on cloves sitting on top of the soil. So we started spring planting instead to work around them.

 

Really? I did not know any of this. The whole "Learn something new everyday" kind of thing, lol. Could you post any pics?

 

Bamboo is well known to get out of control if you don't do steps to prevent it. Here is a nice link.

 

I'll be honest, the main reason I found this very fascinating is...anymore it's sort of hard to "fight back" in a lot of situations without getting, like put in jail, ya know. So I like passive aggressive ways of being an absolutely annoy fuck, **ONLY WHEN NEED TRULY BE** (I went toe to toe with Dollar General for 6 months while they built a store directly behind the house I was living in), and this is a wonderful piece of info to know. I would have loved to planted Bamboo in the space between my fence and the DG parking lot (3 ft, literally) and watched it take over!!!!

 

They prolly have excavators and herbicides lol

 

There are two types bamboo, clumping and regular. Regular grows like crazy and has roots that grow all over the map and come up everywhere. Clumping bamboo grows in clumps and will slowly expand in that circle and is easy to control. Over fertilizing will curb its growth. We have a fence line that is all clumping bamboo and it has pretty much stayed where it was. We were going to remove it when we bought the house in 06, but never got around to it and then we had a hurricane and it was amazing at how much the bamboo protected the house and deflected a lot of wind and rain, so we have stuck with it and apart from it seriously needing to be trimmed back and cleaned up, we have grown to like it and it makes for a separation from the car park behind us.

 

It figures there'd be a gardening thread on here. I'm just beginning to get started on making a small aquaponic garden, some of the ones ya'll have done look amazing.


Edit: Just a quick video of the setup https://youtu.be/KIqrG-HRvtE

 

Put my Johnny's order in today, and also ordered a couple of randoms from Territorial. Figured I'd try my hand at growing a big pumpkin so I ordered a packet of Big Moose, and needed some more mammoth sunflower seeds for in front of the windows on the house. Everything else on my orders was business as usual.

 

So we're trying Bees this year! I've been wanting to put some in since we bought the house, but I've kept putting it off and putting it off while I tried to build up a decent wildflower population around the house, but they keep dying off rather than overwintering. So I've decided that I'm just planting a bunch of annuals and letting the bees do the rest of the foraging themselves
Starting off small, just one hive for the first year or two, but will likely expand if they do well.

 

That’s awesome, how do they handle the winters up there, do you have anything special you do for the hive during this time of year? My family has done a few hives for years down in TX, I’d like to get one here in TN on my 1/2 acre but that’s down the road a bit.

 

We do bees. Well I help it's more my wife. Any questions ask and I will try to help. We have found like most things many differing opinions about bees and it's not one thing that works for everybody. This is our 4th year with bees but have yet to over winter a hive. We hope this winter we can. Find a local bee club and try to get as much info locally as you can but even then everybody seems to have a different way of doing things. We started with one hive and have three now. Its a fun hobby that we are sticking with until we figure it out. Good luck.

 

My family’s current hives in TX. Fun bee fact- if you look at the front of the hives you’ll see the first one has one stripe, the second one has two. The bees actually recognize this geometric pattern as their hive.

 

Apparently they can overwinter fine if you don't overharvest their honey supply. And most of the beekeepers up here apparently recommend a tar paper wrap for the cold months, to help keep drafts down and so they can get some solar gain during the day.

 

Will do. We've signed up for a course in March that one of the local beekeepers teaches, so we'll get a lot of directly applicable experience.

 

Here is a pic of our hives. We usually have done a wind break of some kind and this year we changed and did old hay bales we had. Lot of people use hay or straw in our area. I have heard of wrapping the hive and it works from what I have seen. I have been told healthy bees rarely die from the cold it's from being wet and cold or no food. We leave enough honey stores for them plus supplement with some home made "food" for them. We have learned a lot from the first year and hope to over winter at least on of the hives this winter.

 

watch out for bears, may need to electric fence it if they are a nuisance...

 

Has anyone on here ordered plants from the company Burgess Seed and Plant Co? I am very interested in purchasing / planting some Forsythia for a hedge along our fence, and realize the plants will probably be tiny, but just wanted to know your overall experience with them.

 

Yeah, a 25 mile weed cutter is on the list for once the bees arrive in the spring. We had problems with bears getting into my parent's bees when I was a kid. I've never seen any sign in the woods around the house, but you never know when they'll show up.

 

they are sneaky, rare to see them around here unless they are thousands of yards away or on a bait pile of some sort.

 

Just found the garden thread Here is one yard of girls 11 hives now will be at 22 at end of year. Love keeping bees here is winter Eden garden. About done spring garden is next