Gardening Thread - Show me your gardens!

I wouldnt know how to process them.

 

Time consuming.
Wash in lemon juice, gut, they are full of seeds, cut into quarters, freeze, till we have at least 8 cups.
Make jam with rosehips, a bit of oranges, apples, unbleached sugar, pectin.
My MIL swears by it. Says one teaspoon a day helps with joint pain.
One of the 2 medicinal plants we grow. Sitka rose is beautifull, and works great as a hedge plant. They are covered in needles.
Second plant is little leaf linden.

 

3rd picking

 

That’s quite a bit from that small tree. My grandparents had a couple bigger trees in their yard, could climb up into one.
Duane

 

My grandfather had several big fig trees. Did my share of climbing them too.

 

Thats quite a producer

 

Brown Turkey?

 

4th lap.

 

Been busy cutting back overgrown growth, filling beds with soil, and cutting the property lawn every figgin 5 days here. Summer Humidity levels are definitely here, rainstorms followed by full sun throughout the days has us in adaptive mode ..... "the tropics". Fruit growth has been wild: bananas, avocados, dragonfruit, guava, papayas, and all foliage. Heat index is pretty high as well : 104 - 109. So we're up at 4:30am and outside around 7 and work til 11am. Thankful for the midday nap if that strikes us, then after 4pm we're out doing something if the heat and rain has subsided.

!st Pic is Moringa. The mrs "accidentally" brought over a couple seeds back in the 90's from her homeland. The Moringa is something we consume in soups and hot side dishes. These are the seed pods hanging. They're about a foot long each.

2nd pic is Winter Mellon. A very firm veggie. After it's out shell/skin is cut off, the inside is chopped up into bite sized pieces and added to a hot dish. It absorbs the flavor of whatever is being cooked : Fish chicken or meat.

3rd Pic is a our sweet potato bed. Should start flowering after heat subsides ... maybe in another 6-8 weeks. That bed sits in our 20 x 40 raised garden section. Winter mellon travels around the area on a chicken wire fence. Keeps the rabbits out.

 

1st image is a raised bed with 40% shade cloth tied down around it. That keeps the intense sun from burning veggies here. Also keeps the racoons and squirrels from destroying the plants. All our raised beds are filled with the Hugelkultur method. Then we use really good soil and our own compost. Then some extra fert if needed when planting.
2nd pic is a nice African banana bunch. It is slightly orange and tangy tasting. It's netted to prevent the birds/squirrels, and racoons from getting at it. It's about 2 weeks from harvest, just put the net over it.
3rd pic is my mulching area. Mulch all sorts of debris from Oak tree and all other sticks from fruit trees. Doesnt take too long for that to break down into nice soil. We have millipedes that help it the breakdown of that, as well as enhance that soil with their poop. Great stuff.

 

1st pic is a look of our raised garden area. Lemon grass, sweet potato, japanese eggplant, dragon fruit, coconut trees and herbs.
2nd pic is of the hearty Japanese eggplant, this plant seems to do well all year long.
3rd pic is of a 7 year old dragon fruit trellis. That thing has been great producer, been through 4 hailstorms and a bunch of pruning's. A nice white inside with pink skin.
4th pic is of a small starter potted ginger plant, dang racoon decided to fertile it last night. Have some onion, rosemary, lemongrass, and some garlic growing around it as well. This area is shaded by the coconut trees and is nice to have starter plants growing as well as herbs.

 

We planted beni-imos for the first time this year, in 4 tubs. When do you pick your sweet potatoes and how do you cure them for storage?
Thank you.

 

This guy ate about 50% of the sweet potato leaves from the bed in June. Last year they got to the bed we had potatoes in too. This years' leaves came back nicely, hoping for a higher yield

Wow, the Beni-imos look like a really tasty variety. Do you have a curing/stowing process?

We pick them a week or so after they're done flowering. We've never gotten high yield from our sweet potato beds, Last year had two 5gal buckets. So, with that limited amount, we go through them rather quickly. Just stow them in our kitchen on a shelf in a kitchen cart (not sure what it's called). We make breakfast fries with them using an air fryer, or put it in soup. Yeah, they dont last long enough to store, hoping this year will be better.

 

We have not planted sweet potatoes before. I have cured regular potatoes before, but not sweet ones.
Trying to switch to Blue Zones diet, and beni imos are a big part of it.
Planted 4 of 25gal tubs (made 4 slips out of 2 potatoes we had bought). If we get some this year, next year we will do 14 tubs.
We've been fighting army worms on our beni imos this year.

 

Oh my those are wicked here, if we dont stay on top of em manually. Potato bed be gone within a week or so if ignored. They get our maters, chard, some melon.
This BT seems to work real good. I dont like using it, chemicals. We use neem and insecticide soap usually, but those worms dont mind the latter treatment, they disappear with the BT. So I try and patrol the beds and pluck em off.

 

Thank you!
I have been picking them by hand and drowing them in the water with some dish soap. Found what lookes like worm eggs (soft pink mess), squished them. Should have drowned them, but did not think at the time.

 

Another half bucket of figs this morn, no pics. Looks like it’s winding down. Also got a bag of beans. As soon as things dry out I am turning most all of it under. Nothing worse than trying to tend a garden into deer season.

 

For some reason there has been alot of snakes in my berry patch this year.

 

2nd cantaloupe of the year, got a smaller one on vine but it isn’t getting any bigger