The Gardening Thread

[afreude]

Ooh, this might be better on the recipes thread, but I'm making some plum wine right now.  First attempt!  So I might have some questions for you or anyone who has brewing/fermenting experience.  Hopefully it doesn't get disgusting.

Our plum trees are going crazy.  They're on an every other year schedule, and this is a big year.  I've harvested about 50 lbs so far and used 20 for wine, 20 for jam, and given a bunch away.  I can only process about 10 pounds at a time for jam though, so I have to do a little bit every day (making some right now actually).

Spoiler: show

[Róisín]

I make plum wine and plum melomel. Will put up recipes later, just dropping by for now.

[midwestmutt]

I've been remiss in sharing photos of my flowers this year. I think I need to find a better platform than tumbir which, between it and the forum, makes it such a process that I have to gear myself up for the task. First the hostas and peonies which are long established.
https://64.media.tumblr.com/6defa0eb95fe95b6317db74186ee298b/b23a4c55e7763105-61/s2048x3072/ae37dbcbbabb2f02bcd6c2e3478836130e8bdd84.jpg
https://64.media.tumblr.com/4fe5d81ed8294d0bb78691c5b621df09/dff5dac2c0b718c7-0d/s2048x3072/a5ed1ac05e32970f38eec69a6a50464dbf6a5496.jpg
https://64.media.tumblr.com/351aa92c9935e1960e0c0e39ca907148/16d1aa150d253a85-ec/s2048x3072/2a1fef886cf777f28e8ba97c1dc87e18073de109.jpg
https://64.media.tumblr.com/c78aee1f01750edb8d2bc7f04a4df482/b619921ee2855b19-aa/s2048x3072/24362b7f43701133ef046e8d555c5051899286a5.jpg
https://64.media.tumblr.com/7000918684ea8cc039c4b8a3dcc1d44f/8d8f55ee526d7af3-84/s2048x3072/e96b58404162b85c52d51ffac79ababbf9ad116c.jpg
Next my hollyhocks which I started planting 3 years ago
https://64.media.tumblr.com/dabdd5db45d7933bd1a0d7ec22d0a823/dff5dac2c0b718c7-1a/s2048x3072/1f12df2e3f27c1e06d3a464289760891e308a06e.jpg
The trick is to water them.
https://64.media.tumblr.com/f235297d65e833b2aa0aa7c729aa5253/dff5dac2c0b718c7-1b/s2048x3072/52554fff00da85fec1e56e632efcaba60a5f4293.jpg
https://64.media.tumblr.com/1e00665fc02abf1107e244fc3f320c56/16d1aa150d253a85-e5/s540x810/e48e9205cd684d0948149975fd34e224cd441dbb.jpg
This year's display in the half barrel provided by the village. They also water them daily which is nice.
https://64.media.tumblr.com/49178a1457a25359f2dc3c85c78d6c7a/16d1aa150d253a85-5b/s540x810/186e91aea193316eb9eff69fe77233eeb48371ff.jpg
And of course my lilies.
https://64.media.tumblr.com/1cf7fbbd06995fedbe0c53ed10bf9155/16d1aa150d253a85-43/s2048x3072/8aefc26b2018e08d4c8ae1f102b371af9d1bdd8c.jpg
https://64.media.tumblr.com/a0b636dfae4948d2aebf515ff6859075/dff5dac2c0b718c7-58/s2048x3072/4d3c0a251393a0137989efc665e0cf09d7bd2a51.jpg
That's enough for today. As a shelter at home project I planted 5 more beds of wildflowers. I'll share those next.

[Jitter]

Midwestmutt, lovely! Thank you for the pictures! I love peonies, and hydrangeas:) And many other plants. Here are a couple of collages from my garden this year, from early and late summer.





More pictures in the gallery: https://postimg.cc/gallery/gdLyMhF

[Jitter]

Um, and alliums, and hostas (mine aren’t doing too well at the moment so no pictures) and I would love hollyhocks too but they don’t seem to like me. I have bought plants that (are supposed to) flower that same summer, the first ones did flower but I didn’t get any seedlings, this year one of four flowered and got hit by husband before coming to seed. Hopefully the remaining three will flower next summer.

Your hollyhocks are lovely! I’be liked them before, but a few years we went to Sweden in late July and visited this idyllic town Trosa, and there were lots of cute wooden houses with hollyhocks everywhere

[wavewright62]

Oooh, such lovely flowers!
(midwestmutt, do you want me to stick [ img ] tags around your photos?  I also share from tumblr, and appreciate the gantseh magilla it takes to share from there)

My gardening woe: I have been in this apartment for 9 months now and have seen three whole lots of herb & vegetable plantings into containers germinate & sprout enthusiastically, get to the two-leaf stage, then languish at that stage for weeks.  Lettuce & spring onions just die at that point, the spinach and beetroot just don't do anything further.  I don't get a lot of light (only an hour or two in the afternoon), and I can't help that, but this is ridiculous. 

[midwestmutt]

I'm checking into the site Jitter uses, postimage. I especially like the collage format, which if tumbir has it I don't know where they hide it. Postimage looks good on the surface. What is your experience of it, Jitter?

[Róisín]

Jitter and Midwestmutt, the flowers are lovely!

Wavewright: have you considered vegetables that do okay in low light, such as watercress, the mints, melissa, lettuce and cabbage? Also peas? Also, is there anywhere you can set up a mirror to reflect light onto your plants?

[thorny]

Or can you put lights over them? -- plant light bulbs are better, but any light is better than none. Put them on a timer if possible, so they'll go off for about eight hours overnight, but be on the rest of the time.

[midwestmutt]

The idea of planting some new flower beds came to me in stages. First a Spring snowfall on the sidewalk border of the old garden gave me a desire to see Mother's flower bed back there again. This was where I began to plant hollyhocks 3 years ago in a bout of childhood nostalgia.https://64.media.tumblr.com/c07b07deea4d8c16e685b80063a1ee37/16d1aa150d253a85-bc/s2048x3072/7c4a73a3c46d5a36e43c716977a4d4d079a572e1.jpg
The snow caught my first tulip by surprise. It survived with a bit of frostbite.
https://64.media.tumblr.com/e616943dc33a500f826cf2950a5c5b5e/e62d662a7f4c0e43-bc/s2048x3072/2e39d2f9ee9cbedae2c97b99d22dfe416313a0a4.jpg
I think the final push was when I whimsically stuck a spare grave decoration bouquet in the emerging lilies rather than throw it away on Memorial day.
https://64.media.tumblr.com/106c52ec952a0c07c3ad86b6f835f48f/45724f10a51b790d-4c/s2048x3072/c8b70f1844e833de04d1e4eeee07c3f4e9cfea3b.jpg
Plastic flowers weren't enough so I began a project to weed out the garden border and found some packets of mixed wildflowers to plant. At this time there was a big run on garden plants due to covid-19 as many people turned to gardening while under quarantine so live plants were hard to find for a while. Here is the border at an early stage.
https://64.media.tumblr.com/2a480ee0482886871acabe07fb6e2780/e431c8bfa2221b39-ca/s2048x3072/32076233f087a367e11210ec334fb8c832c076b8.jpg
And later, a little out of sequence, sorry.
https://64.media.tumblr.com/7c01e65e8574ef47db71ea91177b7f16/882ee6d4dbe5b796-05/s2048x3072/aeab302b9d32e0864f4704ef53b357719961d34b.jpg
https://64.media.tumblr.com/2999b10290cb0d461172d09c4df5dd4f/7fa2eac49e2d8b2c-74/s2048x3072/b193fcd99dbd507398fe620ef321993a31eb2913.jpg
https://64.media.tumblr.com/ab9513eeff114cc94f2b338a3ffe6a44/7fa2eac49e2d8b2c-2b/s2048x3072/6f1557969e0dfd6b5a76a3e4bb7bb5428735271b.jpg
https://64.media.tumblr.com/28a8cfc41bfa5a2237dfca830ec1a78e/7fa2eac49e2d8b2c-05/s2048x3072/0c86f36c60adeef99c91b179496fb1063e0d6f13.jpg
https://64.media.tumblr.com/f113a186fbcf95e51bcf69db5ac2d68e/882ee6d4dbe5b796-90/s2048x3072/29b99d37b5c30eef4fa515cb5a7fefaae64403aa.jpg
That's the first bed. More later. I took a lot of photos this summer.

[Jitter]

Midwestmutt, Postimage is easy to use and gives good quality. The collages were made separately on PicCollage on my iPad and loaded as photos.

[Jitter]

The orange/ red sunflowers are wonderful! Our plot is situated so that any sunflowers I’ve had were always “looking” towards the neighbors We felled a tree this autumn and there will be room for a new bed, there they would be looking in the street. Maybe I will try again!

[wavewright62]

I don't have enough light falling anywhere for a mirror, either.  Lettuce is one of the crops I've been trying & failing to grow.  I could try growing lemon balm, especially as I know the council has beehives scattered around the city centre, including atop Town Hall.  I've never used it for my own ingestion, but it could benefit the bees.
I have checked out grow lights from local suppliers, and quite aside from their nudge-nudge wink-wink assumptions about what *ahem* crop I want to grow, even the smallest LED item costs   It'd be far cheaper to get my veg from a grocery store. 
I guess I have to face that I have no space (approx 2sqm balcony, a little strip of kitchen countertop, no windowsills), and I have no light.

[thorny]

I have checked out grow lights from local suppliers, and quite aside from their nudge-nudge wink-wink assumptions about what *ahem* crop I want to grow, even the smallest LED item costs

Get a standard LED or flourescent. Much cheaper. [ETA: and unlikely to give rise to snickers.] Won't give you enough light for some crops to fruit, but will give enough for quite a lot to grow leaves.

Rig them so the lights are almost on top of the plants, just a couple of inches above the top leaves, and can be raised as plants grow. A lot of the fixtures available around here can be hung from chains with hooks; the hooks can be moved up the chain.

[moredhel]

Potatoes

Today I harvested potatoes. A few months ago my son asked if we can try to plant two leftover potatoes from the kitchen. Without any garden, we put it into a planting pot on our balcony and now after some watering and waiting we have potatoes. The yellow sort did produce tiny potatoes. Maybe it is not suittable for planting pots, the red one (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_potato) did better.



We will not eat the poisonous one at the right. This one grew half outside the soil. It is half green and grows a new little plant. My son decided to plant it into a new pot to find out if it will survive the winter in our flat.