Gardening thread! Please join!

gamanit ↓

Mon, Apr 19 2021, 7:40 am

amother [ Mint ] wrote:

Bumping for more in season advice- especially for pests!

Chayella- I’m thinking of doing roses and hydrangeas too- so many too choose from thoug! Need one that lasts long..l

Hedreangeas are really easy to grow from cuttings. If you have any neighbors with a bush that you like ask them if you can take cuttings. Most won't mind at all. You won't have an actual bush until next year but you'll know for sure that it grows well in your area.

amother

↑ Mint

Mon, Apr 19 2021, 2:23 pm

gamanit wrote:

So it grows well in my area, but I hear the deer like to eat it. We are looking into pesticide for the ticks and plants that deer don’t like. I wonder if that keeps deer away though. Anyone experience with this

↑ honey36 ↓

Tue, Apr 20 2021, 8:00 am

amother [ Mustard ] wrote:

I got petunia seeds and planted them this week. I'm super new to gardening. The guy at the plant nursery said to just plant and put the seeds between two layers of soil but now I'm see online that they need sunlight and shouldn't have soil on them. I already planted them.... And they are outside in the Israeli heat.

Anyone know what I should do?

Im not an expert but I've never heard of any seeds needing sunlight. Pretty sure all seeds need a dark, damp environment to germinate. Perhaps what you read online was regarding once the seeds have already germinated and are seedling/sprouts- then make sure they get sun.

↑ Chayalle

Tue, Apr 20 2021, 8:09 am

amother [ Mint ] wrote:

Bumping for more in season advice- especially for pests!

Chayella- I’m thinking of doing roses and hydrangeas too- so many too choose from thoug! Need one that lasts long..l

My roses did really well. Now the bushes are full of leaves, but it's still early in the season, no buds yet.

Daffodils I planted last year came up, but only one set of them bloomed. The other set, all I got were leaves. Wonder if I planted those too deep.

One set of crocuses made it, there are tiny purple blossoms.

I just got supports for my peonies, and have to get myself out there and put them in. The plants are shooting up and getting taller every day.

So now I need to decide what I'm going to do this year. I usually get some kind of perennial that I plant along my walkway, need to choose something. And maybe something longer lasting, too.....

↑ honey36 ↓

Wed, Apr 21 2021, 9:01 am

momof2+? wrote:

I am jumping into planting a whole bunch of vegetables this yr for the first time. Would you suggest I plant in the ground (dig up my yard? Which part of the yard is best?) or should I stick to pots/above ground gardening, like in a kiddie pool?

I’d like to plant cherry tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, potatoes and some sort of berries.

Thanks for your advice!

Ok, I'm a pretty new gardener myself, but had some good successes and failures last couple years you can learn from.
Firstly- all the veggies you mentioned need a lot of sun so make sure to put garden in sunniest part of yard.

I think a raised bed is better than in ground b/c less weeds and easier to contain the soil. If you don't have a raised bed, the soil and fertilizers you buy for $$ can get washed away/disappear easier. Kiddie pool sounds good if you have an extra one lying around, but probably cheaper to make it yourself out of wood. Lots of easy tutorials online.

I think pots are also good for starting out. Anyways you cant fit that many veggies in a raised bed b/c of spacing, so if you have 7-8 pots, you'll probably get same amount of veggies as in a small raised bed. One thing I learnt by mistake- if you use pots make sure they have a mix of compost and dirt from the ground or sand so they drain well. Also place on pavement- not mud or grass. Same reason.

Also the bags of soil/compost can get really expensive! You don't realize how many you need to fill a large pot/planter or raised bed- it really adds up. Always mix in some dirt from your garden- better for draining anyways plus free! If your really planning on a very big raised bed I would look into ordering the compost/soil in bulk instead of buying by the bags from a big box store etc.

All advice above is for the tomatoes, cucumber and zucchini. I've never tried growing potatoes.

Last year I bought a blueberry bush from home depot, but I think the guy who came to do my fall cleanup last year cut it down too much. Not sure if it will grown back this year.🙄 Either way I'm pretty sure berries bushes take a few years to full mature or produce any fruit.

↑ thunderstorm

Wed, Apr 21 2021, 10:17 am

We just built and planted our vegetable garden on Sunday. It’s completely fenced off , I even put chicken wire on the ground to block ground hogs from digging up. We made a roof out of fencing too. I planted veggies from seeds, those are still not ready to go into the ground. I bought some ready plants and planted , beef tomatoes , cherry tomatoes , cucumbers, zucchini, eggplant, sweet red peppers, sweet orange peppers and jalapeño peppers. Cant wait for all those veggies to grow! And let’s hope those little rodents and deer stay far away and don’t come and try to chew through the fence.

↑ honey36

Wed, Apr 21 2021, 10:37 am

Still about a month to go till danger of last frost where I live. Just snowed today actually Rolling Eyes

I planted my tomato, cucumber, green bean, peas and zucchini seeds last week indoors and they all sprouted! hoping it will warm up so I can at least take them out during the day to get some real sunlight before I transplant them.

Congrats on your garden thunderstorm! I'd love to do a fenced in garden, maybe next year though. This year I'm not doing anything too drastic since I'm due in June. I'd love more info on what type of fenced garden you did (how big, what type of fence, etc) and how much it costs to see if it would work for us one day. Every time I try looking into it, all the options seem cheap but when you add up the costs (soil, fence, plant supports etc) seems like a lot and I just forget about it.

↑ BadTichelDay

Wed, Apr 21 2021, 10:52 am

Yay, time for a tomato-rant! Trying about 8 different heirloom tomatoes again this year - guess I'm just a tomaniac. And I'm learning from experience. Originally, I thought that all tomato plants are created equal and must love the Israeli summer by default. But hey, they don't. I got seeds of a bunch of foreign varieties and some varieties just shoot up and thrive while others can't get their act together. And it is the same ones as last year. Guess I'll concentrate in the future on those that have shown themselves to do well under our specific conditions (Pink Oxheart, Russian Mulatka and a Nappa Rose Cherry crossbreed that I got accidentally).
By the way, instead of buying or ordering tomato seeds one can also scrape them out of commercial big and cherry tomatoes while making salad. The plants I had from that were extremely tough and robust last year. Their tomatoes were of course boring like their shop bought parents and not like the colorful heirlooms but the plants were the toughest of them all, disease and drought resistant. Some even survived the winter.(Seems the GMO guys know what they're doing, eh?)

Other than that, I'm planting trees and bushes all over - with shmitta year looming ahead I need some long term investments. I still hope to get a kind of forest garden one day but it takes time and patience (and anti-rock-hyrax fencing).

↑ Rappel

Wed, Apr 21 2021, 12:01 pm

BadTichelDay wrote:

I'm writing all that down Very Happy

I'm feeling rather bare about shmittah. This will be my first shmittah year since I began to garden.

Can I garden in containers? Can I plant out flowers? When do I have to stop dealing with veggies and fruits?

Forgive the pun, but it's really eating at me.

↑ mom4many

Thu, Apr 22 2021, 6:36 am

Rappel wrote:

I'm writing all that down Very Happy

In short: whatever is alive, you can keep alive - no extras to make it thrive.
Things that are fully indoors (maybe should have a plate under too - so no connection to dirt under floor) shmitta doesn’t apply to them.

Of course there are many more halachot that can’t be summed up so easily...