Post Punk Kitchen Forum

I planted some stuff two weeks ago after the summer killed my first attempt at a garden. I saw something on tv about using old dresser drawers as garden beds, so I'm doing that. Currently planted:

pumpkin
peas
green beans
kale
collards
arugula
broccoli
cilantro
sage
lettuce
cucumbers

I'm planning on growing some carrots and potatoes as well. Hopefully, I don't kill things.

I love this thread!! There was a beautiful basil plant growing in my kitchen before Frodo killed it. Now I'm thinking about starting some seeds indoors to prepare for next year. Space is limited though, we live in an apartment.

My summer garden has just finished and I've planted a ton of onions and lettuce. Next will be swiss chard, kale, collard greens, garlic and potatoes.

My basil is sad now, I think it's getting to hot for it, I'll have to move it to the shade.

This morning I planted: a whole lot of basil, rainbow chard/silverbeet, cauliflower, broccoli, and celery; and one plant each of tomato, courgette and cucumber. Still need to plant my lavenders.

How do you do with celery, melanie? every time i try it i get frustrated and wonder if it's really that difficult (and then i guess $3 a head is a justified price, right?). it's mostly bugs that just go hog wild on the celery here.

I grew the shiitake out of a bunch of things (punkins, zucc, tomaters, peas, spinach, chard, beets, beans, oregano, etc) but I have to roll up my beautiful garden and possibly not plant at all this year! My landlord wants the house back. I'm forking bummed. I built those raised beds! I hauled that dirt! grump.

last night i planted 2 varieties of kale, collard greens, and red chard from transplants.

this morning my effing dog dug them up and ate them. she didn't touch the gigantic jalapeno or the field of kabocha, nor the cilantro, basil, marigolds... she must really love greens.

other than that disaster, i have strawberry (everbearing) starts and some spearmint and oregano to put in the ground this week.

i have fruit for next year: my peach trees will be 3 years old and my blackberry will be 2 next year, so i should get some fruit from them.

oh yeah, catnip, for the kitties!

This is my first time trying to grow it myself, but my mum has always been able to grow tonnes of it (in NZ, south of me though) seemingly without much effort. I'll let you know! I'm really wanting it to work out because I only ever want to use a few sticks of celery at a time, so I hate buying and inevitably wasting a whole bunch (and hate paying nearly the same amount for half bunches).

My rainbow chards were looking a little wilty on their first day after planting, but the basil is looking super happy. I wish kale was easier to find here.

I just planted out garlic cloves and transplanted some small leeks. And I'm trying to get some cover crops in too, but the garden is still pretty much of a mess from summer.

I do have carrots, beets, turnips, parsnips, kale and collards to harvest over winter - from mid to late summer plantings, plus assorted Asian greens, corn salad and winter cress that have self-sowed. And Jerusalem artichokes (a perennial) that I usually don't get around to harvesting much from. But if we have as cold & wet a winter as they're predicting, many of the greens will either turn to mush or stop producing until March, and the beets and carrots will freeze out if they're not heavily mulched.

Torque - celery like a rich, organic soil and plenty of moisture - more so than other crops. I don't think it likes it super hot either, but it isn't freeze tolerant either.

Yeah, i had it in the spring, before the real heat. Freeze is not really a worry here, it would be quite eaten by then! (we have about 6 weeks of frost danger, but it rarely actually happens).
The soil was fine, and i think the moisture helped to attract the pests. the problem with moving around is that you find yourself surrounded by new pests you never even considered. last place, i never saw a snail. here, snails everywhere. front yard has no snails but these flying sucking insects. it's like wild kingdom.

I bought some lettuce and chili today. Hopefully the lettuce survives in my location, it said 'plant all year round' for my region on the packet.

My pole beans have just started to go wild and climb, yay!

We had our first nearly-all-from-garden meal yesterday, our snow peas are yielding, not a lot, but yielding. The chard is still alive, and the spinach is just gorgeous.

We ARE having problems with stinkbugs on the tomatoes, though. Everyone i talk to thinks the bugs are sucking the tomatoes, which they're not- they're sucking the stem, low near the ground, and killing the whole plant. I don't find any good info for organic pest management (of course here i can't get the biological agents that my sources in the US recommend anyway, so i shouldn't even bother looking online). Instead i pulled the mulch back away from the stems and put aluminum foil around them (just so i can see better, not sure if the bugs care or not) and try to get out in the garden as much as i can and physically pull the stinkbugs off.

Any good ideas for stinkbugs? I always thought they were cute and innocent (they hang out in the back yard on the sweet potatoes and don't do anyone any harm back there) until they started decimating my tomatoes.

Tommies!

A beard for no-beard November!

I had a major stinkbug problem this summer. my strategy was to spray the tomatoes with water early in the morning to make the stink bugs fly off of the plants. i then tried to spray the fruit with a soapy solution - using Dr Bronners soap and water in a spray bottle. i had to do this every day, twice a day. next year i'll try planting marigolds and other insect repelling plants around the tomatoes, as this whole thing was a huge hassle.

good luck!

did you find that it worked? i've done the soapy water in the past but not for stinkbugs. i figure since i'm out there practically 8 times a day, it would be hard to get more difficult.....

i do have marigolds, yellow chrysanthemums, garlic and lavender all within about a yard of these plants, which kills me since that's what everyone tells me to plant to repel the little mustards.....

thanks, i will get some soap out there tomorrow AM, too late today!

I cleaned out the summer plants from the garden yesterday since we had frost last week. Unfortunately I didn't plant a fall garden Bc of the new baby. But there is still a good amount of chard alive and a ton of arugula and mâché reseeded themselves. I still have a bunch of unpicked carrots too.

I luv plantzz. These are all my plants. Well technically I didn't show a couple ground covers and some small evergreens that came with the place. Not really any room for any more plants outside than what I have shown here. P.S. it's night so the photos are all nasty but I didn't feel like waiting until tomorrow. That phalaenopsis is pretty neat, I have had it for 4 years and it has never not been blooming on at least one branch, sometimes two. I just rescued the other 'mystery orchid' from work a couple of days ago, I'm hoping that is some really good spot for orchids and it will do the same. Only time will tell on that one.

I think I'm going to use some of the garlic I got at the farmers market for growing, but I'm a container gardener, so we'll see how that goes. I desperately want to grow a dwarf citrus plant of some kind, possible mexican key lime. It would have to sit out the winter in my living room, but from everything I've read about their environmental needs, that's basically my living room. If I get drunk and buy a citrus tree, you guys will be the first to know! (getting drunk is usually how I end up buying things I want.)

Done: tomatoes, peppers.
Still pickin': Brussels sprouts, carrots.
Planting this weekend: garlic! I'm growing Georgian Crystal and Khabar, both hardnecks that I ordered from We Grow Garlic, near Madison.

If anyone in the upper Midwest wants homegrown organic heirloom vegetable seedlings, do let me know. I built a fantastic grow light set-up a few years back and its goodness always makes me grow way too many of everything.

what am i growing?

what are you, a cop?


JUST KIDDING I DON'T DO DRUGS THEY ARE BAD AND YOU COULD DIE AND DYING IS BAD MMKAY

Wait, do you mean for your street trees spot? I'm talking back of the house!

I found this awfully helpful:
http://www.sweetadditions.net/green/nat ... stink-bugs

also, can you get diatamaceous earth where you live? That controls all crawling insects. you do have to reapply it after a good rain because it washes the powder off.

try and find a hydro store near you to see what they might have.

Here's a couple of photos that I just posted up in my blog. There's more photos there, but I didn't want to overload this thread....

i planted some greens and lettuce for fall:

Kale, jalapeno, lettuces by jessibot_, on Flickr

also, my acorn squash plant in full effect:

Acorn squash by jessibot_, on Flickr