Gardening

Pretty gutted, had just started to harvest this year's crop. Just the cherry on top of an already shit day. Even managed to snap the half inch metal stake I put there when I first planted it in February 2021.

[Image description: view of a row of five young fruit trees planted in half wine barrels in a home garden.]

Harder to stand up, but SO much easier to carve!

Previous post for reference: https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/d2589c9f-2181-4f5b-8c3e-7686dc4d3673.jpeg

Pretty sad. I have another one going, but this one was a good size and just about ready to harvest. I'm guessing it was a deer. To be honest, I kind of like the idea of a deer running around with a pineapple in it's mouth.

Curious to see if the community has some recommendations

EDIT: The picture didn't upload. Here's an external link: https://ibb.co/q0hmm3S

Harvesting today. It's been cold and shitty out the past few days so it's been wrapped up for a while. Unwrapped it today and started to cut it down when we noticed these weird little growths. Are these seed pods? Is the crop ruined?

Zone 7a, Kentucky USA. I read about over-wintering peppers and tried it out last year, but sadly none of them survived. I pruned them appropriately, and kept them in my garage with infrequent watering once temperatures started getting into the 40s at night. We had wild temperature fluctuations (high 60s F during the day and low 30s F at night) and I’m not sure if that hindered the process.

I would love to try again this year, but I’m wondering what others’ experiences are.

Pros:

• Massive quantities of flowers for about 3 months
• Bees love the blooms
• The plant doesn't need any care to thrive
• We've transplanted a few of the seedlings. They're true to their parent in terms of color, but the parents seems like a double bloom and the children seem like single bloom
• If you want a hedge, this seems like a good option

Cons:

• Seeds! So many seeds. Each of its hundreds (thousands?) of flowers will produce 10+ seeds. They all don't germinate, but it's a numbers game. If you want to avoid pulling volunteers up you're best off pulling the seed pods off the plant before they open on their own

I pulled ~2 gallons of seed pods off a week prior to this picture. My wife dumped them in the compost, so no epic 5+ gallon photo 😭

So I had to pull up some huge rosemary plants in the front yard to have some plumbing work done. I noticed that the rosemary I’ve bought to replace it has completely different leaves. The old plant was more like an evergreen with oily needle-like leaves. The new plant has soft flat leaves but still smells like rosemary.

Are these two plants actually related? Are they both edible? The “evergreen” One was fairly hearty and grew quickly. Will the other variety act the same?

Wrapping up its first season, I think we're supposed to get a harvest starting year three.

I planted a few here last year and I guess they like this spot

As far as I can tell they are over 9 feet tall... What the hell did they bury in their front yard?!

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/20123777

All pots, there is paving under the plants.

Post image is spaghetti squash

This tomato held up surprisingly well.

Marigolds

Another angle of spaghetti squash and watermelon I think.

Beans!

Cucumbers

Tomato

And nasturtiums.

I've been having trouble with several of my plants the last couple of years. I've planted almost 4 blueberry bushes, grapevine and some winterberries that do well for several months then seem to start growing very slow and doing poorly.

Our soil is more of a silty soil that doesn't drain well so I did fill the holes in with good potting soil with compost and covered with a thin layer of the silty soil and try to water about once a week. The last year I had 3 blueberry bushes that I planted early spring that put out some new growth and then started to grow very slow and later died In early fall and didn't come back the next year. I've tried to fertilize and add gardening Sulphur to them to help acidity the soil but no matter what I do everything slowly starts to die. I've noticed this year the leaves on the grapevines and blueberries appears to have chlorosis and the winterberries' leaves are turning brown and curling up. It's still ~90 degrees out so I doubt anything should be going dormant yet (I live in zone 5b). I even tried to buy special blueberry fertilizer to make sure I wasn't missing anything important but I'm still having issues.

Here is the blueberry bush:

The raspberries:

And one of the winterberry bushes:

Does this look like iron defiency or potentially some other sort of issue? At this point I'm considering getting my soil tested but if anyone has any advice let me know.

Behold, after seven months, I have turned one Market Basket acorn squash into four.

Should be ready soon 🤞

I had a volunteer milkweed this year in my small raised bed/container garden.

Early into the season it developed a yellow aphid infestation. I was horrified! They were disgusting things (and far, far too many of them). While I was interested in an insect garden, I was worried spread to nearby plants, specifically my prized blackberries, affecting yields.

I researched and treated the aphid infestation with Neem Oil and basically killed the living population. Success!

Or so I thought…

After I traveled for about a month, I returned to see the aphids had rebounded in full force.

An interesting thing though, neither had they spread to other plants.

Even more interesting there were ladybugs, there were beetles, there were wasps, there was even a praying mantis.

I wouldn’t say the milkweed is super happy about the arrangement, but it is growing, and it was a volunteer into the garden.

Overall it’s been the best plant of the season by far teaching me a little bit about ecosystems.

TLDR: my aphid infestation totally allowed my predator insect population to boom