Nature and Gardening

I live in an apartment so my gardening is limited to containers on my balcony as well as a million tropical houseplants. I finally figured out what grows best in my conditions of scorching hot in the morning and nice and cool in the afternoon out there. I’m growing a fig and a dwarf citrus as well as a blueberry bush that is finally not hating the spot I put it in! Otherwise it’s a bunch of succulents out there.

I’m hoping one day to have a real garden but for now I’m having fun with what I can grow both indoors and outdoors.

This is my first year with an in-ground garden in Zone 6a! Here's what I've got:

-Plant more peppers, I eat a lot of peppers and could use more

-Plant beans/peas earlier

-Plant okra later

-Only ONE cucumber plant!!! Just one! No one needs more than one!

-More ground cherries, they did great and I love 'em

-Wouldn't bother with celery again, probably

-Would give radishes another shot, they did okay. I'd do kohlrabi again too

-Planted too many types of lettuce

My array of cactii and succulents continue to look great, despite us being on year 2 of a drought. I have a painstaking reigeme of upkeep which is mostly looking at them and saying to myself "yep, that's a plant alright".

So, all in all I'm happy with my garden.

For few years I try permaculture gardening. It is sometimes good sometimes bad. This year was dry and not much things grow. I am looking for next year, my asparagus will mature and could be harvested.

Pumpkins are big.

They’ve taken over the garden, half the yard, and show no signs of stopping. We don’t even have pumpkins yet, it’s just the vines.

Our singular broccoli is also massive, and so far has its leaves above the pumpkin plants (plural! What happens when plants 2 and 3 get as big as the first!?), but we shall see if it stays that way.

With any luck, we’ll be decked out for halloween.

the birds and squirrels ate all my tomatoes, haha. at least my rosemary and lavender are doing well. i'll likely transplant them to the front yard (currently in containers) before fall.

My garden is going awesome. Third year gardening, first time managing a pretty sizeable garden myself. I'm currently eating probably 50-60% of my food from the garden. Right now I'm harvesting eggplant, tomatos, beans, carrots, beets, kale, kohlrabi, basil, oregano, dill, cucumber, a variety of peppers, and a preposterous amount of zucchini. The zuchs are finally starting to chill out but I've got like 7 huge zucchinis taking up all my kitchen space and I eat like 3 a week. I've got a bunch of different types of squash coming in. I'm just finishing eating the last of my summer peas. I need to harvest my potatoes, might do that this weekend. The corn will be ready soon but so far I've been real bad at getting the timing right for corn.

My cauliflower is not looking so hot. Dunno if my climate is good for it or if I just haven't been giving it enough attention. Aphids are starting to make their prescence known on my kale, but I find especially with dyno-kale that they don't really detract too much from the food value, just takes some time to wash them off.

I need to do some work putting down straw mulch around plants and reinforcing the bark mulch pathways I've started putting in. Long term I would like to replace or at least supplement the overhead sprinkler irrigation with a drip or even micro-sprinkler system.

I never pruned my tomatoes and so they are kind of a big mess. Getting lots of fruit from them now and they are so good, I didn't used to like tomatoes but I'm just eating these bitches salad style. Lots of damage from quail and whatnot on the tomatoes but not to an extent that's really bugging me since I'm not selling the things.

Peppers seem to be taking forever but are finally starting to turn colour. Got lots of green bell peppers, lots of what I think are hungarian wax peppers that are just starting to finally turn orange and get flavourful. Got some habaneros finally coming in, and some kind of skinny chillis. I've also got some purple ones that I can't at all tell when to properly pick. A few that I've tried have seen premature.

Got sunflowers all over the place, mostly self-seeded. Garden is also full of self-seeding calendula and dill, which have been filled with pollinators of various types including my own bees.

I really like my garden. Inherited it from my grandmother in law, but she would be really horrified to see how many "weeds" I allow to persist.

This was my first year growing salad greens. I figured they'd mostly be cut and come again, but no. Need to plant a new one every 2-3 weeks and harvest the whole thing otherwise the lettuces get pretty bitter.

I bought a single tulip from the store. "I can't possibly kill a single flower that's halfway bloomed," I thought.

Lesson learned: when you read about coffee helping plants/adding nitrogen, it turns out it's not a "more is better" situation.

I got a greenhouse from multiple family members as a combined birthday and Christmas present. Some plants like tomatoes and chili love it there. Some others die because of the heat. Others again love it too much and grow too quickly, becoming too long and thin to support their own weight.

Also, a "problem" I've had for the two years I've been trying to get some vegetables is being pessimistic about how many seeds will sprout and getting WAY too many. And once they've all happily sprouted I don't have the heart to throw them away, so I end up having a hard time finding enough space for everything. Luxury problem I know 😅

I just picked up hydroponic gardening within the last year and I'm in love! I live in a desert climate so gardening has always been kinda off my radar because of the heat. The only plants I generally want in my yard are native plants and wildflowers that don't need my help and support the local ecosystem. I started hydroponically with lettuce and herbs which were shockingly easy and did very well. I recently branched off to buying a bigger grow light and I've got my first baby tomatoes coming in just this week! I also had to learn about stratification but I figured it out and my strawberries/catnip are turning into little bushes! It's all actually SO easy. No bugs, no smelly fertilizers, no bad weather, no desperately trying to shade plants from the sun, and no animals messing with my garden.

I've always joked that plants come to my house to die but now I have a whole farm in the spare bedroom and it barely needs me to do anything other than monitor the nutrient water levels and check the PH occasionally. I've also started some houseplants in their own jars and I only have to refill their nutrient water like once a week if that.

Overall I think the biggest surprise to me is how much food I've wasted in my life. So many veggies from the grocery store can be plopped in a jar with some nutrient water (or even just water) and then keep growing/producing or at the very least stay fresh much longer. Green onions especially just keep growing back.

Also, unless it's heirloom planting most grocery tomatoes will result in a sad vine that does everything it can to die and will never produce a single tomato lol. Then you'll end up feeling bad for it because it's not the tomato plant's fault so you'll just keep the stupid thing alive out of weird misplaced guilt. That last one might just be me though...

We've had an incredibly wet spring and summer, and many of our plants are leggy and behind schedule for it. Things in the ground have fared better than the few hundred potted plants we have, but we just don't have enough space under cover to house everything. We have a friend who's going to lend us their greenhouse jig soon so we can build another larger one, thankfully. Luckily all the plants we're growing in air prune boxes don't appear as chlorotic.

A porcupine has chewed down nearly all of a new-to-me raspberry cultivar ('Anne', in case anyone is curious) patch, including all of the cuttings we took when we planted it. We're burying the tips to make even more, which is okay, but I had some last year and was really looking forward to eating them from the yard this year. The wet weather and a late hard freeze caused most of the early fruits to fail, so we didn't get cherries, apples, or blueberries either. Though, the legginess of all of our tea plants has meant a bumper crop of those. We're so far behind the season that we don't even know if we've been hit by "peppergate" yet.

OP, I'm going to tell you what I've been told by my master gardener friends: you're not a real gardener until you've lost track of your death toll in the garden <3

This is my first year growing more than a few peppers and tomatoes on a patio, since family gardens as a kid, as I finally have a yard. It's also my first year back in the north after decades in the US SW and SE, and quite a bit farther north than I've previously been. I grew up in USDA zone 5, and I'm in a microclimate of 3b, that's probably more like 3a, now.

First timing, it's a very short season, so I need to really do better at seeding some stuff like cauliflower, tomatoes, and cucumbers earlier for an early crop. I'm going to grow early tomatoes in a pot, so I can bring them in for our early frosts, and chase the sun a bit. My cauliflower is doing well during this late summer, but I really need to get it producing earlier when all I'm likely to get is peas and greens, otherwise.

Tomatoes are going to be a challenge here, it's hard to get them ripened before late July. But I'm going to start some short season varieties super early, like late January/early February, to see what I can do. I'm also going to try to stretch the season after our early late frost that usually comes late Auguest/early September, with those same varieties in pots again.

I'm right on a river, so mildew on squashes is going to be an issue. I don't know what to do about that yet, but it's going to be a point of research this winter.

Berries without cages are merely a tribute to the deer and chipmunks. That said, everbearing strawberries do seem to do a good job of keeping the critters away from other things in my garden, so I'll keep maintaining them. Once I buy a place, I'll need to build some five sided cages to grow various bramble berries, blueberries, currants, and strawberries.

But most of all, two concurrent cucumber plants for a single person is way too much. I think next year I'll just grow two pickling cucumbers, one early and replace it once it's production is down. I'm getting big into fermenting, so I think I'll want them all, just not all at once. I'm also finding I'm not a huge fan of slicers due to water content, when I eat them in salads, so a good pickling variety should keep me covered.

This was the first year I've had my house, so I had built two raised beds and had the existing one for the first time this year. I had also built the larger ollas for irrigating an learned how well that it works for the plants to provide water to them with me not having to every morning go out and water the plants themselves, my schedule not allowing for it. Next year will come and I'll do more, plus I still have the winter time for my indoor vegetables I'll be growing, excited for that.

I'm ass at maintaining my garden. The only vegetables I have are cucumbers I chaos-gardened.