not too much different goes on here for gardening at this time of the year.
daydreaming of spring, planning what to plent, getting ready for a seed swap coming up towards the end of February and thinking about what projects i might be lucky enough to finish.
some spots i can do some more reclaiming the garden space from grasses that have taken over. that would be nice to have back as garden for growing more beans and squash but the deer can get at it so without a fence it's hard to justify the amount of work it takes. i may do it anyways. we'll see how that goes when the time gets nearer. :)
any plans there for this coming gardening season? it is mostly looking like the normal routine here and i'm quite ok with that!
i'm monitoring my garlic bed to make sure it doesn't dry out. weather keeps going the way it has been the last few days i'll be hitching an anchor to it so it doesn't float away.
i have a greenhouse of sorts made from wire shelving, heat mats, florescent lights and mylar (reflective) insulation. doubles as drying rack for garlic, sunflower heads, and now gladiolus bulbs. need to clean it and the area up around it and organize. been gardening only a few years and quite the heap of gardening clutter has landed around it and on and under the bench next to it.
will start growing seeds at the end of february / early march. tomatoes and peppers. i have the pepper and cherry tomato seeds i want. i want to try growing determinate plum or roma tomatoes specifically for canning this year. need to make up my mind what variety and where to get it.
my four 4 x 8 foot raised vegetable beds have a 6 foot high 2 x 3 wire mesh fence built around them. the bottom two feet is covered with 1 inch chicken mesh. did a great job of keeping the critters out except for the spots i buzzed the chicken wire with a weed wacker which the groundhogs exploited last spring. my back yard has since been fenced in and the deer are mostly staying out. i'm going to have that rickety wire mesh fence i hastily put up myself replaced with a 4 foot high chain link fence. i will use chicken mesh on the bottom again, folding it out away from the chain link 1 foot on the ground to keep the 'chucks and rabbit from digging under. and i need to run a section of chain link fence between the house and garage which will be more gate than fence itself.
i have 4 passion fruit / flower plants dormant in the basement overwintering. this is the third winter for three of them, second for one. the vines crawled all over the 6 foot high wire mesh fence. have a couple things to do there. need to figure out how i'm going to trellis them on top of the chain link, and, not so smart me put them in 14" terra cota pots requiring watering nearly every day. i was thinking about getting some nice 15 inch heavy glazed ceramic pots, but dayum, they're $100 each. now i gotta decide if there's pros and cons to resin vs ceramic pots.
in the mean time, will just keep putting coffee grounds and used loose tea in the flower barrels and walking kitchen scraps back to the frozen compost piles.
chicken wire is just not strong enough to last very long in the ground. it will rust through within a few years. if you're going to do it use a larger gauge wire.
I had a rather small vegetable garden along the side of my hill the last two years, right at the top, and it's always been difficult to tend it... especially trying to get footing while I turn soil over with my old belt-driven rototiller... plus the bricks to keep the dirt from washing down. I live on a fairly steep city lot. I think I might plant a few flowers (I have dahlia tubers, etc.) there this year, and move the vegetables elsewhere.
There is a flat spot lower on my lot, about the same size (maybe 3 feet wide by 18-20 feet long), where I can easily walk along a wide stone retaining wall to tend the garden. I might take Sheldon's (RFC) suggestion and make a raised bed out of it. Grandpap lived through the depression, and they planted a lot... he strictly advised starting to turn the soil over in late February, as soon as it isn't frozen... we're gaining on that time fast (eastern Ohio). I do have a few tree limbs to cut to take full advantage of the southern exposure.
Shop second hand stores, flea markets, etc. I work at the local antique mall, and some dealers pick up those big ceramic pots at auction, and sell them really cheap in my neck of the woods. I've picked them up for well under $20/ea. sometimes.
That's what I really need to get on doing. I used to keep coffee grounds, egg shells, etc... but I hardly think of it, now. I'd like to fasten a rain barrel on the corner of my house nearest the garden, also.
i worm compost everything organic that comes through here. it's my sole source of extra nutrients but since i only need so much for the heaviest feeding plants it works out fine.
i used to harvest green manure from some alfalfa and birdsfoot trefoil but i've mostly had that patch taken over by grasses and other weeds so i don't cut that back any longer - it gets regularly mowed instead. i'm hoping this year to turn more of it back into garden space.
yes, slopes are always a challenge. i try to plant them with thymes and then leave them alone other than keeping them weeded. rocks and bricks can make some interesting contrasts and help break up any flows that might happen during heavier downpours.
yeah, trees can become a challenge and they can happen gradually enough that you don't notice it until it becomes a bigger problem to deal with. i have some trees here that i wanted to take out years ago but could not (i'm not the owner). such is life...
great point. longevity. the chicken wire i used is galvanized and what is on the ground (covered with mulch) has been there since spring 2020 and is still intact. a few more years it would start disintegrating. i've decided to use galvanized expanded metal instead. it'll come out from the chain link fence 1 foot, and up the fence at a right angle from the ground several inches. thanks.
i'm not going anywhere near an antique mall with my wife who gets to decide what style and color pots she wants. last time i was at one, in Salamanca NY, she dragged me around in there for 4 hours. it was torture. i volunteered to go to the casino so she could browse around to her hearts content but she was having none of that. so no. just no antique malls. lol
there is a giant flea market in a suburb of Buffalo, we will take a look there. thanks for the idea.
we were putting the grounds and tea in the compost. my wife started talking about how her late grandmother was quite the green thumb and would be quite proud of what we've been doing. she said her grandmother always put the coffee grounds in the flower pots. i have 4 half whisky barrels we use for annual flowers, that's where we're putting the tea and coffee grounds now. it was a duh moment for me lol.
No problem. Your antique malls are probably more expensive than ours. We aren't far from the Mountaineer casino, and I know multiple couples who make an arrangement where one shops (usually female) and one goes to the casino (usually male). ;)
After my post quoted above, I started putting the morning's grounds (and egg shells) into a large zip-lock back in my freezer, until I figure out a compost pile. Worst case, I'll just start dumping it where I turn soil over once it's full.
others will know better than me, but my in experience not much decomposition happens in the winter even during thaws. prior to this year i was topping off the barrels with leaf mold and semi-rotten straw and most of it was there in the spring which then got turned into the soil when it thawed.
i wouldn't use freezer space to store the grounds, i'd just dump them in the garden beds and turn it in when working the soil when it thaws. most of it will still be there when you get the shovel out.
i do still consider myself a gardening noob, so those are just my thoughts and i'm quite capable of wrongthink so tread carefully. lol.
if you have room in a basement or an unfreezing and uncooked by heat in the summer type of space you can keep worms in buckets and they will actively help break down any food scraps.
it cost me all of $20 to get started and most of that expense was buying sheer fabric (for curtains) to use as bucket covers, but you could use old t-shirts instead as long as they weren't holey.
for that $20 i've gotten a few hundred pounds a year on average of reconditioned garden soil and fertilzer that i don't spend any money on those in a normal year.
the other thing to do for free garden nutrients is to grow some green manure crops and cut them back once in a while and feed that to the gardens.
i have plenty of other tips from experience doing this too. :) it's fun to learn about worms, ecology and nature while you're at it.
that sounds a heck of a lot better than trudging through knee deep snow to the compost pile in the winter. i have the perfect place for that, our passion flower plants are over wintering there. dark. cool in the summer, not freezing in the winter.
i'll get there eventually. i already have blood meal, bone meal, and potash (Espoma brand) budgeted for spring. and i go through a gallon and one half of hydrolyzed fish and seaweed fertilizer a year. i use Jack's instant release fertilizer for annual flowers. i've been buying black kow composted manure and i really want to get away from doing that.
my compost pile is in dire need of being turned. i have three large bins side by side made from 40 inch square pallets. there's very coarse brush in one bin, kitchen scraps in one, and chipped / shredded brush in another. last spring i chipped the brush and planned on mixing it with the kitchen scraps. when i went to do it there were hornets nests in the ground in front of the compost bins due to the drought. nope. just nope. the compost hasn't been turned since i started adding to it in spring 2020.
i do have four, four foot high three foot round tubes of wire mesh fencing i pack full of leaves every fall. the resulting leaf mold gets turned into the vegetable beds in the spring.
i'll get much closer to being self sustaining someday, Rome wasn't built in a day.
that's an interesting expression if you look at what Rome did to North Africa and also the topsoil of much of Italy and other surrounding areas... well they basically turned a lot of area into bare rocks or desert from removing so much organic materials (to feed the citizens of Rome, etc.).
it can happen so gradually that people don't even notice the changes, but it can eventually add up to destruction.
thanks for the history lesson, i did not know this. am going to have to train myself to use a better expression now, but great achievements are not accomplished overnight so it'll take some patience. ;)
i think it's a great idea too. i mentioned it to my wife and she said if i did it in the house she's moving out. she has a fear of creatures without legs. snakes and worms. it's a deep primal fear. even seeing them on tv triggers her. i told her they'd be covered and wouldn't be able to get out. doesn't matter, she'd know they are there.
if i put a greenhouse outside and heated it i could do it. but that's a faint blip on the outer edge of the radar screen so it's unlikely to happen anytime soon, if ever.
I'd love to have an outdoor greenhouse. Long before I got here, there was a large back porch on my house, but all is gone except for the mortared over slots in the brick wall... and you can see that they used uglier brick below the porch floor, since it wasn't visible (but it is now).
I've thought about trying to build a lean-to type back porch, part of it being a green house, built from architectural salvage window sashes (which are a lot cheaper than buying glass/lumber, especially if you know someone replacing their windows). The trouble is, doing it in a tasteful fashion that doesn't look trashy. That project is probably a long way off, but if I come across a bunch of old windows cheap/free, I'll store them in the rafters in my garage.
there's a good book on the topic from David Montgomery called _Dirt_ if you can get it from your local library it's worth a read. things to think about during the off- season. :)
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