The 2013 Garden Thread

reply to post by otherpotato


Did you know that poppy seeds do not need to be covered with soil, they need the sun to make them germinate.
This could be why you are not having any luck with poppy's.

Also I am one of the people that grow onions from seed

reply to post by Keron


I did read that somewhere and am trying out that approach this year. If I do not get any this go around I officially quit with the poppies and will just stick to Dahlias and Zinnias!

reply to post by SunflowerStar


I really appreciate it!
No worries on the time, I won't need it until this fall, but now it is printed and saved.


I am still fighting the weather, or being beat by it is more fitting. I did receive some trees this week though. I need to heel in my apple, but I also received a lemon, an orange and an olive. I am going to grow them all in the house due to our climate. I was happy to see that the lemon actually has blooms and had a few lemons already started, but alas, my youngest son decided to pick berries for mama while I was going over science with my oldest.
I think he missed some of the lemons and left alone the blooms, but darn, I was looking forward to some fresh citrus soon.

Winter just can't last forever, right?

reply to post by woodsmom


So jealous about your lemon tree. I have been wanting one for years but they're hard to find around here and I always feel guilty about subjecting plants to a trip through the mail. May need to take a trip to connecticut. I hear there's a greenhouse that has been cultivating lemon trees from the same old tree for decades. Hmm....

Ok confession time. I misjudged the temps and left my tomato babies outside Saturday night. Pretty sure all but one, maybe two got hit by a frost. Gone...all gone... see my earlier post where I said the tomatoes wouldn't make it this year. Yep. Gonna have to buy flats. Epic. Fail.

reply to post by otherpotato


I am so sorry to hear about your tomatoes.
Tomatoes are tough at this stage, I had 3 commit suicide on me last year at this time. I was hardening them off outside on a shelf next to the house, a small breeze must have upset them because they just kind of tipped over and almost jumped off. One was salvageable, and I had more, but it was odd, I watched it from about 15 feet away and just couldn't catch them in time. It's heartbreaking.

reply to post by otherpotato


That sucks, sorry to hear it. Here, we maybe get two to four days of frost per year, but I'm still working on how I will handle that issue, while I have some time to plan.

reply to post by otherpotato


So sorry, otherpotato!! I know exactly how you feel; you have all my sympathies.

If I knew how to package young tomato plants I'd volunteer some, but I think they'd get damaged in the near cross-country ship.

reply to post by otherpotato

Ok confession time. I misjudged the temps and left my tomato babies outside Saturday night. Pretty sure all but one, maybe two got hit by a frost. Gone...all gone... see my earlier post where I said the tomatoes wouldn't make it this year. Yep. Gonna have to buy flats. Epic. Fail.

Mass murderer! Plants are living beings, and you were directly responsible for their survival. How dare you!

Druid's respect all living things, and your confession has me appalled. Can you really lead a Research Project when you are so careless?

/sarcasm off/

Really, we've all made mistakes before. So have I. In all honesty, we learn from our mistakes, and become better gardeners because of it. It took real courage to admit you messed up, and you have my utmost respect for your honesty.

We are going Friday morning to buy plants and seeds, and plant the same day. I'll be doing the whole plot at one time, calculating rows and harvest conditions, and capturing the whole process digitally. Expect a few long multiple posts to cover the whole process, and I'll probably post on Saturday.

reply to post by Druid42


Thanks for everyone's sympathy cards for my tomatoes. I know I dug my own grave here - laziness kills. But Druid - your post was awesome. Let me share this photo from 2010 in response. I call it "where plastic cups come from. Aka the perfect garden".



Because plastic never dies.

This was a year where we jumped the gun with our warm weather plants and then had a frost warning. This was how we dealt with it - plastic cups. (It worked BTW). The picture still makes me laugh.

Point being I am "old enough" to know better about planting tomatoes et al too early. I do this every year. I get too eager and pay the price. Mine assith needith to be kicketh. And was.

I look forward to your epic post - with pictures! Excited to get this project thread officially started. I have one more potential participant to confirm with and then the project thread will be up (if I don't get a confirm it'll be up regardless). Expect my official post by Saturday latest. Patience is appreciated.

Oh and we got here rain at last!!!! Plants = happy.

Originally posted by otherpotato
So jealous about your lemon tree. I have been wanting one for years but they're hard to find around here and I always feel guilty about subjecting plants to a trip through the mail.

Perennials are built to last and can handle shipping just fine, assuming its done right. The casual annual gardener might die if they see some of the ways I handle some of the plants around here during various stages of ongoing operations. And that's mostly nothing compared to what bonsai practitioners do to their project plants. I have several books on bonsai and its quite remarkable the destructive hassles perennials tend to be able to endure. However, I have my methods down enough that I can ship annuals just fine, although I dont often even grow them anymore other than for seed production.

reply to post by otherpotato

Sorry to hear about your tomatoes.Last year I got hit with a three week cold snap in June(dubbed Juneuary by our local media);the low temperatures killed all 56 of my watermelons and stunted the 1800 corn plants I had in the ground. This year has been much kinder so far; we have had record breaking temperatures the last week and the 700 corn seeds I have in the ground so far are germinating nicely(I hope to get up to at least 2000 in the next three weeks).

reply to post by TheWetCoast


1800 corn plants. Wow! I feel like small potatoes over here

The weather has been weird. Hot one day. Frost the next. I try to take everything in stride and not get too attached because some things are just not under one's control. I have little hope that I will get watermelons. The two seedlings I was acclimating outside got hit and while they're still green I doubt they will last. I planted some seed but I'm not sure the growing season will be long enough. Time will tell...

What has been occupying my time of late is nutsedge. I dug up every patch I could find and two weeks later it is back. Starting digging up again. And before anyone tells me you can eat it - yes I am aware of this. I just didn't plan on growing nutsedge in my garden....

reply to post by woodsmom


I'm revisiting this earlier post because someone in another post mentioned that the poppies need to be scattered and not covered with soil. This seems to support that. No wonder I've been having problems...

I grew some scallions last year and they didn't do much. Came back this year and I have mini onion-like bulbs popping out of the ground in addition to the greens. Didn't expect that. What do I do with them? Pull them or let them go to seed?

I haven't seen this posted yet, so here is some tomato advise. (actually other plants too)
If you can afford it, and have room, invest in a cattle panel or several. I tried it for the first time last year and could not believe how much easier it made my gardening life.
We put four cattle panels arched over, then tied to steaks in the garden and planted 3 plants per panel, per side. As they grew, we weaved them in and out. It makes it so much easier to harvest as well, just walk through the arch. One of the plants was over 6 feet tall!!!!
I'm doing my cucumbers like this this year as well. For all you bean lovers, this would probably work real well for them too.

The panels aren't cheap, like 26.00 each, but I had a little money last year, so decided to try it. The good thing is, they can last you for many years.

And, if you know a frost is coming, you can just through plastic over them for the night to save your plants!

reply to post by otherpotato


About the scallions, which of the alliums did you plant to begin with? The allium family is huge and includes garlic, onions and chives. Depending on what you planted and where it is at you may want to leave it be for seed, or transplant it to a permanent home.

I grow yellow onions from seed and that is the same variety of green onions, or scallions, that I use through the summer, they are annuals in my climate and are harvested every fall. If it is truly just an onion, then let it go to seed and just harvest that, the bulb would probably be spent if it froze.

I also have garlic chives that produce a purple puff flower full of seed. That is perennial, as well as a plant that I was gifted called an Egyptian walking onion. These have a permanent home as well. I can use all parts of this one, but I choose to leave the bulb in the ground because it will return for me. It grows a mini bulb at the end of the stalk and plants another where it lands, they also make a good mellow near garlic substitute.

I hope this helped instead of confusing the issue more!

Good luck on your poppies! Let me know if the scattering without a chill works, it would be a great tid bit to add to the journal!

reply to post by IgnoranceIsntBlisss


You are absolutely right! The trees came through beautifully! Plants are resilient creatures. I actually got scolded once years ago for treating the plants too gently by the owner of the greenhouse. He taught me that not only can they handle it a little rough, but sometimes it's good for them. A couple of bumps and bruises can make for a stronger plant in the long run.

reply to post by woodsmom


Okay...here is part of the reason why otherpotato is doing these gardening threads. I am completely disorganized with my seed store and am having a hard time keeping track of what I planted where.

The only seed package that I can find that could be what I planted is labeled "early onions." The back of the package also calls them scallions. So mystery appears to be solved. The pictures show narrow white bulbs while what I am seeing poking out of the ground is decidedly rotund (though small). I'd post a picture but it's dark right now. Looks like I missed the "early" mark but If I can get more mature bulbs wile also allowing them to reseed that would be wonderful.

(As an aside we do have two chive plants that we've had for years - just starting to get their purple buds - so I know for certain what I'm seeing is different).

I have one grouping of these we'll-call-them-onions close together that has white bulbs pushing out of the soil. I think there's about four bulbs and they're maybe two or three inches across from what I saw poking through the ground. The other grouping appears to just be green shoots. Guessing the close grouping will keep the bulbs small.

Will they really reseed? I don;t remember seeing them go to seed last year and would swear these are the same plants I planted that didn't do much last year. I'd be happy if they did reseed and spread because this is exactly where I wanted them - in front of the garlic. I'll take the experiment

Guess I need to do some research. Perhaps this will be my accidental success story!

Edit to add - I froze the seeds before planting a few weeks ago but hadn't yet read the tip about not covering with soil. Try try again....

reply to post by otherpotato


You might employ some of my organizational methods to help out. Here is my 'plant rolodex':




The seeds aren't in those packs anymore, they're properly vaulted in mylar ziplock bags (individually). I have hundreds of things that no printed seed packs exist for on this earth, so I had to develop a index carding system [none are pictured] (which also serves as a to-do listing method for intended species/cultivars on my action item list).

Soon I'll do a big thread showing the details of my seed vaulting methods. By this time last year, after only 3 years, I had more seed cultivars than most of the suppliers I was buying from. Now I've gone pro.

I'm anxious to build this thread I speak of, but I don't even yet have my store stocked with 10% of my inventory so I can't get too fancy here unfortunately being so backlogged in everything.

Originally posted by otherpotato
Will they really reseed? I don;t remember seeing them go to seed last year and would swear these are the same plants I planted that didn't do much last year. I'd be happy if they did reseed and spread because this is exactly where I wanted them - in front of the garlic. I'll take the experiment

In my experience, and I maintain mass amounts of seeds and get to play around in ways most people wouldn't even think of, most things you see at the grocery store don't reseed so well.

For example, here is the seed mass we'll be broadcast sowing over my friends 7 acre Florida property this year, as an experiment. Its dense growth, most of it. That's a 1 gallon sized ziplock bag laid flat on the counter there. There's a good 150+ species/cultivars in there; annuals and perennials. At least 1,000,000 seeds. That's the by product of last years seed pre-packing efforts:

We did a similar ordeal to a very remote property within the circle, 3 years ago, but haven't been back up there yet to check on it. It's really wild out there and am anxious to get back up there to see what might have endured.

Exceptions are things with very small seeds, especially those that drop massive amounts of them from each plants (basil, amaranth). Its not to say they wont, its to say don't expect them to.

It's a matter of longevity. The longer your grounds remain under operations, the more and more the 'weeds' that sprout up are the things you normally work for. Here I grow year round. Been doing so for several years now. But you always have weeds. The better you keep out those weeds, the higher the ratio you can expect.

Composting everything helps, it keeps those desired seeds going back into the soils.

Not letting the proper-weeds set seeds before you pull them makes all the difference.

There are different problems with everyday expected veggies. One is people have coddled them for so long they expect us to be there to make it all happen. Tht thinds that are the product of us have been trained o pujt all of their energies into awesome 'fruit' production instead of their abilities to COMPETE with all the weeds that know nothing but 1000's of years of how to do almost nothing but compete. Many of the plants I deal with have had human operators for so many thousands of years they no longer even produce seeds. Several would no longer exist if humans weren't around, and some I know of face extinction as a result of that and power-tripping legislatures. Couple this with, many seeds wont properly sprout unless at a proper depth. Then what turns this upside down is the big cash crops have had many many generations of humans hammering down these cultivars so that all the seed swill sprout within a specific time period. This is essential for commercial crop production. Meanwhile the weeds you hate, they're genetically programmed to sprout at totally random intervals so there's always going to be seeds that succeed in sprouting for years to come, even while some will sprout quite literally immediately.

This all is yet but more motivation to put such energies towards perennials: most of these restrictive ordeals outlined above don't apply to plants that are genetically programmed to endure such odds.

reply to post by IgnoranceIsntBlisss


WOW. I am definitely not providing a picture of how I store my seeds.

If you don't mind my asking, other than cataloging for commercial sale someday, what is your seed storing method? My grandmother always stored in plastic margarine tubs, and I've heard paper envelopes are best for certain kinds.

You have an impressive seed store. I am truly humbled. And hope to make friends with you so I can purchase some