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Home gardens | Pad Patter 3.28.2017

bellbird

bellbird

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Pollywog
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From all the springy-ness in the shop, it's looking like gardening season is coming back for many (although I'm sure there's still a lot of snow around for some). It's going into Autumn here which is also thought of as a harvest time. Do you have a garden at home (veggies or flowers?) or are you a black thumb and just hate dirt and bugs etc?

We have a lot of 'grew themselves' veggies at the moment (tomatoes and sweet potatoes & all the herbs just re-seed) from veggie scraps thrown in the compost but DH is also an avid veggie gardener; i water stuff when told to (but he made a watering system with a timer before our last trip for his most important sections of garden) but am not big on planting unless it's in pots or plastic cups for kids science homework (see the bugs and dirt comment above). The tomatoes have now attracted about 5 different kinds of bees to the yard while i'm not a huge fan of bees either (native or otherwise) it's been interesting to see, hadn't thought of bees as a particularly diverse species
 
I would love to be able to grow veggies, but we just don't have a good spot for it. The only place in our yard that gets enough sun is right in front and that wouldn't work out too well. But I do have flowers, lots and lots of flowers. I have 4 big flower beds and "playing" in them is one of my most favorite things. I also keep several hanging baskets and many potted flowers on my deck. They bring me so much happiness and I actually find it quite cathartic to go out in the early morning and dead head all my pretties. I love digging around in the dirt :)
 
bellbird said:
The tomatoes have now attracted about 5 different kinds of bees to the yard while i'm not a huge fan of bees either (native or otherwise) it's been interesting to see, hadn't thought of bees as a particularly diverse species
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Bee's are an AWESOME addition to your garden Justine! Did you know that more bees are dying than multiplying!? And that is NOT a good thing! That is how the plant world works! They say it is from all the chemicals we are putting on everything. NOT GOOD!
My dad was a Beekeeper and watching him tend his hives and harvest the honey is some of my favorite childhood memories. My brother and his two son's are now Beekeepers.

We used to have a garden but we have gone to a few pots of tomatoes/herbs on the back deck. The last few years when we had our large garden we just could not keep the deer out of it and they would eat most of it. It was either put in a really large fence or not do one. Last year was the first time we did not put one in.
We had researched and done a lot of different things to try and keep them out.
 
I have a black thumb. I have managed to kill a cactus (and I truly tried to keep it alive! I was so sad!) Therefore, I do not have a garden. DH plants flowers for me. I get veggies at the farm stands nearby. :)
 
I have flower beds that I mostly maintain. I worked in them this past Sunday. @Sokee - we feel your pain. I plant only flowers that the deer don't like.

We have a few herbs on the deck in pots. My hubby attempts to put out tomato and pepper plants but keeping the deer off them is a huge chore. We have a dog that goes out on the deck, but the deer seem to know she is trapped up there. He got a cheap plastic green house for the plants last year and it did keep the deer out. However, it also kept the bees out and so we did not get much fruit. One of our neighbors built a gazebo with fence/netting sides and a roof; he gardens in it.

Our neighborhood is right next to a big forest owned by Duke University. So the deer live there but come into our neighborhood for the "all-you-can-eat buffet" know as our yards. The record at our house is 11 deer on the front lawn.
 
we do a vegetable and herb garden each year. generally we have not been very successful. we don't get enough sun I think. maybe this year dh will move it to another spot in the yard. we'll see.
 
yes, what @Sokee said! there are even bee programs here - where they will give you honey bees in an effort to grow their population. we do not use a lot of chemicals on our grass/lawn, trees, shrubs and flowers and do an organic garden ... and we have a ton of bees, not sure if that is the reason but they are everywhere. most of them do their thing & don't bother us too much - i've only been stung once in the 10 years that i've lived here. but living among the bees is just a part of life at my house. my uncle used to keep bees too.

i started a garden a few years ago for veggies and herbs but wasn't able to do it last year ... this year i am though. i'm not a green thumb and just wing it ... what ever comes of it comes. i find it rewarding and soothing.

we have a ton of deer and wildlife here too (this weekend i even had falcon land on my deck just outside my family room windows!) ... so we have to keep it fenced. somehow the wildlife still gets in there though! we've had a bunny family populate in the garden beds!

i'm so looking forward to gardening season!!! :beat
 
I've haven't gardened much but I wish I did know how. The closest thing to a garden I ever did myself was in 2006, while I was pregnant with my youngest. (I guess it gave me extra energy!) But even that yielded just a handful of tiny carrots and a small amount of something else I'm forgetting, I think. It was one of those above ground boxes we can build, using the concept of "square foot gardening" and it was in one of my side yards, kind of less accessible and less visible (so easy to forget about it), but that's the only spot on my property that gets sun for a large portion of the day.

@jk703 Jenn, I managed to let an aloe vera plant die. :( I think it's a matter of priorities. Other things fill my time and I don't have time left for growing plants. Even though I'd love to and I marvel at other people's gardens.

However, I'm currently having a plant success of sorts! :D Last batch of green onions I bought, after I'd nearly used them up (but still had most of the bulbs because I tend to reach in the veggie drawer and break off a stem rather than pulling out an entire bulb), I decided to stick them in water. In just a week they have regrown 7 stems, quite tall! It's magical! Where do they get the raw materials to create more green onion? :D And they're tasty too, perhaps even more flavorful than the original ones from the grocery store (or maybe I'm just paying more attention to the flavor now that I've grown them myself). Watch, I might be making a scrapbook page about growing green onions soon. :)
 
Black thumb with the exception of a garden I did 2 years ago and we are now still trying to get rid of the field mice it brought with it!
 
michelepixels said:
I've haven't gardened much but I wish I did know how. The closest thing to a garden I ever did myself was in 2006, while I was pregnant with my youngest. (I guess it gave me extra energy!) But even that yielded just a handful of tiny carrots and a small amount of something else I'm forgetting, I think. It was one of those above ground boxes we can build, using the concept of "square foot gardening" and it was in one of my side yards, kind of less accessible and less visible (so easy to forget about it), but that's the only spot on my property that gets sun for a large portion of the day.
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this is how i do my garden (read that Square Foot Gardening book that I picked up at the library!)- we have very hard shale ground so it's not pleasant to dig/till- i have 8 large above ground boxes - but can really grow a lot of stuff in there!
 
I did a container garden on my back deck last summer. I enjoyed every minute of it!
With our dog I didn't want to chance having on in the yard. He stayed out of the containers and deer aren't plentiful in our neighborhood. The only pest we had were a few tomato hornworms that I squashed. LOL
We did keep one for my daughter until it cocooned and turned into an ugly moth. LOL

 
We usually do a vegetable garden each year but this has been a pretty rough year for us so far. We lost my mother-in-law earlier this month and our hearts are just not in working the garden right now so we are going to start with a few tomatoes, strawberries, and broccoli in porch pots for now and see how that goes. I have this past weekend planted a new flower garden by my back porch. I have very fond memories of my grandmother's large flower gardens and thought I would try my hand at it with my little ones. I do not have the green thumb like my grandmother so we will see how it goes.
 
We have flower beds with flowering bushes and plants, and everything is just starting to come back and turn green. Nothing is blooming yet except for the azaleas. Almost all plants are low maintenance. We do have a few things on the porch. Hubby just made a planter inside my bird cage and I love it! It has some impatiens and some ivy.

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We have a pretty small yard and just don't have a good place for it. I've done some container gardening but it's so dry and sunny here in AZ, that if you miss one day of watering, everything dies! I've managed to grow some lettuce and tomatoes but that's about it. Flowers do well though!
 
I have imaginary gardens!! I cannot keep any kind of plant or flower alive! I forget to water, or I over water, too much sun, not enough sun LOL
 
Growing up we had a 3 acre vegetable garden, but since I've been married we had a small garden area for a few years. We used to have strawberries, tomatoes, green peppers and peas, but life got busy and we ended up forgetting about it part way through the summer, so we removed the garden spot last spring. I've always loved my flowers, so I do flowers in the flower beds each year. I'm getting excited for May. I won't plant my flowers until after Mother's day or they might freeze. I didn't do any annuals last year because of my health issues and we hired out a face lift on the yard. This year, I'm going to get my annuals again to go with the perennials (zinnias and petunias). I won't have as many as I used to because I can't keep up with that much, but it will be fun to have a few flowers to cut again this year.
 
I used to be an excellent gardener and raised native plants/gardens round the world. e.g. roses in England, orchids in Thailand. Now I could care less. I'd love to brick half our backyard over as we don't get enough sun for even the grass to grow very well. I make some effort on the little patch we have out front but mostly it's ground cover and thyme. I used to have a lot of lavender along one edge of the walkway but a couple of blizzard years killed most of that.

My Cypriot neighbor grows vegetables and I'm content to get his occasional generosity.
 
We live surrounded in woods with a small open area to the south. But the open area has clay-like soil and not good for anything. The tannic acid from the burr oaks ruins the soil for veggies. We have tried so many things, raised beds, etc. Then we end up with worms and bugs and bunnies that eat our produce. It just isn't worth it.

For flowers, yes, we have tons, but shade loving ones. Lots of perennials and I accent with annuals for more color.
 
I am too busy keeping the people in my house alive to worry about plants outside of it.

That is what my husband is for. :giggle

He bought all the veggies I requested: potatoes, carrots, green beans, onions, & tomatoes. He likes to kid himself into thinking he's going to make some things, too, with the harvest so he is also planting jalapenos, oregano, basil, & cilantro. He never did get around to making a batch of salsa last summer even when I was picking more than 50 cherry tomatoes a day off our plants. Last year's harvest was a little tricky as he forgot to mark what he planted where.

He likes flowers, too, and plants several patches in different places around the fence in the backyard. I've requested a rainbow patch this year but he thinks that's ridiculous so we'll see if that actually happens or not.

At our old house, he grew corn & strawberries. He was especially proud of that.

Gardening is how he tends to unwind after work and it's a win-win for everyone during the summer since I can shove the kids outside to play while he's doing that and I can do chores uninterrupted or cook dinner or relax!
 
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