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Outdoor Gardening 2015


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might as well start planning for next year?

 

thread is for any tips tricks knowledge whatever you got rattling around in that head of yours about outdoor gardening.

 

stuff i learned from this year:

 

grow in pots if ground is too cold

i even grow potatoes and carrots in pots. in fact, i got better results than in the ground. i'm not sure if its the poor quality of my soil, or the sun warming the pots more , but this year was the first year i've had full size 8 inch carrots. every other year i grow carrots i get 3-4 inch ones. try it! see what works better.

 

 

make a hugelkultur if you dont feel like watering or want to conserve! more info: http://www.richsoil.com/hugelkultur/

good time to mulch your garden with leaves and coffee grounds. get free 20 pound bags of spent coffee grounds at starbucks or other local coffee shops.

 

 

 

want to attract worms into your outdoor container pots? before you fill the pots with dirt, rip up any vegetative matter such as dandelion weeds or long grass.and put it in the bottom of each pot.

i did this as a filler, since i ran out of compost last year (too many pots!) and needed something to fill the containers with. so i put 1-4 inches of grass and weeds in the bottom of each pot. i had worms in every container! the bottom of my pots turned from grass and weeds into pure earthworm poop. 

wouldnt recommend food scraps, as some enterprising squirrels dug up a few of my food scrap experiment pots and made a mess. this process takes a while, so maybe its better to start it now, with some leaves? so its ready in the spring? something to try anyways.

 

 

what grows really well in our climate?

had good luck with beans, peas, turnips, rutabega, radishes, kale, parsley, sunflowers, beets.

 

did not have good luck with corn, brussel sprouts, broccoli, califlower, celery, carrots (in ground), last year. combination of a too short season , plus frozen ground didnt help.

 

any suggestions for easy to grow vegetables are welcome.

 

my garden was so nice, a little friend came over and "helped" me eat my greens.

chuck.jpg

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t-pain,those little white butterflies are the culprits eating your cabbages. Put more sand in your dirt,you should be able to grow crucerifus (SP) veggies in colder weather.Keeps the dirt a little looser and less apt to freeze as soon. I love rutabagas.Maybe because my family is from up north,but we ate a lot of root veggies that my Grandma kept in the root cellar all winter. They never froze or rotted. I mulch my flowers really thickly with ground up leaves then cover the beds with pine boughs from a Norfolk Pine. They are exposed to the north wind all winter.Have you tried growing parsnips? YUMMY.  PS.....  I just saw what you little friend was. Our JRTs can get him in a minute and would enjoy having a varmint to dispatch.

Edited by jointedone
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  • 11 months later...

update on the garden of 2015.

notes to myself:

 

dont bother growing corn.

 

groundhog ate every single sunflower seedling, i planted over 500.

groundhog also managed to eat every single sunchoke branch, it grows like a weed but he ate my entire backyard!

groundhog is very very fat now.

 

carrots didnt even sprout, maybe 1/10 sprouted very late and are about marble size.

what did i do wrong?! maybe they'll come up next year if they survive winter.

 

zucchini and green beans and maybe pumpkins next year.

will plant more for the birds, mullen or something. wish i could plant them some hemp seed...

 

got some big beefsteaks but the squirrels or birds always take bites out of them. have to leave bowl of water out for stupid animals so they leave the tomatoes alone hah. darn summer drought.

 

not a single watermelon, give up on that.

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We have a groundhog named fatso. He's sleeping now. LOL

 

I have to put up a fence to keep him out of my back yard because he eats everything and then he wants to dig under the pool. He is very social, invites all of his friends over. 

 

I have to bury metal fencing under ground to stop him from digging under the fence. It works. I'm glad I don't have to shoot them any more. That was really brutal. 

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  • 10 months later...

garden update 2016.

 

total 100% failure in every regard.

the weather predictions did not help. i think it was predicted each week to get 70% chance of rain, we never got the rain. or if it did rain, it was for 10 minutes and a little sprinkle.

 

groundhog was female and had a litter of 5.

baby groundhogs proceeded to dance on all seedlings and eat everything else. poor mulberry trees.

 

drought conditions failed to germinate all other seeds.

 

corn for some reason grew better. not good enough to eat yet, but got 200 seeds for next year from the 6 or so plants.

 

tomatoes , potatoes, green beans (only at the end of the year after groundhogs moved out) and turnips were the only things that made it this year.

 

first year nectarine went to fruit, however due to drought, all fruit died from thousands of bird pecks and lack of water?

 

due to mint, motherwart, milkweed, lemon balm plants, a nice variety of large butterflies were observed.

 

no sunflowers = no birds.

 

really really sad year for gardening.

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i gave some seeds to a friend and his garden also failed. glad to know it wasnt just me!

 

looking at my notes from last year, the carrot seeds dont over-winter so i shouldnt expect much next spring either.

 

if this drought keeps up, i will be sad. i planted over 2000 seeds this year. very sad.

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I started putting my garden in five gal buckets to keep the moles away from my roots,  they had tunnels all over my garden searching for them darn lil white phaqs (forgot the name) but it worked well on my cucumbers, tomatoes, brussel sprouts, brussell sprouts are best picked after first frost, makes them sweeter!

 

I had a very productive veg garden this yr, oh I didnt put a top on it either, but I did put fence around it to keep the deer out!

 

Peace

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i gave some ss eedto a friend and his garden also failed. glad to know it wasnt just me!

 

Bad Seed?

 

 

 

 

drought conditions failed to germinate all other seeds.

 

corn for some reason grew better. not good enough to eat yet, but got 200 seeds for next year from the 6 or so plants.

 

 

 

I suggest to try fresh healthy seed stock, instead of old not good enough for eating seed stock(give those to friends)

water your seedlings, so you cant blame those on drought next year too. :P

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seeds were from professional farm and garden seed stores based here in Michigan. always support local.

 

http://debruynseed.com/

http://www​.hazzardsgreenhouse.com/

 

I watered manually with a sprinkler, but not well enough. I learned a lot from this year.

 

Yeah the"other seeds" were the expired dollar store ones haha. Oh well. lesson learned

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seeds were from professional farm and garden seed stores based here in Michigan. always support local.

 

http://debruynseed.com/

http://www​.hazzardsgreenhouse.com/

 

I watered manually with a sprinkler, but not well enough. I learned a lot from this year.

 

Yeah the"other seeds" were the expired dollar store ones haha. Oh well. lesson learned

and you still save "not good enough to eat" seeds for next years planting?

you expect those seeds to make "good enough to eat" corn next time around?

 

I had some luck with herb seeds from the dollar store, but the veggies always were wierded out.

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This side of the state had an awesome year. The corn is huge and ahead of schedule , the apple trees have the best crop ever.

 

The tomatoes were large and plentiful and you know when the Tomatoes are doing well Cannabis is to.

 

The wet stretch in September brought what would have been a record canna crop into just a Great Harvest.

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and you still save "not good enough to eat" seeds for next years planting?

you expect those seeds to make "good enough to eat" corn next time around?

 

I had some luck with herb seeds from the dollar store, but the veggies always were wierded out.

well, I also enjoy growing corn for my squirrel friends....

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This side of the state had an awesome year. The corn is huge and ahead of schedule , the apple trees have the best crop ever.

 

The tomatoes were large and plentiful and you know when the Tomatoes are doing well Cannabis is to.

 

The wet stretch in September brought what would have been a record canna crop into just a Great Harvest.

I have a small orchard in genesee county. The trees are probably 50+ years old. The apple trees still produce well but I don't spray them so they are always buggy. I just let the deer ear them. I had lots of apples this year but strangely few pears. My pear trees always produced well. The last two years some branches were so heavy with pears that they started to split from the trunk. For some reason I got only about 12 pears from two trees this year.

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