i'm gonna start this off by saying that gardening and caring for plants is really good for the soul, but most of you olds in this subforum ought to know that by now

so i'm pretty irritated about not being able to grow weed in SC (not willing to grow illegally) and i've had the itch to cultivate something, so i got started on a vegetable and herb garden. i did a search and this might be the one area of life that doesn't have a 2+2 thread dedicated to it, so i figured i'd make this one to encourage people to engage in horticulture and to be a place where people can brag about what they got going on, share experiences with different nutrients/methods, and help diagnose problems with sick or underperforming plants.

with that said, i got started yesterday and dug out a ~5'x7' rectangle about 16-18" deep next to the concrete slab out back. they say to go down about 12" but i wanted to be able to plant stuff a little closer together, so i went a little deeper. while the soil was sandy and free of rocks, it was a tremendous mess of roots and a huge pain in the ass to excavate. took a couple hours, then i filled it back in, removing the bigger root clumps and branches as i went, raking it out to mix up the dirt every so often. there's still tons of leaves in the backyard, so a bunch of them got dragged back in during the re-filling, which is nice since it's basically just like compost. threw down two big bags of happy frog potting soil on the top to supplement the soil foodweb and watered the area with some 3-1-1 fox farm wholly mackerel nutes (good lord that **** stinks, even spilled some in the kitchen for good measure)- figured i'd go organic cuz reasons. still have to fence/stake off the perimeter to keep the dogs from running through it, and have a hanging strawberry plant that i'm gonna mount on a pole of some sort on one of the bed corners

threw some stuff in the ground after that and it was all super happy and perky this morning when i went outside to check on it.



lots of potential imo and i mostly know what i'm doing, so def hoping for a good summer. wanted to put a few herbs in there because i do a lot of cooking and you can pluck and use them fresh right off the plant throughout the growing season. got a row of celebrity tomatoes in the back- they say you can pair them with a cucumber plant in the same space that it takes to grow the lone tomatoes, so i doubled/paired two of them up with lone celebrities in between. got two zucchini plants in the next row towards the left with a 5th celebrity on the right, a little jalapeno plant on the bottom left and then some catnip, rosemary, parsley, lemon basil, and chives up on the edge of the pad. these things smell ****ing amazing compared to the dried crap you get in spice bottles at the store. left an open space for cilantro once i can find an immature plant of that because it's a bit late in the year to germinate from seed.

we have 3 cats, so i picked off a few of the leaves from the bottom of the catnip plant last night and needless to say, it was a huge hit and a lot of entertainment for the evening. something i didn't know is that catnip is apparently 20x stronger than deet (!!!!) as a bug/insect repellent. def gonna be making some bug spray or something out of that for fishing trips this year.

had pretty good luck with "square foot gardening." its like a whole raised bed principle and ppl are fairly into it but I just did what was convenient.

the main thing is get some wood for raised beds and then fill it in with 1/3 compost, 1/3 vermiculite, and 1/3 peat moss. add a bit of compost every year.

I hate gardening with a passion. I grew up on a farm.

lol you werent gardening, you were providing slave labor to your parents

No. There was the farming - corn and soybeans - and then there was the family garden - mom's vegetables. I hated the vegetable gardening. Still do.

yea raised beds are sweet but i'm renting here so i didn't want to really spend money to create a structure that i'd have to leave behind. figured i'd just roll the dice on the soil quality and treat for deficiencies as they appear.

how do you make your compost, just throw a bunch of vegetable/fruit waste and scraps into a pile with some leaves and let it decompose?

also, whats the benefit to using peat moss in your growing medium? i see a lot of people talk about it, seems popular outdoors. do you still have to mix it with potting soil or does it have a strong/complex enough foodweb? i used to use peat pucks for rooting marijuana clones and they were the nuts, but once they rooted i always transplanted into a potting soil mixture.

also there's been a huge controversy going on for years about vermiculite production at the main facility here in the states, allegedly it's been contaminated with asbestos since the very beginning. heard anything about this?

My tomatoes just started sprouting today and were put under the grow light.



No really, they're tomatoes.

Said everyone ever, that has had an indoor grow light.

I'm in MA. I wouldn't need to lie.

And I'd be lucky to harvest a gram with that light.

Damn, now I'm jealous. I wish I was legally aloud to grow up to like 6 plants in my house. Someday NY, someday.
And now that I look at it better it does seem small. How long til the tomatoes are ready to be put on someones pillow? I mean to eat? I was looking into getting the wife something similar

yea you're def not gonna grow anything to maturity under that little LED. good for sprouting tho.

germination and early vegetative growth can be done quite quickly/efficiently under one or two 60W daylight CFL bulbs, if you're looking to get a late start on anything this year and want to invest minimal time money and effort

nice to see some other pics in here, is that all you got going at the moment zik?

If I manage to not kill them, I'll be making sauce by late July or early August. They'll get moved outside around June 1st.

Yeah, that's all I'm doing this year. I don't really have the time for anything more.

the beds are really cheap. I just used 1x4s from home depot. I ended up with 2 4x4 beds and another 4x8 bed which is a lot of garden. 48 feet of 1x4s was like ~60 iirc. vermiculite and peat was another 60. 10 for peat, and 50 for vermiculite.

re: compost, ya pretty much just a ton of brown leafs that fell and then veggie/fruit leftovers and a bit of green yard waste too. sometimes threw in coffee grinds and egg shells or whatever else is leftover.

also, since I didnt have enough compost, and I read that diversity is important, I drove around town and bought different kinds. its pretty expensive and I proly spent like $80 to fill in the rest. to fill all of my beds with compost would have been extremely pricey (proly like 4-500) they say to use different kinds and try to avoid the kind with manure. I used mushroom compost, lobster compost, peat compost, and then like 3 bags of manure based.

as for the peat moss (as well as the vermiculite) it is to give the soil the proper structure and other properties along with the more dense compost. google "square foot gardening" and they explain. some of the ppl, and esp the founder, are quite particular and fastidious about doing it the "right way" but he has clearly experimented a ton and found a mix that works.

the whole point is to be able to plant the most amount of plants in the smallest area. my understanding is that the compost provides the nutrients while the peat and vermiculite provide the structure and absorption and other properties.

also, being in ohio, I grew tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, squash, herbs and chard from seed. direct planted beans. proly coulda direct planted the chard.

I used starter soil and seeds under one of those humid plastic things. oh ya, used a heating pad too. once they sprouted I put them under a grow light. I just cut the pods off and moved the sprouted ones while leaving the others to sprout.

as they got bigger, I transplanted them to larger containers with potting soil.

havent heard anything. you only need to add the vermiculite one time. I did this like 5 years ago.

I've got my garden started in my green house living room.

My greenhouse a couple weeks ago





Lettuce, beets, pepper and tomato starts, pak choi and cilantro and cabbage and rapini.

Some cedar beds I built in November. I also have 400sqft of cinder block raised bed in a different section of the yard. Also pictured: compost/vole habitat:

dont tease us, what you got in there?

bell pepper (never got them to produce much but this is finally the year), eggplant, zucchini, butternut squash, sweet and thai basil and cilantro. Will be sewing sugar snap peas in the ground beginning of May, and buying some tomato plants to plant. In the backyard I've got three (kinda) raised beds, plus another bed where there used to be a tree, and another bed along the side of the house. Out front my bulbs are starting to bloom and I planted some pansies this week, and will be adding petunias, dahlias and sewing assorted seeds in late May to go along with the perennials.

This will be my third summer here. First year rabbits ate all my pea plants before I got any peas, so I put up fencing. Last year the ****ing squirrels ate my tomatoes so I put up more fencing and now my entire garden is a mess of chicken wire and plastic fencing with netting over it which makes it a real hassle to tend to the garden and harvest stuff but **** those ****ers eating all my veggies. They already eat enough of my bulbs and last year got all the raspberries and the rabbits ate my daisies and black-eyed susans.

**** I hate squirrels and rabbits. At least Amazon and Home Depot gave me my money back when the predator urine pellets and special magic repellent spices 100% GUARANTEED!!! to make all rabbits and squirrels **** off did absolutely nothing.

that's a pretty sick greenhouse jack, what kind of climate are you in and how does the bok choy handle it? i always sautee some with some sort of soy sauce/garlic/ginger type of mixture when we do azn dinners. would def like to get some of that going on my next run

My compost is layers of yard waste/kitchen waste/coffee grounds mixed with layers of fall leaves/shredded paper. Each spring I have about4CF worth. Could probably do better with more active bins.

Peat provides structure to soil and therefore helps with root oxygen. It provides organic matter. It provides very little nutrients for food web, and is acidic so you should balance it with some lime when added. A couple handfuls of lime per bale of peat.

Peat is super useful for seed starting due to small particle size.

Awesome a gardening thread! I contemplated making one but wasn't confident how many people were into gardening on here. I will be all out of whack with you guys seasons wise but it will be fun seeing people growing summer crops while I am freezin my butt over here. Possibly I will be a little envious and make snarky jealous remarks! Just joking, I love watching different You tubers from all over the world with their different gardens, especially vegie patches.

I have 3 raised vegie beds which I intend to turn into at least 6 by next spring and then I also grow things in random spots in my flower garden if I deem that there is a chance the vegie/herb has a chance growing there. I also have some things in pots and styrofoam boxes. I have found eggplants often work better in styrofoam boxes if placed on cement for the extra heat. With our raised beds we got some soil brought in that had compost through it as I hadn't been here long enough to have good compost piles going. I just added some chicken manure to the beds and then when I planted the seedlings I added seaweed solution to everything apart from the tomatoes as I've found they generally don't need the extra fertiliser, I don't think it's great to overfeed tomato plants especially if you have good soil in the first place.

I planted a heap of things but some things didn't work out. The things that did do well were the tomatoes, silverbeet, lettuce, cucumbers, peas, beans and radish. Atm I am in that inbetween stage where summer crops are almost at the end of their life. I thought I would have pulled my tomato plants by now but they are still ripening up so I will give them another week or two. Definitely no longer then that though as I want to get my garlic in before the end of April. I have harvested truckloads of tomatoes this year, a real win. I'm devoting a whole bed to garlic as prices for Australian garlic this year at times were outrageous. I may even put 2 beds in as I'm buying a kilo of organic garlic seeds, which sounds like a lot so 2 beds may have to be sacrificed.

Currently I am growing silverbeet, chili, tomatoes and a truckload of herbs. I have a passionfruit vine in but apparently that takes 2 years to fruit. I also have a lime leaf, calamondin, lemon, apple and peach tree. I want to put more fruit trees in also. Next year I hope to be much more organised and have a lot more things going. I have before and after pics of my vegie area but they are in my old phone, so I will try and get it up and going and post some pics on here. I'm not much of a photo taker but the area was so overgrown that I thought it would be good to. Although from memory the before shots aren't at the beginning but after we had already cleared some of it. I try and garden organically which makes some things a bit harder but I think it is worth the effort.

Sorry for my rambling long post, I got really excited seeing a gardening thread lol.

Bok choi is super tough and along with spinach if I get it started in August it will survive the winter in there unheated but I turn the heater on in February anyway for peppers and tomatoes.

Climate front range colorado zone 5b/6a.

While writing my long post I missed some posts.

Jack,

Awesome greenhouse! I def want.

Greg,

Is "this is finally the year" about bell peppers based on scientific fact or merely a very optimistic outlook?

FACT! They're going at the side of the house where the eggplant thrive, so what could go wrong?