#1
welcome to the 2016 gardenchat thread

this year is looking good for my garden! we've been planting in the same spot for three years now, and we've worked up some really great soil structure and fertility, and have gotten to the point where we only have to topdress with compost to keep our fertility where we want it. all the covercropping has paid off!

for the spring, i'm planting:

peas
lettuce
fava beans
chard
kale
potatoes (la ratte, which is an extremely dank fingerling varity)
many lettuces
and fennel


what are y'alls garden plans>? how are you planning on distracting yourself from the fascist hellscape we inhabit? i figure between tsinava and myself there's enough gardening knowlege that we can offer some good advice if you have questions
#2
i'm thinking about starting a chia head. any tips/tricks?
#3
  1. water that shit
#4
To post, they say, is to make a beautiful flower. But today, the beautiful flower of my post is about a different kind of flower: the flower.


a daylily in my parent's garden

Where I live right now there isn't really space to garden, which makes me a little sad, although in the past I haven't been diligent enough to do it when I could. Growing up my parents had (and still have) a beautiful garden, display beds in the front yard and fresh food in the back. We lived next door to subsidized housing, which provided a garden plot that no one would ever use because poverty is a full time job. So we would grow in their lot as well and share the food, because the joy of gardening is its own reward and the food is just a bonus. My great grandfather passed away in his late 80s, still spry and fit, while working in his garden. How peaceful. Some of the most satisfying work I've done was landscaping with an older more experienced gardener, even when it was working on the terrible yards of rich people.

Let's talk about gardening.
#5
[account deactivated]
#6
my dad, like, owns a garden *dea assaults northern california compound*
#7
i would like to finally have an apartment garden the next place i live, but idk if i will be able to afford a place with a balcony.
#8
my mom, who is super into sustainable polyculture blah blah smart stuff, has a huge library of books about it and probably should just post here about it with the op, used to have huge vegetable gardens for most of my childhood even though we moved a ton. i love the smell of gardening.
#9
i'll buy your cool mom an account
#10
this is actually a pretty good time to revisit my childhood dream of having a single small weed plant
#11
i just planted some ashe juniper seeds. time for everyone nearby to hate me
#12
Why do people even grow those things? They're ugly!
#13
our last female poster perishes and all the guys turn to gardening to cope with it, pretty cliche
#14
Im not sure the term 'poster' is approrpriate
#15

tpaine posted:

is "my parent's garden" going to be the thread equivalent of "my dad's dealership"

"my pary's garden" I like to call it

#16
I've recently divided my vermicompost bin into three different terracotta pots. I've been using them to fertilize stuff around the yard. I think it's best to just set them in one place and leave them alone for as long as possible. My largest one has fig and blackberry cuttings which are starting to grow foliage. I just add kitchen scraps to it and dirt and leaves on top every now and then.
#17
what's that tree that smells horrible and is grown everywhere for no reason. it likes to eject berries all over the ground where they just ferment and rot and is basically the plant equivalent of a goon, unwashed and disgusting.
#18
In a eek or so I'm going to be making an elevated garden out of used wine cases. Because that's the sort of thing I do now, I guess


Example
#19

dipshit420 posted:

what's that tree that smells horrible and is grown everywhere for no reason. it likes to eject berries all over the ground where they just ferment and rot and is basically the plant equivalent of a goon, unwashed and disgusting.



i love washing trees

#20
post pics OP
#21
im going to start a garden this year but i dont really know what im doing and all these gardeners recommend that i start small and incrementally progress to a full sized garden. but i want full garden now
#22
I have small space and will be trying to grow some herbs and flowers. I've done it before but never harvested any food and I have no idea what I'm doing either
#23
i don't see any reason not to use all of whatever space you have available unless you're so busy (or lazy) that there's a realistic possibility that you wouldn't weed or water the whole thing. seeds are cheap
#24

soicowboy posted:

im going to start a garden this year but i dont really know what im doing and all these gardeners recommend that i start small and incrementally progress to a full sized garden. but i want full garden now



If you're the lazy type of gardener, like me, and have access to space on ground level, I would suggest looking for herbs, and food bearing plants that are prolific, resilient and local to your area.

So say if you lived where I live (Austin, Texas) I would tell you to find the nicest spot in your yard and plant a fig tree, a pomegranate tree, a thornless blackberry bush, and maybe like 3 or 4 different varieties of rosemary/mint/sage/thyme around it. Then maybe mulch the area with leaves or compost or whatever you have.

By the next year it will be pretty well established and the blackberries will probably start producing about a year after that. In 5 years, something like that could bear a lot of fruit and usable herbs.

That's just an example though. However, pretty much all of those plants that I mentioned (excluding pomegranates) do pretty well in the U.S. in general. It's just a matter of finding the variety for your area.

I would also look into self-sowing crops, like onions, garlic, sweet potatoes, potatoes, Jerusalem artichokes, basically things you only need to plant once. There's also plenty of crops that just stick around for years and keep growing food for your if you keep cutting and leave the root alone, like kale, malabar spinach, or kholrabi, even tomatoes will do this if they have a nice enough climate.

I recently just ordered some moringa oleifera seeds. I'm pretty stoked about growing those. Moringa is supposed to be very hardy and generous. It's foliage and roots are high in protein. It also grows from cuttings with ease.

#25

le_nelson_mandela_face posted:

post pics OP



post the steampunk wedding pics

#26

tsinava posted:

I would also look into self-sowing crops, like onions, garlic, sweet potatoes, potatoes, Jerusalem artichokes, basically things you only need to plant once. There's also plenty of crops that just stick around for years and keep growing food for your if you keep cutting and leave the root alone, like kale, malabar spinach, or kholrabi, even tomatoes will do this if they have a nice enough climate.

I recently just ordered some moringa oleifera seeds. I'm pretty stoked about growing those. Moringa is supposed to be very hardy and generous. It's foliage and roots are high in protein. It also grows from cuttings with ease.




be careful with jerusalem artichokes, they are fuckign rapacious when they spread and are tough to control. i once lost an entire garden bed permanently to those things. i mean i had an inexhaustible supply of j. artichokes which was cool and all but i wanted to plant other stuff.

i grew moringa when i was in the peace corps, it is good, but takes awhile to get started from cuttings. real tasty though. where are you getting starts in the US?

#27

dipshit420 posted:

what's that tree that smells horrible and is grown everywhere for no reason. it likes to eject berries all over the ground where they just ferment and rot and is basically the plant equivalent of a goon, unwashed and disgusting.



fucking, bradford pear. they smell like old cum. god i hate them

#28
i'm actually ordering a bunch of seeds online. i would like to see if I can acclimate them to texas. then I can just run around town putting cuttings here and there. because it's an ecologically conscious artistic expression of a political statement and there's nothing wrong with it.
#29

dank_xiaopeng posted:

dipshit420 posted:

what's that tree that smells horrible and is grown everywhere for no reason. it likes to eject berries all over the ground where they just ferment and rot and is basically the plant equivalent of a goon, unwashed and disgusting.

fucking, bradford pear. they smell like old cum. god i hate them


yes thank you those things are a scurge. if they drop their fruit near pavement it gets into shoes and tracked inside if near a building entrance, then every reeks all the time.

#30
why the heck would someone grow an aged cumpear tree.
#31


they grow fast and have pretty flowers. cities planted thousands of them in the 80s and 90s during beautification projects. it takes years for them to set fruit even though they flower a lot early on, so it was way too late when everyonerealized that the fruit stank. thye also have really weak wood so if they get hit by a strong snow tons of branches break and cause lots of damage to cars. i read somewhere that auto insurance companies were trying to lobby cities to get rid of bradford pears to cut down on claims, lol

#32
they grow them by the us capitol. i used to be a tour guide around there and when tourists would ask what that weird gross smell was i'd tell them it was democracy
#33

dank_xiaopeng posted:

when i was in the peace corps,



Are you the 'buy wells for guatemala(somewhere in Latin America)' guy from old lf?

#34
yeah, i was chairman-mao on old LF. i might do a non-trolly effortpost about the pea$e kkkorpse and 'grassroots development' someday.
#35
Sorry about how hard we shit on you for that thread buddy
#36
All I can add to the discussion is that the Wobblies in my area, (of which I am proud to say I'm a member with and that we are the largest branch in the world) are planning on seizing some unproductive land and making a garden. Although I have very little experience in these matters, i do think I will get involved, because anything that alters material conditions can hardly be called an unproductive use of my time.
#37
like, it's hard for me to post about my time in PC here on the stalinist irony forum because i now firmly believe that the peace corps is a part of the same imperial machinery that immiserates the world and should be denounced as fundamentally hypocritical. all of its efforts, even if done by smart kids with the best of intentions, are pretty laughable and doomed to failure or worse. but at the same time it was a profoundly formative experience for me, personally, and i value that aspect of it a great deal. i'm pretty conflicted about it. anyway this is the gardenchat thread sorry

Edited by dank_xiaopeng ()

#38

EmanuelaBrolandi posted:

Sorry about how hard we shit on you for that thread buddy



iirc there was plenty of trolling, but funnily enough that thread brought in, i shit you not, $15,000 in donations and directly funded the construction of a rural water system. so not only did old lf buy new pants for a goon in need, it also directly participated in the NGOization of the provision of basic services in the global south

#39
lmfao i'm dying

godspeed goons
#40

Red_Canadian posted:

because anything that alters material conditions can hardly be called an unproductive use of my time.



The next day Red Canadian was pre-emptively arrested by his canadian fbi whatever its called monitor for expressing his willingness to perform an incalcuable number of crimes on moted hate site the rhizzone