while you were out drinking beer and taking ketamine last summer i grew this watermelon
Right about now in the year is when most people above the Mason-Dixon should have their gardening efforts taking shape outside. If you live in the dirty south then you can start much earlier and/or enjoy some northern annuals as perenials, the big factor is when you can expect the last frost of the year. Frost will kill your seedlings unless its something crazy like snow peas, which love a nice frost. The last frost concept is what that USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map is all about, click this little one to go to the blowup one.
and here's one for the brits http://www.trebrown.com/hrdzone.html
This is just a guideline to determine when the danger of the last frost has passed for your zone; you can obvs. start seedlings inside or in a greenhouse much earlier than your last frost date.
-----Starting seeds under cover and/or indoors-----
Seeds that start out in a warm, protected environment sprout sooner and have a much better chance of surviving the season. You won't be able to start all your plants like this - direct sow veggies like potatoes and carrots and onions should just go straight into the ground from seed/starter - but most of them will really benefit from having their first two weeks of life protected from pests and cold.
I usually start my seeds in peat soil pellets, which are super dehydrated pucks of fertilized peat in a degradeable mesh. Add water, stick your seeds in, keep it moist and in a couple weeks you can transplant the entire pellet + plant into its final home without worrying about transplant shock. If you're just starting your garden adventure it makes starting plants pretty foolproof.
three days for this tomato to sprout. three days!!! that's pretty good
You can also make these yourself using regular newspaper (no color ink), loose garden soil, and a pot maker if you really want one. Again, you can just put the entire thing plant and all into the garden when its ready. I've used these with a class of kindergarteners and they all managed to get crazy sprouts so I'm pretty sure you can too.
You can leave your seeds on the windowsill or, if you want to get really nuts, you can turn part of an unused closet into a remarkably handy grow room without using your credit card at a hydroponics store. All you really need for bare-bones is two of these cheapo homemade light rigs and white walls and a little desk fan.
The bulbs are regular twisty lightbulbs you use throughout your house, specifically the 6500k type and the 2700k type. These cover the warm and cool spectrums of sunlight - if you're missing one or the other then you're not going to get good results. For a closet 6ft wide, 3ft deep and 9 ft tall I have 6 of these rigs set up but you can probably get away with 2 in a smaller space. If you want to go overboard, we used spray glue to attach reflective mylar to ringed tarp sheeting and hung them up to make an easy to clean and tear down tanning salon for plants. However its really not necessary to go this far if you're just starting out, white walls should be plenty reflective enough. The bulbs will lose their oomph after a couple months so if you plan on keeping your growing closet going all year make sure to swap them out on a regular basis, otherwise you'll notice yellowing leaves and sluggish growth. Use the old bulbs in your regular lamps (they still put out plenty of light, just not enough for plants to live off of) and drop maybe $15 on new bulbs, don't even worry about those super expensive LED grow lights, you don't need them. Oh and stick a little desk fan in the corner and leave enough room for it to suck in fresh air and keep things circulating.
these are cloches made out of old 2-liter bottles. the photo was titled "cloche encounters" and if you start gardening you will make bad puns like this all the time
You can also start seeds outdoors under cloches, either in your starter tray or directly in the ground, and if you live in a cooler zone you'll want a couple of these just to make sure you don't lose an entire crop to a late unexpected frost - they're just little pop-up covers that insulate the plant, some of them let air inside, some of them let rain in, all of them let sunlight in. Don't blow a ton of cash on these, make them out of old soda 2 liter bottles.
When you move your seedlings into the ground, water them pretty well to establish the roots. That's about all there is to that.
Okay that's long enough for an OP. Tsargon should be here shortly to tell us about raising chickens which is rad as hell and hopefully will help me tag team this thread with great posting (i have more stuff written but that may not qualify, regardless its in the wings). Please share your garden adventures with us or ask questions or take photos of what things you're growing and harvest upvotes
all growing things accepted and loved in this thread, ornamentals, whatever. there's a good post to be made about flowers that double as food, here i go scribbling that on future_posts.notepad right now
discipline posted:
how much time out of your week does it take to grow your own food? I'm guessing by the OP you grow a lot
not tooo much, every year i try to do a little more and this is the first year we dedicated a huge portion of the front lawn to gardening and i'm still picking fucking rocks out of the rototilled designated dirt area. all in all there's probably more time spent planning and prepping, once you get things started its just maintanence here and there while you stroll your patch casually plucking morsels and eating them
its a pasttime that works out well if you have a little bit of time every day and maybe an extra hour or so on weekends to dedicate to it
i find this acceptable.
bonclay posted:
Is there a way to protect houseplants from marauding pets
if the pets are cats, plant catnip, they'll completely ignore everything else to harrass the hell out of that one and then you can also make catnip tea
gyrofry posted:
do you ahve any advice on small scale animal husbandry and slaughtery/butchery
this amazing book actually covers exactly that including how to properly butcher several animals. apparently its up as a pdf too if anyone wants to dl it it should be pretty easy to find and i'll be scanning/posting plenty from it in this thread in future updates
aerdil posted:
how do u grow weed or opium i want to grow them, thx.
weed contrary to its common nickname is actually kind of hard to grow really well
GoldenLionTamarin posted:
someday i want to have a chicken coop. i dont want to kill them though just get eggs
me too! tsargon has little baby chicks and he promised chickenchat. so many people on my road have chickens now like every third house has a handwritten sign out by their driveway EGGS FOR SALE
GoldenLionTamarin posted:
someday i want to have a chicken coop. i dont want to kill them though just get eggs
two chickens just showed up at my parents house and decided to stay so my dad eventually built a coop for them. they pretty quickly take over an are;a what used to be a grassy part of the yard was just mud after about two months of staying there and eating the grass and pooping everywhere.
their eggs are pretty good though. the yolk is an almost dark orange instead of yellow
Groulxsmith posted:GoldenLionTamarin posted:
someday i want to have a chicken coop. i dont want to kill them though just get eggstwo chickens just showed up at my parents house and decided to stay so my dad eventually built a coop for them. they pretty quickly take over an are;a what used to be a grassy part of the yard was just mud after about two months of staying there and eating the grass and pooping everywhere.
their eggs are pretty good though. the yolk is an almost dark orange instead of yellow
if there's any way he can stick some wheels or rollers on the bottom of that coop so he can move it to a new section of the lawn every day it'll help tons
potushead posted:
If you need me to tell you why bypassing the petroleum-heavy first world food supply chain even around the edges of your diet is a good thing then lol, just lol forever.
fixed
Groulxsmith posted:GoldenLionTamarin posted:
someday i want to have a chicken coop. i dont want to kill them though just get eggstwo chickens just showed up at my parents house and decided to stay so my dad eventually built a coop for them. they pretty quickly take over an are;a what used to be a grassy part of the yard was just mud after about two months of staying there and eating the grass and pooping everywhere.
their eggs are pretty good though. the yolk is an almost dark orange instead of yellow
one time i hiked to the top of a mountain and i found escaped goats at the top. scape goats. i wish some feral farm animals would wander into my yard
babby lettuce
tomatoes and shit
this was last year's garden, I had some real problems with soil quality and mold last summer which I hopefully won't have this year. my roomie's gonna give me some worms before she moves out so I can start a bin and I'm going to buy some compost to start me off for the season.
doesn't seem worth it until plants become genetically engineered to the point where you can grab a big mac right off the vine
discipline posted:
and don't even get me started on water YIKES...
hot damn that's a good post, thank you
quoted the water part b/c i have a little bit about xeriscaping i broke off from the OP that i'll post tonight or tomorrow
futurewidow posted:
this was last year's garden, I had some real problems with soil quality and mold last summer which I hopefully won't have this year. my roomie's gonna give me some worms before she moves out so I can start a bin and I'm going to buy some compost to start me off for the season.
that's a lovely little spot, how did your lettuce turn out? i haven't tried it yet
let us know how the composting turns out, its a Pretty Big Deal
Edited by potushead ()
AmericanNazbro posted:
vegetables, that are yucky
ugh i can't even look at you right now
discipline posted:
how much time out of your week does it take to grow your own food? I'm guessing by the OP you grow a lot
to reinforce what potus already said, once youve got stuff in the ground then its really not much at all. if you use raised beds and have good soil such that you dont have to fertilize that intensively then the only real maintenance work would be watering every so often depending upon the plant
potushead posted:GoldenLionTamarin posted:
someday i want to have a chicken coop. i dont want to kill them though just get eggsme too! tsargon has little baby chicks and he promised chickenchat. so many people on my road have chickens now like every third house has a handwritten sign out by their driveway EGGS FOR SALE
yeah we're in something of a Chicken Popularity Bubble but so as long as you dont over-extend yourself chickens are Freakin Sweet. i know a guy who spent $1500 building a goddamn space age chicken coop for his 7 hens that he bought for a dollar a piece, while i also know people that have built coops out of abandoned dog houses and, like myself, salvage lumber and dismantled palettes taken from an abandoned lot.
futurewidow posted:
motherfuckin cucumber
babby lettuce
tomatoes and shit
this was last year's garden, I had some real problems with soil quality and mold last summer which I hopefully won't have this year. my roomie's gonna give me some worms before she moves out so I can start a bin and I'm going to buy some compost to start me off for the season.
^^ these are some of the best plants possible for small-scale gardening. lettuce especially grows super fast, super dense, is far-superior in quality to the normal stuff what youll get at safeway and you can keep cutting at it for as long as you want until it wilts from the heat.
Hubbert posted:
hubbertgarden report: decided to let it all grow out this year, the swiss chard and carrots made it through the winter. other than plucking only a few weeds and ferns out of the garden, i discovered that my next door neighbour's salmonberry plant has launched a full offensive under the fence.
i find this acceptable.
how cold are your winters + did you carrots stems get all weird ?
also a plum tree and an apple tree.
i really really recommend a plum tree if you have the space and whatnot, though they arent big at all. youll start getting good crops pretty fast and soon you'll be shitting profusely from the overdose of roughage. make jam.
I just buy seedlings from the store when I'm ready to do things like peppers and tomatoes, because I'm not actually at the place where the garden is (parents house) often enough to do any kind of day-to-day stuff. I can just come over on the weekend and even then only for a couple hours. still.
I also grew a ton of russet and yukon gold potatoes last year, potatoes are an awesome plant because they just keep growing and if you want more potatoes you just add more dirt around the plant.
I also want to do another gigantic row of basil this year so I can make Fresh Pesto and put it in a jar.
let me tell ya, if you don't have parents with a massive suburban yard that they're not using you are really missing out.
jools posted:
teh main thing i've got "growing" on hahaha is a bay tree. it used to be 15ft high but i chopped teh fucker back and now its only 8ft.
also a plum tree and an apple tree.
i really really recommend a plum tree if you have the space and whatnot, though they arent big at all. youll start getting good crops pretty fast and soon you'll be shitting profusely from the overdose of roughage. make jam.
ive got two pear trees growing. i got like 6 pears last year and they were good. i also made jam last summer from black raspberries that grow naturally in my yard. the first batch came out too hard and the second batch came out too gooey and by that point i had run out of raspberries. oh well i spread it on sandwiches anyway
jools posted:
teh main thing i've got "growing" on hahaha is a bay tree. it used to be 15ft high but i chopped teh fucker back and now its only 8ft.
also a plum tree and an apple tree.
i really really recommend a plum tree if you have the space and whatnot, though they arent big at all. youll start getting good crops pretty fast and soon you'll be shitting profusely from the overdose of roughage. make jam.
a plum tree is a really good idea, how big does it get, can you keep it in a pot? i have a dwarf lemon and a dwarf lime tree and they are seriously not doing a whole hell of a lot of anything
stegosaurus posted:
I think all of my squash and spinach seedlings got killed by the frost, so I'll have to replant. my raspberry bush is finally taking root (i bought 5 plants two years ago, only one survived two winters), my onions are doing well, the apple trees have a ton more blossoms this year than last and I can't believe how many flowers are on the peach tree has.
I just buy seedlings from the store when I'm ready to do things like peppers and tomatoes, because I'm not actually at the place where the garden is (parents house) often enough to do any kind of day-to-day stuff. I can just come over on the weekend and even then only for a couple hours. still.
I also grew a ton of russet and yukon gold potatoes last year, potatoes are an awesome plant because they just keep growing and if you want more potatoes you just add more dirt around the plant.
I also want to do another gigantic row of basil this year so I can make Fresh Pesto and put it in a jar.
that's a really nice selection of stuff. next time you get a bell pepper at the store for cooking with, save the seeds and grow them, they work perfectly
really really want to try potatoes this year, i read that you can use an old plastic garbage bin and start at the bottom with the starters and dirt and just keep going until it grows up to the top, then dump everything out and voila free potatoes. i also read that all starter potatoes come from maybe 5 original plants total so who knows
everybody talking about basil knows the deal: basil frikkin rocks
i treated it more like a learning experiment though and understanding the effects of the inputs to the system and how it modified growth. one day when i have some property i'm certainly going to do an outdoor garden.
potushead posted:
weed contrary to its common nickname is actually kind of hard to grow really well
there's a steep learning curve after you understand the basics of cultivation - but it is easy to grow seeing as it's one of the few plants i didn't just kill outright.
potushead posted:
really really want to try potatoes this year, i read that you can use an old plastic garbage bin and start at the bottom with the starters and dirt and just keep going until it grows up to the top, then dump everything out and voila free potatoes. i also read that all starter potatoes come from maybe 5 original plants total so who knows
ive heard conflicting reports on the potato bin / crate method, so im going to be trying both normal hill potatoes and crate potatoes this year for a Fully Scientific Garden