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The gardening thread

The back garden is unavailable as I need to fence it and plant a lawn and then hopefully next year, get the house rendered and the patio done ... but I regret not having planted out a load of kale last year, so I'm hoping to remedy that and have been researching microgreens and Kratky hydroponics ... microgreens are ultimately a bit silly and a waste of seed and Youtube is full of annoying millennials growing ludicrously expensive stuff for the "wellness community" under LED lighting, but this guy hints at a full transition from a few sunflower and pea shoots on the windowsill to outdoor passive hydro buckets and troughs full of baby kale, lettuce and pak choi :-



I reckon if I have lots of kale and pak choi seedlings available I will be able to plant them out into spare spaces in planters and it would be cool to have some tall kale plants in the front garden since I have been wasting space growing inedible forms of amaranth ... I have a crazy notion of a having a Kratky trough of cut and come again lettuce on top of my east-facing porch :)

I have rearranged my bathroom window sproutery and am going to have a concerted effort to produce decent quantities of pea and sunflower greens as well as sprouts, and it will be interesting to see if I can grow a useful amount of greens in there too - using the windowsill to start plants and then fatten them up outside ...
The elaborate watering system is redundant now that I'm retired and have installed my cold water spray hose.

I might consider supplemental LED lighting - though that's decidedly decadent - especially given the price of electricity now ...

So I wonder what others do for leafy greens - I'm definitely going to try land cress as a practical alternative to watercress ... kale ... pak choi ... lettuce ..


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I was a bit over zealous hacking back a random shrub cos it was blocking a view. hope it grows back quickly as now it looks a bit scraggly and sad.
 
gentlegreen said:
The back garden is unavailable as I need to fence it and plant a lawn and then hopefiully next year, get the house rendered and the patio done ... but I regret not having planted out a load of kale last year, so I'm hoping to remedy that and have been researching microgreens and Kratky hydroponics ... microgreens are ultimately a bit silly and a waste of seed and Youtube is full of annoying millennials growing ludicrously expensive stuff for the "wellness community" under LED lighting, but this guy hints at a full transition from a few sunflower and pea shoots on the windowsill to outdoor passive hydro buckets and troughs full of baby kale, lettuce and pak choi :-



I reckon if I have lots of kale and pak choi seedlings available I will be able to plant them out into spare spaces in planters and it would be cool to have some tall kale plants in the front garden since I have been wasting space growing inedible forms of amaranth ... I have a crazy notion of a having a Kratky trough of cut and come again lettuce on top of my east-facing porch :)

I have rearranged my bathroom window sproutery and am going to have a concerted effort to produce decent quantities of pea and sunflower greens as well as sprouts, and it will be interesting to see if I can grow a useful amount of greens in there too - using the windowsill to start plants and then fatten them up outside ...
The elaborate watering system is redundant now that I'm retired and have installed my cold water spray hose.

I might consider supplemental LED lighting - though that's decidedly decadent - especially given the price of electricity now ...

So I wonder what others do for leafy greens - I'm definitely going to try land cress as a practical alternative to watercress ... kale ... pak choi ... lettuce ..


View attachment 314819 View attachment 314824 View attachment 314825
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Land cress is ok . Try turnip greens they are cold resistant and really good taste
 
Arse.
I carefully labelled the hanging basket with my best-smelling begonia and the corm has been totally eaten by weevil grubs - literally NOTHING left of it :(
The other one is pretty enormous and I've watered it, but don't hold out much hope.
When I brought them in I had planned to try to root cuttings - but I don't know how well that works.
So I will be ordering some replacement corms ...
 
gentlegreen said:
So I wonder what others do for leafy greens - I'm definitely going to try land cress as a practical alternative to watercress ... kale ... pak choi ... lettuce ..
Click to expand...
Chard always does really well for me with absolutely no input beyond sowing seed and a bit of watering when it's especially hot and dry. I grow a leaf beet / "perpetual spinach" variety as well as rainbow chard.

All the usual brassicas, and turnip greens are good as The39thStep says (though at this point in the year I'm bloody bored of them). Not for baby leaves, but I've been growing Jersey kale ("walking stick kale") and that's doing well even on the allotment where other brassicas are generally unhappy for some reason.

Pea shoots, lettuces, chicory later in the year. The various oriental greens (pak choi, tatsoi, mizuna, mibuna, mustards...) are great for both baby leaves and full sized plants and can be eaten raw as salad or stir-fried etc. Some will tend to bolt when sown in spring but mizuna is especially resistant to this ime, and it doesn't matter anyway if you're only growing baby leaves.

I've just got a few new things to try - land cress, Chenopodium capitatum ("strawberry spinach") and Basella rubra ("Malabar spinach" - a climbing vine with leaves that can be used like spinach).

Premier Seeds Direct are a good supplier to use of you're doing microgreens. Big packs of seed, mostly for 99p. I'm happy to send seed for any of the stuff I've mentioned to anyone who wants some too.
 
I confess that for my front garden I have played it safe again - more "voodoo" fuchsias because I have lacked the enthusiasm to take cuttings from my one straggly woody thing that only managed a few flowers at the very end of last year.

I seem to have got five begonia odorata corms in my order this year instead of three - so it will be interesting to see what results from those ... I still hope my one survivor may sprout ...

I ordered some stargazer lilies and some "Gomera" - a magenta version - for stinky fireworks..

I resisted ordering more geraniums because my handful survived the winter and there's no excuse not to root some of those - and I will have far too many begonias in any case ... (and the geraniums were only being offered in packs of 33 !)

My brugmansias were massively coddled in my hallway so should perform half-decently this year if they don't get borg-ed ...

Hopefully some love-lies-bleeding will sprout from the craziness because I made sure to spread the seed everywhere - though maybe not a gigantic one like last year - and there will be oodles of verbena bonariensis for the same reason.

I've sown some old-fashioned nasturtium and lanky tagetes seeds I harvested in the park last year from the vegetable area - the tagetes will certainly sprout, I'm not so sure about the nasturtiums which seem suspiciously soft (I only took seeds that seemed doomed) .. doubtless I will order some more seeds along with my salads ...

I hope somehow to integrate some hydro salads (assuming I can overcome my phobia of learning to mix the nutes I bought 4 years ago)- almost certainly some on top of the porch - but I'm also wondering about a tower because I have a length of sewer pipe and a pump ... it's so tempting to try to fit in a gardener's delight tomato somewhere for scrumping there and then -and I have loads of irrigation hose I've never used ...


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Oooh, the flaunting hussy! That is some lush bloom though, isn't it? Right when you really want that glorious spring spark of life. Perfect, two sheds.
 
I got 70 odd flower pots nice and cheap from auction across the road a few years ago, that pitcher type thing was in amongst them and I don't really know what to do with it. (Ah the submarine in the background - that's a cloche that I've covered a few of said flower pots to protect against frost.) The iron thingy is (was) a drill that was here when I got to the house but was all rusted so I painted it and put it there.

Yus the primroses are lovely at the moment, they're all over the garden. March/April was in fact the only time there was colour (other than green which looks lovely in itself it has to be said) in the garden from the primroses so I've been adding plants to give colour the rest of the year too. :)
 
Think I'm going to have to cheat, and buy in some tomatoes etc.
I don't have much luck with growing some things from seed because of time scales and conflicts of interests ...

Although, I often buy in tomato plants.
 
AnnO'Neemus said:
There's a Shazam for plants type app you can download to your phone, I forget what it's called though.
Click to expand...
I had one of those apps. I'd take pics of one's I knew to see how accurate it was, bit hit and miss. It was the highest rated one on the play app store as well?
I think campanula tried some as well with not much success.
 
used to start my tomatoes on 14th April, back when I was just growing a coupla dozen for me, so plenty of time to grow from seed. It was only when I started sowing them for me, my offspring, my customers...until I was raising over 100, when I moved them all into the (freezing) greenhouse. Seeds come up when they are ready, if left to their own devices. Mine will just be sitting there, waiting until night-time temperatures are around a balmy 9-10C, I mostly shifted the time forward (same as leeks) because I do all the tender annuals in mid April so it was just too lary.

I do generally try to have specific dates cos I work much better with a clear deadline (prevarication and dithering - my usual state).

I am going to buy some chilli plants for a customer because they do seem to need a much longer season to get going (but will carry on through early winter if under cover) Back when I did grew a lot of peppers, I used to sow them on Boxing Day, along with onions (which I no longer grow either cos white rot on site).
 
Chilli plant I overwintered has had flowers for last 2-3 weeks so that was neat.

Should sow a couple of toms but I’ll hopefully be moving and lose access to plot so doubt room for more than that
 
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