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The gardening thread

RubyToogood said:
Am I the only person whose hardening off regime is: put tray of plants outside for one day. Think fuck it, the weather looks ok. Leave them out forever.?
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I was only thinking that today.
I'm really only putting out stuff I'm not ready for out during the day to catch the sun - and go back in at night until they're big enough to tolerate some cat and fox activity.
Mostly it's driven by a need for space in my grow area / bathroom window / greenhousy thing.
With temps in double figures at night, my climbers went straight from the bathroom window to outside ...
 
Isn't hardening off only really a way to avoid shocking small plants to low overnight temps? Is there more to it than that? This year we were lucky - no frosts after March - so I just started planting out from early May. Greenhouse straight to position. Everything's doing well.

Some things would find the greenhouse too hot so they go to the cold frame at the allotment. Leeks, for example, would cook in the greenhouse.
 
Planted up the new strawberry tower, with rooted runners from late last year.
No idea what the original plants were "thinking" - they put the runners out way later than usual.
The original tower and trough are continuing to flower, and maybe, just maybe we might get some fruit this year.
After pest problems last year, I'm keeping at least some of my strawbs under cover this year.

The other planting out job was some random volunteer spuds, which are now in a mixture of mainly 10l pots.
I'll need another barrow load of "molehill" to top up the existing spud farm ...

Yesterday was attending to planting out greenhouse crops, toms, courgettes and cucumbers plus some mixed lettuce. So some extra water on that lot today, as it has been quite sunny, even if the mainly easterly wind kept the temp down.

Tomorrow - well, finish off the rest of the grass cutting and then some more successional sowing of peas and beans.
 
Fucking mice I reckon have eaten half my row of direct-sown giant sunflowers - I've liberally sprinkled chilli powder over the area in the hope they don't like that. My netting probably protected them against pigeons...
I have six in pots I sowed at the same time - which is probably all I need - but the idea was that direct-sown ones get the right start in life...
Maybe I'll use metaldehyde slug pellets instead of iron phosphate in the hope the mice poison themselves ...

I can see that in my future veggie garden I'm going to need lots of wire mesh cloches ... quite likely electrified ...
 
I've added more light to the one shelf I'm using.
I considered soldering in a second lot of strips in between the current ones - but that's for a future lamp..
So instead of that I've added two more 9 watt domestic LED lamps - bringing the total power to 60 watts that way ...
And the second lot of canary creepers are on their way up from unsoaked seeds. I should have started these a long time ago ...

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I find laying some shade netting / butterfly mesh / fleece over the soil, just loosely enough for stuff not to start growing through it the moment it germinates, to be an effective mouse deterrent gentlegreen. Either peg it down, or I just use scrap wood round the edges. Often see mice and rats at the allotment but I've never had a problem with direct sown peas and beans.
 
I only ever doing hardening off by accident :oops: Most allotment stuff is sown direct, but if not it'll tend to go out in my frost-free garden for a bit before going up to the allotment. Cucurbits have been going into the shed at night this year, but that's only because I'd not caught up with nematodes / snail patrol in time to keep them safe. Once stuff goes outside that's it, not bringing it back in to fill my flat with aphids and ants!

Got lucky a few times recently and found the (usually quite expensive) florist round the corner selling off really cheap potted plants that'd seen better days. Big tray of osteospermums and marguerite daisies for 50p each last week, and eleven epiphyllum chrysocardium yesterday for less than a third of what I'd expect to pay for them - just needed an hour in a bucket of water and they've perked right up, and I can stick some together in a couple of nice planters for a customer's bathroom and more than cover the cost of the ones I keep for myself. Accidentallied a few trays of stuff like lobelia and snapdragons when I went to homebase too, which I'll put out in the garden and get housing association to pay for (there's new staff here now and we're trying to give the gardening group another go), so lots of planting to do today.
 
iona said:
I find laying some shade netting / butterfly mesh / fleece over the soil, just loosely enough for stuff not to start growing through it the moment it germinates, to be an effective mouse deterrent gentlegreen. Either peg it down, or I just use scrap wood round the edges. Often see mice and rats at the allotment but I've never had a problem with direct sown peas and beans.
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thanks :)
The irony is of course that I'm now chasing cats and foxes out of my garden...
I just remembered I tipped a drowned mouse out of a tahini tub back in the winter and it had gone the next morning ...
 
A dismal sight at the allotment. Horrible weather coinciding with the peak of rose blooming tends to look quite frightening. I have mentioned the wild rose madness - a decade long insanity (2002-2012) of casually growing roses which think nothing of hurling many vicious canes, 16 feet, in a single summer. I have managed to cull the herd, from over 100 to around 60 but fuck me, most of them are immense. A single moyessii rose is 6 metres high and wide! This is a tremendous problem for me, to be fair...and entirely of my own making...There are quite a few trees as well, including 2 fucking enormous hazels and a million annual seedlings since squirrels have discovered the phenomenal bounty. Plus, I have been away for half-term week on nana duty, and today was my first chance to plant out the (far too) many seeds I sowed, now teetering on the edge of becoming rootbound. In the vegetable beds, the peas and broad beans are shameful disasters (because of terrible timing and netting fails - the usual stuff I ought to have down by now). t However, this does mean that I can whip them out and just line out the flower seedlings for cutting (instead of attempting some coherent planting scheme). I have stuff like broccoli, leeks and stuff at home so my vegetable credentials are not totally fucked. The potatoes look fantastic and I am definitely going to get back to do an early blight spray tomorrow.

Anyway, I spent a couple of miserable hours being wet and shocked at the deranged vigour of plant growth but I did get to plant a bunch of Vanilla Ice sunflowers, ipomopsis and sphaeralcea. Heartlessly tore out californian poppies in all their silky lushness. Cut huge bunches of euphorbia, tall campanulas, sweet peas and ox-eye daisy though...and indulging in my favourite fantasy of growing a cutting garden, with a weekly flower stall.
 
Deer came back in the night and finished off the flowerbed, just ate all of the buds, almost every single one, and left me the stalks.
Properly heartbroken tbh. I don’t think there’s anything realistically I can do other than move house if I want to be a gardener of things that are not lavender.
 
I still have cats "asserting" themselves.
The big street cat thinks he owns my front garden and generally speaking what grew in there before was tough enough to cope with his activities, but he's just done a token bit of digging - so not so far damaged the nicotianas, but then deposited a huge wet poo at the base of a verbena which I am going to have to leave to dry a little before I attempt to relocate it.

And my squashes have to go in the ground today so I ran a garotte wire all the way along the neighbour's fence and am trying a cheap green nylon net over the beds until the plants are established - which I hate having to do
I noticed a substantial bit of fox digging in their flowerbed, so maybe they will stop being so tolerant.

So far the runner bean sproutings at the end of the garden haven't suffered the same mouse fate as the sunflowers near the house ... I'm tempted to buy some more seeds and start them in pots just in case ... otherwise there are French beans as an alternative, but the orange-red flowers of the "Scarlet Emperor" were a key reason I chose them ..
 
Any chance of photos / drawing of the scale of the problem ?

Electric fences aren't very expensive ...

You're entitled to enjoy your garden.
 
Callie said:
bimble
Probably a dumb idea but they're fairly easily spooked aren't they? Would things that deter birds help? Scarecrow? CDs flapping about on strings? Wind chimes?
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I’ve read a fair bit on this and apparently they get spooked for 1 day then learn to live with anything including lights sprays of water etc, if hungry.
The only thing I might be able to do is double fencing, apparently they don’t feel confident to jump if there’s another fence a few feet from the first.
 
Thanks for the support gardening people. Just crushed for today but not totally given up yet.

They ate all the somniferum poppy heads maybe they’ll feel ill and not come back or maybe they’ll be clamouring for more idk.
 
In the garden today.

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bimble said:
Deer came back in the night and finished off the flowerbed, just ate all of the buds, almost every single one, and left me the stalks.
Properly heartbroken tbh. I don’t think there’s anything realistically I can do other than move house if I want to be a gardener of things that are not lavender.
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Sorry to see this ...

High and or double fencing, plus a range of spooking devices that change at irregular intervals. Plus the chemical deterrents ?
Like rabbits, I think deer will nibble almost anything [I know goats do the same "browsing" technique].

I've got a very tall mixed hedge / fence / dry stone wall around my patch, which seems to keep the deer out for most of the time. That and Ben de-dog spends quite a time wandering around and scent-marking ...

My problem this year has been ravenous rabbits and now I need to add grey squirrels / large corvids.
 
O bimble, I have a horrendous surfeit while you are providing a deer banquet. Only the fact that deluded optimism is an ineluctable part of gardening psyche is keeping me from despair. I have a list somewhere, of proven deer resistant plants - will look it up. The worst they do in my wood is strip all the bark off my trees and shrubs. Hellebore, for sure, they utterly ignore...and quite a few of the ranunculaceae family. And paeonies, and narcissus, of course.
 
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bimble if it's any consolation, the deer problems here seem to be intermittent. One year they'll visit regularly and eat loads of stuff then another I hardly see any damage. They do seem to visit my neighbour's garden more than mine but it's probably as he has lots of nice juicy fresh rose shoots in the spring. When they visit mine, it seems that it's the fresh growth on the virburnum and tulip and poppy flowers they like best. In my old garden they used to like bergenia flowers.

I agree with campanula they don't ever eat my hellebores, paeonies or daffodils. They seem to leave the irises and foxgloves alone too.
 
When I had my worst ever garden disaster, I waited till mid June, when everything gets discounted, then rushed out and bought a shedload of begonias, geraniums and margeurites. I spent around 25quid and filled several pots with a fairly lurid display...just to show defiance in the face of the garden demons and goblins.
Buy some foxglove, hesperis and wallflower seeds, bimble - you can sow biennials now for a really good display next year...while keeping your garden faith alive. Leafster is quite right - they do indeed ignore foxgloves and wallflowers (and aconitums and iris as well).
 
i was just about to do exacly this!
Trip to get foxgloves and possibly a delphinium (which they apparently dont enjoy much so may not eat) just to show that i am NOT giving up today.
And also to fill a gerry can with diesel, as diesel soaked rags hung around the place may deter them or so i read. Diesel or human hair. :facepalm:
At least i might sleep better if i try it. They didn't find the sweet peas or 1 sunflower.
 
bimble that sounds really disheartening, but the plants above that could be successful, are a lovely selection.

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First ever bloom from Golden Showers rose. Stop smirking at the back.
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Over the moon with , what I was convinced was an artichoke or suchlike.
These are my freebie top soil poppies. All about 3 ft high now and heaving with buds. Waiting for the others to open is better than an advent calendar.
20220606_143408.jpg
Escallonia 'apple blossom'.
 
Well at least we got a bit of rain - but that and the wind made some of my tall plants lean somewhat and need sticks and string ...

I finally got my squashes and courgettes in the ground - plus have been using up some of the rest of my climbers on the unpromising north-facing fence ...

And the two bits of brugmansia I accidentally snapped off my biggest plant have properly rooted and I'm hoping I might see them flower this year ...

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two sheds said:
I've fancied a chamomile lawn for ages but have failed miserably getting the seeds to germinate but finally this year I've brought on loads of plants from seeds. They're a couple of inches high now but .... I don't have any space to plant them :( unless I did up bits of my lawn which I'm not sure whether it's a good idea. I don't actually have lawns more overgrown grass areas, should i take off the top layer of 'turf' and put some compost down with the chamomiles? I've got enough for a few square metres.

Answers on a postcard please :)
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