/GG/ - GARDENING GENERAL

I live in a very hot, dry climate. Any suggestions for what would grow well here? I was hoping for potatoes

I'm a cityfag, just started a pot of basil hanging in my kitchen window.

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Ask someone with a degree in horticulture who grew up in a large family garden center business anything.

>>8887278
What's the best stuff to compost? I heard coffee grounds were good

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>>8887117
Built a 5 x 10 foot planter have a ton of shit, going to have to transplant some. Mix of regular, melons, beans, broccoli, lettuce, tomato and then some Viet shit. Ended up planting 3 times the lemongrass I had intended, shit is hardy.

>>8887283

Coffee grounds are good. Egg shells. Really anything.

The key to making good compost isn't really what you put in it, it's more making sure you're keeping it at the proper temperature and layered correctly.

>>8887202
are you willing to spend a bit of extra money on water? If not don't bother. If your willing to use enough you can grow anything. I had a pretty damn good garden going in the high desert in california. I had that green fabric stuff covering it for shade and had to water 2-3 times a day. It probably would have been cheaper to buy the veggies but it was a fun project. All that sunlight made that shit grow fast and big.

Also mulch, a thicc layer of mulch.

>>8887278
Why won't my blueberry seeds germinate after a week?

>>8887278
Any chance I can germinate orange seeds from supermarket produce?

Looking forward to my peppers this year, got two bell peppers, a habanero, a scotch bonnet (which I'm a little worried about), and a mystery pepper given to me by a coworker

Also got some brussel sprouts, lupins, rosemary, lavender, lettuce, thyme, chives, carrots, and broccoli.

>>8887310
prolly not but why not try?

30 beefsteak timato stalks, 9 peppers, 100 green peppers just planted, onion, 4 broccoli, 2 2 dutch iris, zinnia, mirabilis.

>>8887310
Yes. Rinse them off, dry them a couple days before planting and keep it in the sun.

>>8887278
How necessary is germination?

I used to plant tons of annual vegetables, but have recently become lazy. So, I plant perennial herbs instead. Thyme, oregano, and chives, so far. Thyme is hardy as fuck. I was picking it all winter.

My apartment complex voted to develop some unused space as a community pea patch or basketball court, and the basketball court won. Neighbors plz.

>>8887202
im in phoenix. basil, tomatoes, okra, and dill can grow like weeds. celery does well surprisingly.

albeit you'll have to cover them during the scorching june/july but thats whatever. planted radishes, tomato, okra, basil, and horseradish, planning on planting eggplant and cuccumbers soon.

>>8887278
weeds in the veggie garden. what do? pulling them damages the surrounding plants. :/

>>8887202
Lavender thrives in that kind of climate, hardly needs any watering once you've gotten it fairly big.

>>8887399
1. Be careful
2. Pull them out
3. ?
4. Veggies!

>>8887388
Dont you mean
>Niggers plz

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>>8887394

We had mad tomato hornworms in Mesa. It was like the caterpocalypse. Cool moths, though.

>>8887388
Fun fact - green spaces (particularly community gardens) improve happiness and bring together communities. Gardening is wonderful for improving boosting moods. Concrete complexes typically do the opposite. Sucks you live in the hood.

>>8887321
Already tried and failed.

>>8887337
Did not dry them for a few days though, thanks.

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What do you guys think of our garden?

>>8887293
Why did you make a gif of that

>>8889318
I have no idea why that is formatted like that, the file was opened from my camera file on my phone.

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>>8887117
I'll post a few pics of larger sections of vegetables we grow. It's spread out because we do crop rotation and leave areas fallow or covered with clover.

These are several rows of english peas that have been producing well but got hurt in a windstorm a couple days ago.

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>>8889570
This is our potato patch. You'd be amazed howmuch that small space produces.

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>>8889570
Strawberries. Been getting large bowls full everyday.

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>>8889570
A row of tomatoes in background and beans in foreground.

Does anyone have experience with growing your food hydroponically?

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>>8889570
Our yearly supply of garlic.

>>8889599
looks really awesome. don't have a house yet but i've been planning on doing the same once i can get some land.

Im not a gardening man, but my parents grow tomatoes, cucumbers, different greens, eggplants, grapes, bellpeppers, cherries and apples at summerhouse.
I use their veggies and pickles sometimes.

>>8889581
Can I plant potatoes with some I have that have sprouted?

>>8889721
Yes, that works. Just make sure you cover with a few inches of soil and as the plant grows 6 inches or so, keep adding soil to just under the top leaves. Do that several times. When the plants flower, you can harvest small new potatoes or wait until the plant begins dies back and get full sized ones.

>>8889770
I have five or six sprouted potatoes, approximately how many potatoes would grow from that

>>8889843
Depends on the variety. We usually get 4 to 6 good sized ones and a few smaller ones from each Yukon Gold plant. Red potatoes produce a few more, russet less. Russets for some reason are always much smaller than the typical Russets in a grocery, so we don't bother with them anymore. I don't think red are as flavorful as Yukon Gold, so we've settled on growing those.

>>8887283
Dry them out for days and mix into soil sparsely, you can put it on the soil but it molds easily. Only for acidic plants, sensitive herbs will die. Pineapples like coffee grounds.

>>8890009
We just add it to the compost pile and the worms process it anyway. Plus it's such a small amount of the overall compost material it won't effect ph.

>>8887117
Most the soil is shitty dry clay. Which makes it difficult to grow stuff that normally likes dry heat as they are the kinda plants that do not like mud.

So I been stuck slowly trying to prepare the ground and thus only planting a few things into the ground after I treated it of course. As a result most of my plants are in planters rather then in the ground.

Except for the fruit trees that need a lot of love which I been working on. They were in real bad shape before I started working on them but they been slowly coming back to life with my care. Am gonna need to do something about the apple and nectarine tree as they are still in real bad shape though. Apple tree needs a buddy in order to fruit properly so the apple crop is gonna suck this year. As it's the only apple tree in this entire area and I will likely ending up putting another apple tree down somewhere nearby. Currently trying to get the apple tree to stop stressing as its not in good shape still but its finally been staring to recover. Sadly it still distressed and thus still a work in progress.

The nectarine tree meanwhile still needs a lot of love along with a strange berry bush that I can't for the life of me decipher what species it is. Has strange berries that seem to go from green to yellow and then red from what i have seen so far. The birds love it and supposedly it makes a nice lemonade like drink from the crushed berries but apparently the berries stay real strong otherwise.

The peach tree has been successfully revived and is doing shockingly well especially given the condition I originally found it in. I can expect a lot of large peaches if I can do something about the damned wasps. The apricot tree is on the way up too. Does need some more trimming done but that is about it and otherwise its doing quite well now.

>>8890369
If you actually take care of the fruit trees they do surprisingly well in this area. Its just the other plants that are giving me such a hard time. So when I am not working on the trees I am working on the land.

Fuck this compact ass heavy clay dirt though. It's so terrible that not even the native grasses and flowers like the stuff. So to scratch my garden itch I been having to largely stick with planters for now.

Those poor fruit trees though. They were really bad shape before I found them and started working on the poor bastards. With the peaches being the biggest success so far. They are doing so extremely well now that it's insane.

I am hoping that I can achieve that same success for those other trees and that hopefully next year I would of treated enough of the dirt to start a proper garden in the ground.

>>8890410
Only good thing about the shitty dirt here is that not even the weeds like it.

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>>8890410
>clay soil

I'm the guy with the series of pics. I sympathize as I'm in MS and our soil is clay. We've been able to improve it by the addition of copious amounts of cow manure and compost. I'm fortunate in that I found a rancher that lets me collect all the manure I want from his barn. Clay soil has a lot of minerals, it just needs to be improved with organic matter.

Don't underestimate clover, either. It adds nitrogen and can be dug or tilled into the soil to decompose. In the pic you see an area we planted in red clover last fall and collected leaves and piled around it. Later this summer I'll till it in with some manure.

(Cont)

>>8890783

After we till it in we rake it into raised beds and cover it (pic related). In one season, the soil is rich loam. It's just a one step at a time process but within 1 season if you use some of these tips, you can have a fairly large bed ready for planting and start building up another bed.

And don't forget, crop rotation is the single most important thing you can do to maintain soil fertility, reduce insect infestations and disease.

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>>8890817
*forgot pic

>>8887278
I have a tiny yard that only gets maybe 4-5 hours of sunlight due to the surrounding buildings. I have successfully grown a bunch of different leafy greens (lettuce, bok choy, arugula) but haven't really tried much else. I live in Seattle, so the climate is moderate. Anything else you think would grow well?

>>8890879
zucchini grows like a fucking weed in Washington as long as they get enough water. Be wary of planting more than one of them though it you'll be giving away zucchini in a few weeks.

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How to make plant grow faster?

>>8891141
Take a shit in some miracle grow and dump it on your crops.

>>8891141
>>8891151
Do not actually do this. I know Matt Damon made it look fashionable, but hu-manure is generally a bad idea (especially when there are other fertilizer options)

>>8891141
find out the plant's optimal growing conditions and recreate them

>>8887303

Because they take a long ass time to germinate. Two weeks minimum. Could take a month or more. Keep them moist.

>>8887310

Maybe. Some cultivars are bred to be sterile. Like a vasectomy. Growing citrus from seed is a colossal pain in the ass though. You need to keep them hot for them to germinate. Substrate temp needs to be 70 degrees minimum, which is difficult to achieve unless you're running a heating mat constantly, which isn't really worth the hassle.

>>8887348

Not? Starting from seed is a sucker's game. Unless you're doing a few dozen or more plants, it's cheaper to just buy transplants from the store. Like, when I see people buying germination trays, germination mix, and CFL grow lights and they are starting a single pack of lettuce, I laugh. Like, why would you spend the money for such little return?

>>8887399

It's usually a "if you have them it's too late" type of problem. Not much you can do but hand pull them. You can put down a pre-emergent (Preen) next year (be sure to buy the type that is safe for vegetables). Container growing is the best option if you're only growing a few plants. If you're insistent on maintaining a bed, put down some weed barrier cloth. Round-Up also makes a foam product that doesn't drift, so maybe consider that.

>>8890879

That's tough. Theoretically, you could grow root vegetables like carrots and beets, but it sounds like you're growing in containers, and root vegetables grow like shit in containers. There's some products out there that claim otherwise, but they're bullshit. There are a few herbs you might be able to get away with like parsley and cilantro. Don't listen to this guy >>8890890

>>8890783
Yeah I personally been using manure mostly horse, compost, ash, and worm crap but its slow going. The soil here is so bad that not even the weeds wanna grow in it level of awful. Even the native plants struggle its so bad. I been living in this area years and I gotta admit that this place is among the very worst I ever seen.

Once I get a decent layer going so the plants can actually survive I intend to start growing fixers and breakers. Gotta fix that soil and break it up.

So far ash has proven to be amazingly effective at breaking up the dirt like sand but not forming cement and fertilizing it all the while. I been using it to form the first pioneer spots in the ground for the very first plants. So far its been working out.

Until then I'll stick with trees and bushes who can barely handle it. For actual gardening I am mostly stuck with planters. Its gonna be a few years before even the hardier plants can survive in the dirt without special care.

I gotta admit though ash is amazing at breaking up the clay. Just gotta make sure to wet it down with the clay and let it soak a bit before digging at it. Only problem is I need a lot more ash, but i don't have a large supply of it not even for sale. Its not something I can just manufacture like the compost or worms for cheap or get for free like the manure.

>>8891141
Balanced fertilizer to avoid burning the plants and customized habitat/treatment to that specific plant. Which I been experimenting with on the planters.

>>8891141

High temps and long days.

>>8891411
you got it all figured out my man, people buying growing trays are just growing a pack of lettuce everytime. No one else could figure out 150 bucks on supplies would take decades to pay off in lettuce, only you.

>>8891411
>pre-emergent
>Round-Up

Holy shit, monsieur master horticulturalist! Horrible advice. Do you really think someone is going to expend their energy growing their own vegetables just to use the same noxious chemicals Monsanto has convinced commercial growers they have to use? Did you even see the pics I posted in this thread showing ground covers blocking weeds? Of course you did. But I suppose you think clover or vetch is a noxious weed, too. Really? The first thing you run to are chemical poisons for a home gardener when there are very simple alternatives that don't rely on them for fertilizing, weed control and insect pest control? Where'd you get your degree, University of Big Agri-Chemical? Trully pathetic.

Anyone want to know how to grow vegetables without needless industrial petroleum based chemical additives, ignore this fuck.

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>>8891526

Mmhm.

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>>8891492

You'd be surprised. We run seminars to take advantage of dumb Millennials who buy into the "eat local" and "organic is always better" bullshit. They get all jazzed up and will buy anything you throw at them. Seeing them walk out with $200 worth of equipment and a pack of lettuce or cilantro seeds is hilarious.

These are the same idiots buying $20 worth of 2x4s and screws packaged in a fancy box sporting "Raised Bed Kit" at a 1500% markup.

This is the thread /ck/ needed.
I'm harvesting pumpkins (southern hemisphere), tomatoes, chayotes, basque beret peppers, red corn, lots of herbs. I also had a fuckton of cucumbers, pickled most of them.
It's fall here so Next month i'm planting devil's ear lettuce, collard greens, daikon, spinach, faba beans and peas. All that in 20 square meters and 3 harvesting bins.

>>8891693
if you grow perennials, you can get 64 plugs pumped out for $5 down in seed and substrate, plus let's say $10 a month on electricity times 3, you've got 35 in and get 21 plants worth, which would whole sale at 8 dollars each. You'd need to add more for soil, to fill up the pots, but still looking at 100 or so in savings. Now, obviously if you are in an urban centre and can't use 20 gallons of plants it doesn't make sense to do.

Yeah I figured you were a hobbyist just shit talking other plebs as being inept, as people are want to do. If you're in the industry then I'll take you at your word . Suckers are born every minute after all

>>8891748
*72, fucked up the math for booze reasons, y'all get the premise though.

My shitty tap water has high sodium content (200 ppm)

What can I grow with good yield?

>>8891771
Gallons of spring water, a shirt bottle and a spray bottle. Plant Tupperware in fresh soil and provide water to grow these devices.

>>8891693
>dumb Millennials

I'm glad you qualified that. People that do their own research, don't rely on unethical horticulturalists and improvise based on practices that were producing food in the 1800's will produce more food than they can consume on a very small amount of land indeed, without relying on industrial chemicals.

You seem to think it's a source of pride to con people into spending on needless crap when an ethical man would have been directing them to resources teaching how to accomplish it without spending much money. So your pic is quite appropriate only it points to yourself, not the millennial you laughingly jewed who came to you for sincere advice. But instead of feeling shame, you boast by bleating a Trumpet. What a familiar refrain.

>>8891411
>Theoretically, you could grow root vegetables like carrots and beets
Thanks for the response. I am actually just planting in the ground, so no containers. Maybe I'll try some root vegetables this year.