Garden 2019.

[backlash]

I successfully grew huge beautiful broccoli last winter for the first time ever and I got addicted to the
taste of garden fresh.
Nothing compares.

That is why I don't eat tomatoes unless I grow them myself. Nothing can come close to a tomato picked and eaten while standing in the garden. I planted a cherry tomato by my front walkway so I can just grab some on my way by. Problem is my wife does the same thing and sometimes she eats them all. Maybe I'll plant 2 this year.
I received my new heat mat and my new LED lights will be here today, and my seed tray and seed starter mix will be here Friday. The weather has finally turned and we are inching up to the 50s. My garden is still under a foot of snow so I must keep waiting.

 

[SheepDog]

Don't grow your own food! Once you do you will never be happy with what is available in the stores again.
Cantaloupe, Brussels sprouts, onions, carrots, potatoes, tomatoes, garlic, berries and all of it is so much better when you pick it ripe from your garden.
It will ruin you for life! (but it is worth it

 

[backlash]

I got my LED lights and heat mat so I planted some strawberry seeds. They take a long time to germinate so I think it will work out. We usually don't plant outside until after Mother's Day.
Too much chance of freezing before that.
Our weather is turning and spring fever is setting in.

 

[Bacpacker]

While the ground wasn't totally dry, I was able to pull my subsoiler down to the hilt thru about 80% of my garden. After that I pulled my cultivator plow thru about 60% of that. It was turning up no clods, but not crumbly either. Suppose to rain tonight and should bust it up even better. If we get a few dry windy day's I'll be tilling by Tuesday and planting onions, cabbage, and other cole type plants. Friday and Saturday.

 

[Tank-Girl]

Moon phase planting charts are saying that Sunday is a optimum day to plant crops that bare fruit so I'll be sifting and sterilising my
seedling mix in the solar oven and then planting my precious tomato seeds.
I'll plant a lot more chillies while I'm at it.
I have a lot of herbs I want to plant.
I didn't plant enough dill last season and I really slacked off in dehydrating my lemon basil.
I've got no oregano or comfrey that survived the heat so I'll have to buy starts and plant them where they'll be more protected.
I'm excited to start motherwort seeds.
I still haven't cut up my rep mesh because my shoulder is still pretty bad.

 

[Patchouli]

You go for it, @Tank-Girl ! I'll be cheering you on from the other side of the earth! It's getting cold here again, will I ever be able to start anything!?
I think I might try making a little greenhouse type structure.
Dill, basil, cilantro, lavender, sage, thyme, and rosemary are wonderful home grown, maybe I'll be able to keep them alive this time.
I want to try the thinner skinned cucumbers too. Who doesn't love tomatoes? And some salad greens! All on my list for this year.

 

[backlash]

I built a small hoop house for around $200. It 7'x8'. Yesterday the temp inside it was almost 100° and the outside temp was about 43°.
Unfortunately it still gets cold at night so I haven't planted anything in it.
Hey look. I found out how to make a ° sign.
alt248 does it.

 

[SheepDog]

I am waiting for my soil to warm up a bit. I still have six inches of snow in places of my garden.

 

[Bacpacker]

Tank-girl, I'm glad to see I'm not the only one that plants by the signs. The weather don't always cooperate, but when I can I always try and plant by them.

 

[Tank-Girl]

Thanks @Patchouli and @Backpacker.

I bit the bullet and cut up my reo mesh.
I'm 100% DONE for the entire day.
I'm going to lay on the couch and whimper for a while.
It's too hot and too humid to plant tomatoes.
We've had MORE rain and a terrible lightening storm which brought down
trees and the power poles the electricity company just put back up after the last bad run of storms.
Weather isn't right so I'll be holding off for another cycle.

 

[Bacpacker]

TG you folks have some severe weather down there. I don't envy you.

We ended up with just .20" rain over night. Storms broke up before they got to us. Thank God. Forecast tonight called for 30's at night, 50s thru the day for the next couple days. Then back to the sixtys for a bit. No real rain threat for the next week. My ground should then be ready for working up fully and planting will begin Friday and over the weekend. Will be starting tomato and pepper seed next week as well.

 

[backlash]

I am waiting for my soil to warm up a bit. I still have six inches of snow in places of my garden.

Same situation here, but we are only about 90 miles apart. It has started to melt pretty fast so I can see the end of winter is getting here.

 

[Tank-Girl]

TG you folks have some severe weather down there. I don't envy you.

We ended up with just .20" rain over night. Storms broke up before they got to us. Thank God. Forecast tonight called for 30's at night, 50s thru the day for the next couple days. Then back to the sixtys for a bit. No real rain threat for the next week. My ground should then be ready for working up fully and planting will begin Friday and over the weekend. Will be starting tomato and pepper seed next week as well.

I wish you luck.
They haven't and can't clean up all the dead livestock from the last lot of flooding because the mud was too deep and the
roads were washed away.
Now with more rain and storms with thousands upon thousands of lightening strikes it puts
a lot of the clean up and re-building back to square one again.
More and more reason to have a garden when your food delivery network to the supermarkets can be down and gone
with 12 hours or less.

 

[Bacpacker]

My prayers are with you folks. I always had a desire to visit there in my younger days. Never could make it happen. You do have a great country.

 

[Hooch]

I just got my seeds in!! I still have a lot of work to do in the garden before I plant but I can get a few things started soon. I have a greenhouse I bought last year to put up still too..
like everyone else I get chompin at the bit to get going but I have tons of work to prepare still and unfortunately my work schedule will be all overtime a ton of hours until mid summer
They said in Nov, 20 18 it's only until the middle of Jan..then back to normal schedule..
Unfortunely, We've heard that before...
sigh...lol...

 

[Sewingcreations15]

We have been working on taking down the remainder of the grapevine and another enclosure to give us upright posts for us to build our kangaroo proof garden beds. Still got around 18 more posts to remove from the large humungous grapevine enclosure to go and the weather has been too hot to do it here. Still got to buy 4 - 6 above ground metal garden beds, some 19mm poly hose and some 50% shadecloth to go over the top of the garden beds to protect them from the heat of summer and cold frosts of winter here. It is a work in progress. We did manage to clean out the grey water tank before the 40mm of rain hit yesterday so that helps with watering the really dry household lawns and paddock fruit trees with.

I have saved some seeds being sugarbaby watermelon and rockmelon seeds too from produce given to us by our neighbour which will get planted in the gardens when the season is right too.

 

[Sewingcreations15]

Sorry to hear you have had more rain there @Tank-Girl it is just what you and the local farmers didn't need after the devastation up there .

Rest up after cutting the rio as no doubt you will be sore. I was also going to give you a tip that you can use for better leverage without so much effort which is put a piece of pipe on each handle the longer handles give you more leverage with smaller amount of effort. I use this method for cross wheel braces to get the tyre nuts to loosen and use my foot and jump on it and it also works for things like wire and bolt cutters too. Just got to be careful the pipe doesn't come off the handle. Us ladies having less upper body strength sometimes we need hacks to get the job done easier.

 

[Tank-Girl]

I got reckless and planted my tomato and zucchini seeds.
Also planted all of my poblano chilli seeds.

I couldn't help myself.

 

[Tank-Girl]

I'm wondering if 30 zucchini plants is excessive?

Zucchini's give me the most bang for the buck and they make up a large part of my chickens
diet.
If I shred them down I only have to put in token amounts of grain in their ration to keep them happy.
Equal numbers of gold and black beauty zucchini.
Gold take a longer to hit their stride, but produce for longer.
Black beauty produces quickly and give you a lot of production over a shorter period and then die.
I'm going to have to succession planting if I want to have full production for the entire winter.
Still trying to work out summer varieties but grey zucchini and new guinea bean ( a gourd) and maybe Russian cucumbers
will have to fill in summer gap.

 

[backlash]

If we plane 3 zucchinis we have more than we could ever use. I used to give them to people I worked with but now that I'm retired I don't know what I would do with them.
With 30 plants you must have zucchini growing everywhere.

 

[MoBookworm1957]

Started Sweet Banana Peppers, Bush Green Beans, Roma Tomatoes in seed starter packs(mini greenhouse) sitting between flower pots on living room windowsill.
Will start lettuce bowls in the next week or so(bowl shape flower pots covered in Saran Wrap till sprouted).
Maybe time soil warms up my seedlings will almost ready for transplanting.
Still got to find 3-5 gallon food safe bucket to plant potatoes in, got my seed potatoes trying to sprout already.
Haven't checked the standing washtub herb garden yet almost afraid too.
But nothing has dried out enough in the raised bed herb garden to see anything yet.
It's drizzling here today, was supposed to get 55*, but so far just 43*.

 

[Tank-Girl]

If we plane 3 zucchinis we have more than we could ever use. I used to give them to people I worked with but now that I'm retired I don't know what I would do with them.
With 30 plants you must have zucchini growing everywhere.

Zucchini are a huge part of my kitchen economy as well as tomatoes so the amount of space they use is worth it.
I grate them up on the mandolin and dehydrate them for summer.
I over did kale last season. I don't like kale but I'll be getting back into breeding guinea pigs
so I'll need to plant it for them along with swiss chard.

Over planted hakari turnips and under planted spring onions and chillies.

 

[Bacpacker]

PLowed thru most of the garden again with the cultivator plow. Then ran the disk thru about half of it. I'll disk again tomorrow night then till and start planting. The ground is pretty well dried out considering how much rain we've had since New Years. The past couple weeks have been dry and windy.

 

[Patchouli]

My prayers are with you folks. I always had a desire to visit there in my younger days. Never could make it happen. You do have a great country.

Don't say Never if it's not yet over. You're not that old, @Bacpacker !

 

[Weedygarden]

Hey look. I found out how to make a ° sign. alt248 does it.

I have tried that in many variations. First I held down alt and 248 all at the same time. Nope. Then I held down alt and then 2, 4, and 8.

This is what I found online: "This method works only for keyboards that include a 10-key numeric pad." I don't have a 10-key numeric pad, so I am still out of luck.

 

[Weedygarden]

I'm wondering if 30 zucchini plants is excessive?

Zucchini's give me the most bang for the buck and they make up a large part of my chickens
diet.
If I shred them down I only have to put in token amounts of grain in their ration to keep them happy.
Equal numbers of gold and black beauty zucchini.
Gold take a longer to hit their stride, but produce for longer.
Black beauty produces quickly and give you a lot of production over a shorter period and then die.
I'm going to have to succession planting if I want to have full production for the entire winter.
Still trying to work out summer varieties but grey zucchini and new guinea bean ( a gourd) and maybe Russian cucumbers
will have to fill in summer gap.

That is a a lot of zucchini. Two plants last year gave us more than a whole bunch of us could eat. Feeding them to your chickens is a great idea.

 

[backlash]

I have tried that in many variations. First I held down alt and 248 all at the same time. Nope. Then I held down alt and then 2, 4, and 8.

This is what I found online: "This method works only for keyboards that include a 10-key numeric pad." I don't have a 10-key numeric pad, so I am still out of luck.

You can still make symbols it's just more complicated.
You have to use the windows character map.
From Microsoft.

1. Open Character Map by clicking the Start button, clicking All Programs, clicking Accessories, clicking System Tools, and then clicking Character Map.
2. In the Font list, type or select the font you want to use.
3. Click the special character you want to insert into the document.
4. Click Select, and then click Copy.
5. Open your document and position the cursor where you want the special character to appear.
6. On the Edit menu, click Paste.
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us...num-lock/0cafea87-6ab0-414d-bbb0-e888a324c368

 

[SheepDog]

To make "special" characters you used to have to invoke ASCII.com or have software that could interpret the extended ASCII codes. Over the years some of this has changed because foreign languages also use extended ASCII codes for their alphabetic symbols. There is still an ASCII standard but it is different than when I was writing programs for DOS. Even the programming language standard in C has changed multiple times. I am using ANSI 99 C or C 99 when I write software. It is the most portable of languages across many platforms. I can write a program for use on a Linux platform and compile it for DOS or mobile devices or even Windows with little trouble. Running programs in the terminal is less comfortable for most people but it doesn't bother me at all. (there are no pull down menus or popup windows. It is all text and the same colors but my software is typically for information and not games.)
To print output the program saves the information to a text file and you print the file after exiting the program.

 

[txcatlady]

Husband tilled up my potato bed on Monday and I planted potatoes when I got home. Last night I tilled my other garden. I will till it again tonight and get onions planted. At work I found one pecan tree showing green today. I have been told we have another freeze sometime. Hope not. Need to get my hands in dirt and I need some sunshine. Picking up 18 baby chicks tomorrow. Need to clean coop and till in with garden.

 

[Tank-Girl]

Yay. Had some of my insanely expensive Origin tomato seeds pop overnight. I was a bit concerned.
Because they are so vigorous and my trellis isn't that tall I might have to do my own version of "lower and lean"
using my tomato clips.
The description on the packet does say that this variety needs less fertilizer because of its vigor.
I guess that means the plant will put on more greenery and less fruit if they're over fed.