Do You Have A Garden?

[Winchester]

Those pictures are outstanding.....you've a beautiful yard!

 

[AbbysMom]

Thank you! Let's see pics of some other gardens!

 

[segelkatt]

My garden is a bust this year and so are the ones of my neighbors. We do blame the weather which has been just crazy all year here in SoCal. Tomatoes came up great, growing tall, started to set fruit and then the plants just dried up with some kind of critter taking bites out of the few tomatoes that were there. Corn barely came up although I sowed it three times and then something ate half of them. Just a few zucchini, can you imagine? I usually have more on the one plant I grow then I can give away. Cukes did alright, are still bearing a few at a time, peppers were a bust completely and the green beans never even sprouted although I planted them 3 times. The only thing that did well were the blackberry vines (I've got jars full of frozen blackberries as I have enough grape jam from last year so that I don't need berry jam) and most of the rhubarb which is still bearing but not like last year. I had a good crop of onions that I had planted from seed last October and one really big garlic. Same with the carrots which had been planted last November, they do take a long time, I wait until some start pushing out of the ground to check for any more. The Concord grape is crazy this year too. It started out very well, the grapes started to get color and then something ate them. However, then a new crop of flowers appeared and those are now green grapes which should be ready to eat by the end of September. This morning I was pruning some of the long vines and noticed that there are some tiny baby grapes AND some more flowers! This means that the grape vine flowered at 4 different times this year and it's supposed to have one heavy flowering and sometimes a second much smaller flowering. Nobody can tell me this has nothing to do with the weird weather!
I am so disgusted with my garden this year that most of it is just sitting there with nothing growing in it and I'm thinking of my winter garden already. The rhubarb will need to be moved away from the berry vines and those need to be severely pruned and some of it dug up, they produce an awful lot of underground runners. I'll plant beets, lettuce, Swiss chard, savoy cabbage, red cabbage, radishes, carrots, onions, and broccoli. Brussels sprouts and cauliflower I'll get from the farmers' market, mine are always full of aphids. Hopefully my winter garden will be a success, I still can't get over how poor the summer garden was considering that all the other years I have been gardening, over 30 years now in various places, I have never had such a poor showing.

 

[Norachan]

I've had a similar problem segelkatt There was hardly any rain during our monsoon period this year but now the rain is coming down in buckets. There is a typhoon heading this way too. Even the wild flowers, which are usually waist height by now, haven't done very well this year.

My rose bushes and my morning glory vines are huge and lush and green, but no flowers.



The apple tree and blueberry bushes had loads of flowers on them in the spring, but there is no fruit at all. The wild berries that I usually see in the forest aren't around this year either. It's all very weird.

 

[segelkatt]

Everything being the same as always, same composted horse manure, same watering that I have done in this location for over 5 years and then this mess this year. During December and January we had so much rain that the governor declared that the 6 year drought was over and the snow pack in the mountains was so thick that the ski resorts are just now closing down, wow! Although it never snows down here close to the coast it does get cold and very windy in January & February, well, what we call cold, low 40s and dipping into 30s with highs in the 50s, but in January we had 70s and even a few days in the 80s so all kinds of plants and trees were blooming. I have 2 plumerias in pots that leafed out and had a few flowers and then the cold hit in February with more rain, killed the flowers, the leaves fell off and the plumerias went dormant again. In April they finally woke up again and have been pushing out a good, no, excellent crop of leaves but even now there are still no flowers. A papaya in a pot has 2 fruit on it and they are the size of small tennis balls, they should be 3 times that size and just about ready to harvest. Dragon fruit has NO buds even, I should be brimming in fruit by now.
Usually in June we get clouds and fog during the night which burns up by 10 a.m., we call it June Gloom, after 10 it then gets sunny but not too hot, high 70s with sometimes in the 80s. Last year the June Gloom started in May so we called it "May Gray" but it lasted a whole 2 months before we got the legendary California weather. This year is even worse. After the heat in January and the cold snap in February which lasted until the end of March we finally breathed a little better:"it's finally getting to be Spring". Yeah right. The May Gray/June Gloom started in April and it is still with us and now it's August, that's 4 months of unseasonable weather. Oh there were 3 days of hot weather (90s) a few weeks ago and that was it, after those 3 days it was right back to the gloomy weather pattern. Day before yesterday it never even cleared up, it looked like rain all day (rain in SoCal in July? Never.), all gloomy. So anyone who does not believe that there is such a thing as global warming with weather going crazy, cold when it should be warm, hot when it should be moderate, and rain and drought in places where it should not be, those people need to have their heads examined. OK, so I am ranting, I just had to get that out.

 

[segelkatt]

It's a year later and the weather was just as crazy as last year BUT: the garden had masses of tomatoes and cucumbers, zucchini was reasonable, there are 40 ears of white corn in my freezer! the rhubarb died after giving me just a few stalks, no blackberries, I think I may have cut them back too far, grapes were very late but a good crop which is now fermenting in 2 carboys with a second good crop just getting color. There's a pumpkin vine on the fence and I've gotten 2 small pumpkins from it already, they are "sugar babies" so they get no bigger than 7 inches across, with a few more still growing on the vine, I have one tomato plant left which has flowers and 1 tomato on it and the dragon fruit has 4 fruit coming, also very late, I should have been eating those in July and they are still quite green and still getting bigger.
So I have started my winter garden early with onions in both seeds and sets, carrot seeds, seedlings of red and savoy cabbages, lettuce, cauliflower and broccoli. Thinking of also planting more carrots, beets, daikon radishes, Swiss chard. I had no winter garden last year as I had been in the hospital for 3 days in Sept last year and was in no shape to plant or care for a garden, so I am really looking forward to having one this winter.

 

[MoochNNoodles]

That all sounds fantastic segelkatt !

The only thing that really made it to my freezer this year were beans. Everything else was eaten on the spot. I still need to clear out my gardens and potted plants. I keep waiting for it to cool off and dry out. Neither have happened yet. I can't remember such a warm, wet fall!

 

[segelkatt]

I'd like to show you pics but the site says that the files are too large. Is it the camera or is it me?

 

[MoochNNoodles]

I'd like to show you pics but the site says that the files are too large. Is it the camera or is it me?

The site does have a limit on file sizes. Everything I've taken on my phone has been ok. This might help you: How To Resize Photos With Irfanview (free Software)

 

[aliceneko]

I have a small garden since my house is a small terraced house in the city. It's got a little patio by the house, and a grassy patch in the middle surrounded by flowerbeds. There's also a concrete space at the end where the shed is. My garden is quite wild, so it's very friendly for wildlife - bees, butterflies and spiders are particular fans of my garden.

 

[segelkatt]

The site does have a limit on file sizes. Everything I've taken on my phone has been ok. This might help you: How To Resize Photos With Irfanview (free Software)

I've downloaded this and yes it does work. But I have so many pics I'd like to share and you have to resize one at a time and then they end up in "documents" and I have to move them to "pictures", what a pain. I'll have to check to see if I can have my camera make them smaller to begin with and I know that will be a pain also.

 

[segelkatt]

savoy cabbage

onions with garlic in front

that's a pumpkin, still green

this I covered up because something was chewing on the cauliflower and brocccoli

the milk bottles and glass jars are covering up lettuce which snails/slugs had been atacking

the tiny plants are lettuce, the big ones are savoy cabbage, you can see two at the right that something was eating, maybe rabbits?

red cabbage but it has not yet made heads, I plant onions everywhere in between, they will be ready in June

My plot is part of a community garden only open to the community in which I live. These pics are from November 2018