I miss my garden - these days I only have a cramped urban balcony, but soon I will leave that behind.
One thing I did was to create a miniature bonsai garden that winters over (New York area) in a New England climate.
I started with a Home Depot potted Juniper (ground hugging variety) and felt through a bunch of them at the store until I found one with a nice thick, hidden ‘trunk’.
Then I trimmed it all up, found some stern moss and sphagnum moss, a bit of small succulents for the edges and voila... an expensive looking, yet very cheap bonsai - everything came from Home Cheapo!
For people who don’t normally follow Prepper threads I keep a Knowledge Base for SHTF situations. Although a lot of the material may be on topics that you aren’t really interested in there is quite a bit of information people who subscribe to threads like this would find useful and it’s all organized by directories so if you aren’t interested in how to make improvised weapons or survive in the wilderness you will still find hundreds of titles on gardening, homesteading, country living in urban areas, foraging, DIY and frugal living tips among other topics. All you need is a pdf reader, an Ebook reader, both of which can be found online for free and most of you probably already have, and a program like WinRaR to uncompress files if you choose to download an entire directory at once. Send me a PM and I will give you an access code to the site. It’s totally free. All I ask is that you don’t discuss the contents of the KB in this forum.
Here it was on day one:
It spent the entire New York City winter outdoors on the balcony exactly as you see it.
Below is exactly how it looks today. I put a little bit of scrap succulents in there to give it a more landscape-ish look. Mostly stuff I found on the floor while shopping at Home Cheapo.
yeah go ahead, put me on the ping if you will please- mostly interested in veggies garden stuff- but flowers is ok too- my folks do flower gardens on property too- always interested in new knowledge-
My update:
Found some free cedar raised beds on offerup.com that were beat up and worn. I rebuilt them... 52”x52” each...painted them white and have placed them in the front yard for the wife to place more flowers. She is appreciative.
The kids 18 & 21 are hating theblockdown and enjoying helping work in the yard even less.
Garden update.
Carrots (60 days) and radishes (28-30 days) direct seed planted.
Planted a 4” gooseberry plant near a for tree drip line as a test to see how it will fare. If it does well I will start some seeds and plant several more.
Seed starts on 10-11 y.o. Johnny’s Seeds (tomatoes, cukes, and japanese eggplant seem to be germinating at acceptable rates 65% 50% and 15% respectively. These are in 2” plastic cell containers or red solo cups....all in the greenhouse.
I have about 1 more week before I can transplant my broccoli and other greens starts into my planting beds so this week I am going to begin gardening them up.
We had a 32-34 degree night last night so I am glad to have not yet moved stuff outside. Would have been a shame for these starts to have gotten wiped out. I am holding off on creating the hoop house tops fort raised beds and that would have backfires has I already moved them outside.
My heirloom tomato, jalapeno and poblanos pepper seed starts are about 2 weeks from getting put in the raised beds so next week is hardening week for them.
My blueberry and raspberry plants are going gangbusters with new growth.....the culling of old growth creates tremendous new growth and it never ceases to amaze me how well the little bit of pruning does the trick with these fellas.
As an aside......up here in the Pacofic Northwest blackberry bushes are like cockroaches who have been transformed by radiation in a Sci-Fi movie....you cannot kill them....they are super invasive ...and all you can hope to do is keep them at bay. Our most famous gardener up.here, Ed Hume, once told me you cannot get rid if them...if you wanted to make then subside the most...you have to cut them off in the fall close to the ground then paint each cut stalk with roundup so they suck it into the root system....but eve. That would not get them completely gone.
I love with them and dig them up as they intrude into the garden.
My chicken wire fence I am building around the garden area is 60 ft x 75 ft....and within that footprint is my 8x12 greenhouse. I found free old cedar posts on offerup.com that I was able to salvage enough length to make short 4’ high fence posts for this project. I spread the posts out at distances of 6-9 feet and put 2” firring cut into stakes in between the posts to sturdy it up. This is a temporary fence which I plan to move outward on 1 side later to increase garden aize.
I am still in the hunt for a supply of woodchips to lay down on the rest of the area to create an excellent planting area with ongoing soil creation like I used to have.
But the lockdown has tree work at a standstill so woodchips which used to be free and plentiful are now scsize.
To-do list is planting apple pear and cherry trees along my back fence line. I am going to espalier them except for the cherry trees which will be bigger.
Time to get to work on this fence.
My reply may be “racial”
Last Fall on the last day before permafrost reemerged, I planted tulip bulbs. MN winters can be brutal, however, all winter I anticipated tulips.
Nobody walked in my yard and messed up my snow. However, I noticed just one track in the snow going to the flowers.
Long story short, a rabbit ate my tulip bulbs. Good thing for the rabbit, I don’t like rabbit stew.
Tuesday it had dried out enough to till, so I dug 3 25-30 foot potato furrows; plus tilled another 30’ row, where I planted the first 10’ with a packet of Green Arrow peas. Also put some spinach seed in a large planter.
Clouds were still holding off, so I also tilled last year’s failed 15 X 25 potato plot at the far end. While there, I checked on last year’s onion & garlic sets that I just left in the ground, instead of harvesting, because of failure to thrive; they are coming up, so we shall see.
Got rain soon after I finished; then snow Wednesday night, Thursday, and Thursday night; mostly gone now, and sunny, in the 50s. If this holds, as predicted, I’ll be able to finish tilling Monday; no more planting though, for at least a week; then another packet of Green Arrow in the middle 10’ of row; 3rd & last packet a couple of weeks after that.
The weather here in Central Missouri is trying to straighten up, but Mother Nature just can’t seem to get shed of her crabby attitude.
It was *almost* dry enough to get on the garden with the tiller, so of course, we got more rain. And temps in the low 30°s for a little extra slap in the face.
I did manage to cut the grass before it rained, so my yard no longer has the appearance of a goat pasture.
I have green salad coming up in the cold frame.
Brought a load of firewood home from the sawmill yesterday and unloaded it. The older I get the better I like propane.
Taking Mrs. Augie to the woods later today to look for morels.
Wife reports lettuce coming up, snow peas thinking about it
Carolina jasmine has fantastic display
Redbud is in full Bloom
Spring is here in force
Looks like I’m getting a couple of Kiko does in the next few days. Wife shook here head and said ok. 100% and I’ll get paperwork to register when/if I want. I’ve got my eye on a 75% Boer / 25% Kiko buck for the Kiko does. Boer bucks tend to put fast weight on their kids. We’ll see how it works out and if need be, I’ll swap out the boer/kiko mix for a 100% Kiko buck. Boer goats are just high maintenance in humid temperate climates bit Kikos are not.
Worked myself into a condition, working on the yard yesterday with the family...digging out blackberry bushes.....where ai had to take today off from most garden work.
If there was a version of Jock Itch called Gardener’s Itch.....then I got that.
Only abkento donsome watering and put some starts outside the greenhouse for a few hours to begin gardening them up.
I just got an email from Territorial Seeds that they are suspending accepting orders for a couple weeks because they are so swamped with orders, they cannot keep up packing and shipping them out.
Silly question: In preparing a planting bed, I dug up some old bulbs. I put them in water to see what might happen. Well, they sprouted. Woo hoo. Not having much experience with bulbs, is that the stem or the root? Wouldn’t want to replant them upside down. I’m probably just feeding the darned moles I’m having trouble making extinct.