This year, LT is joining me in cultivating my little garden plot. We are planting some more substantial veggies than last year, and I'm planning to "farm" it a little more intensively - so we'll have a spring crop, then rotate in some summer veggies and herbs, then a cold season crop for fall. Today we put in sugar snap peas, arugula, lettuce mix, broccoli, carrots, leeks, spinach, and chard. We made a trellis for 2 types of pole beans to go in next month. Sorrel, chives, and tarragon are already back (damn, I forgot to cut a bunch of chives to get that first dose of fresh garden greenstuff! I'm gonna try making a dip with them in Greek yogurt). And my 2 little raspberry canes are getting rolling with some leaves!

I planted up my herbs for the summer last week - one pot contains parsley (curly and Italian) and Thyme (standard and lemon). Another pot contains chives, basil, oregano and cilantro. And the last one is mint - spearmint and common mint. Mint has to be planted separately or it'll overwhelm everything else. They're right by the back door, so all I have to do is go outside and snip off what I need.

The tiniest snails I've ever seen apparently love chives. I must see if I can get a picture of one. Their shells are about 30mm across. There's usually a minisnail or two on the chives.

Does this have to be a veggie garden? As much as I'd like to grow a garden, I have difficult ground here, not a lot of room for raised beds (to combat the bad soil), and most important of all, lack of patience. (that, and the full sun all day has fried most of what I've tried to grow).

So I have flower gardens, and everything I pick must be able to withstand full sun. My daffodils, and hyacinths have done very well - the tulips are growing well with well formed flowers getting ready to open. I have several perrenials doing very well so far (they have spread so much since last year!!) In another weekend or so I'll get some annuals, because I just love color. Then I'll post a picture!

Not much going on out in the garden this time of year here in the rocky mountains, but I do have tomatoes started in my newly awesome plant stand. They're starting on their first real leaves just now. I did dig and till a flower bed in the front, and it has peonies and oriental lilies in it now, and will eventually have several different coneflowers. I dunno if I'll get the kitchen herb garden dug this year, probably not, but that's in my future. Walking out and cutting fresh herbs sounds like a fine thing. I'm hoping for one tomato, and lots of basil, and anything else is just gravy.

Oh, and we just had a massive snow/cold fest, so good thing I didn't start too early.

I have not planted my usual tomatoes/peppers/eggplant this year because I am going to be very busy and don't want to deal with it. This is not a good excuse since I will probably have more than enough time. Maybe I'll buy some tomato and pepper plants this week. I have planted a lot of flowers and herbs, and have weeded, fertilized, and pruned like a madwoman this spring. I'm about to go spray some harmful chemicals (Image) on a section of my lawn. It must be done.

I want to take a picture of my beautiful rose bushes (they are looking spectacular at the moment) but my camera is not working. I don't know what's wrong and it's driving me bonkers. I just asked my husband to look at it again and he said, "I'd throw this if I didn't think it would damage the wall."

My peas are about a foot high and dying for a trellis, despite being a bush variety, in theory. I may have some chard sprouting. I have scallions ready for harvesting as I need them, and yellow storage onions in the ground. The garlic I planted last fall is doing its best not to rot, and I have some beautiful potatoes that have sprouted up. The raspberries have leafed out, and I'm hardening off most of my nightshades (tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, ground cherries) to be planted on Friday! Oh, and I have some herbs to get in, too. Basil, parsley and I'm way late on the cilantro. Jeeze, I guess it's time for beans, too! Planting day will be BUSY!

I only have a couple of pots of herbs on my balcony - but it makes such a difference to cooking.

Actually must go water them!

I live in Los Angeles, and just recently moved to an apartment with a big balcony. My husband and I both love plants, so are thrilled to finally be able to have some! We bought a meyer lemon tree earlier today, and I just finished transplanting it to a larger pot. Very excited!

The Sarracenia rhizomes I split earlier this year have all sent up new growth. I had planned to rebuild a bog* out back to hold them all but since it looks like our area will have water restrictions I probably end up selling many of them instead. I finally remembered to cover my flowering Drosera spp. so instead of hybrids I have tons of pure babies and the Dionaeas put on a lot of new growth last year, so much so that after splitting of offsets and repotting last week, I have nearly 200. I plan to give a set of sundews and fly traps to each of the kids in my son's 5th grade class as graduation presents and I dunno what to do with the rest, sell them too, I guess. Ooh, lots of pymgy Drosera gemmae made it into the baby pots too.

I continue to be a serial killer of most Pinguiculas, but I'm finally having some luck with the easiest species to grow, Pinguicula primaflora. I ended up with a bunch of offsets which I'm going to plant into a vertical volcanic rock wall arrangement.

The Neps are all huge. I need to start cutting back some vines. Several are budding but I don't have the other gender in the same species, doh.

*the new dog, a lab, destroyed the last bog. Water dogs + water gardens don't mix well, who knew.

I cleared two big piles of brush today so the yard is finally looking habitable. I've got seven garden areas and two are planted. Corn in one and wild flowers and an exotic light purple bean to grow up and cover the chain-link fence. Multi-colored sunflowers will be planted tomorrow in one area, and the other areas get the veg some time soon. None the least of which will be peas and green beans planted under the windows so they grow up and shade the windows from the sun. I get tons of exposure here.

I'm getting very excited about my first garden in many years. It's been too long. I've been reading and planning and making maps of where everything goes for two months now. I think I've maximized the number of different veg I can get in so the big pay-off will be bringing freash produce to the local food pantry. WOO HOO!

Life is good!

My plans have scaled way back. Mrs. Plinth wants to build some raised beds in the front, but I honestly don't see that happening, given time and current circumstances.

In the back, I may finally get some sweetpeas in and I will be setting up a small hill for pumpkins. That's it.

I'm developing quite the collection of ceramic pots on the balcony. Last week I planted some basil and got a half-grown tomato plant to keep the other two (the only ones that survived starting from seed, even with fancy peat pellets and all) company, and then over the weekend a metric fuckton of wind and rain got dumped out here, so I spent all Saturday watching the new plants get beat up ;_;

Last month I bought some dried borlotti (cranberry) beans at the grocery store, and soaked a few of them until they sprouted and then threw them into another big pot of dirt. This pot basically turned into dirt soup from all the hard rain (I don't have saucers for any of them yet), so if the beans experiment doesn't work out I'm planning to fill it with mint and maybe Thai basil and borage.

I also have some potatoes that had sprouted in the pantry in a plastic pot in the corner - all the dirt above them got washed away in the rain. Which might be a good thing, since in addition to shoots this pot was starting to send up mushrooms. I swear one of the potato sprouts doubled in size over the past two days.

There's also a lavender plant that just kinda sits there and doesn't do anything (but it looks very pretty), and a thyme plant that likes to fall over, and a rosemary that just moved to a new pot (previously terracotta, now gray ceramic to match the lavender and thyme pots, yes I am a decor junkie), and a tea olive (osmanthus) that recently started sprouting new leaves like crazy, so I guess it's happy.

Is it just me, or is there something ridiculous about having to buy dirt?

This afternoon I set a tray of 4" soil blocks on the ground waiting for my wife to make room on the table where she was repotting tomato starts. When my back was turned, three ducks suddenly descended on the soil blocks, thrust their beaks into the divots, and shook their head back and forth in the way that ducks do. My soil blocks were destroyed. It was very sad.

On the upside, my compost piles are at 125 degrees and 150 degrees with the former due to be turned in a few days. Tomorrow I'm going to pick up a couple truckloads of manure from the stable down the way and build a pile at our new farm where, incidentally, we put up a 60' x 14' poly tunnel using the new technique we'd just learned. Plus, I got another 100' x 40' bed tilled up. Busting sod is hard work.

Radishes are going like gangbusters and all of the lettuces are perking up. The parsnips that overwintered now have tops that are about three-feet tall. And our asparagus came back despite being attacked by the chickens. And soon we will have garlic scapes.

We've got four new wyandottes that just moved out to the coop and three americaunas and four khaki campbell ducks brooding in the house as well as a half-dozen turkey poults on the way. Our drake continues to molest the chickens so he's either going to find a new place to live or he's going to become a combination of prosciutto and confit.

And my good deed for the week was rototilling the pea patches/community gardens near our farm. I took care of that on Tuesday and was gratified to see at least three folks working on their plots today. Community gardens fill me with an inordinate amount of joy.

This is me, as a man outstanding in his field.≡ Click to see image ≡

On preview, "I'm better than dirt. Well, most kinds of dirt. Not that fancy, store-bought dirt. That stuff's loaded with nutrients. I... I can't compete with that."

It's still way too early for planting anything outside (Memorial Day weekend is the time to plant), and with the move I haven't started anything inside. I'm interested to see if the new place is as windy as the manager claims, and what I can do to help things grow on our large shared deck.

I still have last year's pickled green tomatoes on the shelf. I have tomato seeds, but I may chicken out again this year and bury some plants during Memorial Day weekend. My square foot plot did really well last year, and looks to be good this year, but I want more volume, so I'll be doing some "traditional" gardening in the backyard. We can't do squashes or any of that family, so there will be a number of beans and carrots and peas and such. And Swiss Chard. I love Swiss Chard.

I've been weeding and cutting down stuff with a chainsaw. Chainsaw fun will start up again on Tuesday or Wednesday when it's no longer raining here. I have no real gardeny plans this year. I do think I'm going to set up a trolley system for the dogs so that they can frolic while I work in the yard, though.

I detailed my fight with the back yard in an earlier thread. Since then I seeded and fertilized it and it's been raining ever since so hopefully I'll see grass in a week or so. Ms. Octo put together window boxes for the front first floor windows and planters for the stoop and hacked back the evil rose bushes while wearing her elbow length gauntlets.

It's funny that we live in the inner city but I've never seen people more dedicated to gardening; every little square of dirt here gets flowers and if there's no dirt people plant in boxes. This is our first year for window boxes, we were feeling like we weren't keeping up. Hopefully we'll remember to water them enough since they don't get rained on.

We began harvesting lettuce last week, and our beets, turnips, and chard are coming along nicely. Our parsley over wintered, so we've made taboule already, and the peas are sending up foot-long shoots.

We have started tomato, eggplant, and pepper seeds in a little greenhouse, but I'm doubtful that they'll be very big when it comes time to plant them in a few weeks, so we might end up buying seedlings. We'll plant them right in the midst of the lettuce; as the weather gets too warm for the lettuce, it'll bolt or die off and the other plants will take over. That worked very well last year, and let us plant more in our little space. We'll direct-seed the cucumbers and green beans, and we bought strawberry seedlings to plant along the fence.

A big project this year has been to replace all the cheap white trellising with stuff we've reclaimed or made ourselves. I welded some pyramid-shaped cages out of rebar, and we're in the middle of making a fan-shaped rose trellis out of the same material. We have things we've made out of old copper pipe, iron fencing that we've cut and bent into interesting shapes, and a bed frame we found by the side of the road. Also this weekend, we sort of wove a melon trellis out of rebar--looks cool, in our Capitol Hillbillies sort of way. It matches the rebar grape arbor in the front yard (we've had bud-break there, so that's good). We also have a "deck" made out of wooden shipping pallets and have fashioned planters out of terra-cotta chimney liners.

Our season starts earlier than most of yours, I think. (Which is both good and bad.)

Let's see. The peas, despite never being properly trellised, are producing like mad and have to be picked every day. I'm kicking myself for not getting the trellising done in the fall, like I should have, because they're much harder to pick when they're bent over on themselves this way.

Things that are bolting: Arugula, mustard, lettuce, kale, cabbage, broccoli, chard, beets. I pulled the beets out yesterday. (The cabbage was actually pulled out a week or so ago.) Mustard will come out as soon as the arugula finishes making seed (which I'll save), and then they both will go into the compost heap.

Things that are just starting: ** Potatoes are doing very well. Green and leafy and about 6" tall. Since most of them overwintered in the soil, we weren't sure if they would sprout, so we're very pleased with them. ** Spent six hours yesterday (in 90-degree heat!) planting tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and tomatillos. Will have to go back and water well this evening; supposed to be another scorcher. ** Pole beans are up; Three to four inches tall. Not yet climbing on the trellis I made from some buddleia canes. I've also planted what I think is probably way too many cranberry beans. But I love them so. ** Basil is sprouting. Or, in any case, a bunch of little weeds have sprouted where I planted the basil.

Things to do in the near future: ** Okra is started in six-packs. It'll go in as soon as we harvest the fennel, should be in a week or two. ** Corn will go in as soon as we pull up the arugula, mustard, kale, lettuce, and fennel. Yay corn!