Smart Alex …that tub idea is awesome. I think I will try that. Can’t wait really. I might shove some out in the sunporch right now as an experiment. DH just loves that.
Collective Unconscious…
I think about it and where you put your garden in your lawn. You take things into consideration like drainage, or proximity to the outdoor hydrant, or sunlight hours in the day etc. And I stop and think whoa what ever gave me the idea to think about all of this. Do normal people think about all of this? Or am I just weird?
Whoa I love the bucket idea for carrots!! @Hulk - you are not weird…:lol::lol: I don’t think it’s any different than horsepeople and their idiosyncrasies.
I spend a LOT of time thinking about and perusing my plant selections, nurseries, compost, drainage, you name it.
And yes I think some of us it’s bred in and others maybe more of a ‘gee sounds neat’ so they try it and like it. I know for myself, my mom always grew a HUGE garden every year. I am talking major canning and freezing, every single year. You would think I would hate gardening, after having to weed and water all that by hand. But every year she’d let me have a patch of dirt and I’d plant radish seeds or whatever, and I always loved it. I still do. There is nothing quite like the smell of dirt, getting your hands in it, the sun on your back… Sitting in the garden eating a bean or pea or tomato you just pulled off the vine. In the summer my breakfast is almost always a handful of fresh blueberries. I go out to check on the ripeness and end up eating them instead!
I haul buckets of horse manure home from the barn off & on, dump them in my garden to be tilled in later. I look at my yard every winter and peruse what stays, what goes, what needs to be moved, what I want to change about the hardscape… 
(my husband just rolls his eyes and asks if I will ever be satisfied with how things are).
We have a couple of events local to me, Hardy Plant Society puts on a spring plant sale at the Portland Expo Center. I go and pick up things you sure won’t find in a big box store. I can also go to some of the vendors websites and pre-order and they will bring it to me for pickup at the show.
The other is the Master Gardener fair at the county fairgrounds. Find a lot of neat stuff there too.
My mom still gardens - mostly just her flowers now, since she’s older - but she spends the late summer placing bulb orders and she gives me divisions of things. I make her a fuchsia basket at Mother’s Day and by golly a month later the thing looks like it came from the local nursery! (Huge!)
Big sigh… waiting for spring…
Last year I joined several gardening groups on Facebook. All day long I can look at photos of people’s beautiful gardens and discuss the finer points of gardening. On the other hand, there are a lot of times when newbies come up with questions that I just have to refrain from commenting on because I don’t know how to phrase the answer without saying “you sure are an idiot”. And there are always a handful of people who can’t resist saying it anyway. I grew up out in the country and obviously take for granted a lot of farmer common sense that does not get distributed in the city.
I clip my favorites and message them to my co-worker who also grew up on a farm. Because they are just to good to pass up:
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This person swore she knows what a cantaloupe looks like because she has grown them for years but…
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It’s always a bummer when you plant a packet of brussel sprout seeds and get sunflowers instead
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And then there is always the disappointment of buying a new house with a garden and being left with nothing but a thriving bed of thistles
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Obsidian Fire…Loved the story about your mom and her garden, and how she let you have a patch to your own. It brings back memories of grandpa. He always put in a large corn field. So since he had the plow hooked up he would turn over a small patch for my cousin and I. We planted easy growers cukes, zukes, etc. How fun to tend it and watch it grow. Then we would walk around the neighborhood and hand out the extras. Good times. 
Smart Alex… absolutely loved your post. Like as in sitting here laughing out loud. The flowers on the pepper plants that one destroyed me. :lol:
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@SmartAlex - ROFLMAO!! :lol::lol::lol::lol::lol::lol::lol: Oh those were too funny!!
(altho they make me cringe too)
Nope, but it is similar. I would have probably bought this if I had found it when I was searching. Mine has only one attachment to the handle, not two. Because the attachment to the handle is centered behind the arrowhead/triangle of the business end of the hoe, less resistance going through the soil than this one would be, IMO. But the use would be the same, a back and forth motion.
This “scuffle hoe” is about the closest, very similar to what I have. It is a full triangle where mine actually does indent a bit at the back rather than being straight across, but very similar. IF the angle is the same, it’s hard to say for sure in the picture. I definitely would have ordered one of these if I had found it at the time, before I found my $2 one at the junk store!
My husband always says he searches antique stores for stuff he can use, not stuff to display. We do a lot of work outside, not just gardening, but installing RR ties for landscaping and cutting trees. We’ve processed over 200 trees just cleaning up the place. He has gotten hand tools, tow chains, log tongs, a cant hook, a RR spike puller. Easier (and much cheaper) than finding a new one, plus they’re made to last.
What beneficial flowers do you plant in your gardens? To either attract pollinators or repel bad insects?
I buy tools at yard sales. I usually find a pile in the corner and offer 2 bucks each for the whole lot. Most people at the yards sales are happy to see the stuff go. I am happy to restock the supply. So win-win. My best score so far was a 2 ft long pipe wrench, that DH and a farmer that we did a lot of business with used all the time on the hay wagons. I am always on the look out for this stuff. And antique stores are the only place you can find certain items.
The Jenners… I plant the easy ones like marigolds, nasturtiums, petunias, and sunflowers.
I start the marigolds and petunias from seed, along with my other starters. (tomatoes,peppers) Honestly they are both super easy. The nasturtiums I direct sow right along with my squash when I am planting them. Sunflowers are the same. Oh and the same with Zinnias, direct sow them any where. They are also super easy.
I’m still on the floor after reading the garden questions. The cantaloupe is the winner for me.
Marigolds to repel. I just ordered four packets of butterfly seeds from Eden Brothers. Two different types of milkweed and some others I don’t remember. I’m turning our dog’s grave into a butterfly garden. I can see it outside the window behind my computer. The daffodils are already in. It doesn’t look like a grave. I’ve scattered rocks and wood here and there to make it look like a natural garden setting. I also planted a climbing tea rose in a corner next to it.
I rearranged the indoor plants yesterday. Some are inside because they’d freeze in winter. They’ll go back outside come spring. Some are permanently inside - nephitis (sp?), pothos, palms, jade, succulents. They can’t go out because the squirrels will eat them. I learned this the hard way. I still can’t figure out how they got to the kalanchoe. It was hanging from the front porch eaves. They would have had to be able to walk upside-down under the eaves to get to it. Darn varmints. It’s making a comeback inside.
Are you looking for perennials or annuals or can it be a shrub? If you give a little more info on what you would like I can better come up with ideas.
Smart Alex, you and I shop at the same stores, and labour at much the same toil. We don’t cut trees on our 160 acres, well, not live ones anyway. But we have spent 10 years cleaning it up, clearing pasture, mostly by hand (sometimes my tractor has been involved too) and making it into what we want, from the disaster area that it was. Badly logged, probably several times in the last 150 years, slash left behind. Acres of impassable bush when we bought it, 3 feet deep in logs from beaver workings in the low areas. I am pretty good with my little chainsaw now, and the tiger torch. Hay fields and irrigation were in and had been used, but no buildings. It had never been “loved” by someone before. I burned yet another dozen huge piles of crap last week, smoked the valley up big time, again. I have pasture for TB horses now, in areas that were considered “too dangerous to turn cows out in” when we bought it. And there are still areas here that I have not been in or through, impassable. It is a lifelong goal, and will be my final life’s work, to create a beautiful farm from the mess that was here. My gardens are just small spots of production of food, and it’s a good thing that they are so easy to grow LOL! They are not nearly as beautiful and civilized as some of the pictures here on this thread. My small flower garden next to our front door has a few tulips that manage to survive when we have a cold winter, but the daffodils have not survived. A few crocuses come up. But what grows well there are lilies, they grow like a jungle and are spread out in their blooms over a decent amount of time. Also Siberian irises. I stick a few pansies in there in the spring. I have a couple of rose bushes, but have had to try a couple times to get them to survive. We are having such an easy winter this year, that the ones that have been in for a couple of years now are looking quite happy now. I purchase the really carefree roses, not the fancy ones that you have to look after and are fussy.
For indoors, I have an avocado tree. I sprouted it two years ago now, and it is doing OK. Anybody have any info on continuing this success? I have NO experience with avocado trees, though I know they are supposed to be easy to sprout, this has been my first successful one. I can see it at 20 feet high in a huge pot in the prow of our large living room with the big south facing windows, producing avocados indoors!!! Am I delusional?
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On our 16 acres, 10 of it is older woodlot which we leave alone, but around the house was grown up scrubby young woods. In the before photo (below left) just past the front screen of ash, was all hemlock. You on’t see any green like evergreen limbs in there? That’s cuz they were all tops. All you can see at eye level is trunks. The previous owners, 60 years ago, must have gotten an arbor day deal on cheap trees. Because they planted them every 6 feet in a grid in three areas on the property. Over 140 trees in that space alone, which is now occupied by my husband’s mancave-garage. We gave two truck logging-truck loads of hemlock away to someone who had it milled into rough-cut barn siding
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And the view from behind the right side of the garage back towards the road. We still call this side yard “Lake Johnson” because any good rain has it standing in water. It’s often unmowable. We planted three London Plane trees that like water and they’ve tripled in size now topping over 30 feet in just a couple of years. Ahead towards the road is a dry creek bed to handle the water. The trees in the Before (below left) were red oak that we had milled into beadboard wainscotting for the big garage
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This is from the road looking back towards ^ that ^ area. You can see the right side of the big garage on the left.
That’s a 90 foot long french drain covered with 50 tons of bank run/boulders that we dumped with the tractor loader and arranged by hand. We had original mulched it but it was so wet in there that the spruce trees were dying and we had to replace several. We have another 80 tons of oversize washed rock to do another soupy area.
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I wound up Googling and ordered nasturtiums, echinacea, sunflowers, something fuzzy and purple I can’t remember the name of, daisies, and a “wildflower mix” marketed for hummingbirds, bees, and butterflies. I’m getting excited!!! I also have lots of veggie seeds coming.
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Oh, how wonderful a thought planting is right now as I type this listening to 70km an hour winds blow 15 cm of snow around at -25 degrees Celsius. I am quite ready for spring me thinks lol.
My planting adventure for this year is to attempt to find a variety of roses cold tolerant to zone 3 and to not be over run by potato bugs. Is anyone here mabey familiar with cold friendly roses? I have long wanted to grow some and would love some tips
It is exciting isn’t it? Sure does help with the winter blahs. I am excited for you. And there is just something about the bees buzzing around your flowers that is enchanting.
Funny bee story. So DH was at a horse show, had to be there at the butt crack of dawn. So my lazy self says I will come down to the show and meet you at noon for lunch. Well I was late. I got half way there, discovered I had a bumble bee in my car. I turned around and took the bee back home because I didn’t want him to be released too far from home. DH was starving but waited for me anyways, and was totally exasperated when I told him why I was late.:lol:
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Welcome to our thread!!! We have a rose grower on here that will hopefully chime in. I on the other hand will be no help. Roses have been a no go for me thus far. But I am going to try again this year. We are due for a blizzard Saturday, so dreaming about spring and gardens is just what is in order. Brrrr!!!
I’ve been putting together my garden supply shopping list. Happened to go to the Amazon Reviews on Wiggle Worm worm castings. Last year I bought them from Home Depot but they only carry small bags… anyway:
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