The Plant and Garden thread!

I had to rebuild all my garden beds due to tree growth, but my school not getting out until mid May meant I was set back on planting until now! I've got ~12-15 separate tomato plants, either Black from Tulas or Beefsteak slicing tomatoes; I elected for no sauce or cherry types this year because I don't make sauces yet. I'm also trying out single string trellis this year instead of cages and a sunshade. I hope to pop carrots and some other root veggies in between soon while I still have a little time.

The other bed has a couple melons, a couple cucumbers, several broccoli, and an entire conga line of sweet bell peppers. I finally have some containers for the hot peppers so I can control their watering and heat. For my 3rd year growing things in the garden I'm already much more successful than before.

Show me what you got!

Maybe I can show some end results?

We've had a garden every year of our 36 year marriage.  In year one we thought some might die or get eaten or stepped on.   We had 24 plants that went crazy leaving us a lot for the freezer.  We talk about tomatoes all summer long. 
 

Nice setup. Our groundhog got our tomato plants this year. But, we restocked and placed them up on our front porch. Take that, groundhog. Although, now we're susceptible to porch pirates. Let's hope they don't dig tomatoes.

Living in the desert, irrigation is crucial, but I haven't dialed in my irrigation setup yet. The problem lies in leaving the water on for long periods of time, and having a valve that reliably turn the water on and off a few times a day for months on end. 

I'm still needing to mulch, get my sunflowers in, and plant some other small things in between the tomatoes still. Coulda done it yesterday but eh

Doesnt help that something in my garden LOVES the sunflower seedlings and nips them off at the first chance. They've been safe on top of my grill so far, but when I expand the trellis to support the sun shade properly I'll also be putting up a net to prevent deer browsing and my ADHD makes all that difficult.

In reply to GIRTHQUAKE :

If it's not an insect, a mixture of Cayenne Powder, dish soap and water in a garden sprayer will keep everything but birds off your plants.  I had to do this earlier this spring to keep my blackberry plants from turning into stumps every other day.

In reply to GIRTHQUAKE :

I used to love sunflowers in my garden but it fed the field mice that brought the snakes.  No more sunflowers.

The wife and I enjoy gardening and we had a pretty decent raised bed garden in South Carolina with four 4'x12' raised beds.  We did a small in ground plot at my in-laws last spring on a whim when we were visiting over Memorial Day and planning on moving back to Southern Wisconsin.  The house I bought in WI is in the woods, like really in the woods and doesn't get enough sunlight to grow much other than hickory trees and some grass.  There is a family farmette 3 miles down the road from me that my aunt now owns and does almost nothing with the available land so I have been rehabbing the large garden plot my grandpa used to grow veggies in.

First look at the neglected garden plot late April.  It hasn't been maintained really since 2020 and this was after it had been mowed for the first time since then as well.

Some tilling started.

I added an electric fence about 5' tall to keep deer and other critter out. The solar energizer seems to be working great.  A very pregnant Mrs. Racetruck over seeing the squash and pumpkin planting.  The greenhouse in the back is part of the family garden center business, I basically grew up with two green thumbs.

Current status as of Sunday.  We finally got a little bit of rain.  It has been a very warm and very dry spring here in WI. The drip irrigation I have been hoarding for over a year finally got put to use and is making this large plot very easy to keep watered.

Got my little piece of suburban bliss updated.

Bring on the Maters and Peppers!!!

These gardens look great!

The plant I'm most proud of is my 8-year-old pencil cactus. 

Currently all of my gardening hopes and dreams are riding on this single beefsteak tomato. I have a ton of zucchini and spaghetti squash plants too, but they haven't produced anything yet.

About eight years ago now we moved into a space where we had a lot of land but very little foliage, and almost no real shade. It was a fine blank canvas, but blank canvases can be kind of intimidating because you end up with option paralysis, then as you start planting you realize that you;re not really getting a handle on the maintenance end of things.

Overall though I think we —and by "we" I mostly mean "my wife" as she's the one that knows the greenery and I'm just the one that keeps her from planting things too close to each other to mow around—have progressed toward a fairly nice greenspace.

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We also recently fired out lawn service and have taken over doing everything ourselves. Mowing three acres sucks, and paying for the mower sucks more, but the mower payments are way less than we were paying for the service, and they weren't charging enough to begin with and were always kind of bitter about us constantly planting and making their job harder. So it was an amicable split, and now I get a couple hours every couple weeks to catch up on podcasts on the zero turn.

tomato update!

also, I gave the squashes a trellis to climb and tried hand-pollinating some of the flowers to see if they just weren't having their needs met by the many insects that get through our screen

We may be growing nothing so well as groundhogs this year.  Today I glanced out my kitchen window to see a mature groundhog run to the back of my garden and *climb* the 4' tall fence and sprint to the brush line like some kind of Olympic athlete.  I honestly had never seen one of the buggers climb a fence.  I always just assumed they'd dig under.

So far, only the cucumbers have suffered.  They have been leaving the beans, potatoes, peppers and tomatoes alone, but what happens when the cucumbers are gone???

Today's harvest.  We've had lettuce and broccoli but it is too hot for those now.  We have peas, green beans, and some herbs too.  We've had tons of tomatoes, jalapeños and some poblanos too.  We will add more garden beds for next year and rotate the tomatoe beds.  
 

Fresh veggies are awesome.

Kiddo helped me make candied jalapeños, pickled jalapeños and salsa today.  Sadly I lost about two jars worth of salsa.  It was mild but the kiddo doesn't like super spicy stuff.  The wife and kiddo are downing some now.

First harvest today.  Many more zucchinis to come in the next couple weeks.  The wife loves to make squash blossom grilled cheese sandwiches this time of year.

In reply to RacetruckRon :

My wife makes a squash, zuchini, corn, onion like hash dish with a piece of bacon or two and cooks the veggies in the bacon fat.  It is amazing.  She dies a similar veggie has with beets, sweet potatoes and sometimes parsnips.

Part of my long bed didn't make it; raccoons got in and tore quite a lot up looking for grubs. I'll have to grab store veggie plants to fill it out more.

On the plus side tho, tomatoes are growing too fast for me to retie them! They've literally doubled in size in 2 weeks- after this shot I retied 3 of them and I'll likely retie 2 more tonight just to be safe.

We made batch #2 of salsa today.  It's even better.  Another batch or two and we should have this recipe down.  The candied jalapeños and picketed ones made it into the snack rotation too.

These are my 6 Early Girl tomato plants in 24"x18" pots filled with Miracle Grow garden soil fortified with hand fulls of 10-10-10 fertilizer, calcium sulfate (gypsum), and calcium carbonate (lime).

Everything else I can buy in the grocery store except for good tomatoes which I need for BLT sandwiches. Too bad the doctors said bacon is now bad for me except for one that said I can have bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches but when I asked if he would put that in writing, he declined to write a prescription.

Ive been working with dragonfruit for the last year or so. I finally got some blooms! Total, i think i have 7 blooms across a bunch of plants. Some are "American beauty", some are the yellow fruit variety which is much sweeter and has bigger crunchy seeds that i like to eat. 
 

I have always wanted to try and grow grapes so we picked up a muscadine vine from the local nursery and setup a trellis for it. Hopefully this fall we will get a few grapes off of it. 

Keeping up with the weeds in our planter beds seems to be a full-time thing. Adding cardboard and mulch should help. This time of year it's too hot to spend more than 2 hours outside doing anything though. Got this done on the 4th.

It's been pretty warm and dry for Wisconsin but drip irrigation has the garden looking great. Squash plants and peppers are producing really well, the tomatoes and cucumbers are going to be giving us fruit starting next week most likely.

I'm 6'1" and this was our sweet corn 2 days ago. I think taking a picture in between rows of corn is like a right of passage for a farmer extra points for GRM shirts though, right? Hoping to have good ears on the corn in about a month.