The Gardening Thread

[Maria]

http://www.bhg.com/gardening/vegetable/ ... r-gardens/

This article has some great ideas for starting herbs.

[Barbara]

I missed some of these posts. Thanks, Maria. I surely love that style of pattern pictured in the post of Sept. 14 - !!
This past September 14, that is. Beautiful.

I wanted to say that I tried again with the Marigolds near my tomatoes and chard. I only planted one or two of the pretty flowers in those previous years. Now I created a line of orange Marigolds. It seems that the awful earwigs are staying away more from the chard.

Maybe The Marigold Defense Solution works after all ! I will report back later in the season.

At the minimum, the orange flowers lend a cheerful look to the garden.

[Maria]

Our wild rabbits seem to like marigolds. Whenever I plant a flat, they are gone the next day, nibbled down to the ground.

Gophers or rats nibbled our geraniums by pulling them into their hole and eating them root and all.

It is frustrating. It seems that most people here use above ground boxes to plant their food, filling the boxes with composted soil and amendments. Therefore, we are now trying that.

[Barbara]

That's terrible to lose your marigolds and geraniums to varmints !

Geraniums [ Pelargoniums to use their real name ] are the other flower I have tried a few times due to their aromatic quality. I forgot about those last year and this year. Thanks for reminding me ! I better try to get a few before they disappear from the nurseries. I always felt cheered up when i looked at my pelargoniums a few years ago : they seem to soothe ruffled emotions and fight back against bad neighbors by elevating the atmosphere of one's own yard !

I just learned a few months ago what the word amendment means. I thought it was an addition to a legal document only.
Therefore, I am glad to be able to keep up with you - at least a little - for once ! Are you using the Organic soil amendment ? That is, if you have gotten underway already with your raised boxes ?

And how do those help keep out those horrible things, I don't even like to speak their names...
don't you have to put some chicken wire around the sides of the box or boxes to firmly screen out the animal pests ? How is that different from usual level gardening, which is what I have done all these [ well - a few ] years ?

I had a book by an English author who maintained that the raised box gardening is the only style that really succeeds. I never figured how to implement this style, despite his very strong case.

I hope your food and flowers both work well !

[Maria]

Apparently, the large planting boxes (3 feet wide x 6 feet long x 2 feet high) deter the rats, mice, gophers, and rabbits, but give you lots of gardening access without the need to bend over and hurt your back. I have seen some carrot boxes that are three feet high, but those are for growing gigantic carrots. When carrots get more than one inch in diameter, I find that they become tough.

Yes, some people put the boxes on top of bricks or put a wire grid underneath to prevent the nasty rodents from tunneling underneath. However other folks have placed the boxes directly on top of the ground and have had no problems.

Rabbits, or those cute cotton tails, are our major problems here, but they do not seem to enter the boxes. However, they may stretch, standing up to nibble vegetation around the edges of the boxes. To counter that problem, many gardeners plant chives, garlic, onions, or other fragrant herbs around the outer edges of the boxes to discourage the rabbits. Then they use tomato cages too. Rabbits do not seem to bother the tomatoes as they have arsenic in their leaves.

We are trying to grow watermelon this year. So far, they are doing well. A few years back, rats and mice burrowed inside a cantaloupe and completely ate all the fruit leaving us only the hollow shell. It is recommended that all fruit of the vine be placed on bricks, pieces of wood, or in slings hung to a trellis so that the fruit does not touch the ground where earwigs, sowbugs, and rodents can gnaw it from underneath. By the way, earwigs and sowbugs are good for the soil. Earwigs are predatory insects and sowbugs help to chelate dangerous metals like aluminum and lead. So, both are beneficial. They prefer decaying matter too and help form good soil with their castings.

[Maria]

This is interesting. Chamomile tea is an anti-fungal.

So is Pau d'Arco.

http://www.realfarmacy.com/protect-seedlings/

[Barbara]

I am slowly gathering information on the raised bed gardening box style. I noted at a local nursery that a compost mix specially made for this purpose is $ 89 a yard ! That's in comparison with $ 49 or so for the regular. Therefore this is one consideration if one wishes to try out this gardening method.

Perhaps clippings of fresh grass from a healthy - i.e. NON-Roundup-ed yard - might do just as well, especially if one can obtain them for free.

I completely agree about the carrots. I noticed that this year, too ! Now I aim for the thinner and more orange colored ones which seem to be sweeter.

I will try to have a kinder feeling toward earwigs. I am not sure what sowbugs are yet. The earwigs are SO ugly though !
I can't stand the sight of them.
They leave me about 3 tiny leaves of my chard out of 100. It takes an hour to pick a miniscule salad, thanks to them.

My marigolds did go the usual route : disappear as though the plants were never there after a month or so. Only a few out of the entire line are still extant, boo hoo.