2026 Gardening

[Graybeard]

New year so new thread.

So far I have some onions in the dirt. Most but not all of my raised beds have been weeded to remove stuff that grew up over winter. Need to get some plants soon, frost and freezes are done here.

[Bob Riebe]

       Hugo, Minn. Feed Mill's 2026 tomato and Pepper seed lists:

https://www.hugofeedmill.com/w...

https://www.hugofeedmill.com/w...

        I did not get back there last year, and really have zero need for more than at most 3 tomato plants
 (a freezer full of frozen tomato and chiles for chilli) but for what ever reason

[DDZ]

It might be dry enough today to till my garden and get some onion sets in. We have had some days with inches of rain. Its been to wet to till it. I used to plant lettuce early but don't anymore. It takes forever to wash all the dirt and bugs out of it. Plus lettuce is one of the things that is still fairly cheap to buy.  Won't be putting in tomatoes and peppers until around 3rd week of May. To much chance of frost before then, and 40 plus tomato plants are to many to cover. 

[Ranger99]

Looks like another bust year for me.
After a few bad years, a younger relative
sent me a selection of heirloom seed in
hopes that it might do better.
Things havent looked all that good so far.
First try was some variety of lettuce that
can be utililized as head if planted spaced,
or as greens planted in close. I had maybe
1/3 germinate before the cold fronts came
through and we were having high 30's at
night. I planted 1/4 of the pea seed, and
haven't seen any sprout. Probably plant
the rest today for the h.o.i.
Cool and dreary and dark skies all morning
so far. Not very promising for gardening

[Graybeard]

We're having nights in the upper 50s, soon to be lower 60s and days in the mid to upper 80s.

I now have everything Matt bought and brought over for me to plant in the ground except some cucumbers that I don't eat anyway but Faye and Phil do. She helped me this morning and we got all the tomatoes and pepper are planted. I think I have 35 tomato plans in the ground and I have no clue how many bell pepper and sweet banana pepper there are, a LOT tho.

[Ranger99]

I planted some more peas and different tomatoes just
to see what I could see.
I have definitely seen that these heirloom variety seeds
are too pricey vs the seed count. For what they cost
and the much smaller amount of seed you get, I'd
expect much faster germination and a pretty much
guarantee that every seed planted would sprout.

[Ranger99]

Hmmmmmm . . .
That ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ also posted with no difficulty

[Graybeard]

I got some of the cucumber plants in the ground and also some few sunflower seeds I found in a tiny pack that may have come in the package with my onions. They onions are up and growing nicely and it looks like the sunflowers are germinating also. I expect to see the okra poke out of the dirt just any time now.

The tomato and pepper plants seem to be doing well. Some of the pepper had blooms when they got here.

I hope they produce as well as my garden did last year. We sure had a lot of great BLT sandwiches last time and put a huge about of peppers and tomatoes in the freezer. We had friend green tomatoes a few times also.

Then out old chest freezer died and it as a few days before we were aware of it. So we lost hundreds of dollars of our crops and lots of meats also.

Now we have a new upright freezer.

[Bob Riebe]

I planted some more peas and different tomatoes just
to see what I could see.
I have definitely seen that these heirloom variety seeds
are too pricey vs the seed count. For what they cost
and the much smaller amount of seed you get, I'd
expect much faster germination and a pretty much
guarantee that every seed planted would sprout.

         Heirloom seeds, depending on where you get them are NOT a guarantee for better results, from personal experience.
The number of seeds you get varies to a humungous difference and high price, too often, does not mean high seed count.
I finally got rid of a lot of old seed before last year but have found ground prep., and treating the garden like your new baby, as I did ten years ago,  is main reason for success or misery.
Learning the hard way.

Most seed sites list the number, or weight, of seed you get but it is still weird how two different places, same variety, can vary greatly in how many seed you get with more seeds some times being the cheaper.
So many seed companies I grew up with have gone belly-up or been absorbed by another seed seller, so some times if you buy from 3 different places, if you check who is actually the main entity, you find out in reality, you are sending money to the same people.

I finally bought some Ramps, and they arrived last week, now I have to decide where is best to put them.

[Bob Riebe]

           I finished planting both gardens last week.
           I put in 14 tomato plants which is approx.10 more than I have use for but
variety is the spice of life.
           I bought more potato seed than I though I would so I have around 40 hill in
the ground between two gardens.  I have six plots of  various varieties of sweet corn and
4 plots of field and one pop corn.

           Ten chile plants, all mild to sweet as the other half can no long handle the hot stuff and
I do not eat near as much chilli as I once did.
            Six cauliflower plants and eight brocolli.
            Carrots, lettuce, radishes, cucumbers and some squash are the rest , although not all seed
have shown up yet.

            It is still to dry for me so I have to water but with the weather warm up all the tomatoes and
chile plants are looking real happy  right now.

[Drilling Man]

  I have a front garden and a back garden, here's the front one,



  As you can see, all I have in it is garlic.  Gardening is getting to be a lot of work for me, so I mostly just plant in some drums that I cut open and fill with composted out turkey poop.

  Here's a pict. of the back garden, but it's not an updated pict.,



  It now has a few tomatoes and peppers in it, and a full row of flower bulbs that I plant every year.  I trade those to a greenhouse for whatever plants ect. that I want that she has there.

  DM

[Graybeard]

I have I think about 25 tomato plants, almost as many mixed peppers, mostly bell or sweet banana but there are some I have no clue what they are. At least then aren't hot. I don't do hot stuff.

I have two places with green onions, an old wheelbarrow and a plastic whisky barrel. I have six cucumber plants, some squash and some sunflowers. All of my gardening is done in containers of one sort or another.

I have two old trailers I pulled behind a lawn mower before I got a tractor, two old wheelbarrows and two 8' x 2' store bought raised beds. The rest are super large size flower pots and plastic whisky barrels.

I have dozens of tomatoes, all are green for now but if some don't ripen soon we'll have some fried green tomatoes. I'm eating green onions and pepper regularly. In fact I need to pick bell peppers soon.

There are tiny little squash and cucumbers on the plants but they aren't very big yet.

[Graybeard]

BTW I have moved this forum up among the regularly used forums so you don't have to scroll forever to find it.

[gypsyman]

 With the cold nasty weather we had here in NW Ohio almost to the end of May, got a late start putting in the plants. Cut way back from past years, no reason to, don't do any canning anymore. Couple zuchini plants, around 10 tomato's and same in mixed peppers,( like to make fresh salsa), made 1 mistake, my fault. Put 2 box's of sweet melons in, (4x4 box's) and must have put a bucket of ash from my fireplace in it over the wintertime, and raised the alkaline level to high in one of them. Plants all went belly up, still have the other box growing prett good. Next winter wont be so lazy, and will haul the buckets out back to the neighbors bean field.

[Mule 11]

Lots of green tomatoes, strawberries came in early and petered out. Think I am going to plant a variety that produces all season.

[Lloyd Smale]

dont know if it counts but i dug up 6 pails of flowers from my house to transplant at the second house today. irises, lupins, wild roses, lilacs, rhubarb and lily's even a couple small oak trees   

[Bob Riebe]

dont know if it counts but i dug up 6 pails of flowers from my house to transplant at the second house today. irises, lupins, wild roses, lilacs, rhubarb and lily's even a couple small oak trees

Gardening at its finest!

[Lloyd Smale]

need one more load. luckily the main house is flush with flowers to dig up

dont know if it counts but i dug up 6 pails of flowers from my house to transplant at the second house today. irises, lupins, wild roses, lilacs, rhubarb and lily's even a couple small oak trees

Gardening at its finest!

[Bob Riebe]

       The current weather this year has been a God send for vegetable gardening. Up North every thing is doing real, real well.
       The tomatoes are now forming on the plants and all plants look very healthy as do the chiles; I did have to put some bio-fungicide to zap
  some nasties that were showing but I put that on usually when ever I fertilize.

        It looks like at least 98.6 percent of the potatoes are up out of the leaf mulch, and may be 100 percent.  Volunteer squash are going to be
  bit of annoyance as the vines seem to want to go where they should not but I can deal with that.   I filled three bags that once held garden
  boughten compost with weeds last week so the North garden looks pretty good right now.

        The plants in the South garden looked good last week, though some corn plots came up spotty.
        Sadly last year I did not weed until the weeds had gone to seed and now it is covered with purslane.
        I will spend several days after4th of July on   hands and knees pulling weeds.  I could have done some of it last week
  but they were so small I was using just two finger to pull them and that get old quickly.
         For the first time in three years, grass seed I put down, down home, it actually growing.   
             

         

[Bob Riebe]

      For the past 9 days we have had ample rain, no gauge up here, but from looking at formerly empty pails outside at least 2 inches.
 A storm yesterday morning had winds strong enough to tip the corn I had up North over and sadly the decorative South America type corn
does not bend in the wind, it snaps off, so I lost 3 stalks, and do not have that many to begin with.

       Other than that things are going real well.   I probably should pick some of the chiles, as they are producing much earlier than normal
 up here, and not spacing , or having too many, plants is going to be a bit of a problem as crowding is already an annoyance in the whole
 garden.
       Heading home later this week to hopefully get some large tomato cages a friend is not using any more, and do some major weeding down
 there.

       It looks like I will have a large yield of potatoes if the plants have even an average number of tubers.  Carrots are still very small and sporadic,
 which seems odd, although radish are up but far from ready to use and are in the same basic location.

[Mule 11]

I am impatiently awaiting my first ripe tomato.

[Bob Riebe]

      Returned from down home; I spent 5 days down there working on the lawn and garden.
      I spent at least six hours all but the last day on my hands and knees (and buttocks, you can reach further that way) weeding the garden. 
I filled the seventy gallon city compost container on the second day and started filling my wire compost bin after that.
      To many Quick Weed the first days so I did not put that in my bin.
The ground was too close to dry, the weeds came up OK, where the ground had never been trod on, but I wore the skin n my fingers sliding my hand against the dirt as I scooped up weeds with my first two or three fingers and thumbs.
Mostly Purslane, and a tall grass.

      I watered the garden for 90 minutes second day and 60 the third. That made picking weeds easier but I looked like a mud ball by the time I quit every day.
     Normally I rinsed my self off before taking a bath but I was too tired to bother with that one day, and just got into the tub as mud ball. First time I can remember having a bath-tub ring while still sitting in the tub.

     The garden down South looks good but some of the corn needs fertilizer badly.
Not the darker green it should be; that does show which parts of the garden are lacking more that the rest.
     Potatoes look very, very good, and the squash are finally sending vines out for a walkabout.
With potatoes looking good in both gardens, should have a good yield.  Radishes and carrots though meh but the onions do not look bad.
     Watered the garden for a total of Two and One-hours total plus an hour on one part of the lawn so my water bill will be annoying.
Weed and feed I put down on the lawn did its job for feed but while the weed part did well along the garden edge, the boulevard not so much.

     Mowed the lawn up North today, and had to water the hill, as it was so dry , one could not walk on it without sliding down the hil.
What is usually the healthiest part of the lawn has brown, probably dead spots for no real reason. It was chem.treated in the same manner as the worst part of the lawn, which seems to be improving.
The Creeping Charlie killer part of the chems., was a joke.

      The garden up here has gone zonkers as far as growth. I watered it heavily, and in two large tomato cages I brought from home.
Putting a seven foot cage around a four foot plant, without ruining the plant, sounds easy but it not.

      Down home, I only wore cut-off blue jeans while weeding which made being in hot sun far, far, far more tolerable than wearing even a tank-top shirt.
I still have one-fourth of the South garden to weed , that shows difference between having a Lot of Big weeds, or a Lot More smaller weeds which do not come up as quickly.
     Did not finish it as I did not want to drive back up here as a mud ball, and after four days I needed a break , though I did push mower the lawn when it was 95.
     I am going back home Sat. for a friends 30th wedding anniversary and will water the garden again when I get there.