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Rather than hijack a different thread thought I'd start this one.

I enjoy growing plants both indoor and outdoor plants. All my life I've grown up with and have continued with growing a garden. I grew up in WI after all so gardening is in my genes. No mater how often I wash my clothes, it's still in my genes.

Last few years, doing the apartment dwelling, my outdoor gardens have been container gardening.

Typical veggies are...
Beans: Pole beans so they climb up a lattice or teepee structure for a better use of space.
Peppers: Both hot and sweet peppers.
Tomato: I don't like tomatoes but I still grow them. I use them for making sauces, salsa, relish. Plus many people like them so I grow regular toms and grape or cherry toms.
Cucumbers: Again, grow them up a lattice or teepee.
Corn on the cob: I've done that for a few years but it's just easier to buy them from the local farmers and food markets. I did some Numi Corn a bunch of years back (remember Numi here on Cbid? He sent me some of his seeds) for a couple years but I was unable to keep the strain going.

Typically I get the tomato and pepper plants from the nursery in those 6 pack seeding thingies. The pole beans and cucumbers I start from seed since they are less available in seedling thingies. It's getting that time to get some seeds.

Herbs would be...
Chives
Oregano
Basil
Rosemary
Parsley

The herbs can be grown year round inside if you have a sunny window to put them in. If you have a ground based garden, oregano and chives will come back every year.

Fruit...
I've done melons, pumpkins, and stuff before when I had the space for an in ground garden but they really can't be done in containers.

I've done strawberries before but the birds and animals would eat them before they were ripe for human consumption. I guess I could put netting over them but I just punted after a couple of years.

Also did a rhubarb patch. Just a couple plants. Once that is established it grows like a weed and doesn't need any maintenance at all. Strawberry rhubarb pie is awesome.

I used to live next to a field/small wooded area and there were wild blueberries in the field and raspberries & blackberries where the field met the woods. I could easily pick 1 pound of each every week when they were in season.

Peas. I forgot about peas. However, they usually get eaten as I pick them so they don't last long. I like fresh peas.

Ok I'll start.

Considering inflation, in goods and services, and "supply chain disruptions", self reliance and food security (Garden) is just as germane to the 2024 (s)election discussion as taxes or abortion.

Anyone know the candidates stance on drug legalization, in particular Marijuana?

When I was living in Chicago I had an attic apartment. There was an access panel in the bathroom to the unfinished attic area. I removed it, turned it into a small door and had a 10ft x 5ft area about 5ft tall I turned into a grow room.The smell was ...intense

Now I have cattle troughs around my deck for a small garden. But it's just some herbs, carrots, peppers, beets, collard greens last year. Haven't decided on this year, probably just carrots and peppers. Wife n boy love carrots. I love peppers. We tried a big garden once. I tilled up a 20x20 section of yard but my topsoil is very thin and it's all hard clay underneath so I'd need to put in some work to make it happen. I didnt, so it didnt. I planted a couple dozen 3ft tall fruit trees 10+ years ago. The ones that haven't died yet are still only 3ft tall. They just don't grow. The peaches grew great until we had a very deep freeze in 2014 and they all died. Had a couple plum trees that gave us fruit one season and died the next winter. I had grapes along the edge of my woods but they all died off. Did corn one year, deer ate it.

I'm not great at growing stuff.

Heavy clay soil is tough, plant roots have a hard time with that.
It can take some years to convert a plot into healthy soil for growing. It's a lack of organic matter and a healthy microbial population in the soil to cycle nutrients that is the problem. The bacteria and fungi attract larger critters including earth worms that contribute to building soil structure.
Incorporating compost, mulching with ground-up fall leaves, adding coffee grounds and spent tea are good practices to move things along. They all have a high carbon content and nutrients.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/89/Soil_food_webUSDA.jpg

One way around it in the meantime is building raised beds and container growing like with your cattle troughs.

Had a huge garden in California with ten 5x5 garden boxes, lemon, lime, orange, tangerine, and apple trees. Chardonnay, Cabernet, and Zinfandel grape vines.

Currently I have two indoor AeroGardens and scheming what I can plant outside based on the HOA rules.

Peppers do well in clay.

I grow plants for a living (farmer)

I can grow just about anything.

I like celebrity tomatoes I picked over 70 baseball sized tomatoes off 1 plant a few years ago. Some of my buddies wanted to do a contest 😂

Poblano peppers. Are my favorite to eat. But I grow several kinds. To grow decent corn you really need around 6 rows. The center of the patch is gonna be where it does the best. Corn needs lots of nitro

If you have any questions I can get the answers if I don’t know. I’ve got a few agronomist. Even if I haven’t grown it I know someone who has

Grew carrots cabbage tomatoes peppers potatoes sweet potato broccoli squash (yellow crook) some bush limas and some random beans I can’t remember what they’re called but everything did well.

Don’t give up if you have tough soil. You can still grow decent plants

For income I grow soybeans corn and wheat I like gardening just for the hobby

I have a shrinking garden which at one time was 60' x 100'. Grew about everything from peanuts to catnip. Seems I no longer have the time or energy to grow more than the 2 of us can possibly eat. Last year I had 4 pepper plants, 3 tomato plants, and a couple each of summer squash and cucumbers, along with beans (only enough for two meals thanks to the mice) and some leaf lettuce. By mid-July the weeds started to take over and it all went to hell thereafter. I don't know if I will do anything with it this year, but I hope to move the fences to shrink the garden to a much smaller size.
We go a vacation 3 times or more a year and those weeks make things fall behind.

Bought a tiller today. 2010 Cub Cadet RT65 H. H is for the 190cc Honda engine.

This thing is lightly used. Got it from an older couple in their 70's. They said it hadn't been started in 3 years but garage kept, they even had the manual that came with it.

It started right up even with the old gas.

Will do an oil and gas change on it bf I use it. Maybe air filter change too idk.

Thankful to find a lightly used pre-covid era tiller in my area. Wont have to borrow the neighbors tiller this year.

Over and out.

we have tried to grow things over the last 8 years or so with mixed results. always seem to get peppers and zucchini to grow no issue. Tomatoes grow but we seem to get small yields. tried potatoes but i must have done something wrong because i am pretty sure i got less useable potatoes then i started with seed potatoes lol.

best experience and most fun i have had was a few years ago we took our pumpkins and gourds from Halloween and just tossed them into the tree line for the animals to eat ( we live in a rural area and get lots of deer, rabbits, fox, and other small wildlife. the following year we had vines sprouting up all over the yard lol. i assume they were eaten and then pooped out the seeds. we had so many pumpkins and Gourds we were giving them to friends and neighbors and the vies were taking over. even took one and put it in a wooden crate to make a square pumpkin which was pretty cool.

we have tried this every year since and none have grown.

we have extremely black thumbs lol.

The biggest PIA using my grow bags for outdoor garden is the bags are fabric and made to allow the soil to breath and have good drainage (good thing) but that also means they require more watering to keep the soil from drying out since the breathable fabric is exposed to sun and wind from all sides.

Watering the plants was pretty much a daily or every other day thing depending on the weather keep the soil from drying out. So I did some searching on the inter webs to see how others deal with this.

Many folks use automatic drip irrigation systems so I looked into them. I ordered one of these automatic drip irrigation thingies off of Amazon to give it a try for the container garden this year.

https://tinyurl.com/ywd5xy2d

It looks like a neat thing and has positive reviews. You fill a bucket with water and drop the water sensor level thingy and the intake unit into the bucket, run some tubing to all the containers, hook up the tubing the solar powered control unit and set the timing and watering frequency. The soil will get watered automatically every day for your set time as long as there is water in the watering bucket.

Most of these small systems only cost about $30-$50 so I thought why not give it a try?

Last year when I did the fabric grow bags I put them on a caddie thing with coaster wheels in case I wanted to move them. They were on a cement patio in full sun so probably extra warm from the cement absorbing and radiating the heat. Also my town is very hilly so wind the wind can kick up more than normal lowland areas so that is a factor. The soil would tend to need water within a couple of days.

I'll give the drip watering thing a shot. It's only like $30. If it turns out I don't need it, no biggie. What would be nice is if the system had a humidity sensor and would turn on or turn off based on the soil sensor.

Robert I’m gonna have to research these peppers. Maybe grow a couple of them to try out.

That's not possible unless some jalapeno pollen got into some bell pepper flowers and you collected seeds from a resulting ripe bell pepper and planted the seeds for the next crop.

Drafter I wonder if you got mexi bell peppers? They are exactly what you described and fantastic. It’s possible they mixed it up in the store.

Started working on my raised bed today. It's roughly 16 feet x 8 feet and 2 cinder blocks high. Gonna dump a load of river silt Monday and cart it all to the back one wheelbarrow load at a time.

Not sure but that could have happened... the wife collects seeds and does starters sometimes... I just figured since they grew up right next to each other they shared stuff...
kinda reminds me of this white guy I worked with in DC.. he grew up with black kids and he acted black... I reminded him he wasn't several times...

Gonna try again just to see what happens... haven't planted bells in a couple years cause they were small and deformed.. but tasted good..

Yep, hybrid seed created from 2 different types of peppers contains the genetics of both parents, so they are not likely to look exactly like either one. "goofy" is good as long as they taste good.

I pre-sprout pretty much all kinds of seeds Bucky. It is beneficial especially when you want to test the viability of the seed. With new or older seeds, it's a crap shoot sometimes when planting directly in the soil, you can't see if the seeds germinate unless they pop green growth With pre-sprouting you can also see if the radical root that comes out of the seed is healthy. With bad seed or older seed where the DNA has degraded, the radical root will look puny or deformed and will not continue growing.

I've used the paper towel method before, you can also use coffee filters, sand, diatomaceous earth, anything that will hold moisture in a sealed container.

As far as catnip, not all cats are attracted to the scent or get a high from the nepetalactone in it. Your cat isn't an alien, they say catnip. will show no effect on 40% of cats.

Got both gardens tilled, went over them twice.

Mended the fence on the big garden and the small garden.

Went to hardware/farm store and bought another 300 feet of wire fencing and fifteen 6 1/2 foot posts so we can either build an entire new garden or, at the very least, build out our small garden. Might do both idk. Depends on time and energy...

Planted 1 apple tree and 1 peach tree. Fenced them and mended/extended the fences on the other 3 fruit trees.

Transplanted some of our plants into bigger containers--maybe around 50 of the 200 or so that have sprouted.

Still havent had to mow yet, but that will be this week I'm sure. Got around 4 acres to cut and weedeat.

Plus I've been doing a few things on the other wooded 40, up on the mountain. Put up a deer feeder on the acre or so of completely flat land up there. Got the deer cam up as well.

That's the lawn and garden report. Got blisters on my hands and I'm tired.

They'll almost eat anything out there...

We brought one of our Mimosa saplings up here from Virginia, and it got decimated by the deer. It lived, we built a fence around it to keep the deer out.

They've eaten our flowers and limbs of an apple tree too. We knew to fence our garden in from the get go.

I think I'm going to go Rambo on them this summer. "They drew first blood not me."

Started a handful of herbs in pots today. Oregano, Basil, Chives, Lavender, Rosemary, Sage, Parsley, Dill, Cilantro, Thyme. They will probably break ground in a weeks or so.

Still too early to do put the plants outside but give them an early start inside. Yesterday bought bags of potting soil and time release fertilizer to fill up the grow bags when it's time to get them going. The indoor peas and bean seedlings seemed to have paused on growing, probably putting energy it make their roots. Will so some flower boxes too to attract the pollenators.

It's still a month or so before the risk of frost is clear so no rush.

Agreed. It takes a week or two the indoor plants that are destined to be outside and acclimate to the outside temp and the sunlight schedule - they need a "harden off" period. I still have some cucumber seeds to get going. For Cukes, I pick pickle size versions. I haven't tried growing the English cuke but maybe I'll add it to the list to try.

My son's bedroom closet is pretty big and would make for a nice indoor grow room but I wouldn't do that (take over his closet). If the Zombie apocalypse happens, all bets are off. Kids closet will be a grow room.