I have a question for you all about vegetable garden paths!

Under the cut you'll see a lovely photoshop rendering of the layout of my garden. This is my first garden and I've got it all tilled up and we're actually heading out side for a day of compost adding and fence building so we can start planting our little plants. As you can see, I have three beds, 4 feet wide, with 1 foot wide pathways in between each. I do not have raised beds this year, mostly due to not being able to afford the materials really and being that it's my first garden, I didn't want to get too perminant till I figured out I could and wanted to do this every year. I'm confident that I will, but I don't want to get in over my head. My husband and I just bought our house earlier this year and it's our first house, so we owned absolutely zero gardening tools. We didn't even own a hose. So we've had to buy a lot of things, including a lawn mower, and I just didn't have the extra funds to buy the materials to make raised beds. next year I will being doing that though!

So to my question. The pathways are both for me to haul stuff around the garden in and for me to kneel down or sit while weeding or taking care of my little plants. I'm stuck on what to make the path out of.

I bought some weed fabric to put down on the paths, but I'm not sure whether I should buy like concrete pathway pavers, brick, mulch, no idea. We have a short pathway that the previous owners put in going from our deck to our shed made out of these square concrete pieces that I had originally intended to copy in the garden, but that would be a whole large expense I think to buy enough to fill in the whole thing. But I'm not sure if mulch would be comfortable to kneel/sit on even if I had a knee pad (which I do). What's the best solution for cost/comfort/function?

Thank you so much for any advice you might have!
-Sommer

When we moved into the house last summer, we all thought we should pull up the rose bush. It grew exactly 3 flowers, the leaves were all yellow, it was scraggely and ugly with many, many blackened branches. In fact, there were more black and white dead looking branches than ones with yellow leaves. But I thought I'd try and save it and I think I did.

This is it today:


This picture I took after I had to clip a 4 ft branch that was growing onto my front steps and biting people. Now I'm afraid that I may have hurt the poor thing. I hope not. Also, the long branch had dozens of unopened buds on it. I clipped them and put them in vases around the house ( like this )

Will the buds open? Should I remove some leaves? Maybe put something in the water? Also, ( I didn't do any damage to my saved rose bush, did I? )

And lastly-- dang, those thorns like to draw blood!

 This is by way of introducing myself. I'm 47 and live in West Yorkshire. I've been a bit of a gardening nut for years and find it amongst the most relaxing things to do. When I'm in the garden I'm not thinking about anything else, just getting on with whatever is at hand. I have to confess to being more of a plantaholic than a true gardener, I'm constantly going 'Oh, that looks interesting, I wonder how you grow it, what it looks like through the year etc.' and so end up finding a home for all sorts at the expense of a garden plan. I think I've calmed down a bit over the years but my garden is best described as cottage garden/informal (very :-) ) in which I act as a referee. I love herbaceous perennials, especially the older English ( or at least ones that have been in England for a longtime ) plants  such as cranesbills, spurge,  hellebores, lavanders and campanulas. It's not a patriotic thing it's just that they're food sources the local wildlife is used so I get lots of birds, frogs, newts, hedgehogs, squirrels and foxes which is a nice thing in a suburb of a city.
This year I've just got an allotment - it's really neglected so I've dug out a bit and am sheeting over the rest for the year. I'm new to vegetable growing so would appreciate any advice going, it's safe to assume near total ignorance on my part. So far new potatos, onions, asparagus artichokes and a herb bed seem to be doing well.
The community looks great, lots of really friendly and helpful people form all over the place and I love some of the photographs.
So once again hello to you all

Something is happening to my zinnias and it's happening fast. What was a problem on just one flower the other day is quickly taking over my zinnia flower bed.

Can anyone help me identify what's going on?

( pictures )

what's the best way to repel cats without chemicals (since i have 2 dogs)
i had a successful garden about a day ago and now it's all dead from my neighbor's cat peeing all over it
I am so beyond freaking furious the thing is lucky i don't have a shotgun.
this has been happening for months and i keep telling my neighbor to keep his animal INDOORS
not like he cares.
and every time my garden gets back and running...the thing comes around and pees EVERYWHERE.

I'm new at gardening, and as you can see I've started small. My grandfather has an orchard back in our home country and I loved helping him with it, but in here we live in an apartment and we have three cats, so there's VERY little space to cultivate anything in. However, we managed to make a small corner in our washing room upstairs (to which the cats can't go, and it has an open space approx 6'5" x 6'5" that has rather decent sunlight).

I like cooking, so I decided I wanted to start growing what we eat: that's why I got the three plants in the picture (the fennel, I think, was sort of a mistake to get... but it didn't live through a recent windstorm so there's not much I can do now about that).

In any case, the issue at hand is that my city (Mexico City) is currently going through the mom of all heatwaves, and I think it's affecting the plants. The strawberries were just fine after I planted them, but since then a few runners have been wilting and I found a strange, small bud(?) of a strawberry that altogether looked like it had burned up. Upon opening it with a knife, the insides were like sand, they were so dry. It's not been even a week since I planted them, I've been watering them like I got told to at the nursery (watering them one day yes, one day not), and before that, said bud looked healthy.

Regarding both oregano and basil, they're fine, but upon visiting them this afternoon I noticed they both had a few yellowing leaves at the bottom, and that the ones at the top felt really dry. I watered them yesterday, but their soil looked painfully dry, so I watered them again (until I made sure the soil was humid through and through).

To remedy excess sun and rain coming down on such a small space of potted plants, I built a small plastic roof to protect them that would still allow them to get five or so hours of sun (and after that, indirect light). Am I doing something wrong? Is it the location they're at?

Thanks, and I'm sorry in advance for being so inexpert at this. :/

Do you have a bat box?

My dad has wanted to make a bat box for years to help eat the critters that plague his yard, but he's never gotten around to it (typical). I want to get him one for father's day, so does anyone have recommendations about a particular model or supplier? I live in an apartment without tools, so making my own is kind of out of the question. I was also curious about how you attract bats to the box, and how you prevent nasty things like wasps (they've had issues with carpenter bees out there) or just silly things like squirrels or birds from moving in before the bats can.

Thanks!

Young pepper plants of many varieties just potted "up a size" in the greenhouse.



and yet to go are these ... pant, pant, busy .. .



But now they are all done. Oooo can't wait! These will live their entire life in the greenhouse. Their final plant-up will be into 1 gallon pots, with large stakes to hold up, what will be fruit-infested plants.

So turns out I found the Critter that was eating my rose of sharon plants at 5 am when I woke up to get a drink and saw a big fat caterpillar crawling around on my floor! So it's a relief it's not a mouse or palmettos (since they are after all pretty common in south florida) but I know that one caterpillar could mean a bazillion others hiding somewhere else....
I'm afraid to check under my carpet lol

So as for the questions:
1. I seem to have an awfully hard time growing any sort of squash here...all of my plants get the same dusty fungus that you can brush off with your fingers. But the fungus moves so fast that within a day one whole leaf is covered and it dies :( Are there any natural things I could repel it with from something I might have around the house? (i've tried spraying it with very strong chamomile tea....it worked, but not enough at all)
What about vinegar? maybe that would be too strong?

2. Also, Could bean stalks vine around the bottom of a corn plant and not kill one another?

3. What's the dang trick to getting Coffee Beans to sprout!!!? I've been trying and trying to get my Kona coffee beans to grow for about 6 months now and STILL absolutely nothing!

Thanks in Advance!

Well, now I can answer the question I asked about what happens when a garden suddenly gets much more sunlight than usual!

Within two days, almost all of my salad greens bolted, and my strawberry plants were suddenly covered with an unprecedented number of blossoms, each about an inch wide, which is larger than normal. My grass grew several inches in those two days. Even things I thought were growing normally, like lemon balm, daylilies and the leaves of daffodils, are suddenly enormous. My raspberry plants are now covered with flowers, and (not sure if this is because of the sun) I have raspberry plants coming up all over the place, some several feet from where the rest of the plants are. A previously  tiny, feeble Virginia creeper suddenly grew a few feet up the back of the building. And the stupid creeping charlie decided that it wasn't content with creeping and changed its name to the Exploding Purple Doom.

Except that I no longer have delicious mizuna and tatsoi and need to pull Exploding Purple Doom out of everything every couple of days, this is generally good news. But some things are now too big for the spaces they're in.

Now for the crackpot theory, for which you should feel free to laugh at me. Last year, I didn't manage to harvest all of the garlic I'd planted, resulting in about thirty new garlic plants this spring. I dug them up to separate them yesterday, and they didn't all fit in the empty spaces in my garden. My tomatoes aren't planted out yet, so I temporarily transplanted a bunch garlic seedlings into the tomato bed until I can pawn 'em off on someone.

Then I started thinking - my tomatoes had a touch of blight at the end of last summer. And garlic can be used medicinally as an antifungal. SO my crackpot theory is that planting garlic in that soil and leaving some of it to grow among the tomatoes might prevent blight. Am I nuts?

Also, a few questions related to the exploding garden situation:

How and when do you separate daylilies?

Does clematis grow from cuttings?

Do you think I could shade my lettuces by trellising runner beans over them? Do those grow quickly enough that that would be practical?

New gardener right here. (Actually, I don't know if I could technically call myself a "gardener" since I only have 2 houseplants so far).

( Anyway...I do have a question )

Could have posted more but I'll do that tomorrow, maybe.

I spent a good moment at the terrace....  



I went to the local market today, and bought some pepper plants, one cucumber, one zucchini and... one watermelon ! I guess I'm pushing my luck too far, being a container gardener, but well, we will see how it goes for all these in big pots at the terrace. I had tried zucchini a few years ago downstairs in the garden but I think it didn't get enough sun...  (or maybe... does it need a second plant to produce fruits ?)



So, I planted some peppers, the cucumber, I changed the place of the passifloras I bought the other week, I placed two cobea seedlings next to them, I did put down some more marigold seeds (the first ones I started back like 45 days ago are in bloom... ), two lily bulbs I had bought a while ago, but that I didn't manage to plant outside, some more seeds - hoping they'll enjoy being outside under the sun, I took out the rest of the tulip bulbs and so on... 



I try in meanwhile to watch closely my other passiflora that I transplanted last week... I hope I didn't do much harm, it seems to have slowed down - it had started to produce flowerbuds - I know that's probably the worst moment to transplant something - but if it has just slowed down  and starts blooming a few later , I won't complain...  (I'd like if anyone has advices about this)


The funny thing is that this year, I feel being very late... but this is a year I started things very early. Usually I start thinking about things at mid may and do only actually start in june... which is indeed late for here.


On another note... Last summer, I had planted sunroots hoping they would flower... They grew well, but I didn't get any flowers... I tought, being bought at the supermarket, so not the best thing to try to plant, those just disappeared ... with a last sprout of greens.  I've been told that I should try to go the *organic market*  and see if I find any there, which I didn't.  And then, last week, surprise : they are sprouting back ! Shall I hope to get flowers this time ? Was the sun that wasn't enough for them ? Shall I look for another variety  ? I bought a few more today at the market, which can mean a more natural production, and I'll see what happens with them... 

 
Edited to add : Those peppers are rather small varieties, that I have only seen here in Turkey so far (I haven't seen any of them in European countries at least).

Hi all, was wondering if you could give me some advice!

I'm in the UK and I was wondering if it's okay to start Forget-Me-Nots off in a seed pot indoors? My border isn't quite ready yet but I'd love some ready-grown Forget-Me-Nots to be ready to plant in a couple of weeks once the border is filled back in and has had time to settle. Also, as much as I love my garden birds, I don't want the seeds eaten before they can grow!

Thanks in advance! :)

we're in the middle of a freak heat wave. yesterday it got up to 95* and today it hit 100*. when i got home from work, i went to check on my plants outside (well i was outside trying to figure out why there was a PD copter flying directly over my building) and the only plants that weren't wilty and kind of pathetic looking were my pepper plants and my french lavendar (and he's looking a little yellow although he's also starting to bloom..so i don't know if i'm over or underwatering him). my mint and basil were all but gone. and i'd just watered them TWO days ago. my tomato plants were a little worse for wear, but not so bad off. i trimmed/pinched away the wilty leaves that i knew weren't going to bounce back after some watering (some were so dry they were crunchy). i know the mint will probably bounce back (they always seem to) but basil...well...i've never had luck at growing successfully before so who knows. and the tomato plants, i really hope weren't harmed by the "minor surgery" i had to do on them.

is there anything i could do or should be doing so this doesn't happen again? should i be watering every day? i have everything in containers, and this is my first time container gardening, so i'm not sure what i should be doing, other than hoping my poor plants bounce back.

and yes, i watered all of them this evening.

I'm fairly new to the gardening scene, just started planting in the spring of '07. Since then however, I have been consumed by the beauty of it all. I live in Huntsville, AL (North Alabama = deep South). About 20 days and nights of frost, a few months of pleasant weather (in spring and fall) and nearly 6 months of oppresively hot and humid conditions. The plants down here seem to like it.

I'll be posting photos soon.

Thursday, May 15, 2008
10 pm

I was so tired of being lame and sitting in my chair in the house, so I gathered up the essentials: binoculars, bug suit, clippers, quart of homemade soup, willow and birch basket, camera, bug repellent, journal and pen.

I put it all in the basket. I made that basket with a very tall handle so I can carry things with it without having to bend down to pick it up all the time. I put all that on the little golf bag cart I found at the reuse center at the dump the other day.

I wheeled it all along, stopping to add a hide to the mix, and down the hill and along the highway to my woven walled tipi.

It was wonderful to be outside again. I put my bug suit on and lay in the hammock for a few minutes. I decided the hides should be on the outside of the walls to provide me with a bit of shade, so I stood on my chair down there and got them through the tipi poles onto the outside of the alder weavers. It was perfect.

After a moment’s rest, I took my clippers and headed out to a willow patch and clipped it all down to the ground. I wanted to make a labyrinth of willow, so I figured if I put willow pieces into the wet ground every few feet in all directions, leaving rows and aisles, I could later connect them to become the circles that the labyrinth will eventually need.

I worked out there for a long time, walking along and pushing a foot long piece into the ground beneath the layers of dried sedge leaves from last year.

When I had finished that, I rested in the hammock again, then put them into the ground all the way around the tipi, one at the base of each pole and two between poles.

The marsh marigolds look like they are doing wonderfully! They haven’t gone back at all since I transplanted them from the marsh the other day!

I can’t say how many willow stakes I pushed into the ground of the marsh, but the area is about 30’ X 30’.

I'm hoping that they will all root and I’ll be able to cut willow for baskets at the end of the fall!

I am obsessed with my garden. I think about it all day long. When I am at home, I stare out my front windows just to look out at it. I even go upstairs to get an aerial view from the second floor. That is where I really get my design ideas, from the second floor.

Anyway. I planted a hydrangea plant on Sunday and it isn't doing well. It's all wilty and sad and it's driving me nuts! I have a green thumb dang it! I will not accept failure. So I spent some time researching hydrangeas today and how to care for them. Apparently, hydrangeas that are sold with foil on them as a flower (such as the one I bought for Mother's Day) have never lived in the ground and therefore, are difficult to transplant to the garden. They were not grown for the garden. They can thrive if the conditions are perfect and from what I read I have given my plant the best chance I can without even knowing it. That's how green my thumb is!

So today, I came home from work and went right out to the garden. The hydrangea was still all sad and wilty, so I decided to tie it up to some stakes. I don't have stakes, or string for that matter, so I reached into my lady tool box and dug out some size 15 and 17 straight knitting needles and some yarn and ran back out to the garden. That's right. I staked up my wilty hydrangea plant with knitting needles and yarn. That's just how I roll.



( well, it worked!!! )

I have no idea what either of these could be so any information would be apperciated. :)



& this random plant started growing at the side of the house. i'm not sure where it came from because they weren't there last year?