Something Else

:tomato: *Tomato thread* :tomato: 
Start tomatoes indoors this month sez the local cooperative extension calendar. I recommend starting them in cardboard egg carton cups (you will want to separate the cups before planting) set in a shallow tray. Water into the tray and the egg carton will absorb the water and transfer it to the soil. When they are like 1–2" tall, plant the whole carton cup in the bed. Don’t be afraid to thin them out.

do they sell pre-sprouted tomatoes that i can just plant once? I’d rather pay ten bucks for something like this than fuck with egg carton cups

sure, you can buy tomato starts. i think they are available in like April or something. I like growing from seed because the changes keep me COVID sane

tomato super tips:
• pinch off suckers (the smol branches that grow between the main stem and the primary branches) because they will _suck_ energy away from flower-makin
• when they start lookin raggedy at the end of the season, cut off all non-fruit-bearing branches so the plant puts its energy into plumping up and ripening existing fruit

need to also move the planter to where it gets summer sun….remember our overhanging tree problem? lots of tomato sun in spring and fall, total shade in midsummer

put in cole/brassica crops, arugula, lettuce and they will be happy. put tall stakes at the corners of the planter and cover the whole thing in a butterfly net and you will have no fucking cabbage worm problems like i do

ok, lets start with basics. I need to replace the soil. Any particular product to get for my bag ‘o’ vegetable soil?

i see you have soil testers, renee. but i’m working with planters, so i just want to get a bag’o’dirt

I like the bags of planting (not potting) mix from EB White. You can get them at OSH.

do not go to home depot for soil, and do not ask them for advice. their stuff sucks and they sell very soggy weird soil and try to pass it off as normal 

Garden links and notes

OSH is easy and a smaller and less-busy business than Home Depot anyway. if you wanna get fancy, go to any of the nurseries in my Garden Links and Notes doc for speshul dirts (I got succulent mix from Westbrae, for example)

<@UHJDNGSBF> Don’t replace your soil; amend it! <https://www.sfgate.com/homeandgarden/goldengategardener/article/Planting-mix-a-good-soil-supplement-not-5275317.php>
Pam Peirce, the author, wrote the “bible” of Bay Area vegetable gardening (_Golden Gate Gardening_) and authorizes this message

Image from iOS.jpg

Of course I am just realizing I don't have this and only have potting mix. Oops.

:exploding_head:  there are different kinds of dirt?

this is why I need a garden dom to tell me exactly what to do. “buy this dirt. Put it in the pot”

Potting mix (I think) retains moisture more than planting mix, which is good for the small volumes of pots. Raised beds should have planting mix/garden soil.

And get this if your plants like to do the same drugs you do ;)

<@UKCFFTX6G>: potting mix is for pots and container gardening with small spaces
Planting mix/soil is for raised beds and for amending and conditioning the soil in your yard

the pottnig mix we got made everything really soggy and fungus was growing

*PEAS, please!*
The best winter-start crop. I have a fuckload of sugar snap peas you can have. I’ll even start them for you if you ask me nicely. They don’t transplant well, so you have to start from seed. Soak in hot water overnight, then plant into egg carton cups, then put the cups into soil once you see them start to sprout. Can be planted as early as December, even though the guides may tell you to wait.

yeah, they like to climb up brown twine strings (and then when they are all dead you can toss it all in the green bin)

I started mine in December, but since recommended time is Feb/Mar and Sept/Oct, I will plant some this weekend and :crossed_fingers:

renee, will you be so wonderful and kind as to start some peas for us?

as many as you accumulate until I bring you pea starts

We trade soon! And I will bring your phone too

<@UHJDNGSBF> <@UM2NM5PAQ> you got a spot for peas ready?

oh, well, we have string, a fence, and screws, I’m sure we can macgyver something

<@UHFP8UVT2> Pea-time on Sunday?  I’ll build some planters by then

oh you’re not just going to put them in the planters you already have?

no, i think other stuff will go there. I dunno, <@UM2NM5PAQ> had thoughts that peas don’t require the deep planters and that little shallow ones would do

gotcha. peas want 15–18" ideally, but i have some growing in 6" and will see what they do.

Sunday is Lydia’s birthday day trip, so unclear what time i will have, but i am taking Monday off

you are, but she is busy and i so am i, so it hasn’t been publicised. does your fam want to drive for a day trip to bolinas/inverness area?

anyway, if peas need 15-18", then maybe they should go in the planter boxes and that saves me some work :smile:

:strawberry: *Strawberries* :strawberry: 
Are weird and I have only ever seen them as bulbs or as plants. I have extra bulbs. lmk if you want some. The recommended way to grow these looks like a lot of attention and work, but I am lazy so I will explore lazy strawberry-growin’ this year. I invite you to join me!

we have a few in our planter, they haven’t been fruitful…but i think they’re the kind that doesn’t produce much after the first year?

"strawberries are weird"
the ones I have say they are "everbearing", which sounds promising

Having researched strawberry growth for a 6th grade science unit, ever bearing means it will give a slow trickle of fruit all year as opposed to all the fruit in one go. The varieties are most common have 1 to 2 years of good fruit bearing.

Thanks <@UHFP8UVT2> for being an awesome plant guide. I, unlike <@UHJDNGSBF> do want to learn, though still need relatively low effort as I have always had a brown thumb. I was thinking about one of the planters (or a new one) being devoted to herbs.

Oregano! I want to plant some this year. Rosemary and thyme have been great to have around, as has the mint. Mint is a spready one though, so I have it in a pot, where it won't thrive, but is enough for summer mojitos. Cilantro is so annoying, takes forever to get going, them seems to bolt immediately. "They" encourage successive planting (like every 2 weeks) so you have some on a continuous basis. Basil is fun to start from seed and I am in the process of seeing if they survived the winter or if they are really and truly dead.

We need to eradicate the mint from our large planter and I was going to try to replant into an isolated pot. 

Get a big one! They do like a lot of soil

Also any thoughts on parsley? That’s the herb we use most often but never a lot at a time.

Haha I think parsley is silly so I have no idea. I have lots of basil seed if you want some

cilantro requires eagle eyes imho. same experience as renee. 

i feel like cilantro is really bad for my morale bc of its neediness. i need an easier edible for my abilities to step up. 

Noted. Cilantro will not be in the herb garden.

you know, i may actually try to crowdsource brains on irrigation 

we had a guy do it for our front bed and i definitely want to learn how to do it for the rest of our property, but i’m finding the large # of options + a few of the basic principles a little hard to wrap my brain around 

if anyone has any fortune cookie sized wisdom regarding gear or key concepts they’ve learned the hard way, i’m all ears. until then... youtube :hankey:

I bought a lot of tubes and fittings on Amazon for like 20 bucks. It was surprisingly cheap. I think the pumps are more, especially the programmable ones, but not more than a hundo or two. I think just get a basic thing that hooks to a faucet and irrigates a couple of planters and try it small-scale first before you hard-plumb it and spend a week digging trenches 

i think i’m a little stuck on understanding howpressure works, like when do i need a pump, how to make sure it’s enough pressure and not too much etc. maybe it’s all experimentation 

It might not even be as much a pump as it is a valve.

irrigation equipment co in berkeley schooled me when I set up backyard drip

also... is anyone here messing with diy compost? i’ve read some things that seem to indicate it’s easier and faster than i thought, and requires no equipment. 

i’m scared of it turning into a smelly hellspawn rat heap though

I made a worm bin! and I have free compost I get from the school garden nearby. Worm bins are a lot easier to work with than traditional compost and require less space, but worms are pickier about what you put in (no animal products, citrus, or banana peels, mainly; and keep them moist)

Ooooh, a worm bin might be something Eli would like to help with. That’s a good idea.

<https://ecologycenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Compost-Worms.pdf>

<https://www.stopwaste.org/at-home/home-gardening/all-about-compost/backyard-composting/build-or-buy-a-compost-bin-3> has instructions to build a worm bin

I used to have one of these, but gave it away before I got into gardening. Alas. So I recreated it in wood and now it lives in the front yard <https://triformis.com/products/wriggly-wranch/>

oh and one more- i’m gonna build some planters for our sidewalk and front driveway. if anyone wants to compare notes on how to do this well, and plant things that will actually survive in them without too much effort, lmk. i actually have a whole google photos album of inspo. 

untreated wood, ideally redwood or similar so it doesn’t rot (Buy Nothing groups often have people getting rid of redwood fence boards). different plants have different depths they like—I’ll share that in a different thread

You can use this container depth guide to help plan your bed depths <https://www.sfgate.com/homeandgarden/article/No-yard-Grow-great-veggies-in-containers-2498988.php>

Year Round Gardening class is now! (I’m also updating my notes and putting the docs in my folder; they are recording and putting the talk on Youtube) <https://ucanr.zoom.us/j/99655600208?pwd=WWFablNMVTExVUVNVHZqM09WUzlDUT09>

SFBayGardeners YouTube channel <https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCD5KZJYrJGZ5hbp5pv3y6wQ/featured>

men want one thing and it’s disgusting 

Image from iOS.MOV

I was eradicating some plants out front today and dug up this dude 

Nice! Saw one of those at Saratoga springs a couple weeks ago

I’m starting a backyard compost if anyone wants to talk about that

I built our worm bin in April and I just fed it the remains of Charra's mushroom growling out from last year (straw + oyster mushroom mycelium) so I'm excited to see how that turns out.

The levels are wooden frames made from 1x4 with double-layer chicken wire on the bottom. I'm thinking about replacing the chicken wire with a single layer of 1/4" hardware cloth.

i need something to help me manage fertilizer scheduling and also let me push a button that says “it rained” that “waters” everything. it’s kind of a functionality hole between my houseplant ios app and my garden spreadsheet. 

A lot of the sprinkler controllers have rain sensors 

yeah, but i have a bunch of things not on irrigation 

the bigger issue is the fertilizer, but i get that getting irrigation done will probably solve a lot of issues :)

Ah. Well if you wanna get real fancy, your Python app will connect to a weather API and you won’t have to push a button 

It’ll just turn on a light and Pavlov you into watering plants when you see a light 

A raspberry pi will run Python and you can wire it up to a light...

the bigger problem is fertilizer. i don’t really mind the water situation 

i want something that’s like “here’s a paragraph about fertilizer for this plant. here’s your last fert date. push this button to mark it as fertilized today. enter next reminder date.”

i guess now that i say that, my spreadsheet still works for that. just unweildy. 

<@UHFP8UVT2> <@UKCFFTX6G> I dunno why y’all were talking smack about cilantro but that plant in the middle is prospering 

just that when it bolts, it does so quickly and then dies

also i don’t have irrigation in the back so i was watering it by hand every dang day

<@UHFP8UVT2> any idea what this is growing along the radishes and carrots? 

Let it grow! As beginner learning gardeners, I think it’s worth watching new plants grow and learning from them (until/unless they are identified as evil weeds, of course).

No one here is even at subsistence farming level, so losing a bit of crop to a mystery plant isn’t going to significantly impact our lives, but it may have something to teach us (like the squash seeds in my compost that are growing!)

_Sidenote:_ Someone in one of my gardening groups shared that <http://www.sonomaswampblues.com/|this blueberry farm in Sebastopol> is closing and selling their plants to be dug up and transplanted to new homes. How much does each 15-year-old plant produce in a season? *One pound* :sob: