What do you Grow?? The Garden Thread

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The yard long beans are producing now. I also have some peppers coming along. Florida Survivor is really shooting up. Black Krim is also looking good. Mangoes still ripening, a couple or so per day. Just enough to eat.

Your broad beans look great, domineekee. Nothing like manure tea to get things growing. When I had rabbits, and their manure does not need composting, anything planted in rabbit manure exhibited amazing growth.

Nice post. Tried growing radish once which turned out ok. As for cabbages always ends up getting eaten by slugs lol

String beans and tomatoes (large heirloom) this year. I have many large oaks and consequently very little sun. The plants are in the few spots with adequate sun.

I’d love a load of rabbit manure, no weed seeds and it won’t burn plants.I’ve been side dressing with old mellowed poultry manure.Works good but if you add too much the nitrogen gets too high.
Cow manure tea is awesome, no worry about weed seeds.One year we used fresh patties and that was a mistake.Awful thorny weeds popped up everywhere.
I’ve also used cottonseed meal and alfalfa pellets for fertilizer.
This fall I will plant winter rye for a cover crop and green manure.

I love mangoes too. I am passionate about mangoes.

Bearing trees: angie, maha chinook, Jean Ellen, Pickering, keitt or Kent, Carrie, and a Carrie seedling.

I also have in the ground 5 seedling trees from a mango workshop and 3 still in pots.

There are dwarf and semi-dwarf mango varieties. Pickering is a dwarf. Names of other dwarf mangoes escapes me at the moment. You can also keep some mangoes short with aggressive pruning.

Back to the rabbits: rabbit manure also has the right balance of NPK. Sometimes I almost think I would raise them again just for the manure.

We are sort of raising worms, but so far just for fishing.

/\Do you have night crawlers down there?Those worms are humongous!!
Do Catalpa trees aka fish bait tree grow there? Those are excellent fish bait and you can freeze them and they come back to life when thawed.Not sure exactly how long they stay viable in the freezer.
My lizards loved them and tomato horn worms.It was satisfying to see a lizard whip those darn hornworms after they ate half the foliage off my tomatoes.

We do not have night crawlers. The worms that tolerate our climate are called red worms and they are much smaller than night crawlers.

I don't know what Catalpa trees are in regards to fish bait. Please elaborate!

I find solace in my garden and working in my garden. In a way, gardening is one of the optimistic activities a person can do. Putting a seed in the ground on the off chance that it will grow, avoid pests, fungi, bacteria, caterpillars, too much rain, not enough rain, etc., and will end up producing something edible or beautiful; that is optimism.

Here are some photos for general interest. These are the inflorescences of two bromeliads, which are quite large. The generic name is Achmea, but I no longer know the specific name. The first one is taller than I am. The second is also almost as tall as I am.

Hummingbirds like both. I never realized until a few years ago, that some bromeliads are nectar sources for humming birds.



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We watered our garden yesterday.

The region that we live in has a very wet spring with many floods but that is balanced by a bone dry summer. This year the winter hung on several months longer than normal. So we didn't even know if it was worth while planting a garden. But with the coronavirus rampant, there was not much else to do, so we planted one anyways.

It is a large garden. Surprisingly, the garden really took off. Not too many bugs this year. But now the dryness has set in. Every week the weather forecast promises rain but it never comes. So we decided to water the garden yesterday. I have a small creek that runs through my property. So we took down a NorthStar Semi Trash Pump and 300 feet of 2" diameter hoses and took water from the creek and feed it into the garden for an hours.

The pump is called a trash pump because it is designed to move water with some dirt, sand and other sediment or impurities. It runs off from gasoline. It is rated for 10,010 gallons per hour. Since I did not run the pump full open, we probably put around 5,000 gallons into the garden. That should keep it wet for a few days.

This is almost like running the hoses from a firetruck. Because of the weight of the water, you can barely move the hoses when it is running. When our grandkids were over a year or two ago, we let them pretend they were fireman. But the hoses were so heavy that their parents had to help them with the task. They even wore fireman hats as I recall. The joys of being a grandparent.

The Catalpa tree supposedly grows in Florida so it should be easy to find one.
https://www.gameandfishmag.com/editoria ... ing/334019
The bromeliads are amazing,very majestic looking plants.
There was a dry spell here so I used the collected rain water first then used the well and a hose.We used to be hooked up to a spring up the hill.I hope to get a new holding tank up there this winter so next year there will be gravity flow water.
I just planted red beans, black beans and a mix of field peas.
The biggest tomato has caught a leaf curl virus.

I've always had a greenthumb, and recently I've been growing some rather diverse things.
Currently I'm growing:

Morning Glory (Ipomoea tricolour)
Eggplants (Solanum melongena)
Summer Squash
Carrots
Chili Peppers
Lima Beans
and my personal favorite, Passion flowers (Passiflora incarnata) these are gorgeous flowers. I'd recommend checking them out if you have the time.

And they taste good.Also called Maypops.

Passion flowers are the host plant for a couple of semi-tropical butterflies: zebra longwing and gulf fritillary. When I lived a bit further south, we had them in our yard all the time, and I raised them in my screen room. They are butterflies that just sort of flutter around; not strong or fast fliers. At night, the zebra longwings all roost together under a leaf or branch. You can pick up the leaf and just look at them all - 10 or 20 at a time.

Where I live now, we just catch a glimpse or two of the zebra longwing. Butterflies move north with each "flight" and by the end of the season, some zebra longwings get this far north. I always enjoy seeing them again. With global warming and if the winters continue to be warm, I'll plant passion flower again and see if I can entice some to stay up here.

Geese found a hole in fence and ate the blue collards down to nubs.Then they ate the kale.
as*holes.

How awful!