sunandshadow
Cocksnail!
- Joined
- Jan 1, 1970
- Posts
- 3,863
Here in the northern US it is finally getting to the point where we can expect there to be no more snow for the year. My crocuses, daffodils, tulips, hyacinths, and a few other things are all sending up little green shoots. 
My rose bushes and fruit trees are also budding out. Even more interestingly, masses of bulb, seeds, and young bushes and trees have just appeared at the local stores and I'm ready to go on a shopping spree! 
So far I've bought gladiolus and dutch iris bulbs - don't have any of those in my yard yet. I also picked up several packets of flower seeds (pansies, snapdragons, columbines, zinnias, hollyhocks, poppies...), those I'll just toss over the bulb beds and see if anything interesting blooms.
The part that requires actual planning is the vegetable garden. I've previously gotten the best results from carrots, okra, and stringless bush beans, so I have to decide what type of each of those I'm planting this year. In a different garden I had great success with zucchini, but here there seems to be a type of mildew that kills it, so I have to decide whether to try to find a mildew-resistant variety or give up on that. I grew turnips last year, and they tasted good but were a lot of work to prepare because each individual root was small. So I am thinking about growing rutabagas instead; they are bigger and equally tasty. But they are less than a dollar a pound at the grocery store, so should I waste my limited garden space on them? Then there's corn. Last year I planted corn and it came out all stunted and I only got about three tiny ears. I don't know why that happened, so I'm not sure if trying a different variety of corn would help at all, or if I planted the seeds to early, or what.
How about you all? What are you going to plant, and how do you decide what variety of each vegetable to grow, or make sure that you find a variety which doesn't have a problem that the last variety you tried had?
My rose bushes and fruit trees are also budding out. Even more interestingly, masses of bulb, seeds, and young bushes and trees have just appeared at the local stores and I'm ready to go on a shopping spree! So far I've bought gladiolus and dutch iris bulbs - don't have any of those in my yard yet. I also picked up several packets of flower seeds (pansies, snapdragons, columbines, zinnias, hollyhocks, poppies...), those I'll just toss over the bulb beds and see if anything interesting blooms.
The part that requires actual planning is the vegetable garden. I've previously gotten the best results from carrots, okra, and stringless bush beans, so I have to decide what type of each of those I'm planting this year. In a different garden I had great success with zucchini, but here there seems to be a type of mildew that kills it, so I have to decide whether to try to find a mildew-resistant variety or give up on that. I grew turnips last year, and they tasted good but were a lot of work to prepare because each individual root was small. So I am thinking about growing rutabagas instead; they are bigger and equally tasty. But they are less than a dollar a pound at the grocery store, so should I waste my limited garden space on them? Then there's corn. Last year I planted corn and it came out all stunted and I only got about three tiny ears. I don't know why that happened, so I'm not sure if trying a different variety of corn would help at all, or if I planted the seeds to early, or what.
How about you all? What are you going to plant, and how do you decide what variety of each vegetable to grow, or make sure that you find a variety which doesn't have a problem that the last variety you tried had?
Neighbors said yep, the whole area's like that. I used a mix of approaches - two low spots in the yard I just filled in with soil to make beds, I built two raised rectangles out of planks and filled those with soil, and where I wanted the berry bushes I dug holes with a mattock and spade, pulling out the bricks, and built a pocket of good soil for each bush.
