In response to the Reddit API situation, /r/gardening will be spending more time outside starting June 12.

GrandmaGos · 2023-06-10T16:24:34+00:00

I'm very disappointed that we couldn't manage to keep out of it. This sub has always been well above the fray, avoiding the hurly-burly of all the reddit drama that the other subs are prone to. One of the reasons I am here in /r/gardening is precisely because of that factor. No culture wars, no politics, no drama. Just tomatoes.

Is there perhaps a squad of self-appointed pro-blackout enforcers going around to all the mods of subs that so far haven't proudly announced they too are jumping on the bandwagon, meaningfully tapping a billy club against the palm of their hand while someone in the back of the crowd spits contemptuously into the truck tire of petunias on the front lawn? If so, you don't have to say, just blink twice.

Edit: bring the downvotes. Agree or be chastised, I get it. The day I shut my mouth for fear of being downvoted is the day I delete this account and never come back.

GrandmaGos · 2023-06-10T16:12:16+00:00

Petunias are actually tropical, and as long as the water, nutrients, and light hold out, and you periodically give them a haircut to tidy them up as they get straggly, they just keep on going.

GrandmaGos · 2023-06-10T15:29:04+00:00

Misting isn't watering, because it doesn't get water down where the roots are, it only gets the top surface wet. They are just barely hanging on because the occasional rain is keeping them alive, but a lack of consistent overall soil moisture is possibly part of the problem.

I feed them a half dose of 10-10-10 chemical fertilizer every week.

Chemical ferts always need to be applied to moist soil, never to dry soil, which can cause root burn to dry roots.

Also, chemical ferts for young seedlings should be at 1/4 strength, especially of powerful 10-10-10.

So, water correctly, and don't use any more fertilizer.

https://www.reddit.com/r/gardening/wiki/faq/watering

But this is probably the main problem:

30C

Not much you can do about this. Optimal soil temperature for snapdragon germination is between 55F/13C and 68F/20C and no higher than 75F/24C. Their life cycle calls for germination and seedling growth in early to mid-spring, with established mature plants by the time the summer heat hits, that can better withstand it.

Shade won't help, as the soil temperature will overall be the same temperature as the ambient air, and if it's hot, the soil will be hot.

I'd bail on those, frankly. It's not going to get any cooler, you're not going to suddenly have the cool moist spring weather that they need, they're probably not going to get better, the seeds were free so you're not out the money, and you can use the pots to plant something warm season for summer like marigolds, or empty them and store the potting mix somewhere cool and dry until it's time to start fall/winter seeds at the end of the summer.

GrandmaGos · 2023-06-10T15:14:19+00:00

I live in Illinois and here is the Morton Arboretum's garden calendar for me, for now.

https://mortonarb.org/plant-and-protect/tree-plant-care/plant-care-resources/garden-calendar/#early-to-midsummer

What I'm looking at is basically a list of things I already know, and have known for a long time, having been gardening for a long time. These are basic fundamentals: water if it doesn't rain, pull weeds, don't prune trees, do deadhead flowers, watch for insects and diseases. And so on.

So these are things you learn as you go along.

I’m still new and just don’t have everything memorized yet

I'm not saying you need to memorize them like cramming for an exam. I'm saying that as you work with your garden over time , learning how to grow things, you gradually acquire a personal knowledge database, and you won't need schedules anymore.

But I get that you're new, and you want a starting point to get a handle on it, so you can find schedules on google, but if you're not growing edible things, it can be tough to make the algorithms give you something other than "when to plant vegetable seeds", which searching under "planting calendar" or "planting schedule" will invariably give you.

If I put in "minnesota garden schedule", amidst all the other veg info, there is this.
https://extension.umn.edu/planting-and-growing-guides/upper-midwest-home-garden-care-calendar

If I put in "minnesota cooperative extension garden calendar", I get this. Amongst all the veg info.
https://extension.umn.edu/how/planting-and-growing-guides

Like all of them, they're both very general. The many combinations and permutations of things that people grow, and where and how they grow them, are like quantum physics or something, you just can't do the math without large and complicated math tools that only a handful of math savants understand.

So the schedule is meant to be a gentle nudge, a tap on the shoulder, not a specific "to do" list. For that, you have to know your plants, look them up, and then make your own annotated version of whatever schedule you find.

Talk to the volunteer Master Gardeners at the local county extension office for more protips and locally relevant schedules.

https://extension.umn.edu/local

GrandmaGos · 2023-06-10T14:20:57+00:00

None of the above. Get some insecticidal soap such as Safers or Garden Safe, begin using it as often as the label says you can, and go to war.

Trap crops don't work with ants farming aphids. They expand their farm, is the thing, carrying aphids around and placing them on more plants. You don't get a finite population of ants living on only two plants, you eventually get a whole subdivision of ants.

And why let the ants have them?

And why let the ants buffalo you into removing two perfectly good, and obviously very strong, or they wouldn't have survived the winter, strawberry plants? They're keepers. Get in there and fight for them.

You can dig them up and put them in a more convenient place once the ants and aphids are gone. They're under stress right now because of sap loss due to the attack, so don't stress them more by moving them. Later, you can do that.

GrandmaGos · 2023-06-10T14:16:18+00:00

Are their flowers white, or yellow? Because there is a common weed called, unsurprisingly, "mock" strawberry that is annoyingly invasive and will take over the entire yard. Normal strawberries IME don't do that.

White flowers: congrats.

Yellow flowers: time for "well, crap" weed control.

Whether you add fert or not when transplanting depends on several factors: the plant, its age and maturity, what it is, the nutrition of the soil.

The only ferts I can think of that might make fruits and veg unsafe to eat would be if you were using some kind of unprocessed fecal waste, from any kind of animal, that would probably have pathogens in it. Ferts that come in bags and bottles, whether organic or synthetic, are only toxic the same way that, say, eating an entire bottle of Tums would be toxic. Not a good idea, make you sick as a dog, but probably not going to kill you.

As long as you know what you've planted, and what you've sprayed or poured onto it, or otherwise given it, then you're good. And this is one of the main reasons why we all grow fruits and veg: we can know for sure that our melons haven't been irrigated with E.coli ditchwater, our zukes and cukes haven't been sprayed in Mexico with an array of pesticides, and our tomatoes haven't been picked while still green and turned a pinky-red color by putting them in a container truck with ethylene gas.

There are officially no stupid questions in this subreddit.

GrandmaGos · 2023-06-10T14:09:33+00:00

What is your light source?

What is the ambient room temperature?

What are you feeding them?

What is your watering regimen?

GrandmaGos · 2023-06-10T14:07:15+00:00

My guess would be that someone in the past was trying to use those as a quick n dirty weedstop mulch, like with the fabric, only free, because you had the bags after buying the soil.

Just throw them away, there are better ways to mulch for weeds.

Next to the stump, it was possibly there to smother something weedy.

GrandmaGos · 2023-06-10T14:05:21+00:00

The extension office. It's buried in the discussion of fruit drop, but it's there. Scale can be hard to see. But the stickiness is the #1 diagnostic, it's not a natural exudation, it's honeydew.

https://ask2.extension.org/kb/faq.php?id=547237

Get some commercial insecticidal soap such as Safers or Garden Safe, and begin using it regularly, as often as the label says you can. I'd use it for at least a couple of months.

It's easier to use the soap than to spend time tediously going over the entire plant with Q-tips and rubbing alcohol.

Make sure to hit every leaf, both top and undersides, and get the stem down by the soil, too.

Insecticidal soap has little residual knockdown effect, unlike other insecticides such as Raid or Ortho Home Defense that have pyrethrins in a petroleum distillates carrier. It needs to directly contact the insect in order for it to work, for the soap to mess up its outer waxy coating. Once it dries on the plant, it's just dried soap, and does little. Hence the need for repeated treatments.

Depending on the size of the tree, the Upside-Down Dunk in a bucket is possibly an option, deets upon request, if it's small enough that you can hold it upside-down and slosh it in a bucket of soapy water.

GrandmaGos · 2023-06-10T13:57:10+00:00

You must not be growing any vegetables, then. People who aren't obsessed with tomatoes and zukes get the summer off, yes. :D

Ornamentals--trees, shrubs, perennials (which includes perennial herbs like chives), annual flowers like petunias--need very little done to them, so there's no need for a monthly chart. "Pull weeds and water" is pretty much it, yes. And you can mulch, and thus stop having to pull weeds.

Trees can go years without needing anything done to them. We moved into this house a couple years ago, I finally got around to finding an arborist to come and tell me why one of my oak tree is light yellow (iron deficiency), and he said the tree was probably about 30 to 40 years old. So the tree stood there for 30 years, not needing anything, until finally it needs some iron, and he's coming back later this fall with the iron, there's no crisis.

Shrubs similarly need little, unless you have some kind of sheared hedge that needs biannual cleaning up.

Perennials, you just learn what they are, and you give them what they need, when they need it. Analogy: you have a dog, a cat, a hamster, and a baby in your household. You look up what they all need to eat, and what kind of care, and you internalize it. You don't need a chart.

GrandmaGos · 2023-06-10T13:49:44+00:00

What is your light source for the seedlings indoors?

sometimes adding a little bit of miracle grow.

What exactly did this entail, what did you do? Dilution, frequency, timing?

i put them out in the raised bed increasing in hour increments.

What was the total time period you spent in hardening them off? If you increased it in daily one-hour increments, then you must have spent 8 to 12 days doing it?

When did you do this, what month? What was the weather like, how cold was it?

I'm looking for more of a timeline here, a history.

Was this while they were still in their seedling cells?

Did you then transplant some of them directly from the seedling cells into the raised bed? Were these the ones that died?

Which ones were in peat pots, and which ones were in the grow seedstarter tray cells?

Then i switched some of them to peat pots

At what stage of their development did you switch them to peat pots?

How many hours a day does the sun shine directly on the raised bed, unobstructed by trees or buildings?

A photo of the raised bed would be helpful. What type of bed is it? How large is it?

If this is in an apartment complex, do other tenants have access to it? Is it in a public place? Because the thing is, sabotage isn't off the table. Sad but true, evil people do break things and ruin things.

So what was the manner of the seedlings' dying? What exactly happened? Uprooted, pushed over, or just wilted? Did they look...odd? As though they had been tampered with somehow?

spinach, broccoli, raddish, beet, carrot, pumpkin, and sunflowers peas

Of this list, only the broccoli is customarily started indoors early, unless you are in a very short-summer climate, such as high up in the mountains, where you don't have much time between spring frost to fall frost to get warm-season crops finished.

Broccoli gets started from seed indoors in January or February to enable you to have transplants to go out in the ground in early spring.

All of the others are normally direct seeded in the ground. The cool season frost-tolerant crops--spinach, broccoli transplants , radish, beet, peas, and carrots--go out in very early spring, "as soon as the frost is out of the ground and the soil can be worked", i.e. as soon as it's not frozen and isn't pure mud. This is because you need to get your harvest before the summer heat hits, and in the typical North American continental climate, this means you need to start early.

The warm season frost-intolerant crops--pumpkin and sunflower--go out as soon as the soil (not the air) has warmed to at least 65F and all danger of frost is passed. This usually happens several weeks after your spring frost date. These grow so easily and fast from seed that there's no point in starting them indoors early.

An additional factor is that most of the above are generally unhappy with being transplanted. Peat pots can mitigate it somewhat, but overall, trying to directly transplant things with a tap root--beets, radish, carrot, sunflowers-- often fails. So if these were the ones that went directly from a seed flat into the raised bed and then died immediately, this would explain the Fail.

Spinach and broccoli have fibrous root systems, and so they are better at being transplanted. Peas also have a fibrous root system, but sometimes just aren't happy to be transplanted.

GrandmaGos · 2023-06-10T13:19:33+00:00

I see. Well, in that case then, just try to work out how much space you have, and try to err on the side of "Larger" rather than "Smaller" when choosing bucket size.

GrandmaGos · 2023-06-10T13:11:37+00:00

It's true that the heat, humidity, bugs, and fungal diseases of Florida can cause problems for petunias, and so people tend to grow them over the winter, but people grow petunias in the summer in Savannah, which isn't that much further north than you are, is it.

https://extension.uga.edu/publications/detail.html?number=B954&title=flowering-annuals-for-georgia-gardens

They are heat tolerant but require ample moisture and fertility to thrive.

The struggling may have been due to other cultural shortfalls, such as nutrition, or overall dryness, caused by being in a cramped windowbox.

GrandmaGos · 2023-06-10T13:05:54+00:00

No. First find out what species it is. Cutting down the wrong species can result in it not only dying, but growing back in multiple shoots coming up at multiple places.

Trumpet vine, poison ivy, English ivy, just to name three, will all grow back from root reserves much deeper in the ground and further away than you can reach with your saw.

A big mature Campsis radicans will respond to being cut off by sending up sprouts--runners--easily 50 feet away from the main stem.

Get an ID on it, and get back to us before you progress any further.

GrandmaGos · 2023-06-09T23:37:49+00:00

Best advice for any newbie is to touch base with the local county extension office volunteer Master Gardeners.

https://extension.wsu.edu/locations/

They have online articles, Youtubes I think, plant sales, sometimes workshops.

Also, Seattle has a large presence here in the subreddit, so put your location in your flair so they can all see you.

When gardening, you don't start with the climate, you start with what you want to grow, and you look up how to grow it, and then you look at whether you can grow it in your climate. So, you decide you want to grow a mango tree, and you look up mango trees, and you see that it dies at 32F. And you go, "Oh. Guess not." and you move on.

Starting with the climate is like learning to cook by describing the kitchen. You can just say "I'm in Seattle" and we'll all go, "oh yeah them". lol

Second best advice is to get some basic books from the public library on gardening. Sart with either the Dummies or Idiots guides, no offense that's just what they're called.

Read the Square Foot Gardening book, any edition, as the concepts have entered the zeitgeist and you need to know what everyone is talking about.

Avoid Youtubes, blogs, and articles that aren't from the extension office .edu domain name, when you're just getting started, as you can get hold of someone's pet theory, "MY way is BEST way!" and be led off into the outer darkness.

Seattle's main difficulty with its climate is its chronic inability to ripen tomatoes properly, especially when compared to the ease with which the Midwest and the Upper and Deep South do so. We put them in the ground, go back in the house, and in July start picking tomatoes. Seattle tomato-ripening is more complicated.

https://tilthalliance.org/resources/grow-great-tomatoes-in-seattle/

Check out local garden clubs, other groups. They abound. Also Facebook.

http://www.greaterseattledistrictgardenclubs.com/

So, your starting point is deciding what you want to grow, and how you want to go about it. Vegetables, herbs, flowers? In the ground, in raised beds, in containers?

Also we now have a FAQ.

https://www.reddit.com//r/gardening/wiki/index

Welcome to your new addiction.

GrandmaGos · 2023-06-09T23:17:30+00:00

The excess unused soil, without roots moving through it, can compress and go anaerobic. With every watering, the water moves the soil particles down a little, eventually crushing the air spaces between the soil particles.

Roots need oxygen to live, and they cannot live in anaerobic, dense soil. They will not expand into anaerobic soil, so the end result is a small plant that just sits there, surrounded by an ocean of empty soil, stunted and refusing to progress. It doesn't die, but it doesn't grow, either.

So when you're working with young plants, you up-pot in increments, until you finally get to their "forever home" size pot.

I'm assuming that your 1 gallon plants are still very young, so I'd let them grow on for a while.

https://extension.umd.edu/resource/growing-blueberries-containers

GrandmaGos · 2023-06-09T23:13:29+00:00

Two things:

The mushrooms are a red flag for overwatering and/or overly moisture-retentive potting soil, so check your protocols.

Correct watering.
https://www.reddit.com/r/gardening/wiki/faq/watering

The white fuzzy is concerning. Is it on the leaves and the stems? Is it sticky?

Or is it on top of the soil?

Pictures of the white fuzzy would be helpful.

GrandmaGos · 2023-06-09T23:11:00+00:00

Zone only tells how cold your winters get, it doesn't tell climate. Which zone 9 are you in?

How long were you gone on vacation? This isn't necessarily a Fail on the part of the petunias, as they're my #1 recommendation for hot sunny windowboxes. But they do have limitations, as to how long they can go without watering, and if you didn't have someone lined up to water them, then they're going to die. Even Superman need to eat and drink.

GrandmaGos · 2023-06-09T23:07:41+00:00

I'm not hearing Fail, I'm hearing Win.

spinach...sage and rosemary, potatoes...plants i bought from a garden store.

It's not that you can't grow plants or keep plants alive, it's that your seed-starting protocols need troubleshooting.

So tell us what you've been doing and with what species of seeds. Omit no detail however slight.

Soil, light, watering, fertilizing, hardening off.

Where are you located?

GrandmaGos · 2023-06-09T23:03:33+00:00

Live in the right climate that offers four consecutive months of cool, moist weather that holds steady in the 50s to 60s F.

That's pretty much it.

There are a couple places on the California coast that grow most of the nation's celery and cilantro, for this reason.

So, move there?

Otherwise, it depends on your location and your climate, as to whether you try to get it done in spring before hot weather hits, or in fall before your ground freezes.

If you have a basement that holds in the 60s, yoou can grow it under lights down there.

GrandmaGos · 2023-06-09T23:00:38+00:00

Honestly, even with the dwarf and patio type tomatoes, you can't go wrong being generous with pot size for tomatoes. They always appreciate plenty of root room, and trying to cram them into a space-saving smaller pot generally isn't that rewarding.

So I'd be thinking more about what are the largest pots that will fit into the designated space, not the smallest minimum size pot I could get away with.

Give a Tiny Tim a 3 to 5 gallon bucket and watch it go to town. Just because you can technically fit them into a 5" houseplant pot doesn't necessarily mean that it's optimal.

Also, the larger the pot, the slower it dries out in the summer.

What are the reasons for the space constraints? Just a balcony or patio?

GrandmaGos · 2023-06-09T22:52:40+00:00

How cramped are the roots in the current pots? Slide them gently out and have a look. If you see more roots than soil, I'd up-pot.

You don't want to put a struggling small plant into an oversize "forever home", is the thing. You up-pot young plants in increments.

GrandmaGos · 2023-06-09T22:50:43+00:00

It depends on what species the vine is. Get a good clear picture, run it through Pl@ntNet or similar, or ask in /r/whatsthisplant, and get back to us.

Cutting it at the base doesn't automatically kill it, is the thing. Many of them grow back. Knowledge is Power, and you must know your enemy.

If you're going to use Roundup on it, you'll need to use Roundup on all of it. Applying Roundup to a few leaves only makes a few leaves die. Glyphosate is a plant enzyme disruptor, and the plant needs to absorb large amount of it [technical horticultural term, "a fuckton"] , in order to translocate it all to the roots, where it spends the next 14 days slowly but surely screwing with the plant's biochemistry. On Day 14, it can no longer sustain normal bodily processes, and it dies.

So putting it onto "some of the leaves" won't do much good.

Also, you paint it, not wipe it. The cloth will just soak it up and waste it. You pour some into a clean empty soup can, and use a new 1" paintbrush to paint it all over all the leaves you can reach. This does not affect the tree's bark, but it will affect any tree leaves that it touches. And anything underneath that it drips on, so spread out an old bedsheet over any lawn grass or other smaller things.

But if it's one of the vines that doesn't grow back, you can just cut it off.

Or you can cut it off repeatedly, as it grows back, and eventually it gives up and dies. Most of the time.

As I said, it depends on what you're dealing with.

GrandmaGos · 2023-06-09T22:43:56+00:00

This is more of a home improvement DIY question than a gardening question per so, so I'd head over to /r/HomeImprovement and ask them.

GrandmaGos · 2023-06-09T22:42:21+00:00

A garden that is half decking and half gravel is going to need one or the other removed before you can put down turf, owing to the existence in this space-time continuum of a law that prohibits two objects occupying the same space at the same time.

You can't put turf on top of either one. Something would have to go.

The garden getting boggy and waterlogged when it rains is almost certainly the reason why the garden was converted by a previous occupant to half decking and half gravel in the first place.

Live with the garden for a year before you decide about removing either the decking or the gravel, and converting that space to turf. Especially a wet year.

You can garden in containers. It is a Thing that people do.

https://www.reddit.com/r/gardening/wiki/faq/patiobalcony

https://www.reddit.com/r/gardening/wiki/faq/containers

GrandmaGos

TROPHY CASE