Gardening 2024 edition

[MintyWyvern (Minty (she/they))]

I’m wondering who else here is growing stuff this year?

I live in a town house, so we don’t really have a yard (just cement ) so all our gardening is relegated to a raised garden bed, big ass buckets, or the pots that survive the winter (rip my decorative pot i bought last year… it was too heavy for me to rescue.)

I tested out some old seeds we still had around from past years, I ended up testing most of them to see which ones are still viable.

I was fully expecting most of them to be deadge but about 50% of them made it!.. however I did test way too many so there’s a possibility that i’m going to end up with 6 corn sproutlings and 5 zucchini plants so UMMM… i’m probably going to have to use my mom and dad’s place to grow stuff (and pray that my dad doesn’t accidentally kill anything I put at their house aaaa)

Other than that we have some green beans sprouting to help the soil, we have marigold seeds going too and some basil! (fresh basil fucks so hard)

Anyways, what are you all growing/planning to grow? :3c

[barquq]

i wish i could do some gardening but my apartment makes that impossible sadly

i took care of a sunflower when i was in grade school and it was one of my favorite projects that i still remember to this day

[Adell ((he/him))]

I have plants, though I wouldn’t call myself a gardner; my style of growing is “spread some seeds around, water then generally but mostly forget about what they are, then come back when they’re all grown and healthy and brag to people about it” (guess I take after my father on that!) though my mother, and occasionally my sister, are around.

I also “inherited” several of these from my mother, who “inhereted” from my grandmother. I asked once why we have some of these, and she just said “Well, your grandma had spiritist beliefs and I held on to that” which is weird because no one in this family is explicitly religious (I’d call my mom polytheist and it wouldn’t be wrong, but it might make her a little mad)

First my acerola cherries tree. These are some sour bastards, and pack a shitload of Vit C. They’re also a massive pain in the ass to get rid off when they’re at full bloom because it takes only a few weeks to get bored of sour fruits every day and people don’t want to accept gifts of plastic bags full of cherries back home for some reason

Parsley! Sometimes we mix a little bit on the food, though I still buy it for convenience

these are dumbcane and St. George’s Sword, both toxic plants because religious people like to play pranks they ward off evil and strengthen the foundations of the home.

These are boldo leaves. Get a few of those leaves and squash them in some water and you got some nice tea for stomachaches, headaches, and probably other things. Boldo Tea is a traditional given in any household as less of a “cure all” and more of a “help all”

We have a lot of aloe. My sister used to use it on her hair, but I don’t know why I still have that since she isn’t around that often anymore. I think its good for burns but I don’t really get burns either? Anyway, they’re there.

This is a papaya tree. My sister liked to eat it, and threw the seeds around. Now they sprouted and its my problem.

[MintyWyvern (Minty (she/they))]

@Adell

I have plants, though I wouldn’t call myself a gardner; my style of growing is “spread some seeds around, water then generally but mostly forget about what they are, then come back when they’re all grown and healthy and brag to people about it” (guess I take after my father on that!) though my mother, and occasionally my sister, are around.

Hey! gardening is gardening (also damn same hat wrt fathers. lol )

@Adell

First my acerola cherries tree. These are some sour bastards, and pack a shitload of Vit C. They’re also a massive pain in the ass to get rid off when they’re at full bloom because it takes only a few weeks to get bored of sour fruits every day and people don’t want to accept gifts of plastic bags full of cherries back home for some reason

oh my god the same thing happens when my parent’s peach tree fruits. It gives us some sweet and juicy white peaches that we cant reasonably eat on our own but not enough ppl take them off our hands. (sometimes the middle school kids will take some tho.)

@Adell

Parsley! Sometimes we mix a little bit on the food, though I still buy it for convenience

Oh yeah I understand, we grow basil to use since fresh basil tastes amazing but sometimes stuff happens and either we’re waiting for more basil to grow or we just buy some if we really need it.
I wanna be better about actively watching out for the herbs we grow.

@Adell

These are boldo leaves. Get a few of those leaves and squash them in some water and you got some nice tea for stomachaches, headaches, and probably other things. Boldo Tea is a traditional given in any household as less of a “cure all” and more of a “help all”

I don’t think i’ve actually heard of this before :o that’s kinda neat!

@Adell

We have a lot of aloe. My sister used to use it on her hair, but I don’t know why I still have that since she isn’t around that often anymore. I think its good for burns but I don’t really get burns either? Anyway, they’re there.

Having aloe on hand in a dry state is useful, the goo from the inside is good for sunburns and also any cooking burns (which i get from baking bc i have more than once tried to grab a hot pan out of the oven without gloves.)

I think aloe vera can be eaten too as long as it’s prepared properly? I know my dad uses it like that, but i don’t really know what he makes with it. I’ve never tried eating it myself.

[gardencoffin (mir)]

I also live in an apartment that doesn’t have a good space for gardening stuff, but in a previous place I grew a mint plant and some really tiny carrots. I’d like to get back to it sometime when I can.

[MintyWyvern (Minty (she/they))]

Mint is such a good place to start bc it’s so easy to grow (like, scarily easily, the mint at my parent’s house broke containment one year and we spent the next four years finding mint plants everywhere sdfj;sdj )
at least we had access to mint for tea very easily! good for keeping (some) bugs away to!

[MintyWyvern (Minty (she/they))]

we re-potted some of the seedlings that were sprouting finally (some of them were sharing a pot and started to choke each other out… nature is scary)

looks like a lot of our zucchini is doing well and so are the beans. there are some seedlings that miiight not make it but we’re giving them another week, if they don’t look better after some TLC then I think they’re not gonna make it.

Twin got some pepper seeds that we can plant in their place though.

Our strawberry plant has come back after winter slumbering (strawberry plants are surprisingly tenacious?? ) so that’s exciting! gonna see if we can get them some nice new soil :3

[MintyWyvern (Minty (she/they))]

seedling update: some of them aren’t doing so well anymore suddenly, luckily we have plenty of seeds left over but dang the beans and zuccini seem ok at least, so does the basil.

[MintyWyvern (Minty (she/they))]

update update: most of the seedlings didn’t make it, which me and my twin have determined two possible culprits

• Soil didn’t stay moist enough (we considered it maybe was too wet at first and the seeds rotted, but upon inspecting them that doesn’t seem to be the case.)
• UV lamp was too strong. (which may explain why the soil didn’t stay moist enough actually)

Funnily enough, the seedlings I was sure WOULDN’T survive (bc they tend to be kind of sensitive) ended up being our broccoli seedlings.

It’s still early enough in the year that we can start over but we’re definitely going to be more careful with the uv lamp.

The corn was doing just fine and then seemed to wilt as it got taller (and closer to the uv lamp by extension)

Not the biggest loss, though it is unfortunate.

Bright side though, we got a new standing planter! It even has wheels! Might use it for the zucchini if we can get some of them to sprout again.

[barquq]

hell yeah excited to see the results of the next try

go broccoli go

[MintyWyvern (Minty (she/they))]

I forgot to update on this since admittedly, sometimes plant updates are slow and kind of boring

So, Since april, we sadly lost al ot of the little experimental seedlings we began inside the house. Part of it is due to not moving them out once it got sunnier faster, they really hated the window light.

But! What did survive was the green bean plants! tbh we mostly grew them to revitalize the soil of our garden bed outside and they’ve done really well!

Our strawberry plant was good, as usual, we even got a second strawberry plant that’s also doing really well! We got it at a discount and saved it from being thrown away in a clearance sale lol. We got a few other plants that are doing ok too, i Might move them off of a table we have in the backyard though. The table gets too hot for them I think and it’s stunting their growth.

Back to what we grew from seeds, our zucchini plant is doing SUPER WELL thanks to the green beans. We’ve grown zucchini a lot in the past in our garden bed and they always go thru a bit of an “ugly” period, but with past knowledge of growing, the new soil we have via the composter, and the extra nitrogen from the green beans, the zucchini is doing SUPER good! We already harvested two zucchinis with at least three more coming in. I’m super pleased with the result lol.

We also managed to grow one corn plant!! It’s starting to get taller than our patio fence… lol. We mostly grew it just to see if we could, so fun fact! you Can indeed grown corn in a planter.

We have a habanero growing in with lots of peppers, I can’t wait.

For herbs, our rosemary plant came back stronger than ever after we messed up overwintering it. Our lavender surprisngly came back too! (albeit it looks a little scrungly) We managed to get a mint and basil plant going to. Fresh basil for pasta is perfection.

One last update, when we moved all our seedlings that eventually died outside, we thought they all didn’t make it. As it turns out, something did make it, but we don’t know what it is. It was growing in the abandoned bed and is getting tall enough now that it needs support. It looks like it could be one of the tomato seedlings because of the flowers that are growing on it but… we’ll have to wait and see I guess!