Almost Canadian

Thank you.

Just a thought, do people use all the leaves, stems, etc. from their harvest as mulch for the next one? I can't be bothered with compost bins and would hope that, if at the end of each season we put it all together with the horse poop, give it a rough mix dump it into what we already have and leave it, all will be good. Am I delusional?

Almost Canadian

Thank you, that is very encouraging.

I have heard about the crop rotating that you mention.

At the minute, our beds are quite mixed but, if this trial is successful, I can foresee that this time next year I will have lots of beds containing only one thing and will rotate everything in in a circular fashion so that there is likely 8 or 9 years before a particular item is grown in the same bed again. The plan is to succession plant too so that we can eat them as we harvest them.

That's the plan anyway.

iaink

No Racoons? They will laugh at any fencing and just consider it a challenge

BristolUK

Not enough of a challenge these days. They're more interested in scaling tall buildings.

dbd33

A list, opinions mine alone:

Almost Canadian

I have never heard of a racoons in Alberta. They may be here, but I have no knowledge of them if they are.

After leaving Calgary, I have never seen a rabbit on our property and the main critters are gophers. We have thousands on them on our property, as to all of our neighbours, yet, 10 kms away, there are none.

The gophers result in badgers. We also have lots of coyotes and deer too, but I haven't seen a deer in anything other than our large hay field and have never seen them anywhere near the house, which is where the planters are.

Almost Canadian

Thank you.

dbd33

There's a stiff breeze in them raised beds this evening...


Unfortunately the photo uploader seems to have been enhanced beyond my ability to operate it. Ah well, imagine row upon row of bright green plants flapping about.

scilly

All I can tell you is that OH gardens as his father did (and mine also) .......

............ build a compost box at the bottom of the garden, square or rectangular, 4 corner posts and planks cut to size that can be slipped down between the corner posts to raise the depth.

Compost everything that is vegetable matter ............. all grass clippings, weeds, deciduous leaves that fall off trees in fall, all parts of harvested plants that can not be eaten or otherwise used, potato peelings and uncooked vegetable matter from the kitchen, dead flowers, etc etc etc. Leave it open to the elements. You can buy boxes of Compost Mixture and add some of that between layers of plant material. Leave it over the winter, and it can be used the following spring at the bottom of the trenches, or left to further compost down for 2 or 3 years .......... but in that case you need one or two or more boxes.

These fancy composting containers that can be turned to mix etc really are not worth the money to such old-style gardeners!

I used to work for a botanical garden (inside the office building not gardening), and I know the gardeners had a compost pile at the "end of the garden", the Plant Ops guys responsible for mowing grass all over the campus used to deliver their grass cuttings to add to "our" composting.


BTW ................. leaves from deciduous trees can be used as mulching round shrubs etc or as a protection over a flower bed or even your veggie patch, to help provide a bit of protection over the winter, and then dug in the ground or moved to the compost box in the spring.

Conifer needles are not good.

Siouxie

Last year and this year I have grown or am growing:

Bush beans (green and yellow) very successful, was picking beans for weeks
Runner beans - successful, but not as good as the UK
Snow Peas - didn't grow last year, this year they are climbing the poles
Red peppers - successful
Yellow peppers - successful
Spring Onions - successful
Garlic Chive - successful (been growing them for years, they 'self seed (bulbs)
Corn - very successful, though having to pollinate by hand is a pain
Carrots (3 different varieties) - very successful
Radish - not as successful, ground is too dense, trying again this year
Beetroot - not as successful, ground is too dense, trying again this year
Head lettuce - successful
Romain (not successful, they bolted last year, it was too warm)
Lettuce variety - first time this year, they are picked as young leaves
Coriander - very successful
Chillies - so/so
Basil - successful
I did have sage, oregano and thyme up until last year
I've got mustard to grow, haven't put it in yet..
Everything I grow is from seed, planted directly into the ground.
It's all grown in a very rough n ready bed approximately 30 x 15

Souvy

We bought tomato seedlings. Vine tomatoes. We planted them in a sunny spot beside the garage. They grew like snot. We also did shallots (no effort required there).

We don't do any of it these days, apart from some herbs.

R I C H

We tried to grow all sorts of fruit and veg; potatoes, runner beans, beetroot, carrots, zucchini, garlic, pears, apples, peaches, cherries and melons. We encountered issues in the countryside where we had acreage, and wildlife proved impossible to control (bears ate the fruit, deer enjoyed the veggies and squirrels/chipmunks/gophers helped themselves to everything). In a slightly more urban setting, though on the periphery to Crown Land, we still had deer problems, but it was the cost of irrigating that was prohibitive. Kamloops summers require a huge amount of water to keep any sort of garden alive, and once we were reliant on city water supplies with a meter, the veggie garden consumed way more $ in water than the cost of purchasing from a fruit and veg stand or grocery store.

Atlantic Xpat

We grow in both raised beds that I built a couple of years back, a vegetable patch & a greenhouse. We're rather late at starting this year due to too much other stuff going on & will be planting in all of those places this weekend. Given that a week ago we had a dusting of snow on the ground and that night time temps still get perilously close to freezing we're probably not too far behind schedule for the outside planting at least. Short growing season in this part of the world.

We've had success with spuds, too many tomatoes to eat, peas and sometimes broccoli. Corn has done well in the greenhouse but the wind is a problem outside. Truth to tell the effort in growing 6 heads of corn wasn't probably worth it except to educate the kids on where corn actually comes from! Carrots are straightforward enough as well. Strawberries have been a bit hit and miss - the birds get a good feed, we don't!

Oakvillian

We've been very successful with peas, runner beans and cucumbers. I built a frame of 2x2 posts and made a mesh of twine for them to climb up - more cost effective (and frankly less ugly) than a lot of the commercially available climbing frames, and the fact that the edible bits are some way off the ground discourages the rabbits and chipmunks from destroying them before we were ready to harvest. We were also inundated with butternut squash one year - the plant spread much more widely than we'd expected, and while the squashes were excellent (we kept some in the cold room for most of the winter, after making and freezing a huge batch of soup with the first lot) they did rather take over the space and crowd out some of the other veggies. Shallots, garlic, and a selection of herbs are pretty much a given, too - the onions and garlic are usually planted in among the roses, as rumour has it they are good companion plants to keep the bugs away from the rose flowers (I don't know that it actually makes a lot of difference, to be honest).

Tomatoes and strawberries were a little less successful - the few fruits that we got were delicious, but the bushiness of the cherry tomato plants and the low-to-the-ground-ness of the strawbs meant that critters got there before we did, more often than not.

We did potatoes for several years, until one year when a family of rats decided that the potato bed would be an awesome place to build a nest. My OH's disgust at unearthing spuds and getting a handful of baby rats instead has rather put us off trying that again any time soon!

I don't think we've ever quite managed to get timings right for carrots - we either plant to late, or forget to thin out in time, or whatever, but by first frost we've had a small quantity of edible roots and a whole load of tiny stringy things that wouldn't even grace the most nouvelle-cuisine of micro-salads. We'll keep trying - one year will get it right.

I'm envious of the Lower Mainland-ites talking about harvesting leeks in late winter. You'd need a jack-hammer to do that here

edit to add: one year the chipmunks left us a few tomatoes. This was one day's crop in around 2010, I think

Almost Canadian

Fantastic!

I had never thought about growing chillies so will have to give those a go too.