Bob

I kept a bunch we bought at the grocery store in a glass jar on the window sill...kept fresh for ages and eventually started to grow...but went manky when we were away on holiday when the glass dried out

Hamish Healys

Probably the easiest fruits to grow with U.S. soil are bananas and papayas. Plant their seeds, water them and watch them grow! At least that’s my experience with planting fruits.

Uncle_Bob

I had to rip all my tomato plants out which is a shame because they should be 4-5 foot high plants with a good yield by now.
Oh well home depot had a sale on their boinnie range of herbs and vegatables. 6 inch pants normally $4 each were on sale 5 for $10. So I'm back to square one but at least the plants are green again

WEBlue

Tomatoes seem so picky about their growing conditions. I had some success growing cherry tomatoes in Houston, but never produced a very satisfactory crop anywhere else I lived. (Back in the UK, our garden was too shaded so I gave up.)

Cold water shocks them, warm water is better, also water that's sat for a few hours to lose chlorine. Fresh rainwater is supposed to be the best for tomatoes, but if you collect and hold the rainwater for too long it'll give them blight.

"Enlivened" rainwater?--that's supposedly the very best for watering. The bottom of this link describes how to make it.

http://www.vegetable-gardening-onlin...to-plants.html

WEBlue

Good news and bad news in my garden.

Snow peas are coming up well, starting to twine up the stakes a bit. Cabbages were very droopy but have recovered their health. Lettuce is showing slow but steady growth. Onions are doing best of all, which is nice because they're my rabbit-deterring fence.

But the herbs are all suffering--tarragon was infested with little webworms but perhaps has recovered, dill is looking thin & poorly, parsley is losing its green & getting very pale. I should plant out the basil I have waiting on my kitchen windowsill, but I don't want to see it join the others in this trend of sickening a week or two after it's planted.

We're going away for a few days, so I have my doubts everything will survive.

Pulaski

How far south do you need to transport the "US soil" to get a viable crop of bananas. I am in "the South", but winter lows of around 10°F +/- put paid to any possibility of growing bananas here. ..... Quite aside from the fact that regular "Cavendish" bananas are sterile and the fruit contains no seeds.

WEBlue

I have to agree with this. Both bananas & papayas are too tropical for most of the US, unless grown in some specialized greenhouse. When our family lived in Houston we had a banana tree on our property, but it only produced (tiny inedible) fruit once in the decade we lived there....

Uncle_Bob

I do see banana plants around here in Phoenix. They are quite difficult to grow though, soil needs to be well drained and they require a different watering pattern that many other plants. They need freeze protection and shade for when the temps get into the 100's. I've heard the fruit can often taste very bland. But not everyone grows them for the fruit.

ottotheboar

Slow cold wet spring here in Virginia, the tomatoes are going well, the okra died in the heavy rain we will replant.

Squash should be ready next week.

Blueberries around two weeks late.

The corn is very slow around three weeks behind last year.

We tried some oyster mushrooms in bags of straw, it is a little cool but they are going quite well.

Bob

So we've got millions of tomato plants growing...everywhere. I only planted a few.

Mint is all over the place.

Lettuce, it do great, where I didn't plant it, only one growing where I actually planted it.

Bean/pea things are doing well.

Got some things growing well, but not sure if they're a weed or not, don't recognise them at all :/

Uncle_Bob

Good to here things are growing well then Bob.
Temps are in the 100s here. My lettuce grew fairly well. I cut some at the weekend and it basically just wilted within a few minutes, even starting to wilt before i even got back into the house. As i originally expected i was way too late planting it. I took the rest of the lettuce out to make room.
Also i wanted to transplant my sunflowers to various pots and free up some more room for plants. The sunflowers had grown to about 3 foot. But like the lettuce they just wilted within the hour of me transplanting them to the pots. I still have them planted i don't know if they will recover.

Jalapeno plant is doing great, about 8 green peppers so far.
Also one variety of the 3 different types of bulbs that i got from the dollar store has gown and started to flower.

I murdered half my herbs they are growing in a deep ceramic pot which got full. I transplanted half of each plant a wooden window box, they didn't like it. Dead within 2 days.

Lesson for the week. Don't transplant anything, ever

We are still looking good for our goal of being able to have the garden provide a supply of ingredients for making home made fresh salsa fresca, which the whole family likes. All we would need to be buying is onions. We have about 5 varieties of tomatoes, the Jalapenos, garlic chives and I've just added Cilantro to the original ceramic pot herb garden. I've even got access to a lime tree growing into my yard.

ottotheboar

The closest thing we have to papayas are probably the paw paw which is indigenous, they have an advantage in the deer do not eat them as they emit an unpleasant odor when the stem is broken.

WEBlue

The garden is coming along. Everything planted (except very early spinach, which never came up) has survived so far, though a few things are growing awfully slowly (snow peas, lettuce, curly parsley).

The yellow onions are a roaring success--my rabbit deterrent. So far no rabbits have nibbled anything...as far as I can tell. Fingers are crossed.

Haven't dared to plant the real summer crops yet--still seems too cool & cloudy.

Bob

It's looking like they might be peppers....they're everywhere like the tomatoes.

Seems we might have a couple watermelon, well they're where they were planted and possibly some corn, hard to say.

Nutek

In which Mrs. N. combats my ability to kill everything in sight...