Anybody Grow Anything?

Just typical garden stuff for me. Tomatoes( metric sh&t ton of them this year off of just 5 plants), hot peppers, scallions, basil, cilantro, shallots, zucinni. New garden this year as I moved but they had raised beds that were kick ass soil.

 

Hay

 

Bumping this. In the "looking for silver linings of Covid" category, working from home does allow me the time to focus on my gardening more so than in year's past. Got my four raised beds done with 4 yards of compost in them. Closest two have tomatoes/cukes/eggplants/squash and some other random shit, and the furthest bed is all habaneros and the other pepper bed is a 50/50 mix of ghost peppers and Trinidad scorpions.

Also built a hydro setup (it looks like a standard NFT system, but it's actually a media-less flood and drain). Have kale/lettuce/spinach/arugula/swiss chard in there and will have that growing year round in my solarium.

Have had time to build out a pretty killer setup in my basement grow, too

 

That's a bad ass garden. I wish I had the room for that, but I chose to live by the ocean and evidently it wasn't an original choice. Next house will have a proper garden, for now it's four pots.

 

Here's a pic of my coliseum in parts. Threw it into the dumpster a few months ago when we did our spring cleaning (don't grow SOG anymore because of plant counts).

 

Finally had time to transplant last weekend.
1st Row : Roma Tomato . Those were given to me by a friend that had too many.
2nd Row San Marzano and Super Sauce.
4 rows of different types of Bell Peppers. 1 row Italian Sweet
1 row of Sweet Heat
1 row jalapeno. Yet to be planted Serrano & Costa Rican .
Shit ton of nutrients

 

2021 update. Decided to grow herbs for the first time (first half of the front right box), and have no idea WTF I'm going to do with them. Focused hard on cukes this year (goal is to make ~100 jars of pickles - I make them with habaneros/ghost peppers and they're delicious), and backed off on the hot/extra hot peppers (as I still have hot sauce from years ago). Other major change is this is the first year I've grown kale and I'm a big fan and make smoothies 4-5 times a week for breakfast.

 

Nice, I've got a small planter with Basil .
Started a little later this year with my tomatoes {all paste}.
Just flowering with some fruit starting.
Lost just about my entire tomato crop last year, as did several others in the area .
Looked like blight .
Only peppers I have going now are jalapenos.
Just about to transplant them.
Waiting until the end of July to start my bells.
Last season it was so hot that they did not produce enough foliage and was fighting sunburn all year.

 

Amish neighbor brought us 2 qts. of the first of this years strawberries yesterday. Fresh strawberry shortcake last night for dessert.

 

I added 25 more fruit trees this spring to my hobby orchard.
I counted how many trees I have the other day and I'm up to 140 now.
All 5 of my beehives died over the winter so had to buy 5 nucs in April, hopefully these ones hang on.

 

Sorry to hear that, what kills the beehives?

 

I've been doing this for about 5 years now so I'm a rookie, I wish I could say what exactly it was but as time goes on I'm finding it can be a variety of things, something called Colony Collapse Disorder has been around for many years now. It has been attributed to the Varroa mite that attaches itself to the back of the bee and can weaken the hive if not dealt with thru treatments, some organic, some not so you have to time the treatments (some can't be used above 90*F) right or not use when you have the supers on (the supers are the honey I take for consumption), a local commercial bee keeper I know said last years issue was due to late season nectar, the bees need time to dry it to about 18% moisture content or less otherwise it can ferment. According to this beekeeper that had Cornell look at his hives they said the bees got dysentery and killed a fair about of his hives (he keeps some hives on my property too) Bees don't hibernate in the winter and they don't shit in the hive so they hold it until they can get a nice day in the winter to take a "cleansing" flight, so if their system isn't right they hold until they die. Thing is I got 10 gals of honey last year so the bees were doing really well. 3 hives were really strong and I expected them to make it but the first cold snap in Nov killed them all. One hive I had was a feral hive swarm I caught in the summer and they were mean as hell, I never have been stung so many times as that hive so I figured those mean bastards would make it thru the winter, nope, that swarm I caught was huge too so they were alot of bees to keep it going.
Good thing about have established hives even with dead bees is that the frames can be reused so when new bees are introduced to a hive that died off its like having a fully furnished house. They come in and clean up and start going again. Instead of spending energy making comb they can go right into setting up shop and tend to new bees and produce honey. Probably take me another 10 years before I get a better understanding of bees, they are definitely more sensitive to the environment than I ever thought and had I known that going in I may not have gotten into it.

 

Thank you for typing that up. I know nothing about bees but wondered if it was a disease or weather based? Nice to know, the new bees will take right over in a previous hive.

Never thought about the temperament and how one hive could be nice and another hive a bunch of jack wagons. Does the temperament also tend to make the honey taste different, or is that taste more based on the local surroundings available to the hive?

 

Temperament is largely dictated by the queen, there's only 1 queen per hive so she controls the mood, you can replace the queen and change the hive mood for the most part. Honey tastes are based on whatever is flowering at the time. You can pull frames and see different colors and it's based on whatever is flowering at the time. When I extract it in the fall it all goes in the same bucket so it all gets mixed together. I keep a few frames in our garage fridge for the kids to spoon the comb off during the winter, its a hit with their friends.

 

I planted 400 apples and 40 peach trees 25 years ago. I didn't understand how woods rats worked (ie deer). Come spring I had 20 trees left. They're now at full potential...so many apples, so little time. Two years ago I took 2 PU trucks of apples to the cider mill. What in the hell was I thinking I'd do with 185 gallons? I made 45 gallons of hard cider but most of it went bad. Talk about misguided intentions.

 

Got my self a tiny garden, 1 Tomato plant, 1 sweet pepper, 3 Serrano, 3 Thai, 1 Squash, basil and parsley. Also accidentally growing two pumpkin plants in the mulch near my shrubs.

 

2 tomato plants, 1 bell pepper, 1 sweet banana pepper, basil, Italian oregano

 

10 buckets with cucumbers, peppers and a raised bed with maters and herbs

 

Show off.

 

Bumper crop (ehhh...somewhere)...