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Gardening

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I think I need to take up gardening now. I have never grown a thing or even kept a potted plant but I’ve got to have some genetic memory of all the generations of Ukrainian peasants who toiled on the land, right?

So what should a person who has no idea about gardening do as her first step? Is there some book or a website? Are there gardening outfits?

Also, if we move in on May 31, is it too late to plant some flowers? And does anybody know if it makes sense to plant decorative red thyme in Southern Illinois?

When I ask people I know these questions, they begin to make fun because the idea of me gardening seems too extreme. But I learned to drive and I go to two different gyms, so change is possible. Especially, given the genetic memory.

28 responses to “Gardening”

  1. Sandra Heine Merchant Avatar
    Sandra Heine Merchant

    Contact your local County Extension Service, and speak with whoever runs their Master Gardener program. It’s a free service.

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  2. Katrine Avatar
    Katrine

    I think it’s a great idea, just start small f.e. a patch of 3×3 meters (or smaller) in a sunny and plan area.

    Outfit: Gloves! Gardening gloves to be specific. Other than that, you only need comfortable shoes, pants and a t-shirt. Mud can be hard to get off, so you may want to use an old outfit.

    Equipment: A shovel, a watering can, a rake, maybe a fork (big one, not tablesize), a small shovel, fertilizer, a pillow (for your knees, having to weed without one can be hard).

    I think you would love tagetes, it is a very pretty flower and it will grow fast. You don’t have to worry about beginning in June, I planted mine last year in Juli and they were blooming two weeks later and kept their flowers until the frost began (late November).
    According to Wikipedia thyme love being somewhere hot and sunny so Southern Illinois sounds ok.

    I hope you will enjoy gardening, if nothing else, it really shouldn’t be as hard to learn/do as driving.

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      Thank you for the suggestions! I looked up tagetes and they are beautiful.

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      1. Katrine Avatar
        Katrine

        You are welcome 🙂

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  3. NancyP Avatar
    NancyP

    Come to the Missouri Botanical Garden (www.mobot.org) AKA “Shaw’s Garden” in St. Louis, a 30-40 min. drive from your town. There is a gardening center with examples of plants, and more importantly, with live experts to answer questions (check ahead, the question desk is not always staffed). Also, you can email questions, attend a class, etc. Here’s a resource page:
    http://www.missouribotanicalgarden.org/gardens-gardening/your-garden/help-for-the-home-gardener.aspx

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      Thank you for the link, NancyP!

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      1. NancyP Avatar
        NancyP

        You are welcome. The Botanical Garden is an amazing place. BTW, thanks for restoring the old gravatars. I rather like being a floppy-eared dog.

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  4. David Bellamy Avatar
    David Bellamy

    Start by buying green onions and planting the roots in the ground. They will grow into large round onions. Then graduate to lettuce and spinach. It may be too late for lettuce and spinach in the spring, but you can have a fall crop of them. They will not do well in the summer heat, only spring and fall. If you go to a seed store and read seed packets, there will be basic instructions on the packages. I have raised tomatoes and okra, in addition to these. I think beets are also easy to grow, so you can be prepared to make your borscht from home-grown beets.

    If it is flowers you want, instead of food crops, I suggest reading Mary Anne Mohanraj’s blog, which I have suggested to you previously.

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  5. Ol. Avatar
    Ol.

    Let your ancestors speak through your fingers.

    I would plant rhubarb and espárragos. You can forget about tem once planted and they never fail. Also, if you are planning to stay at your house for a while, plant raspberry plants! And a peachtree!

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    1. Ol. Avatar
      Ol.

      And blueberries! Although this may be too complicated.

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    2. Stille (@aperfectbalance) Avatar
      Stille (@aperfectbalance)

      This might sound obvious as hell, but if you plant edibles, make sure they’re edibles you actually like. We have 2 very large, extremely fruitful plum trees in our garden because I was eating plums on the roof and spitting the seeds in the garden one afternoon 15 years ago. Each of them fills a 30-l barrel with fruit every year, which we have to collect since otherwise the whole garden and a bit of the neighbours’ garden get covered in rotting plums. We maybe eat a few pounds of plums a year. There’s jars of plum jam in the basement that are as much as 5 years old. I’ve managed to exchange some of them for rose jam 2 years ago at 10/1 parity but seriously, our friends are getting bored of plums and plum jam too so I’m not sure what we’ll do about the plumpocalypse . And the damn trees keep growing.

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      1. ¡No Pasarán! (@nopasa) Avatar
        ¡No Pasarán! (@nopasa)

        Have you considered “growing” a still ?

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        1. Clarissa Avatar
          Clarissa

          What’s a still?

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      2. Stille (@aperfectbalance) Avatar
        Stille (@aperfectbalance)

        That’d involve dealing with the local tax man, even if we didn’t sell the stuff. Stupid stupid alcohol laws.

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      3. Clarissa Avatar
        Clarissa

        Plumpocalypse is my new favorite word. 🙂

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      4. Stille (@aperfectbalance) Avatar
        Stille (@aperfectbalance)

        A still is a piece of equipment used to distill liquids. You can get booze to about 14-15% alcohol by normal fermentation, so if you want to go higher without fancy aging, you need to distill it. Alcohol boils at a lower temperature than water, so if you boil the plum cider, collect the first steam and cool it back to liquid, you end up with plum brandy.

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  6. Ol. Avatar
    Ol.

    I am now convinced that in twenty years you will win the first price for the most beautiful roses in the county, prices that you will pick up in your car.

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    1. cliff arroyo Avatar
      cliff arroyo

      “you will win the first price for the most beautiful roses in the county, prices that you will pick up in your car” ….and accompaned by your dog.

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  7. Tim Avatar
    Tim

    You could try growing garden cress. That is really hard to fuck up, even as a double-lefthander. It is guaranteed success! 😀

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      Never heard of it! That means I should definitely check it out. 🙂

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  8. Jones Avatar
    Jones

    One useful thing that the USDA does is that it produces a map of growing regions, since the US has several major climate regions and many sub-regions. I believe there are at least twelve major climate regions on the USDA map.

    In some parts of the US, such as in the Pacific Northwest, you can drive fifty miles and enter a completely different growing region. This is why the map helps.

    For instance, it looks like there are several growing sub-regions for Illinois:

    http://planthardiness.ars.usda.gov/PHZMWeb/

    If you are far enough south in Illinois, you should have few troubles. Anything that would grow from the Carolinas up through Pennsylvania should grow where you are.

    When you decide you’re going to grow things from seed, and be a grower of food in addition to pretty plants, you’ll know precisely what to order based on the USDA growing region number. If you decide you want heirloom vegetables from a small organic seed provider in Vermont, for instance, you’ll have enough information to know what would work and what probably won’t work.

    Try growing some chiles — I was able to grow them in tropical and sub-tropical environments, even though they supposedly grow better in desert sun.

    Some dried aji mirasol chiles would brighten things up considerably …

    Forget the flowers — chile ristras are much prettier. 🙂

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      Very interesting! We have what amounts to desert sun in the long summers, so chiles might work.

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  9. FD Avatar
    FD

    So, I have to confess to some experience with this; when I turned 30, gardening awoke in me like a latent disease in the blood and now I spend more money on it per annum than books even. (Nobody in my generation, or my parent’s generation are farmers, but go back to my greatgrands and 7 out of eight sets were farmers; the eight were a herring girl and a fisherman, and her family were fishers/ subsidence farmers. And the first thing the Admiral did when he retired was plant a garden!)

    The primary thing that I have learned: there is a place for every plant and a plant for every place.
    Corollary to this is that growing the right plant in the right place is easy; if it isn’t then you’ve either misdiagnosed the place or plant.
    The first step is to work out what zone you are in climate wise; that will to a large extent determine what you can grow.
    The next is to work out whether your soil is acid, alkaline or neutral, you can either ph test it or identity what already grows and determine soil type from that; e.g. if you have rhododendrons, you almost certainly have acid soil.
    Step three is whether your garden is wet clay/dry sand/ in between loam. Most people have dry patches and wet patches which is great because it means you can grow lots of different things.
    Step four is it sunny or shady?
    Armed with those bits of knowledge, you can start thinking of things to grow. My first year I grew a lot of annual flowers like tagetes, petunias, lobelia, sweet peas and bedding begonias (these grow flower and die all in the same year) and some vegetables; onion sets, runner beans, peas, mangetout, potatoes, tomatoes in pots. All of those should grow well for you if planted now or soonish (as long as you aren’t expecting more below freezing weather) – you might have to start the tomatoes inside or buy small plants to grow on – they need a good long growing season here not sure about where you are. As a side note, flowers / veg are not alternatives to each other; you need flowers to attract pollinators (bees, hoverflies etc) so that your vegetables will crop properly!

    My second year I spent the winter planning and saved up my money to buy seeds and plug plants of perennials (plants that die back overwinter then regrow in spring) plus some annuals because many perennial plants won’t flower their first year.
    This has continued the pattern; I didn’t know what I wanted besides roses when I started, but gradually my ideas have evolved and changed – I discovered peonies my second year and they continue to ravish my heart – I have thirty odd now and still collecting!

    Visit other gardens; there are often local open garden schemes and those often give better ideas of what is achievable locally than formal park gardens.

    Ahem. As you can see, gardens can rather become a source of passion; I am possibly the least creative person you will ever meet (can’t sing, dance, draw, act, play music, not any of the creative arts and believe me I’ve tried a few!) but I can grow beautiful things and that’s a balm to the soul.

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    1. FD Avatar
      FD

      So, this captures almost how I feel about my peonies… and it’s a good description of how gardens grow in your heart.
      http://echidneofthesnakes.blogspot.co.uk/2006/02/first-draft-of-short-story.html

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    2. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      Ah, I can see I have a passionate gardener among my readers! This is great news because I will be blogging about the results if my efforts at length.

      Thank you for the great comment!!

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  10. el Avatar
    el

    What can you plant, according to the rules and amount of land? I would love to plant a cherry tree, if it wouldn’t keep light away from the house. 🙂

    Or you could grow organic tomatoes or any other costy and/or hard to buy vegetable.

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      I haven’t read the whole by-laws yet because the thing is enormous. I want to start small with some flowers, annuals mostly.

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  11. Carole West Avatar
    Carole West

    Step on over to my blog – it’s all I talk about. First thing is you need a plan – where you want your garden and what you want to grow. Start small so you don’t get overwhelmed and enjoy the process. Come on over to GardenUp green. – A good book is The Backyard Homestead -Carole

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