@Kyeh@phendrick interesting images and memories. The Japan garden might be any good garden but looks like the Portland Japanese Garden if you visit Portland, OR, right next to the famous rose garden. Once we were there on a tour and they introduced us to one of the gardeners who was meticulously pruning the moss using tweezers.
The Garden of the Gods is where my (new) wife and I and some family members went after our informal wedding in Colorado Springs. Great place to take short walks and get great photos.
@Kyeh@tinamarie1974 it does sound good. The weeds sometimes have nice flowers if you let them. Dandelions actually have nice yellow flowers until they turn into those round things you can blow on and get lots of flying dandelion seeds; very fun as a kid. Also funny when I saw bunches of dandelion leaves at a local market; apparently a very good healthy salad addition as long as they haven’t been toxicated by weed killers. I like diverse “ pasture” lawns but sadly my neighbor seems to want everything to be toxic bright green monoculture looking like a golf course.
@spacemart black locust doesn’t have the thorns that honey locust has, people often confuse the two. We harvest the walnuts cause they’re delicious. Trees have all been around for over a decade with no issues!
@nobile@spacemart We have a large black walnut tree - it makes nice shade, but the nuts are quite bitter so we leave them to the squirrels. (We have high hopes for the two English walnuts that we planted a few years ago.)
@macromeh@spacemart I love the contrast of that bitter flavour and something sweet like fruits. They also make fantastic pralines, so they make for good holiday treats.
@Tadlem43 was talking to my neighbor, they had garden beds and one wasn’t used yet this year. I mentioned that it looked like a lot of “volunteer” tomatoes. Already the yellow flowers and they said probably wait a but we can share good “free” tomatoes this year.
Too well.
I have often said that I wonder if I’m planting on an old nuclear dump or something. Many of the plants we’ve bought over the last (almost) 40 years here have grown to be over twice as big as they were supposed to. It’s led to things being planted, then transplanted (sometimes more than once) as they overgrew their space in the landscape.
We have tons of flowers (annuals and perennials), trees (decorative, as well as nut & fruit), grape vines, a veggie garden, herbs, melons (cantaloupe & watermelons), asparagus, blueberry bushes, and this year I started a chayote. Looking forward to seeing how that does.
Oh, and the goldfish pond out front has aquatic plants in it…
We have an ok sized (15’ x 12’) vegetable garden, but we (more Mrs. H.) loves the flowers. Our entire house and patio are surrounded by flowers. I think we have around 30 pots of flowers. We have one flower bed that is a 25’ x 5’ rectangle (which has ~95 different plants in it BTW). PS: my job is to keep the lawn looking nice so that it doesn’t detract from the (her) flower show.
@tohar1 How can you decide what veggies to plant? I was thinking “stuff we buy” but I subscribe to a CSA garden box and their vegetables and fruits are way nicer than anything I could grow at home. I thought “radishes” but nobody will eat them! And it’s getting late in the season… might be picking watermelons for Thanksgiving at this point, if the bunnies don’t eat the plants first…
@2palms Mostly by what we like to eat. We typically have bell & hot peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, tomatillo, zucchini, eggplant & then herbs like basil (3 varieties), chives, oregano, mint (3 varieties) are all staples. We like green beans & peas, but it just depends on Ma Nature whether we get to plant those or not.
@2palms@tohar1
That sounds pretty much like what’s in my garden. I don’t do corn because unless you plant a large plot it’s very susceptible to wind damage. It also matures all at the same time so you have to eat the stew out of it or put it up. Processing 200 ears of corn in the dead of Summer is not a pleasant task. OTOH I’m rotten tomatoes, peppers, eggplant are all so much more tasty than what you get in the store. I’ve been planting carrots radishes and beets in the spring and fall since it’s much too hot here to grow them in the summer
We used to have 2 vegetable gardens and several flower gardens. Then my wife noticed that we were spending an inordinate amount of time feeding the local deer herds, which appear already fat enough. The veggie gardens are primarily grass now, and the flower gardens are behind trellises and deer/bird netting. But the deer are still fat (and sometimes get past the netting).
@2palms@mehcuda67 We have suffered the deer browsing in our vegetable garden for years, but this spring I put up a 6 foot tall chain link fence around most of it. So far, so good…
(And yesterday we deployed netting over the blueberry patch to dissuade the birds.)
@2palms@macromeh That sounds effective! Unfortunately our neighborhood association is not a fan of chain link fences. A couple of years ago I designed and set up a barely visible electric fence, as we have friends that used that to great effect. My limited experience was that the effectiveness seems to be a function of intelligence/daringness of the critter. Adult deer - “Let’s move to an easier garden.”
Young deer - “Let’s get tangled in the fence and short it out.”
Squirrels - “Ow! What was that?! Let’s get some food! Ow! What was that again?! Let’s get some more food!”
Unfortunately that was about the time that my better half decided to throw in the towel (and the amount of traveling we were doing wasn’t conducive to a good garden, either). Since I wasn’t going to do all the gardening myself, thus ended the garden and my science experiment.
We have a garden again this year! Can you tell I’m excited? My 9-year-old daughter is “helping” (putting lots of flower seeds in the ground) and we got a gift card to the local nursery that meant we started with some “plants” (not just dollar-store seed packets). So far the recognizable sprouts are purslane, amaranthus, dandelion, and cheese mallow – all weeds that were probably dormant seed from lots of years of fallow. Plus the herbs and marigolds we planted from the nursery, sunflowers that are a foot tall, and a couple watermelon sprouts. It’s a motley assortment but it brings me so much peace – it’s planted at work, and I can take breaks and long phone calls out back; I changed my parking spot so I have to walk past it every morning and on the way home in the evening.
One fun project-in-progress is the “landscape cover” I built to conceal a couple PVC garden valves that’ve been exposed to the sun: after I repaired the water lines going to the garden area, I made a wooden box to (hopefully) deter vehicle traffic and protect the pipes from more sun damage: my daughter’s been painting it and we will eventually hang a hose on that side of the driveway.
We caught our first gopher of the season, and I made ‘lavender extract’ from the first few early stems/flowers of the season and a big batch of basil mayonnaise ; this week I’m going to try for “Lemon Verbena Vinaigrette”: the leaves are steeping in vinegar and once I strain them out I think I can make us up a salad dressing… oh, geez. Have I become one of those old coots who just wants to talk about his garden?
Most of our 30 PNW acres are covered with forest (20 acres are commercial timber farm). There are a couple of cleared acres near the road with buildings, lawn, orchard and vegetable garden.
growing up back east, we had a decent sized veggie garden - rhubarb, tomatoes!, zucchini, cukes, one year corn (wasn’t very good but it popped lol). now in the high dry desert of colorado, no veggies I wish I could!
My garden grows flowers bc i planted them but it also grows weeds bc the previous assholes planted things like carrots in the middle of the garden and shit.
@pakopako@Star2236 yeah. My neighbor thinks she has weeds because we don’t spray. Nature existed before humans. Seeds are engineered to be carried off all over the place. Weeds are just plants that you don’t want in a specific place. I actually get stoked when I find useful volunteers. Well most of the time.
All of the above.
But mostly the weeds.
@Kyeh Add a few rocks for balance.
(They don’t take much maintenance.)
/showme a garden with balanced rocks
@phendrick Here’s the image you requested for “a garden with balanced rocks”
@phendrick
/image Garden of the Gods Colorado
@mediocrebot Those in my image are a lot more uniform and symmetrical than many I’ve seen!
@phendrick Hmm. The /image is pretty, but I was hoping for this:
@Kyeh @phendrick interesting images and memories. The Japan garden might be any good garden but looks like the Portland Japanese Garden if you visit Portland, OR, right next to the famous rose garden. Once we were there on a tour and they introduced us to one of the gardeners who was meticulously pruning the moss using tweezers.
The Garden of the Gods is where my (new) wife and I and some family members went after our informal wedding in Colorado Springs. Great place to take short walks and get great photos.
@Kyeh Centuries of college students in this country and HOW is that rock still standing like that?
What is that shadow at the bottom of the balanced rock? Is that a small grotto of sorts?
@phendrick I think it’s just a recessed spot on the rock, not a real opening.
Veggies and herbs
@tinamarie1974 And don’t you have flowers too?
@Kyeh @tinamarie1974 it does sound good. The weeds sometimes have nice flowers if you let them. Dandelions actually have nice yellow flowers until they turn into those round things you can blow on and get lots of flying dandelion seeds; very fun as a kid. Also funny when I saw bunches of dandelion leaves at a local market; apparently a very good healthy salad addition as long as they haven’t been toxicated by weed killers. I like diverse “ pasture” lawns but sadly my neighbor seems to want everything to be toxic bright green monoculture looking like a golf course.
@Kyeh I do! Lots of flower beds and my raised garden (no flowers there, except for the ones that come before a veggie - ie tomato bud, etc)
Trees. I planted redbud, black walnut, tulip poplar, red maple, cucumber magnolia, black locust, and saucer magnolia.
@nobile omg walnut and locust are so obnoxious why would you plant them on purpose
@spacemart black locust doesn’t have the thorns that honey locust has, people often confuse the two. We harvest the walnuts cause they’re delicious. Trees have all been around for over a decade with no issues!
@nobile @spacemart We have a large black walnut tree - it makes nice shade, but the nuts are quite bitter so we leave them to the squirrels. (We have high hopes for the two English walnuts that we planted a few years ago.)
@macromeh @spacemart I love the contrast of that bitter flavour and something sweet like fruits. They also make fantastic pralines, so they make for good holiday treats.
Ideas!
I’m good at growing grass, but not flowers.
Is a grass garden a thing?
@phendrick yeah its called a lawn
@cevans125 @phendrick if you want to be a part of the aristocracy!
I didn’t plant one this year, but a rogue tomato plant popped up, from a fallen tomato from last year, I suppose. Weird!
@Tadlem43 was talking to my neighbor, they had garden beds and one wasn’t used yet this year. I mentioned that it looked like a lot of “volunteer” tomatoes. Already the yellow flowers and they said probably wait a but we can share good “free” tomatoes this year.
@Tadlem43
Actually the gelatinous stuff around tomato seeds makes them ideal candidates for “fallen fruit” sprouting and volunteers.
Too well.
I have often said that I wonder if I’m planting on an old nuclear dump or something. Many of the plants we’ve bought over the last (almost) 40 years here have grown to be over twice as big as they were supposed to. It’s led to things being planted, then transplanted (sometimes more than once) as they overgrew their space in the landscape.
We have tons of flowers (annuals and perennials), trees (decorative, as well as nut & fruit), grape vines, a veggie garden, herbs, melons (cantaloupe & watermelons), asparagus, blueberry bushes, and this year I started a chayote. Looking forward to seeing how that does.
Oh, and the goldfish pond out front has aquatic plants in it…
We have an ok sized (15’ x 12’) vegetable garden, but we (more Mrs. H.) loves the flowers. Our entire house and patio are surrounded by flowers. I think we have around 30 pots of flowers. We have one flower bed that is a 25’ x 5’ rectangle (which has ~95 different plants in it BTW). PS: my job is to keep the lawn looking nice so that it doesn’t detract from the (her) flower show.
@tohar1 How can you decide what veggies to plant? I was thinking “stuff we buy” but I subscribe to a CSA garden box and their vegetables and fruits are way nicer than anything I could grow at home. I thought “radishes” but nobody will eat them! And it’s getting late in the season… might be picking watermelons for Thanksgiving at this point, if the bunnies don’t eat the plants first…
@2palms Mostly by what we like to eat. We typically have bell & hot peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, tomatillo, zucchini, eggplant & then herbs like basil (3 varieties), chives, oregano, mint (3 varieties) are all staples. We like green beans & peas, but it just depends on Ma Nature whether we get to plant those or not.
@2palms @tohar1
That sounds pretty much like what’s in my garden. I don’t do corn because unless you plant a large plot it’s very susceptible to wind damage. It also matures all at the same time so you have to eat the stew out of it or put it up. Processing 200 ears of corn in the dead of Summer is not a pleasant task. OTOH I’m rotten tomatoes, peppers, eggplant are all so much more tasty than what you get in the store. I’ve been planting carrots radishes and beets in the spring and fall since it’s much too hot here to grow them in the summer
@2palms @chienfou @tohar1
Rotten?
@2palms @Kyeh @tohar1
Sigh… Stoopid voice to text… certain.
Thanks K
We used to have 2 vegetable gardens and several flower gardens. Then my wife noticed that we were spending an inordinate amount of time feeding the local deer herds, which appear already fat enough. The veggie gardens are primarily grass now, and the flower gardens are behind trellises and deer/bird netting. But the deer are still fat (and sometimes get past the netting).
@mehcuda67 Oh deer, sounds like a venison garden to me
Our problem is mostly gophers and squirrels!
@2palms Yes! Once the deer found the veggies (and flowers), all we had were ruminants of a garden.
@2palms @mehcuda67 We have suffered the deer browsing in our vegetable garden for years, but this spring I put up a 6 foot tall chain link fence around most of it. So far, so good…
(And yesterday we deployed netting over the blueberry patch to dissuade the birds.)
@2palms @macromeh That sounds effective! Unfortunately our neighborhood association is not a fan of chain link fences. A couple of years ago I designed and set up a barely visible electric fence, as we have friends that used that to great effect. My limited experience was that the effectiveness seems to be a function of intelligence/daringness of the critter. Adult deer - “Let’s move to an easier garden.”
Young deer - “Let’s get tangled in the fence and short it out.”
Squirrels - “Ow! What was that?! Let’s get some food! Ow! What was that again?! Let’s get some more food!”
Unfortunately that was about the time that my better half decided to throw in the towel (and the amount of traveling we were doing wasn’t conducive to a good garden, either). Since I wasn’t going to do all the gardening myself, thus ended the garden and my science experiment.
We have a garden again this year! Can you tell I’m excited? My 9-year-old daughter is “helping” (putting lots of flower seeds in the ground) and we got a gift card to the local nursery that meant we started with some “plants” (not just dollar-store seed packets). So far the recognizable sprouts are purslane, amaranthus, dandelion, and cheese mallow – all weeds that were probably dormant seed from lots of years of fallow. Plus the herbs and marigolds we planted from the nursery, sunflowers that are a foot tall, and a couple watermelon sprouts. It’s a motley assortment but it brings me so much peace – it’s planted at work, and I can take breaks and long phone calls out back; I changed my parking spot so I have to walk past it every morning and on the way home in the evening.
One fun project-in-progress is the “landscape cover” I built to conceal a couple PVC garden valves that’ve been exposed to the sun: after I repaired the water lines going to the garden area, I made a wooden box to (hopefully) deter vehicle traffic and protect the pipes from more sun damage: my daughter’s been painting it and we will eventually hang a hose on that side of the driveway.
We caught our first gopher of the season, and I made ‘lavender extract’ from the first few early stems/flowers of the season and a big batch of basil mayonnaise ; this week I’m going to try for “Lemon Verbena Vinaigrette”: the leaves are steeping in vinegar and once I strain them out I think I can make us up a salad dressing… oh, geez. Have I become one of those old coots who just wants to talk about his garden?
(You asked!!)
My cousin dropped by while I was out. Weeded my yard.
Which, while necessary (they were growing over the first floor windows), also meant they removed my onions, tulips, squash, and orchids.
@pakopako
@pakopako Oh nooo! Worse than the deer is when the dear are the ones uprooting all your crops
@pakopako
Oh, that’s awful. 
@Kyeh @pakopako
Wow! That’s cool that you grow orchids!!
@chienfou @Kyeh it wasn’t intentional
Most of our 30 PNW acres are covered with forest (20 acres are commercial timber farm). There are a couple of cleared acres near the road with buildings, lawn, orchard and vegetable garden.
growing up back east, we had a decent sized veggie garden - rhubarb, tomatoes!, zucchini, cukes, one year corn (wasn’t very good but it popped lol). now in the high dry desert of colorado, no veggies
I wish I could!
My garden grows flowers bc i planted them but it also grows weeds bc the previous assholes planted things like carrots in the middle of the garden and shit.
@Star2236 carrots incur weeds? I always thought it was the starlings pooping seeds from everywhere.
@pakopako @Star2236 yeah. My neighbor thinks she has weeds because we don’t spray. Nature existed before humans. Seeds are engineered to be carried off all over the place. Weeds are just plants that you don’t want in a specific place. I actually get stoked when I find useful volunteers. Well most of the time.
@pakopako @sillyheathen
Your garden looks great
This was from a few weeks ago
This is from yesterday
I actually made carbonara with the peas today.