The FastDay Forum

[janeg]

Please everyone, keep posting about your gardens, exploits and put up photos! I enjoy it so much and thank each and every one of you to allow me a peek into your horticultural life. I have no garden now, no need for composting (that is really hard!) and a complete lack of wild food and polyculture in the 'municipal ' gardens. The Miracle Garden boast 7 million plants. You can see from pictures and from passing that they are all petunias - aarrghghgh.
So looking forward to going back to UK for a holiday and getting to play in the dirt.
Thanks everyone for helping with my sanity

I'm going to attempt to post a photo of our weekend harvest.
Nope can't do it. We picked kipfler potatoes, kale, cavalo Nero and snow peas.

[janeg]

drool @Wineoclock. Are kipfler potatoes a variety?
I grew veg but it was hard with such an exposed plot and short growing season. The garden I had second last was built fem scratch. The aim was to be able to fill my hellish looking vase with flowers from the grade. It took about 10 years and was a great sense of achievement.
I loved just plucking the odd bloom or rescuing flowers and putting them in wee vases dotted about, as well as filling bigger vases.
And a great feeling picking and eating your own produce.

Yay! My snow peas are up! Lucky you, @wineoclock, eating them already! Mine are just little spiky shoots above the ground. What sort of climbing frame do you have?

[wildmissus]

I'm really excited. I have flowers on my cucumbers and cherry tomatoes. I've never grown either of these before as I don't have a green house. However I was chatting away to a friend recently and he told me that even up here in the chilly north you can grow them outside in a pot on the patio. So being someone who will try anything once I ordered plug plants online, potted them up and brought them on in the kitchen and now they are very happy outside on my sunny (when we get the sun) patio.

@janeg, yes they are a potato variety. We planted them at the wrong time but a friend had given them to us and it was plant or throw out. I'm so glad we planted as they are doing really well.
@Sallyo hubby built a frame with timber stakes and twine. Then the snow peas went berserk and kept growing so now they are falling down. It's really windy here today so I hope they don't blow off.
Now it's confession time - it's really hubby who does all the gardening - it's in his blood. I'm happy to water and pick and cook and eat

[janeg]

That makes a good team @Wineoclock

I'd love to post a picture, but I can't find anyway to do that with the regular editor without having the picture already uploaded to an URL somewhere. What am I missing?

You can post it direct, but it needs to be smaller than 400 X 600 pixels (I think). Do the upload attachment and hunt for the picture. You will probably need to adjust the size first. I usually have two pictures at once on my harddrive, one is the picture I took, the other is the same picture edited (shrunk) for this forum picture, labelled slightly different so I don't get them mixed up.

Thanks! It's letting me post one, then I will have to go fiddle with the other. .

Here is the view of the garden from the dining room window.

Here is the view of the garden from my dining room window

Here's a closer picture. Unfortunately, it doesn't look all that much like the way the garden looks as you lose the detail.

gardenSmall.jpg (110.48 KiB) Viewed 315 times

There is a 100 foot long narrow rock garden carved into the base of the cliff behind the house, too, but it is impossible to get enough it into a picture so it looks like what it is. It has a fairy door and a fairy, too, which is my favorite part.

Nice garden @peebles
Well I just learned that snails have teeth, makes sense, but 15000 teeth??? No wonder they can chomp through so much stuff

Not enough ducks, Wineoclock. Great garden snaps, Peebles. It's often the way: photos can't capture the beauty. I see there are patches in my row of snow peas where there are not green spikes. Maybe birds have scratched them up in those places. I am thinking of the trellis. I have a line of x-tomato stakes and some rio grid tied up, but it doesn't go very high. So I am thinking: encourage the OH to prune the apple tree and use prunings to create a lattice for the peas to climb on. Should work. I am reading books about permaculture at the moment and last Sunday went to a talk. Very inspiring and makes me think in a different way about the garden. That 'too many snails/ not enough ducks' is a permaculture idea.

I am so much enjoying, (and am so proud of), eating all my tomatoes from the summer, preserved in all kinds of ways. And I still have a basil plant in a pot in the window of the kitchen.

[janeg]

Lovely view @peebles it just leads you right into the garden. @Sallyo used prunings for years to hold up all manner of plants - very successful and seems environmentally sound too,. No waste!

I have to race the birds to my ripe blueberries, they won last year - I got 3!! - but there's a bumper crop this year so hoping, as always, for the best :0)

Hi @Azureblue, I stop the birds stealing every one of my redcurrants by hanging old CDs and DVDs on canes around the fruit, back to back with the shiny side out. It sends pretty lights swirling all around the garden in the slightest breeze and it works, I no longer have to net the fruit. The only birds that it doesn't scare away are the pheasants which so far haven't taken an interest in the fruit - they prefer my brassicas but that's another story!