Do you have a vegetable garden &/or grow any Fruit trees? What time & effort do you put into it, and what do you grow?

[Dasmoetorhead]

We have Blueberries, and blackberries in our garden. We let the birds feed on them. We also had a family of foxes this year, and the Kits loved the Blueberries.

 

[Little Blue]

Another great story about my Mother is this one.

When I was 7 years old, one of my summer jobs/chores was to help my older siblings pick peas. Each of us had to pick a bucket of peas after we had breakfast. Then for a nickel a bowl, we could shell out the peas. I usually did four bowls and earned 20 cents.

That was because of the ice cream shop just down the street. I would buy two scoops for 20 cents. What a real treat! Man, that was good ice cream!

Those were the good ole days.

 

[Little Blue]

My tomato plants are looking good.
We have enjoyed three wonderful tomatoes so far. The rabbits are having a field day on my peas.
Oh well, that's the way it goes.

Keep on growing and enjoy the good things of your Life.

 

[Dutchy]

Dam I have to log on a bit more I am missing all the hot gossip and my wife is the gardener.

 

[Little Blue]

Well, @Dutchy post up about your garden experience. Love to read them.
Gotta Love those pesky rabbits.

 

[jdgretz]

Now that things have decided to grow, there's not much work in keeping them going other than ongoing weed pulling and occasionally tilling the soil.

In the parkway (between the sidewalk and street) we have English and French Lavender, cooking sage, Rosemary, and California wild flowers. In the front yard, there is a Pear Tree, an avocado tree, multi-graft citrus (plum, nectarine, orange, tangerine), sweet Grapefruit (not at all bitter - don't know how I found this one, but I'm glad I did), Meyer's Lemon, grapes, and a cherry tree. The wife recently planted watermelon, zucchini, and a couple of other things that I forget. Closer to the house, we have a large cherry tree, a fig tree, three kinds of blue berries, mint, and some other herbs.

The wife makes a wonderful lemon and lavender marmalade out of the front yard.

It took a couple of years to get the soil to where it would allow stuff other than weeds to grow. Now it just takes water and pruning. I have a drip system installed and we also hand water.

No lawn!

jdg

 

[Little Blue]

Now that things have decided to grow, there's not much work in keeping them going other than ongoing weed pulling and occasionally tilling the soil.

In the parkway (between the sidewalk and street) we have English and French Lavender, cooking sage, Rosemary, and California wild flowers. In the front yard, there is a Pear Tree, an avocado tree, multi-graft citrus (plum, nectarine, orange, tangerine), sweet Grapefruit (not at all bitter - don't know how I found this one, but I'm glad I did), Meyer's Lemon, grapes, and a cherry tree. The wife recently planted watermelon, zucchini, and a couple of other things that I forget. Closer to the house, we have a large cherry tree, a fig tree, three kinds of blue berries, mint, and some other herbs.

The wife makes a wonderful lemon and lavender marmalade out of the front yard.

It took a couple of years to get the soil to where it would allow stuff other than weeds to grow. Now it just takes water and pruning. I have a drip system installed and we also hand water.

No lawn!

jdg

Sounds like a good piece of work. But on the other hand it has it's value. How much water do you use?

Any pictures of your on your garden/yard.

 

[jdgretz]

Sounds like a good piece of work. But on the other hand it has it's value. How much water do you use?

Any pictures of your on your garden/yard.

My wife is a certified Permaculture Design specialist through the Jeff Lawton school in Australia, so that helped in the entire design process as well as ongoing modifications and additions. She had/has a plan. I just get out of the way and let her do her thing.

As to how much water? That's hard to quantify since the irrigation use is not separable from total household use. Hand watering and the drip system and much more efficient than the old sprinkler system my dad and I installed back in 1957/58 to keep the dichronda and clover lawns nice and green.

I'll take some current photos tomorrow. Last ones I took are 6 years old now. A lot has changed.

jdg

 

[jdgretz]

Here is what the front yard looked like six years ago.

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The trench is from the wife finding an old irrigation ditch from when this area was a citrus farm.

Today it looks more like this:

-

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The thing that looks like it is falling over is holding up a Dragon Fruit plant.

jdg

 

[Little Blue]

Nice Pictures of your garden. Thanks for sharing.

 

[Tango]

We have a lemon tree and fig tree. This past winter devastated the lemon tree. Had to trim it way back to get rid of dead branches. The ones that survived are not as healthy as they shoud be. Last year we had over 36 lemons. So far we have three this year that have made it. The fig tree? It's running wild. Little to no maintenance. Lots of fruit.

 

[canamjhb]

My Snowbird neighbor would get potted cherry tomatoes from another neighbor each year. They would pass them on to me when they left town for the summer. It was amazing how many tomatoes we could harvest from a couple of potted plants. Just required daily water but eventually succumbed to the desert heat. There is an abundance of citrus trees in the area... orange, lemon, grapefruit, tangelo, etc. We have several crews of volunteers who will pick the fruit upon request, bag it, and place it on big tables in the parking lot for all to enjoy... free. Kinda like share cropping. Two or three citrus trees will produce more fruit than any one family can reasonably use. We have a good system for sharing and it keeps the fruit from falling to the ground where it would attract pests and rot.....

 

[canamjhb]

We have a lemon tree and fig tree. This past winter devastated the lemon tree. Had to trim it way back to get rid of dead branches. The ones that survived are not as healthy as they shoud be. Last year we had over 36 lemons. So far we have three this year that have made it. The fig tree? It's running wild. Little to no maintenance. Lots of fruit.

My (very) limited experience with fruit trees is that production can vary widely from one season to another. And, sometimes, they just "time-out". A heavy fruit production can leave little energy to produce buds for the following season.......

 

[Bfromla]

Found this in YouTube, I believe itwas at one of the Disney parks.

 

[Tslepebull]

We have two 3x5' raised beds (14" tall) with galvanized sheet metal frames. During the summer we raise banana peppers in one and bells and jalapenos in the other. In the winter we raise collard greens and herbs.

 

[pegasus1300]

Well, the wife's garden (see post 17) yielded exactly 6 tomatoes, everything else died of thirst. The hurricanes that hit California however, have given us much needed rain and the lawn now looks really nice. Lake Powell has risen 22 feet because of all the rain. The drought is not over, but we did end the water year on a high note and began the new water year in good shape for a change.

 

[Peter Aawen]

It's late Spring here in South Oz, and I've been slowly turning in the last of what's left of our the Winter crops; planting this season's/years varieties; and putting in a few of those other veggies that'll take a while to grow. All up, we took close on 100kg of citrus fruit off each of our Lemon and Lime trees, maybe only half of that off the young Mandarin tree; and both the Lemon and Lime trees already have another crop ripening and a whole heap of flowers setting for next season too. The Mandarin tree is still young & fairly small, and I don't want to push it too hard just yet, so I've pruned it back to keep it to a light crop for this season so that it'll put more effort into growing a healthy root system and establishing a strong base tree for the coming years.

I've already got bumper crops of carrots and new potatoes coming on, and we've only just finished picking the last of last season's carrots, tomatoes, broccolini, brussels, cabbage, cauliflower, cucumbers, and red beetroot - we've got some of all that lot preserved/stored/frozen, and our garden kept the extended family and a few neighbours well supplied with all those veggies all thru Winter too, but right now, we're basically between harvests, so we're not getting a heap from the garden (besides citrus) except small amounts of onions, celery, lettuce, strawberries, snow peas, new potatoes, and spinach (the proper stuff, not silver beet), altho I do have new plantings of everything going into their new plots as and when they're ready.

And I did lift, divide, and replant the best of the few rhubarb plants that I had last year as they started to wake up this Spring, so I've now got a couple of really healthy plots of rhubarb going gangbuster out there too - we're taking about 20kg of stalks as long as your fore-arm and thicker than your thumb off those plots every couple of days! I don't think we'll need for too much more than what's already coming on!

The hardest part of all this atm is keeping an eye on it - what with the humidity, rain, and changeable weather that we don't usually have here at this time of year, all the plants seem to be perpetually right on the brink of bolting to seed! If I don't keep an eye on them and removing any stalks as soon as they appear, just one single plant bolting will trigger all the rest too, so within a day we can have a whole bed of bolted veggies that've ALL gone to seed!!

So I'm watching very carefully!

 

[Little Blue]

Wow, that's awesome stuff about your gardening. I'm lucky
to get 10% of the stuff you guys get. We don't have a compost
pile any more. The wife said we were getting to many 'bad' critters.
So we have stopped for the last three years. Now we just use our
leaves.

Have you done anything to help your soil?
Do you use chemicals or anything like that
on your garden?

 

[UtahPete]

And I did lift, divide, and replant the best of the few rhubarb plants that I had last year as they started to wake up this Spring, so I've now got a couple of really healthy plots of rhubarb going gangbuster out there too - we're taking about 20kg of stalks as long as your fore-arm and thicker than your thumb off those plots every couple of days! I don't think we'll need for too much more than what's already coming on!

The hardest part of all this atm is keeping an eye on it - what with the humidity, rain, and changeable weather that we don't usually have here at this time of year, all the plants seem to be perpetually right on the brink of bolting to seed! If I don't keep an eye on them and removing any stalks as soon as they appear, just one single plant bolting will trigger all the rest too, so within a day we can have a whole bed of bolted veggies that've ALL gone to seed!!

So I'm watching very carefully!

You're overthinking it, Peter. That's why God invented grocery stores. Ryde more, garden less!

Anyhow, our growing season here in the Utah mountains at 6700' is pretty short, and edible crops are pretty much non-existent (unless you like crabapples). Nothing like where I lived in California a lifetime ago.

 

[Peter Aawen]

You're overthinking it, Peter. That's why God invented grocery stores. Ryde more, garden less!

...

Due to the accumulated damage I've scored over the years, I can only manage about 10 minutes at a time doing most things in the garden before I hafta go off and do something else involving less mobility, like checking on the Forum; going for a ride; maybe sitting on my mechanic's stool spinning a spanner or two; &/or maybe swapping war-ies with one of my regular visitors, Spyder Ryders and others... So I only poke around in the garden in short spurts, and all up, I probably only spend about an hour, maybe an hour and a half total each day actually doing things in the veggie garden. Besides, apart from watering and a little bit of weeding, thinning, etc, it basically tends to look after itself once things are actually growing, and I just hafta go pick whatever stuff the Chef decides we'll need today - so I've still got plenty of time for riding.

...

Have you done anything to help your soil?
Do you use chemicals or anything like that
on your garden?

When they first opened up this area to housing, the developers took all the good topsoil off and sold it elsewhere, so when we bought and built here back in the early 2000's, there wasn't much topsoil left at all - what was left was sorta OK for building houses on, but really not good at all for growing anything!! So while the soil we have here now is pretty good stuff, that's only because it's been an ongoing development project from day dot, involving as little as possible in the way of chemicals and as much organic mulch & compost as I can make, find, beg, borrow, or steal!

At any given moment, I've generally got three active composts 'heaps' cooking away, two on the go for the veggie garden, which take pretty much all the general sorta stuff you'd expect, altho I do keep one of those two as a 'special' or 'more particular' heap, carefully checking and managing everything going in and coming out of it; and apart from those two, there's also one more compost heap that serves the native garden I have out the front, surrounding my sorry patch of rabbit traumatised lawn. It only gets local native material added, and none of them get rabbits or rabbit components added - any of those pesky critters 'caught' around here are simply waaaay too worm and disease infested!!