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I have voles in my yard that are little assholes that delight in biting all of the stems off of plants. I have to anxiously run my hands over everything to see if half of the plant is detached because they don't even eat it, they just leave it there. I applied some castor oil based repellent to the gardens and put in some sonic stakes. I'm not convinced that either is working; while I haven't had any plants get ravaged since, I have seen voles lurking near the gardens. Anyone had any success getting them to gently caress off? There's a bunch of woods bordering my property so trying to trap them all seems likely to be futile. Also, while I'm asking, anyone had any particular success with any of the many squirrel repellents? They like to try and dig poo poo up right after I plant it (though at least they leave it alone afterwards) and I'd like to plant some bulbs in the fall. Wallet fucked around with this message at 16:15 on Jul 26, 2020 |
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Jul 26, 2020 16:11
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Hexigrammus posted:Cats. Voles are fat, slow, and dumb even for small rodents so they're easy prey. Unfortunately I live too close to major roads for it to be responsible to have an outdoor cat, but I am intrigued enough by your bucket strategy to try it. Are you baiting it or anything?
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Jul 26, 2020 20:15
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CommonShore posted:I'm also having trouble finding access to soil testing in my area - my search has been providing lots of dead links and poor, ambiguous websites, or redirects to services in other countries. The easiest sources of soil testing around here are major public universities, but given that you said you're getting results in other countries I'm guessing you might not be in the US? All of the labs here were also closed for quite a while and have just started accepting samples again for a limited subset of tests, so depending on how the pandemic is going in your area that could make life a lot harder. Do you have a Master Gardener Association or something similar in your area? Ours used to do free soil test events and their website provides a lot of information about sources for soil testing
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Jul 27, 2020 17:41
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Kaiser Schnitzel posted:My sunflowers are too tall and are falling over and the petals have fallen off all the flowers and they look a little sad. Could I cut them back to like chest height? Will they make new growth/flowers, or would that be end of them? It's my first time growing sunflowers. I like the little individual metal plant supports you can get for like 50¢ at Ocean State Job Lot or insert local discount chain.
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Jul 28, 2020 18:55
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Harry Potter on Ice posted:I'm going to have to grab those next year. I did a ton of work labeling all the different indeterminate tomatoes I grew so I could cross reference the notebook with different watering schedules and fertilizer levels to see if I was making any positive difference and.. it turns out the old labels I used are not uv resistant so I have a ton of really nice identical faded blank labels lol. Plant Delights claims that Deco-Color Paint Pens work well for this (on Pylon labels, anyway). They'd probably know.
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Jul 30, 2020 00:51
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Ok Comboomer posted:I want to share all of my obnoxious millennial succulents and tropicals (a buncha my succulents are flowering There has historically been a lot of indoor plant chat in the Plants thread which is why you probably aren't seeing a lot of it here but I think that kind of stuff is supposed to go in this thread now.
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Aug 2, 2020 23:02
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lil poopendorfer posted:Here's a cool tip I learned for anyone growing in containers that aren't draining quick enough. No need to re-pot or put in a smaller container, just pop a cloth of some kind in the bottom and it'll wick any perched water right out so you can water daily again. This is also a pro tip for emptying saucers on plants that are too heavy to easily move.
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Aug 13, 2020 16:02
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Jan posted:I'll try this next, I think it might be getting too late considering the amount of visible webbing the evil little fuckers are churning out. How did you apply the DE? A large shaker? Besides the pure logistics of getting the powder distributed you should make sure that you are doing so when it's dry. Moisture makes DE ineffective.
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Aug 17, 2020 14:01
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lil poopendorfer posted:Forgive my cross post please but I’d love your input: Depends on how ugly you are comfortable with it being and how much space you are trying to light. I didn't want massive purple light bars all over my living room and some of my plants would like a bit more light than they get through the windows so I ended up mounting 9 of these inexpensive gooseneck fixtures (after rewiring sets of them together so that I didn't need 9 timers or a bunch of cords running everywhere) and putting grow bulbs from GE in them. It seems to be working well and they don't have a horrendous color temperature. It looks like it's summer in my living room whenever the lights are on.
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Aug 21, 2020 15:33
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Jaded Burnout posted:Just sent this proposed layout to the landscapers. What's the second (little) fence for? Also the ~15 by 30 foot gravel patch next to the house seems like a lot unless you have a particular plan for it—you could fit in a nice little shade garden there or something. Wallet fucked around with this message at 22:24 on Sep 27, 2020 |
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Sep 27, 2020 22:14
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Sarah Bellum posted:I am an immigrant here and my gardener speaks only a few words of English and my Dutch, while passable, is insufficient to express my wishes and tastes to him. For my decorative plants, I want a very gothic, Morticia-Addams inspired colour scheme, combined with freaky, odd looking plants, and that everything else should be edible or medicinal, preferably native and non-invasive. I'll second the recommendation to check out the horticulture thread, but if what you really want is unusual plants you're probably going to have to devote a decent amount of time and attention to figuring out what unusual plants you want, finding them, etc. The list of plants you posted is pretty close to describing the stocking of the closest Home Depot, and the assembled collection isn't going to be unusual or particularly striking. My eyes sort of glaze over looking at the whole list. 29 of the most humdrum Carex imaginable would drive me insane. Based on what you're saying you may want to look into the many attractive varieties of rosemary/thyme/mint as an alternative to all of the Carex. There are lots of more interesting varieties of ornamental grasses that could replace stuff on the list—Andropogon gerardii 'Blackhawks' might fit your intended color scheme but I'm not exactly sure what a Morticia Addams inspired garden color scheme is since black isn't a color that shows up in living plants very often.
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Oct 10, 2020 02:11
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Bioshuffle posted:Talk hoses to me. I came really close to buying a Flexzilla, but the pictures of mold covered hoses on their amazon page scared me off. Which hoses are worth buying? I'm interested in durability. I think we talked about this recently, but if you get one of the not-super-cheap expandable hoses you can just not worry about how you're looping it. Some people seem to constantly break even the better ones but I have rather high water pressure and haven't had any issues, even with a 100' that sees regular use. I would be interested in what nozzles people have had good experiences with. After a number of the cheap ones breaking on me almost immediately I got one these which seems very durable so far but even on the spritziest setting I have enough water pressure to annihilate plants unless I gently caress around with the extra valves I have attached to control the flow.
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Oct 26, 2020 00:09
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mischief posted:There's a little bit of diminishing returns if you don't have a truck/trailer/etc but I'm almost positive if you're not in an urban area you can do better than bags from the big box store. The places I talked to around here were happy to deliver a single cubic yard, which is what I needed. I think I paid ~$30 for them to deliver it. Even with the delivery fee it was less than half the cost of buying the same volume of dirt at a big box (and lugging it home myself, etc).
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Dec 9, 2020 15:55
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Kaiser Schnitzel posted:Anyone have good ideas for cheap edging that looks decent? I've got ~500' in the front yard and 425' in the backyard I need to do. The beds in the front yard need to be deep-ish, backyard can be lower. The best I've come up with so far for looks and price is old bricks standing vertical in the front where I want deep beds and laying horizontal in the back. Vertical bricks comes out to ~$1.65/linear ft and horizontal is $.75/linear ft. Even with vertical bricks, that's cheaper than steel edging from lowes. Plain black plastic is like $.50/ft and isn't the look I want and doesn't have any height. Having had some gardens in the past edged with bricks they don't stay in place all that well even put in vertically. If you're really into the brick look that's one thing, but otherwise I don't think it's really worth it. I didn't do anywhere near 900 feet, but I edged ~200' of garden this spring/summer. I didn't want to do wood because I don't want to have to replace it constantly, and plastic/metal stuff was either ugly as gently caress or expensive as gently caress or, more often, both. I went with these from Lowes because they were significantly cheaper than what Home Depot carries (at least around here—I also didn't want to buy an entire pallet), they interlock, the design makes it easy to put in smooth curves, and they can be put in approximately flush to the ground or installed upright for more height. IIRC the installation guide significantly overestimates how many are necessary and it ended up being ~$1.75 a linear foot or something like that. I think they look pretty alright though the color of them is, unsurprisingly, nowhere near as consistent as it is in the product shots. I don't have pictures that are really of the edging but here's what it actually looks like both upright and flush:  
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Jan 4, 2021 01:17
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rojay posted:Con: Drainage. I built one last year so I don't know how long it's going to hold up, but you probably want to use a sealer on the inside of the bed before you put dirt in it. Unless you're doing something weird I'm not sure why you would need to add anything to keep the dirt inside, but you definitely don't want to gently caress up the drainage. My understanding is that ground-contact PT lumber will last for decades in contact with soil theoretically, and it is extremely rot resistant, but it isn't inherently resistant to moisture so if you don't seal it it will still tear itself apart from expansion/contraction as it takes up moisture.
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Jan 17, 2021 16:38
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wooger posted:Untreated wood will last a decade, oak will last much longer. Even treated wood isn't going to last this long if you let it stretch/shrink with moisture and temperature over and over again. People build decks out of PT lumber without accounting for this all of the time and have them turn into garbage within a handful of years.
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Jan 18, 2021 00:12
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Earth posted:Cedar has never been cheap. Yeah, this isn't some pandemic thing. If anything relative to PT cedar is probably cheaper than it used to be because PT has gone up so much.
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Jan 22, 2021 14:36
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Platystemon posted:Nurseries should be getting bare root trees right now. Some big box stores, too. [...] This is all excellent advise, though I'd personally wait and buy a not bare root tree. The nursery I buy trees from has some additional recommendations in their planting guide that I have always had success with:
Wallet fucked around with this message at 15:25 on Feb 2, 2021 |
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Feb 2, 2021 15:23
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Platystemon posted:I like bare root trees over potted/bagged, but I can see why some people don’t. I think bare root trees establish better, and I like the prices and variety, but you’re more vulnerable to getting an outright dud, usually dehydration at retailers that don’t care for their plants, and your planting window is limited. Do see about getting a replacement or refund if that happens, but sometimes at the end of the season they’re sold “as is”. I definitely like the cost of bare root trees more, but in my experience they take longer to settle in and start growing and there are timing issues I don't really want to deal with. Guess it depends. If I was planting a lot of trees I'd definitely go bare root but the nursery here doesn't sell them that way and I don't mind paying a little extra for the 1 year warranty if nothing else. Platystemon posted:I disagree pretty strongly about amending that heavily. Half peat moss might work for blueberries, which are swamp plants anyway, and maybe you can get by with large fractions like that in sandy soil, but in something like clay there’s going to be anærobic decomposition and it’s not great for trees. There’s no harm done in throwing in a few handfuls as if you’re seasoning the soil, but my policy is that manure belongs on top. That's fair, there's definitely major regional variation in what's appropriate—basically everything in this area is sandy loam but I wouldn't try it in heavy clay soil. Also if you're planting a bare root tree then filling the rest of the hole with a 50/50 mix like that is probably going to be overkill no matter where you are, but they're talking about filling in the extra space in the hole around the root ball which I should have specified.
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Feb 7, 2021 00:07
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Nosre posted:I use ~1 tablespoon of each in ~1 liter of water, does great against mites I'm a lazy bum and I don't use it that much so I just buy it pre-diluted but there are definitely some plants that don't love it. I have also had good results using (diluted) Dr Bronner's but I don't know if that would irritate the same things neem oil does.
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Feb 11, 2021 00:03
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Jan posted:Mine never "decayed", leaving my plants severely root bound until I extracted them anyway. Solkanar512 posted:I will say that those loving peat pots never, ever seem to break down and I have to rip them off to preserve the plants inside. The ones I planted without removal never thrived and died off. Terrible. This was my experience with coco-coir pots. I didn't use them for starting but a couple of the plants I put in the garden last spring came in them and the seller said to just put them in the ground so I gave it a shot. They were the only plants that were the same size in the fall as they were when I put them in. I dug them out and the pots hadn't broken down at all and none of the plants had managed to root through so I replanted them potless. I guess I know for next time.
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Mar 3, 2021 00:58
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FogHelmut posted:I'm building a raised bed with redwood boards. Is it worth it using some kind of wood sealer or preservative on the inside before adding soil? I would apply some outdoor deck sealant to the inside. You don't have to but this is the last time you're going to have easy access to the inside of that wood. Redwood will still rot eventually, even sealed, but to me it's worth the $30 to help it last as long as it can. It will stand up to getting rained on and poo poo for ages so the outside should be fine, but letting it sit against damp soil that you're going to be continually watering without additional sealant risks letting moisture hang around in it for long periods of time which is what will cause it to rot. Wallet fucked around with this message at 19:53 on Mar 7, 2021 |
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Mar 7, 2021 19:50
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Solkanar512 posted:Could you or someone else explain what's going on here with nitrogen depletion? Is it a factor of using a specific kind of mulch, or the bacteria breaking down any mulch or something else entirely? As far as I know the nitrogen depletion issue with wood chips/mulch hasn't been borne out in studies. There's a decent run down on mulch here. You can find a more academic version of the same information here.
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Mar 15, 2021 22:18
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Motronic posted:I don't have the time to get into those right now, but nice.....I haven't actually read a study on this in a loooooong time and I do like to get my info from ag school studies. Just be careful in that the conclusion isn't just supporting "this can make for good mulch" (because it absolutely can) but that it's specifically saying it can make for good mulch for a vegetable garden. Yeah, the way you handle a high turnover bed (annuals/vegetables) is often pretty different. The same woman specifically addresses arborist wood chips as mulch here but she's mostly discussing landscape plants.
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Mar 16, 2021 13:45
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Earth posted:At this point I've probably moved about 30 five gallon pails of lava rock and I fuckin hate it. I probably have 10-20 pails to go. This is why I need a break. I feel your pain on this. The previous owner had some landscaper dump loads of stone on the gardens year after year for reasons I don't entirely fathom. It was all ¾ to 1" which is just large enough to be a nightmare to try and dig a shovel into. I spent a significant portion of last year digging this poo poo out of the gardens, then a bunch more time refilling everything with replacement soil. Totally worth it, but gently caress am I happy to be starting this season without that hanging over my head.
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Mar 28, 2021 16:17
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Kaiser Schnitzel posted:Roundup works best on things that are actively and vigorously growing, but even then it usually takes a few days or a week for the plant to start yellowing/wilting. If stuff isn't growing super fast, it's not gonna die super fast. I sprayed a bunch of stuff sunday and it's been perfect sunny 75 degree days since then and I'm not really seeing any yellowing yet. Sometimes on a hot summer day it'll make stuff wilt in hours, but usually it's a few days. Give it 10 days and reapply if needed? How safe is this to do near plants that you don't want to kill? I have a garden on one side of the fence that has lawn on the other side of it and despite sealing the bottom up with stone some grass still manages to sneak through.
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Apr 7, 2021 18:38
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Motronic posted:Yes, in general. Of course their stuff comes from the same local commercial nurseries as everyone else. But it's hit and miss if they're being cared for properly once they get tom LowesDepot. Chances are high that they aren't. Yeah, don't buy stuff that has been sitting at Home Depot, but stuff that has literally showed up same day is generally going to be fine (and usually cheap).
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Apr 10, 2021 23:00
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HIJK posted:How do you know when something has just been delivered, do you ask an employee? If it's still tied with rope to the pallet it got delivered on that's a good sign. Usually you want to look at the plant and feel the soil. If it's something small I would just remove it from the pot and look at the roots—they have a tendency to overwater the poo poo out of everything. Fitzy Fitz posted:Employees at big box garden centers rarely know anything. They put somewhat knowledgeable people in appliances and hardware sometimes, but garden center mostly gets a random selection of high school kids. When I worked a summer at lowe's on "loading" duty I'd go hang out in the garden center when I had time because I could actually help people there. This isn't necessarily the case, but even employees that know something are discouraged from taking care of the plants properly. A friend who originally ran an actual nursery took on running the garden department at a Home Depot some years ago and initially went into it trying to take care of the plants as if they actually mattered, but the staff to plant ratio at Home Depot can't support that and management doesn't want anyone wasting their time taking care of the plant stock. Everything gets watered every day to try and keep it from dying before they can push it out the door (this does not work for many, many plants). I'm told that, at least at the time, Home Depot only paid their suppliers for plants that were actually sold so they don't have any incentive to take care of them. If it isn't out the door quickly they mark it down until it's unsellable or some poor sap leaves with a half-rotten plant. Wallet fucked around with this message at 13:55 on Apr 11, 2021 |
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Apr 11, 2021 13:53
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Ok Comboomer posted:or you end up with three 4-6” staghorn colonies for a grand total of $9 (including the terra cotta over-pots that basically made the deal amount to “get the pot regular price and then get a fern in it for an additional $0.50”) that are now rapidly outgrowing their pots.......wait, the poor sap is me isn’t it, these things already have way more foliage than they did when I bought them in February Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. I picked up some of their very last closeout (outdoor) ferns for $4 whole dollars at the end of last season that are doing well but it was an amount I could live with losing if they poo poo the bed. If you recognize the risk that's cool, but if you're at an experience level where you don't yet recognize why Home Depot's plant care can't be trusted then you should probably be wary. I mostly feel bad for people who go to Home Depot to start their succulent collection with whatever looks interesting and go home with a bunch of stuff that has been sitting in the store for three weeks and then spend the next two months becoming convinced they have the blackest of thumbs when they do everything they're supposed to do and the plants wither away anyway because all of their roots are rotten and incapable of taking in any water. Wallet fucked around with this message at 22:58 on Apr 11, 2021 |
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Apr 11, 2021 22:53
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Jhet posted:I’m just going to have a few yards delivered and then get my workout in. The Wonder Weapon posted:Dumping mulch all over everything and waiting another year is right up my alley. It's like 900 square feet, so it's going to be nearly $100 of mulch, but if that's my total cost for landscaping this year, I can live with that. If you're trying to kill stuff with mulch (without some kind of layer under it) you're going to want to go pretty deep. 8" is what I hear most often for that purpose. If you are going to put something under it I would avoid a tarp or any of the really plasticy weed fabric stuff they sell. The last person who lived here put down that plasticy poo poo under their mulch and it made the mulch rot and smell awful until I ripped it all out. Wallet fucked around with this message at 17:26 on Apr 12, 2021 |
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Apr 12, 2021 17:24
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CommonShore posted:Anyone have any strong opinions on irrigation systems? Like drip irrigation or greenhouse irrigation or some other kind of mystery irrigation?
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Apr 19, 2021 16:11
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CommonShore posted:Some kind of irrigation for an in-ground planted greenhouse, which should be arriving this week and I'll set it up not long afterwards. I'm just starting the process of researching this now and thinking about my options. I'm looking at drip lines and soaker hoses and pricing stuff now. This actually all looks quite affordable! I've been looking at irrigationdirect.ca. For what you're talking about drip irrigation sounds pretty reasonable to me  and will be a lot more efficient than sprinklers (though you may not care that much if you aren't paying for water). As far as clogging goes even if you're going to use clog-resistant emitters it's generally a good idea to have a filter and that probably goes double if it's cistern fed (both because of sediment and because of algae).
Wallet fucked around with this message at 20:15 on Apr 19, 2021 |
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Apr 19, 2021 20:12
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The Wonder Weapon posted:My question is about how long I should wait to be planting them. They need to go right where all that water is. Right now, all my unplanted trees are still in the containers they were shipped in. I presume I can't plant them in literal pools of water, right? I bought a bunch of ultra cheap disposable pots that are a bit bigger than what they came in, with the expectation that I might need to re-home them to bigger pots for a few weeks while we get past the wettest part of spring, and then fill those pits in with soil and plant them in early May. Is that my best bet? In general you're better off with the plants in the ground as long as it isn't freezing. I haven't grown them but my recollection is that Arborvitae is subject to root rot. How well does your soil drain? You definitely don't want to site them in standing wander, and if you have ponds just hanging around for long periods you probably need to address your drainage in some fashion.
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Apr 24, 2021 14:22
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CommonShore posted:well if I use the cedar it's just going to live there and be the permanent rot-resistant solution. I definitely have enough cedar to do all of the baseboards. Where I'm waffling on those is if a softish 1x plank will be sturdy enough. Since the answer is "maybe no?" I guess I'm headed to the lumber yard. I'm not ultra familiar with greenhouse construction in general or your greenhouse design in particular, but if the baseboards work the way I think they do 1x seems like it should be fine as long as it's attached to the frame correctly because its purpose isn't really to stabilize the structure against force perpendicular to the baseboard anyway. A quick google also turns up a number of people using/recommending 1x for this purpose. Personally I'd use the cedar. If you realize it's not strong enough later you can either bolster it or replace it, but I suspect it will be fine and you already have the cedar. Wallet fucked around with this message at 17:03 on May 5, 2021 |
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May 5, 2021 17:01
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poeticoddity posted:Speaking of things that are probably fine but feel vaguely like eco terrorism, my dad once mentioned that his HOA was giving people grief about weeds and my response was, "Did you know you can buy bulk dandelion seeds on Amazon?" I'd just fill my garden with milkweeds. Milkweeds are dope.
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May 8, 2021 11:21
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BadSamaritan posted:Does anyone have recommendations on a garden planning tool/software, or a strategy to track plants and work? Our largeish front garden will probably be a muti-year effort (especially due to baby/toddler time constraints) and I’d like to keep things organized. I have yet to find any tools that are really useful for planning a garden though I've looked. Certainly nothing that seems like it would help with anything on the level of precision of tracking individual plants. I did find it useful to pull up a copy of my lot from the master deed and take hourly pictures of all of the parts of the yard one day last year so that I could turn it into a sort of sun map. If you're going super formal you probably have to go all in on mapping everything out, but for a pollinator garden on a physical level you probably don't need to plan too much beyond knowing approximately where you want shrubs and where you want perennials and so on. Personally I keep track of plants with a spreadsheet organized by garden bed and by (semi-arbitrary) plant type but I recognize that I like spreadsheets more than is healthy or normal and most people do not—I'm sure you could get most of the way there with a plain old list. I usually find it harder to keep track of the plants I've ordered than the ones in the ground so I enter everything into the sheet when I order it and just leave it without a planting date until it's in the ground.  This year I've been going through and adding labels to match up the actual plants with the sheet which has been less fun than it would have been if I had started from the start. If you're going to go that route extra fine Deco Color paint pens hold up a lot better on plastic labels than sharpie does and you can get them for a couple of bucks on Amazon. I don't know if any of that answers any of your questions but .
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May 9, 2021 18:44
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skylined! posted:Thanks. I’m learning about the string method now - the raised bed is near the edge of my deck so I might be able to set up a 4-5ft string! I don't think there's a tree thread specifically but this thread is usually more focused on stuff you can eat so you may have better luck in the Horticulture thread.
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May 13, 2021 14:56
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BigPaddy posted:Not sure if this is gardening or landscaping but we will see. More horticulture than either.
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May 14, 2021 21:06
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Salvor_Hardin posted:1) Does this plan make sense? You'll probably get more bites in the Horticulture thread as this one's mostly about growing poo poo you can eat, though a lot of people follow both. Hostas are pretty solid shade plants as far as being easy to grow and looking decent, but there's lots of other things you can mix in if you don't just want a pile of two varieties of variegated hosta. Even if you want to just go for hostas (which is legit, there's some great hosta gardens out there) it's worth checking out the massive number of varieties that are available. They aren't necessarily the cheapest but NHHostas has an absolute fuckload you can peruse to get an idea of what's out there. There's lots of different kinds of mulch and many of them will work fine to help keep the soil healthy (uncovered soil isn't really a thing that happens in nature) and retain water—what's easily available seems to depend a lot on where you are. I'd avoid the dyed poo poo because there's no reason to dump a bunch dye in your gardens. Make sure you aren't getting mulch that's too course (they sell poo poo like pine bark nuggets as mulch in a lot of big box stores which doesn't really work for poo poo). When you're regularly applying a decent layer of mulch that isn't in oversized chunks it starts to break down and form a sort of mat on top of the soil that is fairly easy to blow leaves off of. You do need/want to reapply once or twice a year as it breaks down (which you want it to do as it improves the soil), though the first time you mulch a new bed you'll be putting a lot more down than you need to when reapplying. If you know you're not going to get around to it too often, go for hard wood over soft as it will last longer. Mulch is a lot more effective at slowing down weeds if you're applying (or reapplying) it at the right times of year (near the end of winter and the beginning of summer, more or less). It's hard to ID all of the other stuff growing in there from the photo, though a lot of it appears to just be weeds. If you want to try and figure out what's growing in there Seek (it's an app) does a decent job of identifying things. Wallet fucked around with this message at 00:29 on Jun 3, 2021 |
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Jun 3, 2021 00:26
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Solkanar512 posted:Wouldn't 12" of perlite give you the same drainage at a similar cost with a lot less weight? I know "This Old House" suggests styrofoam packing peanuts but I'm not about to go near those if I wasn't forced to. None of these things will improve drainage if you put a layer of them at the bottom of a pot; you're mostly just reducing the productive depth of the container. If you actually need better drainage you should mix whatever it is you're using into the soil (be careful mixing sand with anything that has clay in it, though).
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Jun 9, 2021 22:12
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