Plant nerding

Almost jealous. Our invasions are just of things like garlic mustard and thistles. I mean, at least blackberries are delicious...

Yeah, we're getting hit by the frost too. I'm hoping my rhubarb didn't get killed last night. XP

 

the only thing that invades here is fuckin goatheads ;_; the area was all full of em before i tendered it up

 

I have a few small mother-in-law's-tongue plants. I used to have more and bigger but I uh... am bad with plants. But then I figured out how to save what wasn't already dead and now they're getting bigger and sprouting new ones I think... I love those.

 

I took some photos of my flowers for my brother today. They feature my new hydrangea, chive blooms, and choral bells.

I mentioned in another thread that, according to my neighbor who is Knowledgeable About Hydrangeas, they like coffee grounds, so I work my morning's grounds into the soil around it most days. It's supposed to keep the blossoms blue. As for the chives, I did not know that they do this. It is their third season and they saved this little surprise for this year.

 

@Ink Those look awesome. Chives definitely bloom - the blooms are edible, though stronger-tasting than the leaves. You may want to take the flowers off to promote leaf production if you're going to harvest them much, though honestly, chives always go nuts in my garden anyway.

 

Those pods are cool.

We sometimes get devil's claws around here.

 

That's awesome. I managed to almost kill my own, but I think it's slowly coming back... XP

Yeah, mother-in-law's tongue reproduces by offset. If you want more of them, you can actually take the baby plants off and put them in their own pots.

 

This thread makes me jealous. I live in an apartment complex, so no digging in the dirt for me :( Maybe I'll try to talk my partner into getting some flower boxes we can hang over the balcony rail..

 

@albedo Yeah I actually did that with a few... I think the first was by accident and when it didn't die I broke apart the ones that were in awkward positions... When they were dying I actually just took them out of dirt and kept them in a class of water until they and enough roots that I felt safe putting them back in dirt.

 

Today I was able to plan a veggie garden and got the best possible news: My lemon tree made it through the winter! My mom's friend successfully greenhoused it over the winter, thank goodness, I thought it was a goner for sure.

(in b4 "Nai how and WHY do you have a lemon tree in Washington - I found a sprouting seed in an organic lemon, we planted it, it's now like three years old and doing pretty well given that it's two states north of the nearest friendly climate. We've never induced it to fruit, but SOMEDAY [shakesfist] someday.)

(I am very fond of my lemon tree)

#I must not take over my highschool bff's front lawn with tire pots full of vegetables #but hell if I don't want to

 

And now having read the thread -

Our native balckberries are pretty tough! They also will come back year after year with their berries in increasingly difficult to reach places if you don't keep them pruned, so definitely do that. (Big clippers are the best, imo, because then you can use the not-all-the-way-tight clippers as hand extenders to move things around without risking your fingers to thorns.) Raspberries also do really well here since they're basically variations of the same plant, but it's the big fat blackberries that are native.

Dude, no, it's actually hard as hell to grow a lot of squash/pumpkin/melon type things, because our grow season is so short because of how far north we are. You also want to lift the vines that actually bear fruit off the ground, because otherwise they'll mold on the bottom right on the vine.

And anything that takes a beating from frost (like my dear lemon tree) has to be dragged inside or it will probably die in our winters. Even if you can keep 'em warm you're going to want to stick a goddamn sunlamp on them because of how dim and dreary things are otherwise.

 

Comes back in for the full triple post because I forgot the OTHER thing that makes gardening in Washington difficult. To quote my skype chat;

Basically all of western Washington is old glacier land, which means that if you dig into the ground at basically any point that hasn't been itself used as a garden in the last few years, you're going to ram your shovel into a rock. A third of any given shovelful? Rocks.

Our soil is fantastic aside from that, mind, but after only two hours digging and separating rocks from dirt, I'm fuckin' beat.

 

Gotta love that Vashon Till!

Native blackberries are cool, but the himalayan stuff can go get fucked with a chainsaw.

#geology all the threads! #also obligatory lemon stealing whores

 

I love it like I love... Well, trying to pick blackberries in shorts and sandals. There are delicious rewards for the effort, but.

#also excuse you those lemons were a GIFT

 

teleports over to filch tomatoes

 

If I were closer, you would have no tomato-overload problems. It's not an addiction, honest, I could stop anytime ... maybe ...

 

Apparently I did that as a kid so much, my dad (plant grower extraordinaire, so much that he taught it at college eventually) rented a patch of land that he grew vegetables on and I'd just sit there and eat things, especially peas.