Is anyone growing veggies?

I love these but have never had them with the onion. It is on my list!

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Good with green beans too. and adding garlic cloves doesn’t hurt anything either. :slightly_smiling_face:

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I’m slowly starting to plan for fall! I’ve got some space now I’ve harvested the first beets, all of the radishes and some of the lettuce. I’ve sowed more bok choi, beets and endive and also kale and purslane.

We had the first batch of endive for dinner today and it was delicious! It’s traditionally eaten raw with mashed potatoes in my country.

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We’re also planning our fall garden over here. I planted broccoli this morning and carrots & parsnips last week. We finally have ripe tomatoes to eat. We’re having BLTs for dinner tonight and I have a tomato pie in the oven.

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The pickled beets with honey are good, but they don’t have a very strong pickled flavour. They basically taste exactly like boiled beets with a hint of pickles. With the next batch of beets I’m harvesting I’m going to try one of the recipes with more spices. They are nice though, we are half of the jar last night with dinner.

The fall garden isn’t working out so far. After a warm spring and a mild July with a fair amount of rain, we’re suddenly having a heatwave in August. I have a rainbarrel and I’m giving lots of water, but so far I’ve not spotted a lot of seedlings yet.

That’s good to know- I don’t love beets enough to have the full boiled beet flavor, so maybe I’ll skip that recipe. The neat thing about pickling is that you can generally mess around with the spice combos, just not the vinegar amount or processing time.

I planted up a tower garden at the end of June with some tomatoes, peppers, and bush bean seeds. The tomatoes and peppers didn’t make it in the heat. The beans sprouted, and a few have some flowers, but I don’t expect that I’ll be harvesting any beans. I did learn that I need to set up an automatic watering system, because I am unreliable :laughing: I’ll be working on that over the winter. Also, I probably won’t be gone for the month of May again, so I can make sure to get my plantings done on time. I’m not even going to attempt any fall garden crops.

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We have an automatic watering system for when we go on holidays. Since we aren’t going anywhere we’re not going to use it this year but it’s very convenient. It’s basically a small computer that we attached to the washing machine tap since we don’t have one outside. We have a cat flap in the back door and that’s how the hose went outside. We have a basic model that cost about €50 I think (Gardena brand, not sure if that’s available on the other side of the Atlantic) that was programmed to water every day, but there are fancy ones with sensors that only water when necessary.

I actually look forwards to fall gardening with lower temperatures and more rain since everything will basically grow by itself, without needing my help.

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Look at this!

Ok, it’s not a vegetable, but I’ve always loved sunflowers so I had to have one. I don’t think I’ve ever grown one this tall before. For scale, the annexe is around 2m30 high and the soil in the bed is around 15cm high.

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Wow, what a sunflower. I planted a special “good to eat seed” sunflowers and the groundhogs ate the seedlings. They must have been good! The birds are going to love this one!

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I agree! Wow is right! I have such limited sunny space in my yard, but I think that sunflowers might need to be on the list for next year. I know the birds and squirrles will love them, too :slight_smile:

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That’s awesome! I love sunflowers. I planted some along our driveway against a short chain-linked fence I share with the neighbors. All was well until about two months ago they all wilted in unison. I thought they needed water and attended to them. But within a month the damage was prevalent… I think the neighbor may have sprayed them, thinking they were weeds I was letting go to town. Because their growth was stunted tremendously and their leaf shaped even changed. I will have to take pictures when I get home. I yanked up most of them and will likely pull the rest too. Next year I will be sure to tell them what I am up to. :upside_down_face:

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How rude! Who sprays into someone else’s space?! I am offended on behalf of your plants. Harumph!

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I have to admit that I sometimes do it as well. In my defense, we have a Japanse knotweed issue, it used to grow dangerously close to the foundations of our home. We have spent literally thousands to get rid of it - we dug out every last bit of roots last year and put in clean soil, and every new plant that comes up gets sprayed (I hate it, but it’s the only thing that works and it’s a super invasive plant). My neighbour doesn’t believe it’s a problem. I do spray around the fence but not on the rest of his property of course. And I make very sure that I only target the knotweed and nothing else because Roundup just kills everything.

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This is the tallest one, and the only one that is blooming. You can see that the bottom foot and a half grew fine. Then… the change…

The spiky leaf on the left is what the leaves all look like above the foot and a half point. The leaf on the right is how they should look.

This is how most of the others look. Right about the same height they have this nasty growth then they just haven’t grown properly since. Leaves are jagged, veins are prominent, some leaves never finished unfurling. Something clearly got into their systems and messed them up…

Oh, they look so sad :frowning: It definitely looks like they were sprayed with something. There’s no natural explanation for toxic mutant sunflowers. It would have looked so nice to have a whole row of sunflowers instead of a boring fence.

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What a shame

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Right? Next year. I think I’ll dig up the little drizzle of dirt there and put down some awesome new stuff. Then try again, and be sure to let the neighbors know what’s up this time. They’re really nice people. So that helps. :slight_smile:

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Oh, that they are nice people changes things, maybe they thought they were being helpful then and were simply misguided.
Ok, i’ll stand down. lol

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I find that a lot of people think that spraying insecticides or herbicides on their property only affects their property. And that it only kills what it’s supposed to kill. It could have been drift. My ex wiped out several of our baby ducks by spraying for weeds and not penning up the little critters. Hard lesson. He was new to the whole home owner/land owner bit and just didn’t think.

Ohhh… so sad. :sleepy: