Help me LJ gardeners!
Apr. 26th, 2008 12:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rivkaI know that many people on my friends list are accomplished gardeners. I humbly ask that you please not laugh at either the size of my project or the depth of my ignorance. I'm looking for some extremely basic gardening advice.
As you may recall from our pre-move pictures, we have a small but lovely courtyard in front of our house. The previous tenants were devoted gardeners, but they moved out several months before we moved in and in the meantime the courtyard kind of went every-which-way. The things growing there are a mix of pre-existing plantings that either didn't die over the winter or are perennial, and weeds. We've pulled the obvious weeds, and probably pulled up some perennials as well. (I think I recognized some mums.)
But, for example, there was an unidentified plant that we didn't pull up, and it put up these utterly gorgeous flowers, in pink and in white:
I'm afraid there's going to be other stuff like that, that we just don't recognize. (We still don't recognize the flowers. What are they? Are they perennial?)
The former gardeners planted a lot of herbs. There is, for example, the rosemary-and-sage forest. I have included Alex in this picture for scale; she is just over three feet tall and so is the rosemary.
What do we do with this thicket? We love rosemary and sage, but they appear to be quite willing to take over the entire universe. My impulse is to cut them way, way back, but leave the underground parts as they are. Is this correct? Or should we be removing some whole plants? If I cut them back, will they die?
I think we may have two different kinds of sage. One is broad-leaved and the leaves look a greener than the sagebrush I'm used to seeing out west. The other is narrow-leaved and has the grey-green color I think of as characteristic of sage. They both smell more or less like sage. We've been eating them both, so they'd better both be edible. Could they both be sage?
Our neighbor says this next plant is thyme. It doesn't look like the thyme we get from the grocery store - it's much tinier, and the leaves look kind of hairy. Is this thyme? Can we eat it? (We'll keep it around regardless, because I think it's pretty.)
There are two beds that we'd like to do some planting in. One of them is a square bed, about 4 feet by 4 feet. There used to be a big planter in the center medallion, and when the planter was stolen the dirt from it was dumped into this bed. So it's a mix of potting soil and regular dirt. There appears to be some plastic sheeting buried about 4-6 inches down. This bed gets very little direct sunlight - maybe an hour or so, in the late afternoon. It doesn't seem right to call it totally shaded either, though - there aren't trees above it or anything. The surrounding houses prevent it from getting much direct sunlight, but there's a fair amount of indirect/reflected sunlight. (Does that even matter or make sense?)
The second bed is a raised bed right along the front of the house. It's L-shaped, 16 inches deep. The long part of the L is 8 feet long, and the short part is 4 feet long. This looks like plain old regular dirt. This bed gets quite a bit of sunlight in the middle of the day. It had a bunch of vines growing in it, deep green leaves with pale green edges and the occasional blue star-shaped flower. People seem to use this vine a lot in our neighborhood for low-maintenance cover. I pulled them up. They're pretty, but I want to plant vegetables or something here.
Here are my questions about actually planting things:
1. Do I need to do anything to prepare the soil for planting? We've pulled the weeds and broken up the soil with a little hand cultivator. Do we need to enrich it in any way? I remember my mom used to occasionally buy a bag of humus for her garden.
2. Do I need to worry about lead in the soil if I want to grow food and eat it? If so, what should I do?
3. What should I plant in the big plot that gets very little direct sunlight? My neighbor tells me that vegetables need several hours of sunlight a day, so they wouldn't seem to be good candidates. What would grow well in the twilight zone between sunlight and deep shade?
4. In the sunny plot, I know I want to plant parsley and tomatoes. I was thinking of sugar snap peas (a favorite vegetable at our house), but this site suggests that they need a cooler climate. What do you recommend? What's easy to grow? We like zucchini but I know that zucchini plants can take over the world. Sweet bell peppers? We love those. Are they hard to grow? Spinach? Carrots?
5. I was planning to buy seedlings rather than seeds. Y/N?
6. Should I put flowers in the sunny plot too?
7. Are they going to have a good selection of plants at someplace like Home Depot, or do I need to go to an upscale nursery?
8. Is there anything else that I'm so ignorant about that I don't even know I should ask?
Climate factors: I'm a little shocked to discover that because Baltimore is an "urban heat island" we are actually considered to be in Zone 8, which I think is the horticultural term for "you were supposed to get your garden in a while ago, babe." (I grew up in Zone 5, and my mother always put her garden in on Memorial Day weekend. I know it's warmer here, but that's still the timeframe that's fixed in my mind.)
Our summers are extremely hot and humid, and with sunlight reflecting off all the brick and asphalt plants can get pretty dry. We don't tend to get water shortages, though, so we'll be able to water our plants as needed. Still, obviously, as much as possible I'd like to grow climate-appropriate plants.
As you may recall from our pre-move pictures, we have a small but lovely courtyard in front of our house. The previous tenants were devoted gardeners, but they moved out several months before we moved in and in the meantime the courtyard kind of went every-which-way. The things growing there are a mix of pre-existing plantings that either didn't die over the winter or are perennial, and weeds. We've pulled the obvious weeds, and probably pulled up some perennials as well. (I think I recognized some mums.)
But, for example, there was an unidentified plant that we didn't pull up, and it put up these utterly gorgeous flowers, in pink and in white:
I'm afraid there's going to be other stuff like that, that we just don't recognize. (We still don't recognize the flowers. What are they? Are they perennial?)
The former gardeners planted a lot of herbs. There is, for example, the rosemary-and-sage forest. I have included Alex in this picture for scale; she is just over three feet tall and so is the rosemary.
What do we do with this thicket? We love rosemary and sage, but they appear to be quite willing to take over the entire universe. My impulse is to cut them way, way back, but leave the underground parts as they are. Is this correct? Or should we be removing some whole plants? If I cut them back, will they die?
I think we may have two different kinds of sage. One is broad-leaved and the leaves look a greener than the sagebrush I'm used to seeing out west. The other is narrow-leaved and has the grey-green color I think of as characteristic of sage. They both smell more or less like sage. We've been eating them both, so they'd better both be edible. Could they both be sage?
Our neighbor says this next plant is thyme. It doesn't look like the thyme we get from the grocery store - it's much tinier, and the leaves look kind of hairy. Is this thyme? Can we eat it? (We'll keep it around regardless, because I think it's pretty.)
There are two beds that we'd like to do some planting in. One of them is a square bed, about 4 feet by 4 feet. There used to be a big planter in the center medallion, and when the planter was stolen the dirt from it was dumped into this bed. So it's a mix of potting soil and regular dirt. There appears to be some plastic sheeting buried about 4-6 inches down. This bed gets very little direct sunlight - maybe an hour or so, in the late afternoon. It doesn't seem right to call it totally shaded either, though - there aren't trees above it or anything. The surrounding houses prevent it from getting much direct sunlight, but there's a fair amount of indirect/reflected sunlight. (Does that even matter or make sense?)
The second bed is a raised bed right along the front of the house. It's L-shaped, 16 inches deep. The long part of the L is 8 feet long, and the short part is 4 feet long. This looks like plain old regular dirt. This bed gets quite a bit of sunlight in the middle of the day. It had a bunch of vines growing in it, deep green leaves with pale green edges and the occasional blue star-shaped flower. People seem to use this vine a lot in our neighborhood for low-maintenance cover. I pulled them up. They're pretty, but I want to plant vegetables or something here.
Here are my questions about actually planting things:
1. Do I need to do anything to prepare the soil for planting? We've pulled the weeds and broken up the soil with a little hand cultivator. Do we need to enrich it in any way? I remember my mom used to occasionally buy a bag of humus for her garden.
2. Do I need to worry about lead in the soil if I want to grow food and eat it? If so, what should I do?
3. What should I plant in the big plot that gets very little direct sunlight? My neighbor tells me that vegetables need several hours of sunlight a day, so they wouldn't seem to be good candidates. What would grow well in the twilight zone between sunlight and deep shade?
4. In the sunny plot, I know I want to plant parsley and tomatoes. I was thinking of sugar snap peas (a favorite vegetable at our house), but this site suggests that they need a cooler climate. What do you recommend? What's easy to grow? We like zucchini but I know that zucchini plants can take over the world. Sweet bell peppers? We love those. Are they hard to grow? Spinach? Carrots?
5. I was planning to buy seedlings rather than seeds. Y/N?
6. Should I put flowers in the sunny plot too?
7. Are they going to have a good selection of plants at someplace like Home Depot, or do I need to go to an upscale nursery?
8. Is there anything else that I'm so ignorant about that I don't even know I should ask?
Climate factors: I'm a little shocked to discover that because Baltimore is an "urban heat island" we are actually considered to be in Zone 8, which I think is the horticultural term for "you were supposed to get your garden in a while ago, babe." (I grew up in Zone 5, and my mother always put her garden in on Memorial Day weekend. I know it's warmer here, but that's still the timeframe that's fixed in my mind.)
Our summers are extremely hot and humid, and with sunlight reflecting off all the brick and asphalt plants can get pretty dry. We don't tend to get water shortages, though, so we'll be able to water our plants as needed. Still, obviously, as much as possible I'd like to grow climate-appropriate plants.
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Date: 2008-04-26 05:21 pm (UTC)