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Gardening for Geeks?
selan asks: "Spring has sprung, and this year I've decided to try gardening for the first time! I'm starting with a small container garden on my balcony and am planting oregano and parsley. I was wondering if any Slashdot readers enjoy this low-tech hobby and have any advice to share with a newbie."
Herbs... some are like us Geeks, some like normals. Don't try to mix shade/partial light plants with full sun plants. You will find one or the other suffering. Keep partial shade plants in a seperate container, I have found that morning sun works for most food herbs, while flowers tend toward noon day sun best. Depends on each plant.
If you are growing temperate climate plants (thyme, oregano, etc) then watch the nightime temperature, they don't take well to cold nights (not even in Florida.)
If you have children over 5, plant mint, they can chew 1/2 leaf for a good fresh flavour and to help prevent tooth decay. (Be very careful about what you put on those plants!)
Avoid harsh chemicals and pest sprays. If it says non toxic, it can still make the plants taste like manure. Growing for food, organic takes more work but is well worth it. I love being able to grab a fresh bay leaf for soup right from the plant.
And always, always rinse under cool water before using.
I could go on all day, but that's a start for ya... yes, I do enjoy this archaic sport. Watching mints grow!
You can have it fast, accurate, or pretty. Pick any 2.
Any herbs you cook with will be much, much better fresh, and you will save a ton. Since you're getting started try to find things at the end of their planting season, as the garden stores clearnance them, then you won't feel bad if you kill them. An easy starter garden is catus and other desert succulents, since they can go a week or two without watering, nice when you want to take a trip occasionally, and don't want to find someone to water for you. Tropicals are fun and neat to, but like water almost daily, and prefer fertilization year round. If you don't mind spending some cash, you can get some nice dwarf fruit trees that are designed for the smaller plots of land, or city dwellings. Aloe is another easy to care for plant that has an excellent second use, its great for burns, cuts, scrapes, and other minor injuries (some people drink the juice, but its pretty pungent. I don't know too many geeks that don't like some of the odder things like venus fly traps, pitcher plants, or orchids. They can be a little more difficult to care for, but are usually quite rewarding. I keep my office filled with plants, its a wonderful excuse to keep the window shade opened, and really brightens the place up.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
Don't bother keeping basil beyond a year. Just buy some new seeds and plant a new one. It grows very fast and tastes a lot more fresh.
Daniel
Carpe Diem
Along with this, keep in mind that seeds will also have instructions on how to plant. Naturally, this is a little beyond simply dropping your seeds in dirt and doing the slashdot three-step (1 - plant and water, 2 - ???, 3 - profit!).
If you're concerned about mineral content of the soil, your local city office might have assay information. The books will also show you how to deal with this.
Rotate your soil bases, especially if you are doing this yearly. You know how production farms will let a field rest for a year after using it a few years? It's to prevent depleting the soil. Barring this, be prepared to replenish the soil with commercial fertilizers or cattle manure.
(To wit, cattle manure is not straight fecal matter from bovines, it's decomposed cattle waste. Broadly speaking, manure is anything that fertilizes the soil when worked in - including commercial fertilizers if you want to reach. Decomposed cattle waste is fairly common, though.)
Lastly (and speaking of manure), one thing my father did back in the early 80s was get some straight up manure-based soil (like what some people put on their lawns to fertilize). It smells horrible, but your crops will taste fine, and they will also be extremely healthy - but again, be prepared to replenish after a period or your crops will start losing .
This sig no verb.
Look into Companion Planting. In a nutshell, a companion plant is something you grown alongside your food plant to keep the bugs away. Some companions repel bugs altogether, some work to draw all the bugs to themselves and thus away from your herbs/veggies.
:-). Dump some water on every couple of days, partial-to-full sun, and you'll have happy flowers.
... a hernia makes everything taste like ass.
My fave is the Marigold. Its a pretty flower, easy to grow in a small pot, and fairly hard to kill (that's important for me
Also check out Container Gardening for many many more links on growing things on patios, small spaces, in containers, etc.
And finally, a safety tip. If you go for anything larger, like say a couple of tomato plants in one of those big terracotta pots, PLEASE get one of the wheeled bases for it. A 3' tall pot full of plants and wet soil is a biatch to move. I don't care how sweet the tomatoes are
How about a three-day version of gardening? :-) Put some seeds in a dish... Pour a little water... Add water every day, just enough to cover the seeds... Rinse and eat when sprouts look good enough. You can buy good grain in healthy food stores like Whole Foods.
Speaking from experience, try a strawberry plant. Keep it from getting frost, and if you're in a hot climate, keep it from getting direct afternoon sun. For a whole year, it's just a green plant. The next year, it'll bear fruit. The sweetest fruit you've ever tasted. There's nothing like a strawberry vine ripened and still warm from the sun.
My new problem, however, is that my wife won't eat strawberries from anyplace else now. Like oranges, when you've had fresh off the plant from the right plant, nothing else just can compare.
You asked specifically about two plants. Your number one enemy, from my experience, is severe spider infestation. Mist your plants if they're too delicate to handle direct hose water. Don't use pesticides, but try to keep as many nasties off as you can. There are some nice organic solutions, including using cedar. It seems to work pretty well to use cedar mulch on top of the soil. If you have the right window exposure, you can grow good plants indoors. My strawberry plant grew well in a Vermont window with a northwest exposure.
Also, stay away from plastic pots. They hold moisture too well, and even with the right drainage, it's tough to keep mold / mildew from growing in it. Same with heavily painted terra cotta. Stick with bare terra cotta and you won't go too far wrong in the drainage department. Of course, you will still have to monitor moisture (Wal-mart sells hydrometers for like $5 or less), but it's tough to overwater a terra cotta pot with a hole in the bottom.
- ~ First off, figure out what kind of exposure your chosen window has. (No, not
- that kind!) A south-facing window gets the most light, and is best for plants that like a lot of direct sun. North-facing windows have a more filtered light ("cooler" light, in art and photography terms.) Plants that like light, but not quite so much, will do well there. Partial-shade plants will do better in an east-facing window. I recommend sun-loving plants for western exposures, because they'll get lots of late-day sun as the summer wears on.
Just don't allow yourself to be talked into buying three dozen gaudy petunia plants, and you'll be fine.~ Don't plant anything that will outgrow its container. Save the zucchini for when you have a yard, and a fence that you want to hide.
~ Using potting soil relieves you of worries about soil Ph. By the same token, though, you should do some homework on what kind of soil your chosen plants like best.
~ Buy seedlings, and re-plant them. That way, the local wildlife will be less likely to think you're putting out a buffet for them.
~ If you can manage two windowboxes, plant one with cooking herbs and one with flowers. Also, until you learn what everything looks like, keep the little nametags on sticks. Parsley and cilantro look very similar to the novice.
~ Find a copy of Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew. (It's available through amazon.com.) He has a lot of good ideas that can be adapted for pot and windowbox gardens. And don't overlook what might be your best resource of all: the folks at the local garden center. Yes, I know that interacting with real, live people can be scary for /.ters (wink, grin), but they're the professionals. Think of them as tech support for dirtware.
Doing my level best to piss off the religious right wing...
For several years now, my friends have watched as I geek out over some house plants. I have had a great deal of fun watching several of my plants grow.
Amaryllis
About 7 years ago, I was given an Amaryllis. A flowering plant that has a bulb. When I received the bulb, it was already on the way to flowering. When it flowered, I took a q-tip and cross polinated the flowers against one another (not sure what the correct term is). I left the flowers on the plant until they dried out and fell off. After a few weeks, the stem on which the flowers grew turned into a small bulb that obviously contained seeds. I have since re-planted the seeds and given away about 10 small amaryllis plants to friends. Unfortunately, I have not been able to watch any of the small plants grow large enough to flower again, but hope to do so with my most recent bunch. I have also had the original large bulbs split into separate bulbs several times. I now have four large bulbs from the original (plus the many small plants that have grown from seed).
Ficus
When I finished school, I purchased a small ficus tree. It grew quite well sitting in the window. When it out-grew its pot, I trasferred it into an overly large Rubbermaid container. Once it was in the too-large container, the extra soil space allowed it to grow out of control. As I was living in a small, urban apartment, I decided to plant my own "lawn" in the pot. I was able to sustain a small patch of green grass along with the tree for an entire summer (all indoors). I learned a great deal about small ecosystems (clippings must be VERY small to not matt down new growth) and potting soil from bags (these bags contain bugs- if the plant is indoors, the bugs will be indoors too).
Worms
One of the things that I learned from the Ficus-lawn experiment (see above) was that a small potted-plant system does not break down organic matter very quickly. I spoke to several friends, gardeners and academics. They all said that the possibility of getting the lawn clippings to compost properly in the large container was fairly slim. However, they said that if I was interested, I should look into getting some worms to help out. They also said that the worms would help with small bugs. On several occasions, I gathered earthworms that appeared on the sidewalks after rains, but I am not sure that any of them survived for long in the soil system (I believe that worms require fairly loose soil and potted plants generally end up with fairly dense soil).
I have also played with various other herbs and flowering plants. I have 4 calla lillies that I have grown from the same cross polination "technique" that I used with the amaryllis described above. The callas live happily in my office windowsill with a cyclomen, hyacinth, and several pots of amaryllis (at various stages of maturity). They all seem happy enough living in a windowsill.
All that said, there is a wealth of information out there on how to grow plants of all varieties. As useful as the information is, I have always found it more interesting to experiment on my own and see how much I recall from high-school biology and geolgraphy courses. A bit of common sense can keep almost any plant alive; a bit of experimentation and work can grow a single plant into many or