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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."
Gardens actually have usefull bugs, know them and let them be.
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.
Riiiiiiiiight...
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
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