I don't know what it would take to keep marauding animals a birds away.
Posted on 03/29/2013 2:17:42 PM PDT by greeneyes
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You said to Johnny: “Now take care of yourself and sweet dreams....”
I am Johnny’s personal EMT and I can tell you he is a difficult patient.
You’ve got a lot of work ahead of you!
Let me suggest when you replace stuff try to find a substitute that actually gives you food in return. Instead of little dwarf maples, try dwarf fruit trees. Instead of box hedges, try blueberry or cherry bushes. Upright blackberries do great against a fence as long as they have 7+ hrs of sunlight. The trailing berries also trellis nicely against a chain link fence or some equivalent. Tomatoes and beans or peas (the climbing kind) like to be trellised as well.
I do all this plus my ‘groundcover’ plants are strawberries. I put dwarf pepper plants in amongst my plantings too. Some of those only get about 18” tall. You could easily turn a suburban ‘landscaped yard’ into several hundred square feet of food bearing garden with a bit of effort. And without your neighbors having a clue unless they walk right up to your house. There are lots of dwarf or container varieties of most veggies now.
Since you’re starting anew, try this link:
http://www.rosalindcreasy.com/
She’s got some good ideas and pics. Searching for ‘edible landscaping’ will get you a website that sells plants for this purpose (I have no idea if they’re a reputable business or not) but also other links with pics and ideas. I lived in NJ for a while and if I were paying NJ property taxes I’d be darned sure I got something out of that!
Just a suggestion.
To all:
What do you recommend a beginning gardener in North Texas attempt to grow, in light of the sandy soil and drier conditions?
Also, are there any websites or books you would recommend on the subject?
Lol! Good luck with that! I’m glad I can yell and pontificate at him from a distance. (Besides, it’s fun to be everybody’s mother.) Forge onward!
I have no idea, but since they’re perennial and don’t form bulbs, I’m guessing they would be “day neutral”.
Our ground freezes solid, so they go dormant both summer and winter; SoCal, they only buckled to the heat, with a summer dormancy. Most milder places I read about them, they use them fresh throughout the winter.
I'm almost done transferring all my peppers from their original plastic cups to one gallon pots. I seriously have more than I know what to do with, so I might give them away to friends. My wife has been harvesting snow peas this week. She's kind of worried about her tomatoes (the leaves look a little yellow and anemic). Her tomatillos are doing good, as is the tomatoes she planted in a hanging upside-down planter.
Thanks. I’ll look for them. We seldom get below 20F in winter and then only for a few hours at a time.
I like the idea of growing food, I’ve done herbs for the last few years and I did tomatoes when we live in Bayonne, the only thing that makes me hesitate here are the critters.
I grew up in NYC and have never lived in the suburbs before now. (Hubby grew up on Long Island, but pretty close to the city.)
To me, this is almost like a wilderness. We’ve actually had deer in sight of our backyard and we’ve got possums and racoons and creatures like that.
And, our soil is dreadful, it’s pretty much toxic it seems.
Hubby is saying that after the house is lifted he wants to put in sort of huge planters, so I think we could do veggies and stuff like that.
I love the idea of fruit trees. I’ve never wanted to be a farmer, but I was always open to the idea of an orchard!
Our little ranch house is going to be about 5 feet up in the air, so we are going to have to re-do the whole landscape.
Is this them?
http://rareseeds.com/red-welsh-bunching-onion.html
I put your allium perutile in a search engine and got ‘welsh perennial onion’ then searched for that.
“I suppose I could eat a squirrel if the economy completely collapes, although I hope it never comes to that.”
Oh my goodness, Afraid, what an awful tale!
If it ever gets THAT bad I will eat squirrel with you, but only after we’ve exhausted the supply of grass, roots, nuts and hello, chicken!
I’m not going to do well in a societal collapse, not at all.
“However if we don’t rinse them off real well, we might find ourselves with some catz!”
LOL! It wouldn’t be the worst thing, unless you ended up with cats like ours, they’re terrible!
Critters can be dealt with. Since you can’t really hunt the deer you will probably just have to put up barriers of some sort. We use nets (Jungs) to keep birds off the berries. Sluggo takes care of the slugs. Check to see if your township has or uses the haveaheart traps for the smaller critters. If you’ve got an animal control department they might be useful.
My biggest problems are deer and bunnies. And we hunt deer down here. They breed kind of like the bunnies though. This year we’ll put a fence around both gardens. Last year the deer ate all my shell beans. Bunnies ate a few of my peppers. Gardening is a risk.
You can have your soil tested perhaps. Raised beds and large containers might be an idea too.
I’m jealous of you actually. Your climate is much more conducive to great fruit and berry growing than ours. We can’t grow much of anything in comparison. There are dwarf zucchinis, squash, peppers, eggplants, okra, bush melons and so forth that you could really stick here and there in full sun. The dwarf bush beans can be attractive if put in a row in a flower bed. And if you plant flowers there too, no one will know those are beans. I put low growing stuff like strawberries, oregano and dwarf basils here and there as well. And if you make the raised beds out of landscaping stones instead of the wooden planks everyone else uses they will be even less likely to seem like a ‘garden’ in the front yard.
If you’re that close to the shore you can likely grow winter season veggies most of the winter as well with a little protection if things get below 20ish. This is a great link with temperature limits for various winter growing stuff and some tips for winter gardens:
http://www.southernexposure.com/southern-exposures-fallwinter-gardening-guide-ezp-38.html
No, Fistulosum is the Welsh or Bunching onion; these are sometimes called False Welsh Onion.
Google is slippery with the bait & switch results. :)
Thanks for the empathy. Men who love squirrel were never served on soaked in lemon juice and oregano when they already had a queasy stomach. LOL
I don't know what it would take to keep marauding animals a birds away.
Ahem! You live in the “Garden State” LOL. When my daughter lived in Mahwah, there were still working farms nearby.
Here's my picture.
It’s 28 degrees right now here in S.E. Michigan. Is it safe to plant my tomatoes now? LOL!
Yes. You can plant them in your heated basement under a grow light!
It’s starting to get warm here after a week of below normal temps. I have lettuce and turnips coming up. Onions are in the ground as well as shallots and are thriving. Got some tomatoes planted, but covered them when it got into the low 30s earlier this week.
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