Growing your own veggies

I just planted some seeds yesterday actually. How much to you actually get from this garden of yours? I'm not really expecting much.

My parents are gardeners, so yes, I love garden-fresh foods. TOMATOES ARE TEH BEST. *cough* Anyway, they grow amazing tomatoes, yellow crookneck squash, peppers galore, carrots, peas, green beans, corn, pumpkins, cantaloupe, cucumbers, turnips... Then herbs like thyme, oregano, basil, and rosemary in my mom's greenhouse. We get produce out of our ears, and my parents end up giving a lot of it away to needy/greedy neighbors. We usually end up freezing a lot of the corn too.

Strawberries actually grow in my mom's flower garden. This year I'm growing my own strawberries to take with me to college. They've always been my favorite plant and treat, and were "mine" to take care of as a kid. My boyfriend (he's a botanist) and I started them from seed in the dorms in april.

Here they are from today:

I just planted some seeds yesterday actually. How much to you actually get from this garden of yours? I'm not really expecting much.

-"adam"

Well we were experimenting with what would grow this year, so we had a fairly small number of each plant. Those that did well though gave us decent crops. We used the lettuce throughout the summer, had an almost constant supply of beans, and pull a couple of carrots every now and then. We got a good number of cherry tomatoes and some delicious mealies. I'm expecting a bumper potato crop within a couple of weeks too.

I would say this year's crop will give us huge numbers of tomatoes, potatoes, strawberries, beans, mealies and lettuce.

@sarasne I actually wondered recently what strawberry seeds look like, apparently the little seeds on the fruit are not generally viable for growing from. We planted two strawberry plants from a nursery, and so far I've been able to transplant 8 runners from the one, so we'll have a big strawberry patch come summer :)

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Here are some shots of some of our 'crops' :) I need to work the soil deeper for the carrots next time around ;)



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@sarasne I actually wondered recently what strawberry seeds look like, apparently the little seeds on the fruit are not generally viable for growing from.

-"FlintZA"

The seeds we grew were definitely from the fruit... They were the same size and everything. We only had 11 seeds and 9 of them grew (I was very surprised by this, I expected 3 or 4 to be successful, ha). There's probably some special way to treat them so that it's more likely they'll grow...

Cool, I look forward to some Flickr shots :)

Our first cauliflower :)

All my seedlings died when I moved them from the garage to the backyard. It's hot out there, I think they just burned out.

Your carrots are hilarious. :D

^ Lol, homegrown carrots always turn out "special" for us too.

Here's an update on the strawberries!

All my seedlings died when I moved them from the garage to the backyard. It's hot out there, I think they just burned out.

You most likely need to acclimatise them first, plants are very much like animals in that they don't handle a sudden change in environment very well. There are a couple of ways to do this,you could just leave them out for an hour a day and slowly lengthen the amount of time they're out, or leave them near a window in the garage so they get used to the heat of the day or even get a seedling box with a lid specifically for acclimatization.

Your carrots are hilarious.

Yeah.. they're 'different' ;) At least they taste great!

Nice to see the strawbs coming along @sarasnee. Where do you intend to transplant them? We just transplanted two of hours into hanging baskets (apparently they do well in those). BTW, if you have access to lawn cuttings, they really like the acidity a grass mulch provides.