Grow your own!

[foundationist.org]

Well, the yard and garden we have is tiny - there's no real room for growing veg or fruit, but we will try with a little this year.

However, bought a mushroom growing kit weeks ago and finally we had 4 whopping big mushrooms growing in the box this morning.

So I sauted them for tea.

Not a very big deal, and I certainly never stopped to rejoice in the taste of home grown (I don't think the effect can be expected with mushrooms). But there was something very satisfying about literally cutting food from its stalk and then beginning to cook it within seconds. Truly fresh!

Anyway, anyone make a proper effort at growing their own food around here? Or is everyone else in the inner city as well?

[Talia]

Your own veg really do taste much better when you grow them yourself. Trust me!

[foundationist]

Oh, I believe you! And I can't wait to have enough land to feed myself! That would be great, if I ever reach that point. Not in terms of the labour involved, though.

[Talia]

That's the best part of growing your own! Eating becomes a reward, a prize of hard work well earned.

[Dave the Web]

I would so love to grow my own vegetables and fruit. A villa with orchards in Spain anyone?

[maya]

i grow my own and roll my own! :twitch2: :wink_2:
:sun_smiley:

[Alex P]

Originally Posted by foundationist

Oh, I believe you! And I can't wait to have enough land to feed myself! That would be great, if I ever reach that point. Not in terms of the labour involved, though.

Open your window... There it is

And the labour involved in working the land/living with the land... That is -real- work, that is good and benefiting work. (Doubt ya here anymore but wanted to share that with EVVVVERYONE.)

[wil]

cook??

There is nothing finer than walking into the garden with a pocket knife and a towel, carrots, celery, corn, radishes, peppers, plums, figs, raspberries....

Wandering around grazing, dropping cuttings on the compost heap, wiping off your knife and walking away full.

No dishes, no pots and pans, no cleanup, no refridgeration, no cooking, just reaping what you sow.

[Alex P]

Originally Posted by wil

cook??

There is nothing finer than walking into the garden with a pocket knife and a towel, carrots, celery, corn, radishes, peppers, plums, figs, raspberries....

Wandering around grazing, dropping cuttings on the compost heap, wiping off your knife and walking away full.

No dishes, no pots and pans, no cleanup, no refridgeration, no cooking, just reaping what you sow.

I recall when we used to take (my kinda step father's) mother to stay with her friends every now and then, and they are a lovley couple that lived through WWII and have that mentality still (which Is a good one.) And there large garden is a giant crop like place so many veggies and fruits and they are all real big and juicy tastey things and we'd always be treated to eating with them when we went up, always looked forward to that.

Used to go around the garden eating tons of rasberries and gooseberries lol

[gp1628]

Something interesting I saw on TV was about lettuce. Instead of picking the whole lettuce you can just peal off the outer leaves for your meal. It will continue growing inner leaves continually to replace those you take.

So one lettuce in a pot in or near the kitchen would be a garden unto itself.

Gandalf Parker

[path_of_one]

That's true about lettuce- that's what I did in my last garden and just a couple heads of lettuce provided plenty for two people over the summer.

It was interesting to see what happened with the broccoli we didn't eat- it kept growing and got all flowery and purplish. LOL

A tip is to plant intercropped rather than in rows. If you plan squash among your other plants, they have natural insecticides that protect the others and you'll hardly have any bugs. If you plan beans along with other plants, they fix nitrogen in the soil and will fertilize your soil without any extra labor.

[greymare]

i once bought eggplant seeds, just to see how they grow.
if you havent seen them grow, you should. they are freaky plants...
I dont eat it, i gave the "fruit/vege" away to people who did
oh i think you guys call em aubergine.

[Garnet]

I have a tiny patch of dirt (about half of a square meter) next to the front porch where I grow "shade" plants (it gets little direct sun), but have had some success with lettuce & kohlrabi.
My back yard is paved, so I grow herbs, tomatoes, & peppers in pots. Last year my pepper plants were beautiful; large & lush, but produced no peppers.
This year I'm hoping for better: one plant (a purple bell) already has a tiny pepper.
One year I grew a cherry tomato plant that was still producing when the first frost was predicted, so I hauled it inside & put it in my south-facing bedroom window. I was able to pick tomatoes almost all winter, though each successive "crop" meant smaller tomatoes; by winter's end they weren't much bigger than peas.
Of course, I shared my bedroom with fruit flies all winter.

[juantoo3]

I've dabbled a little over the years with growing things.

Seems like I had to relearn everything when I moved to FL, the sun is too intense in the summer for just about anything annual, but the winter is pretty short lived. With modest precautions a lot of things will grow well over the winter that would typically die back elsewhere.

I've played with container gardening and interplanting simultaneously. It's fun to see how much variety can be grown in little space. If they weren't so darned unsightly, I would probably still grow in 5 gallon plastic paint cans (with drainage holes punched). The trick is feeding the plants without artificial and chemical preparations. When I used to go fishing, I would bury the scraps in the bottom of one of these buckets, and the plants seemed to enjoy that as they came up. I've been thinking about maybe using canned sardines or mackeral, both relatively inexpensive, to do the same thing.

Right now I've got some green / bunch onions in one container, and carrots in a couple more. And there's momma and daughter pineapples, several years old now, one of whom is trying really hard to gift us with yet another baby pineapple. There's the avocado tree in a container. And sassafras taken as a cutting from a small tree I bought at a native plant show and planted at my former residence. And pomegranate and loquat I grew from seed and put in the ground (finally, after about 5 years for the pomegranates in containers at my former house). There is a citrus tree already at the new house, kind of a tangerine or tangelo I think, that is mature and producing well last year.

Yeah, I miss keeping a regular garden, I just don't have the time to do it any justice. There's no comparison though the taste and quality, and satisfaction, between home grown vegetables and store bought. Presuming the gardener is any good at what they are doing (soil condition, nutrient balance, viability and friability, water content, etc.).

I've also seen, and grown, some poor quality stuff that struggled just to stay alive.

Oh, Garnet;

When I was a kid I watched a cherry tomato produce for 2 1/2 years once. It had to have been a mild winter, but Southern California generally doesn't get very cold for long anyway. Even so it was pretty well sheltered growing beside the house. Haven't seen one live that long since....