[ale] Way OT - Gardening

[Jim Kinney]

Yay Food!

I have a batch of the funny brown tomato seeds ready to start sprouting.
The fruits look odd but are very, very tasty. Grape vines are in but not
trellised yet (merlot in Georgia will be a challenge!) and the new fig tree
is looking happy. I didn't get around to splitting out the root runner off
the early blueberry bush (again) this winter and it looks better than the
mother bush. The other 2 blueberries are fruiting out nicely.

I'll probably plant some other stuff soon but I have such limited full sun
it's hard to narrow down the choices. I've learned my lesson about sugar
pie pumpkins - plant those AFTER July 1 so the squash vine wasp won't get
them. We eat pumpkin pie for breakfast :-) YUM! way better than cheerios,
poptarts or bagels.

Oh. I also planted a cascade hops vine this year :-) I still need to set up
the ling string to the gutter for it. It's got 3 good shoots now at nearly
3 feet up a pole.

The plum tree from 7 years ago has never produced a single bloom as is
likely to get the axe to make room for a dwarf apple or pear tree. Bummer.
It was from a runner off a relatives plum tree that cranked out 15-25 lbs
of red plums every year. the last apple tree I had got hit by a sudden
April freeze that killed all the leave buds (3 days below 25F will do
that). We had been getting really good cooking/canning apples from that
one. I almost held a memorial service for it.

We no longer get volunteer tomatoes from 8 years ago. We had a single plant
called "garden candy" that put out a steady stream of thumb-sized
sugar-sweet OMFG!!! tomatoes from June until frost. The birds hauled off a
bunch and those seeds popped up plants for the next 4 years. The drought
finally stopped all that fun. Very sad now but very happy then. Hard to
collect seeds from it as we ate all before they made it inside. Not a
single one EVER hit a salad :-)


On Fri, Apr 26, 2013 at 2:26 PM, Beddingfield, Allen <allen at ua.edu> wrote:

> So, this is about as far off topic as one can stray, but I thought I would
> throw it out here for an afternoon diversion on this pretty spring day (at
> least it is a pretty spring day over here in Alabama :) )
> Are any of you into gardening? If so, what do you plant, and what have you
> already gotten in the ground for this season?
> I start most of my tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, etc... from seed, and I
> have them up and almost ready to set out.  I've been tilling during the
> brief periods when it has not been raining/too wet from rain, and I haven't
> been at work.
> I'm hoping to get the first round of tomatoes in the ground in the
> upcoming week, along with squash, corn, green beans, cucumbers, and lima
> beans.
> I start from seed and set out fresh batches of tomatoes at about 2-3 week
> intervals through August, giving me fresh tomatoes through Fall, so I have
> lots of tomato plants in various stages of growth.
> Lots of work, but I love my fresh vegetables almost as much as I love
> growing them :)
> Allen B.
>
> --
> Allen Beddingfield
> Systems Engineer
> The University of Alabama
>
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James P. Kinney III
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