What do you Grow?? The Garden Thread

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^ I’ll look out for them as more peppers come into season in our supermarkets here: might luck out and have a variety name on a pack (fingers crossed)

Ooh: where’s the new rose planted? Can we see a pic?

Is there some kind of fencing that could keep the deer out?
Pretty sure I’ve seen some here where farmland meets forests.
Big heavy duty stuff (and tall).
Unless you don’t want to limit their freedom of course!

While I was looking for recipes for pumpkin soup, I stumbled across directions for roasted pumpkin seeds. It was basically the same as what Karamazov wrote, with the following tip: here is the way to get the salt flavor into the seeds and not just on the outside:

Boil pumpkin seeds in salted water for 10 min: Measure the pumpkin seeds in a cup measure. Place the seeds in a medium saucepan. Add 2 cups of water and 1 tablespoon of salt to the pan for every half cup of pumpkin seeds. Add more salt if you would like your seeds to be saltier. Bring the salted water and pumpkin seeds to a boil. Let simmer for 10 minutes. Remove from heat and drain.

I just finished cooking a winter squash and will try this out.

I like to share my garden with the local inhabitants. After all, they were here first. And I don't like the aesthetics of the kind of tall and imposing fence required to keep deer out. I am trying to use the biggest landscape type bromeliads around the comfrey. The bromeliads are large and sharp. I also try to spread things out around the "yard" which in theory limits their destruction. Were I completely dependent on my garden for food, I supposed I would be much more vigilante about it. I also have possums and raccoons, who tend to get the pineapples and tomatoes unless I pick them early. I get way more serious about my mangoes....I use electric fences around the trees when the mangoes are ripening.

Any photo I sent of the rose bush would be disappointment at this point in time. In the background is a discarded hot tub from which I plant to make a water garden. The foreground is pretty much a mess due to leftovers from Hurricane Irma. But I am cleaning up the area now and will put in plants between the rose and the ugly hot tub. Then maybe I will take a picture.

^That’s a good idea with the salt boil!

Everything else: fair enough, I did think after posting that would look pretty ugly round a garden! And potentially unfriendly to smaller critters at the same time.
I’ll just have took look forward to the Rose.

The deer, raccoons, squirrel and possums were attacking my garden.Eating all the peaches and veggies.I had no choice but to put up a fence around the vegetables.Then the deer started eating all the roses, lilies and azaleas to the ground.They don’t like boxwood, everything else was on their menu.Now I have a dog pack which even deterred the bear family that showed up for my pears.Without my dogs I wouldn’t be able to grow anything to eat.

Do your dogs stay outside at night? We have two dogs and they are outside during the day: they come in at night due to concern about predators.

Sometimes the big dogs stay out all night, not the corgi.I have a Catahoula, she’s not afraid of anything.I saw her bite a bear on its butt.They usually stay in if it’s really cold at night but they like to wake me up to go out on patrol and then wake me back up to come in.lol In the summer they like to sleep on the porch.

Yeah, I live in a caravan with an awning from Easter through till October so it's about all I can manage. I grew a couple of tomato plans last year but they didn't do too well so I'll just stick with sweetpeas and nasturtiums this year and maybe a grow bag with some mixed leaves.

Exotic diseases

Yeah, I lived in a house with just a patch of concrete 10’ by 6’ for a garden and tried tomatoes in pots: I got a crop (f1 plum variety), but small fruit and inadequate ripening, the plants never looked that healthy either.
Since then I’ve only grown them directly in the ground: I’m pretty sure it was access to water that was the main problem.

Bergamot can do well with little in the way of soil: I got a mixed seed packet and scattered them in a raised bed I rigged up on top of the concrete with bricks backfilled with a 50/50 mix of grow-bag and multipurpose.
Lots of colour and lovely shape to their flowers.

Now the deer has really done it. (I am pretty sure it is just one, and probably a doe based on the tracks.) She stripped off the huge, top leaves of my pepper plant (see photo.)

This is exceeding, "sharing."

I asked about your dogs, Miss Lizard because we have dogs too, who are outside during the day, but it does not seem to slow down the deer, who come in during the night.

So, I have ordered this wireless deer fence:

https://wirelessdeerfence.com

Peppers are supposed to be "deer resistant" but this one got two of my best peppers. Tomatoes are supposed to be poisonous to deer, but they have stripped two bearing tomato plants. It is not like these deer are starving. Every landowner in central Florida has feeding stations. But they may need some micronutrients or something.



What you are looking at are the remains of at least seven leaves the size of my hand.

Deer know not what havoc they wreak....

That fence sounds like a good idea.They eat anything,pepper,,tomatoes,potato and even poisonous stuff like monkshood.They even started bedding down right by the house till I got the dogs.Like as in ten foot from the porch.One was just laying there chewing it’s cud.
Not anymore.

That looks like a really good way of securing your poor bemunched plants without making the garden feel like a prison camp in the process

I'm sure we just call them 'Sweet pointed peppers' in the UK. They are tasty though- I like to add them to salads, and to spicy dishes because the sweetness contrasts well

^ they sure work well in paella

Paella (I've only had it in Barcelona, and it was so good it's one of the main reasons I want to go back there one day! I need to find a recipe for veggie paella )