2026 Garden Thread

[begreen]

A caution on the tomatoes. They don't like extreme heat. We have gotten sun scald in the past year on very hot days. This year I will be top covering them with remay or sunblocking cloth during very hot spells. With a super el Niño brewing, this may be another record breaking summer. It already is in the Pacific with an exceptionally strong super typhoon hitting Guam and Saipan islands. Very unusual for April, they usually occur in summer.

 

[djlew]

A caution on the tomatoes. They don't like extreme heat. We have gotten sun scald in the past year on very hot days. This year I will be top covering them with remay or sunblocking cloth during very hot spells. With a super el Niño brewing, this may be another record breaking summer. It already is in the Pacific with an exceptionally strong super typhoon hitting Guam and Saipan islands. Very unusual for April, they usually occur in summer.

My wife mentioned something about this. I was thinking the same thing, last summer was brutal. My tomatoes got wiped from a cooler start to the Spring/Summer and then never really recovered. July and August were brutal. I'm hoping I have better luck with tomatoes this year. I'm also doing better amending soil. Last year, besides some garden tone, we just did the log, brush, leaf trick and the top soil was just recycling center compost. Pretty carbon heavy I think. This year hopefully waiting until Mother's Day puts us at lows in the 50sF but hopefully the highs aren't too high. I still have some mid 30s lows coming up.

BTW, how are your peaches doing so far? Was just thinking about them since mine got the blooms wiped by a frost a couple weeks ago.

 

[begreen]

The peaches have finished blooming and are leafing out now. I had to act like a bee and do some hand pollinating due to cooler weather at bloom time. I am going to construct a permanent shed for the dwarf peach trees this year. They are outgrowing the portable greenhouse.

 

[djlew]

Cool! I want to build something modular and portable while my peaches are small to protect them from future frost. I might even leave one in the pot I have it in to "diversify my portfolio" so to speak.

 

[djlew]

I think the lemon especially is enjoying outside. Flowers buds swelled really fast and a ton more are forming. Featuring apricot seedling and pomegranate. Giving the deck a bit of life before the veggies come in!

 

[begreen]

I think the lemon especially is enjoying outside. Flowers buds swelled really fast and a ton more are forming. Featuring apricot seedling and pomegranate. Giving the deck a bit of life before the veggies come in!

Our citrus plants are going out today. They will welcome the full sunshine. However, the greenhouse won't be the same without their intoxicating blossom aromas.

 

[djlew]

Our citrus plants are going out today. They will welcome the full sunshine. However, the greenhouse won't be the same without their intoxicating blossom aromas.

It's always a treat getting that smell walking by. I'm sure inside or in a greenhouse it really encapsulates it. Might hit just under 40F here soon so should bring it inside!

 

[DuaeGuttae]

My Satsuma has been out for a while, and the key lime has been enjoying the heat wave outside this week. I just brought the latter back into the sunporch this evening. It would be okay for the next night or two, but the current forecast for Monday night is for 33 degrees, and we usually drop lower than the forecast. I moved the key lime, jade plant, ginger, fish pepper, and some hardening pomegranates and blueberries back in today so that I wouldn't have to worry about them tomorrow when the cold front moves in.

I worked on mulching the area where I plan to plant the pomegranates. My husband was chipping up branches and twigs from a dead pine tree he took down. I had added my old roselle plants from the garden to the pile, and I think they clogged the chipper. He didn't have time to unclog it before a commitment this afternoon, so that put an end to the mulch production. It was too hot to be outside at that point anyway.



This evening I worked on setting up some hoops and frost cloth over my tomatoes. They don't need it tonight, but this gives me a day to see if my setup works before its required. Sunday and Monday they'll need some protection, and I'm planning just to leave it on during the next few days.

I actually already have a couple of blossoms on my Ruby Slippers Cherry tomato. I don't know if they'll set fruit or not, but they seem to have settled into their new home without a problem during the heatwave. Now we'll see how they do during the cold snap.

 

[djlew]

Awesome! I can't tell you how many times I have clogged my chipper. Once so bad I had to use a pry bar to dislodge it. Then I asked myself... do I get new/sharpen the blades? Or just deal with a jam every time!? Still haven't answered that question...

How did you do with the cold snap? I accidentally left some seedlings out that got obliterated. I covered my blueberry and brought in my lemon in time. Nothing else is really flowering so I am pretty low risk but still a bummer to lose the seedlings.

 

[DuaeGuttae]

Awesome! I can't tell you how many times I have clogged my chipper. Once so bad I had to use a pry bar to dislodge it. Then I asked myself... do I get new/sharpen the blades? Or just deal with a jam every time!? Still haven't answered that question...

How did you do with the cold snap? I accidentally left some seedlings out that got obliterated. I covered my blueberry and brought in my lemon in time. Nothing else is really flowering so I am pretty low risk but still a bummer to lose the seedlings.

You've only had to use a pry bar only once? You're definitely ahead of us.

Our blades can be sharpened, reserved, or replaced, and I think we've done all three over the years. We use the chipper a lot. It's a pain but definitely worth it to improve performance. Our best way to avoid a jam is simply to watch the input and output carefully and to stop feeding it if the output diminishes. I think the roselle debris was too fluffy and clogged the output and my husband thought he could clear it by putting through some good wood. Instead it just caught stuck in the mechanism. I think we'll be prying or even sawing at that wood with a drywall knife to dislodge it.

It's a little too early to say how we've done with the cold snap. It's twenty-eight degrees this morning. Yesterday was the surprise with thirty-three in the morning when the low had been predicted to be in the forties. My mom had not protected anything in her garden and lost a few tomatoes. Yesterday afternoon she got everything covered with boxes, buckets, bins, and bags as well as my extra frost cloth over her strawberry blossoms. I'm still concerned about the temperatures tonight since they've been dropping well below what's been predicted, so I'm not sure I'll trust the forecast.

I did peek under the frost cloth in my garden yesterday when I was resecuring some edges, and things looked okay. I'll have a better idea when I remove it, probably tomorrow. I sure hope everything did okay in my garden as I don't have replacements grown out. My mom does have backups, so she'll be fine even with the ones she lost.

 

[djlew]

You've only had to use a pry bar only once? You're definitely ahead of us.

Our blades can be sharpened, reserved, or replaced, and I think we've done all three over the years. We use the chipper a lot. It's a pain but definitely worth it to improve performance. Our best way to avoid a jam is simply to watch the input and output carefully and to stop feeding it if the output diminishes. I think the roselle debris was too fluffy and clogged the output and my husband thought he could clear it by putting through some good wood. Instead it just caught stuck in the mechanism. I think we'll be prying or even sawing at that wood with a drywall knife to dislodge it.

It's a little too early to say how we've done with the cold snap. It's twenty-eight degrees this morning. Yesterday was the surprise with thirty-three in the morning when the low had been predicted to be in the forties. My mom had not protected anything in her garden and lost a few tomatoes. Yesterday afternoon she got everything covered with boxes, buckets, bins, and bags as well as my extra frost cloth over her strawberry blossoms. I'm still concerned about the temperatures tonight since they've been dropping well below what's been predicted, so I'm not sure I'll trust the forecast.

I did peek under the frost cloth in my garden yesterday when I was resecuring some edges, and things looked okay. I'll have a better idea when I remove it, probably tomorrow. I sure hope everything did okay in my garden as I don't have replacements grown out. My mom does have backups, so she'll be fine even with the ones she lost.

It sounds like despite the challenges you have a good plan and took good precautions. I will say, this is the first year for me where it was even really worth paying attention to the forecast in terms of protecting crops. Not saying I shouldn't have before, but I actually have blueberries and raspberries flowering this early, lemon was outside, etc. which is exciting but equally scary! Zapped some peach blossoms, so I am starting to get firsthand experience on how important it is to pay attention to the forecase! LOL

 

[DuaeGuttae]

The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men
Gang aft agley.

The cold got my tomatoes even under the frost cloth. It may be that there were gaps where it was held under the bamboo poles that let air in, or it may simply have been too cold for too long. All the leaves were killed on the tomatoes and some stems as well.

Here is a photo of the best of tomatoes, on the Ruby Slippers Cherry plants.
Don't be fooled by the green Austrian Winter Peas behind it. There are no large leaves left, but the stem is still alive, and there's a tiny bit of growth at the very bottom.

Here is a photo of the worst of tomatoes, the smaller of the Tundra plants. It looks dead and hopeless to me.

Most everything else has a green stem but dead leaves with no new leaves showing. I'm leaving everything in the ground for now, though, to see what happens from the stems and roots while I start some replacements inside. I figure by the time the replacements are getting big enough, I'll have a much better idea of how the garden is doing.

The potatoes got hit a little but look much better overall. This is the middle section of the row with the slightly larger plants.


My lettuce and arugula in the planter on my patio look like they had a trip to the spa. I need to thin some arugula. I sowed way too thickly thinking that the seeds weren't good. I've already transplanted some to the garden. I think I'll put some thinnings in our salad for dinner tonight.



Most of my other plants got to move out of the sunroom yesterday and today to keep enjoying the sunshine and hardening off. I have plans to transplant a bunch of lettuce on Saturday.


My tomato seeds that I sowed before the cold started popping up yesterday and today. I thought it was interesting that one of these seems to have three cotyledons.

 

[DuaeGuttae]

Today was a lovely day for gardening. It was not too hot and not too cold, and the sun was behind clouds for most of the morning and for much of the afternoon.

I started the morning by finishing putting down cardboard around my camellias and hydrangeas in one of the three beds where I'm trying to eliminate grass. New neighbors gave us lots of moving boxes recently, so it has been a blessing to have a good supply to use for this. We didn't make any new mulch today, but we had an aged pile in the woods that my husband shoveled into a cart for me to finish the project.

The next task was to get the pomegranates and blueberries planted behind the house in the fenced beds. The pomegranates are behind the back wall of our garage which faces southeast, so it should be a more protected location for them in winter. (If you notice the orange extension cord in the corner, it's running over to the electric log splitter where my husband was splitting up a dead pine he took down a couple weekends ago.)



The blueberries are behind the house on the other side of a patio from the pomegranates. I have two smaller varieties planted somewhat close together. We dug a really wide hole and did lots of amendments mixed in with the native soil, which does tend to be acidic naturally. I'll have to watch it, though, because they're near the concrete patio and house foundation. I put down some extra cardboard where bermuda grass was coming through gaps in our previous layer that had many more small boxes pieced together.


My last project before lunch was to transplant lots and lots of lettuce into the row where we had covered winter rye trimmings with compost. I think I put out forty-nine transplants. I gave a few to my mom. I'm planning to grow okra in this row later in the summer, but I'm trying to use the lettuce to eat and to act as a shade for the soil to help keep out the bermuda grass.



After lunch I weeded out some grass that was coming into the bed, put down some moving paper as a barrier, and covered it with more compost. I then planted Rattlesnake pole bean seeds all along the trellis in the back of the bed. We've used up all our frozen green beans from last year, so I did a full row of eight panels this year instead of only six.

I then helped my husband clean up from logsplitting and get the splitter put away just before we actually got some rain. It has been, dry, dry, dry here recently, so it was lovely to see it coming down. We got about a quarter of an inch, and there may be more showers later. I'm so pleased.

The last good news of the day is that the Ruby Slippers tomato is definitely putting on some new growth.

 

[TreeCo]

Hey folks I've not been checking in here as much now that our heating season is over.

I've been in the garden!

Some garden photos from yesterday: Cauliflower, three cultivars of heirloom collards one being a yellow 'cabbage collard', two cultivars of broccoli. We've been eating and freezing collards for the past few weeks. Two rows of sugar snap peas, 7 kinds of garlic and a triple row of multiplier onions.

 

[Whitenuckler]

Hey folks I've not been checking in here as much now that our heating season is over.

I've been in the garden!

Some garden photos from yesterday: Cauliflower, three cultivars of heirloom collards one being a yellow 'cabbage collard', two cultivars of broccoli. We've been eating and freezing collards for the past few weeks. Two rows of sugar snap peas, 7 kinds of garlic and a triple row of multiplier onions.

View attachment 347572 View attachment 347573 View attachment 347574


View attachment 347575


View attachment 347576

Nice garden. Paradise.

 

[begreen]

Hey folks I've not been checking in here as much now that our heating season is over.

I've been in the garden!

Some garden photos from yesterday: Cauliflower, three cultivars of heirloom collards one being a yellow 'cabbage collard', two cultivars of broccoli. We've been eating and freezing collards for the past few weeks. Two rows of sugar snap peas, 7 kinds of garlic and a triple row of multiplier onions.

Fantastic. That looks to be a month ahead of our garden up north.

 

[TreeCo]

We started the tomato and cruciferous plants from seed on 2-1-26 and grew them for a few weeks under led tubes and then moved them in and outdoors depending on weather conditions.

Zip code 30011 if you want to look at usda grow zones. We are getting a low of 45°F tonight and higher than that for the next week predictions.

 

[DuaeGuttae]

@TreeCo , thanks for the pictures of your garden. It looks great.

I grew up eating collard greens and loved them, but they don't seem to be so well known anymore. Are you part of the Heirloom Collard Project?

When do you anticipate being able to set out your tomatoes? It's been so cool here that just last week I potted up some tomatoes and peppers a second time as our soil temperatures have dropped significantly. Our lettuce is loving it, though.