Fed up with the garden

[Paddy]

I agree with gardening is a hobby. A bit like fishing. I do enjoy it so we plant selectively every year. I like to plant things that are either easy to grow or hard to get good produce.

We are no till. Just a 70 ft long 2 foot wide strip covered in mulch with irrigation tubes. I can mow right up to the mulch, virtually no weeding. Also in the garden are (3) 7 year old peach trees pruned to 7 ft tall. Last two years we picked 1200-1500 peaches. This year nothing due to X-mass sudden deep freeze. two sour cherries planted this year to replace one that died last year. The fruit trees do require pruning and spraying.

The entire garden is surrounded by electric fence on a timer.

The peaches and tomatoes are grown because you can't beat a home grown peach/tomato picked fresh. We can't buy sour cherries here so we enjoy having a source. We have Rhubarb that will be ready for the first harvest next year, who doesn't like strawberry rhubarb pie! We also have cukes and zukes.

Friends and family enjoy the bounty of peaches but so do the local food pantries. other than a two dozen canning jars of jams or a few frozen pie packs, we don't spend the time to put it up. Enjoy as it comes on.

 

[oosik]

We had a GREAT garden the first year here on the property. Then - slowly but surely - the local indigenous inhabitants ( Ex - deer, coons, pocket gophers, birds, chipmunks, mice, etc ) found this "offering". By the third year we were lucky if anything even survived sprouting. We gave up and bought everything at the local farmers market.

The final straw - for the wife - the chipmunks ate all her strawberries before they were half ripe.

 

[GeneV]

I've heard that argument many times. Gardening is like any hobby, you have to enjoy it because the money saved vs time spent doesn't make for much savings.
Personally, there's nothing like FRESH produce, just picked as opposed to the stuff that's probably close to a week old by the time it gets to the supermarket. You also know how it was grown if that matters to you.

Oh, I definitely get the value of it.

 

[RobertEH]

We had a GREAT garden the first year here on the property. Then - slowly but surely - the local indigenous inhabitants ( Ex - deer, coons, pocket gophers, birds, chipmunks, mice, etc ) found this "offering". By the third year we were lucky if anything even survived sprouting. We gave up and bought everything at the local farmers market.

The final straw - for the wife - the chipmunks ate all her strawberries before they were half ripe.

Don't forget those Washington Slugs... Nothing like finding a 10 inch long banana slug on your produce!

 

[Jstpssng]

lady bugs = good.
F...ing beetles I meant to say potato beetles. Just hundreds of them. I've never seen so many.

Spinosad, AKA "Captain Jack" works well on them. Spinosad General Fact Sheet I'm not organic by any means, but do try to keep my pesticide footprint to a minimum; otherwise I may as well just buy commercially grown produce.

I've found that delaying planting potatoes until around June 20th +/- seems to keep them to a minimum.

I plant a short row as soon as I can work the ground in spring, for summer use. Then I plant 10 lbs around the end of June to use through the winter. Aside from the reason you list, it also means less time from the time they are dug until when spring comes.

 

[jyoutz]

same. Didn't mention cherries. Every year the birds are a challenge. This year also had rain, rain and rain when they were ripening. What the birds didn't eat split and rotted.

Our cherries did exceptionally well this year, but no apples and a very light pear crop. Last year we had a bumper crop of apples and pears. Grapes have a very heavy crop developing. A mixed bag.

 

[ning]

Our cherries did exceptionally well this year, but no apples and a very light pear crop. Last year we had a bumper crop of apples and pears. Grapes have a very heavy crop developing. A mixed bag.

I got two cherries.
Two.
My figs are just now starting to grow, I thought we'd completely missed figs somehow.
It's like our trees just didn't wake up till recently.

 

[Egon]

While growing up the garden was not a hobby. It provided serious food for the year. Canning & freezing!

 

[NoTrespassing]

While growing up the garden was not a hobby. It provided serious food for the year. Canning & freezing!

Our hope is that ours will this year.

 

[masseyrider]

Now we got hit with high winds, nothing extreme like on the news, but enough to beat things up.
Just one thing after another.