Garden Chat

I am trying to get the blooming onions out of the garden and I’m really hoping that I didn’t pull up any solomon seal by mistake. Based on photos i looked at, I shouldn’t have gotten confused.

I do have some nodding onions around as well, so I’m leaving where i think those patches are alone until I see a bit more growth. Plus the oregano and lemon balm are returning.

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My bleeding hearts are coming back!! Had just texted my mom on Wednesday complaining that I didn’t see anything yet. So these shot up in mere days! Must have been all the rain last week. Maybe now that they’re established I can rip out the hideous bush in the corner without the landlord noticing…


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Hello, gardening friends! I have two small spaces in my yard. (10’ by 10’ ish?) where I’d like to take the grass out. I was planning to use the cardboard method to kill the grass, but I didn’t realize that would take months to work. Oops!

It seems like renting a sod cutter would be an option: what do you all think? In one space, I’m going to put down wood chip mulch and put in garden beds. In the other space, I’m going to plant native to Colorado flowers.

I don’t know what kind of grass we have, and it’s not wildly healthy, if that makes a difference.

Do you know what kind of dirt you have? Do have have a shovel to try to get one patch up to see how difficult it is?

I’ve done a 10x10’ area by hand, it wasn’t fun but for me it was easier than going to the store and physically getting a sod cutter on site. Our soil is very sandy though so that might’ve helped, if we had very clay-y soil it would have been much more annoying. I would use the shovel to “cut” a patch, get under it, flip it over so the roots were facing up.

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Thanks! I haven’t gotten the soil officially tested, but my guess is that it’s way more on the clay side than sand, unfortunately.

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I have a mini tiller that I use for some things, but I also dig a lot by hand at my house. The soil is the easiest to work with this time of the year for me (or any time when the soil is fairly well hydrated but not soggy). A large-tined garden fork like this is, for me, much easier to use to dig and lift up sod and I only use a (pointy) shovel after that. YMMV!

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Do you prefer to do it by hand because of the savings in not having to rent the machine, or is there another benefit? I think I’m lower energy than the average OMDer, so generally it is good for me to outsource this kind of thing to gadgets when I can.

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It seems expensive and I am cheap! Plus, I don’t live super close to anywhere that would rent them, so there’s the added hassle and time, and then it definitely has to get done whatever day you rent the machine. In that respect I am super glad I bought my mini tiller rather than renting like I had originally planned. There’s no way I would have gotten done with what I needed it for initially in 1 weekend!

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I have had success with the cardboard + compost approach directly over grass, as promoted by Charles Dowding on his No Dig youtube channel.

Did this in September 2019. Planted out with winter hardy greens directly into the compost.

Here is what it looked like by the following August – the kale was the stuff I planted in the fall:

This was a couple of weeks earlier, from the north side. That huge thing on the lower right is a brussel sprout plant that overwintered and then went NUTS

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It looks so happy! Am I reading this right that you put the cardboard + compost down, and then were able to plant right away? The advice I’ve seen is that I’d need to give it ~6 months before planting, so I’d be thrilled if that isn’t the case with this method.

I don’t think that you need to let a raised bed sit before planting. Cardboard and compost/some sort of soil mixture should be fine to plant in right away.

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Hmmm, OK good to know! This makes me wonder if it might be more efficient/cost effective to put the native flowers in a bed too, instead of ripping out the grass and planting them in the ground. Worth looking into…

I think planting directly in compost works fine especially with shallow-rooted plants.

In general though, native plants often do best in, well, native soil. Very rich soil or compost is sometimes not ideal.

If you can be patient too, for at least part of the area (?), wood chips over cardboard will definitely break down and improve the soil structure of the underlying soil as well, and wood chips are widely available for free, whereas quality compost can be expensive. In SLC I used cardboard and wood chips (and spaced pavers) to create a path from my back door to my shed. The only real goal was to prevent grass (and the omnipresent bindweed) from growing along the defined path. After 1 year the soil structure underneath the path itself was much improved from the surrounding soil, and the chips were visibly breaking down, so much so that I had to replenish them. (The caveat is that you do not want to dig wood chips into the soil, which ties up nitrogen, you just want to lay them on top. When planting in wood chips as mulch, you pull the wood chips back to make your planting hole for individual plants.) Improving the soil structure itself (friability) is often just as important as improving nutrient levels, if not more so, depending on local soils. This is, IMO, especially true of clay soils.

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I do the no dig method of short cut grass, cardboard, garden soil and plant out. There is no need to wait. And if you want to do natives then just replace the garden soil layer with a native soil layer.

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How big do baby plants need to be before I plant them? I am planning to get seeds planted this weekend but probably can’t plant for a month or so, but I’m not sure if this weekend is too soon.

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I haven’t had that much energy in the past 2 months and been neglecting my garden. I have like 10 beds and have nothing transplanted or sowed out back. Normally I start a bunch of seedlings indoors for transplanting, like 2 or 3 shelves worth, but the only thing I’ve started is a single tray of tomato plants. And they don’t look the healthiest, but will be fine after I transplant.

So I got the tomato plants hardened off now. Tomorrow is the day to get them in the beds. I have some Sun Sugar tomatoes (I save the seed, your not supposed to I gues since it is hybrid, but it keeps tasting the same or better, so I figure why not lol). Mortgage lifters. Cherokee Purple. Black Krim. Yellow Pear. (All from saved seed and library seed.)

I’ll scatter some tokyo long scallions in one bed, which will give me onions all year long; they last through the winter and get like 3 or 4 feet long :slight_smile: Huge scallions almost the size of leeks lol. Great for soups and salads.

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It depends where you live and what you are growing, honestly… what are you planting? Seedlings need to be hardened off before going outside fill time, and at least in my area, almost always need to be potted up 2, sometimes 3 times, before then, because of the weather and the size I want them to be.

Flowers. Zinnia, cosmos, snapdragon, asters, stock, rudbeckia and some others all for the first time. I have done some reading, but didn’t see how large to plant at. I can just experiment.

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The scallions sound awesome!! I hope your little tomatoes get stronger everyday :seedling::green_heart:

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My guess: with those types of things you can probably get away with planting out after 2 or 3 sets of true leaves (and after hardening off properly). But I think in your case I would definitely use the larger seedling trays or 3" pots, because the smallest seedling trays will be too tiny for that long, they will run out of room for roots, plus tiny seedling trays have to be monitored and watered a lot as plants get bigger. Or else you will have to pot everything up before the plant out date.

However, some flowers take a long time to germinate, so… check the days to germination (the packet should say), and then maybe add 2(???) weeks to that and work backward from when you want to plant out? Maybe? Some flowers grow very fast, some are really slow, so it might be case by case. I have only done zinnia and coleus for ornamentals in seedling pots before. :woman_shrugging: Maybe someone else will have better info!

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