Quote:
Originally Posted by Bill Bumface
Where I am, the dogs are the preferred source of alley urine.
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What about something with thorns in that area then? Raspberry or goji should both grow like crazy even in a lane scenario. You would honestly want to make sure it doesn't take over too much area. The only things more vapid I can think of are probably mint and strawberry.
For goji berry though, I personally like using the leaves for soup, but for the average person, I don't know what they'd use it for.
For squash, I'm kinda glad I don't have enough space in my yard. My inlaws grew kobocha pumpkins and zucchini in Saskatchewan and thought they failed because they had less than a dozen from a 10x20 foot area by mid July. I realized they had too many gigantic leaves sapping nutrients from the squash and blocking the sun (excess moisture rotting lots of the squash) so I chopped off 2/3 of the unnecessary leaves much to their chagrin (looked ugly)... In 6 weeks, we had enough to probably fill two bath tubs. We basically couldn't give them away fast enough and I got in trouble again for setting circumstances to grow too many. Lol.
Cucumbers... So good. There are so many types and the Asian cucumber variety has something about it that is quite nice. It's like a perfect blend of field cucumber and English cucumber. Crunchy and not too hard or soft/soggy. You do have to milk the cucumber to get rid of some of the bitterness though. But it's easy to do in 5-10 seconds.
I like growing Swiss chard and banana peppers outdoors in Calgary. Snow peas also do well. A single dill plant also goes a long way. I typically grow things that are more expensive in stores so I can supplement those purchases (ie: not beets, potato, carrots, lettuce, cabbage, garlic etc. That are basically the cheapest per pound produce).
One exception is ginger. It's quite beautiful as a plant and gets quite large. Probably better in a greenhouse, but you can get solid spurts of growth for weeks on end.
I'd love to give hops a try. inexplicably I'd love to try growing capers too, but those are probably best done in a greenhouse. One other insane project I inexplicably want to give a shot is to prune certain small juniper bushes on my property in a manner similarly to the Lethbridge Japanese garden. Another strange one that I'd like to tackle is fern. I have two that come back every year in my yard, but I can never seem to get them to grow more than 2.5 feet tall without it somehow bowing over and drying up/starting over again. I'd love to figure out how to get it bigger and taller and potentially see if I have something that I can potentially harvest the occasional fiddle head.
Whoever owned my home before me did a good job with perennials, so I'm kind of limited in terms of garden space unless I rip it all out and start again. I'm kinda hesitant to do that, but there's definitely a few places where I'm quite convinced I need to rip out some of the trees growing too close to the house and replace it with fruit bearing shrubs like gut cherry, cranberry, haskap, saskatoon or ornamentals/fragrants like cherry, juniper, mock orange, lilacs, peony, crocus and bleeding hearts. I also have some flowers like lily of the valley that pop up every year which are poisonous, and I'm not sure if I want those around my kids...
I don't honestly consider myself a true green thumb horticulturalist. I will say I kinda like having a variety of plants around that are relatively low maintenance. I honestly just grew up on farms and watched those families do their thing growing up, and figured out how to identify sun and soil conditions for certain plants. Most of what I listed other than a few items I think can be considered basically "set and forget" with initial germination and transplanting the biggest challenge.