The Urban Garden Thread

[Bill Bumface]

My wife wanted to plant some rhubarb and something else behind our back fence in the lane. It got me thinking about soil contamination. Whether in the lane, or in the yard, who knows what happened for the 100 years this lot has been in use before we showed up.

Is growing stuff directly in the ground a bad idea? Do people do soil contamination tests? Any options that won't break the bank?

[redforever]

Originally Posted by Bill Bumface

My wife wanted to plant some rhubarb and something else behind our back fence in the lane. It got me thinking about soil contamination. Whether in the lane, or in the yard, who knows what happened for the 100 years this lot has been in use before we showed up.

Is growing stuff directly in the ground a bad idea? Do people do soil contamination tests? Any options that won't break the bank?

I would not be worried about soil contamination in or out of your yard. If you are, dig out the soil presently there and prepare a new bed.

However, I would not plant anything in my back alley. I would be worried about contamination from dogs peeing on the rhubarb.

[Bill Bumface]

Originally Posted by redforever

I would be worried about contamination from dogs peeing on the rhubarb.

Where I am, the dogs are the preferred source of alley urine.

[undercoverbrother]

Thank you Nyah for starting this thread.

Look for recommendations.

We have 3 raised beds, get good sun and heat. Each bed is 2ft x 4ft and about 1.5ft deep

We grow tomato plants in two stand alone bug pots.


I've grown Kale, Lettuce, but am looking for other ideas.

[StevenAbootman]

Originally Posted by undercoverbrother

Thank you Nyah for starting this thread.

Look for recommendations.

We have 3 raised beds, get good sun and heat. Each bed is 2ft x 4ft and about 1.5ft deep

We grow tomato plants in two stand alone bug pots.


I've grown Kale, Lettuce, but am looking for other ideas.

I have 5 large raised beds made from pressure treated lumber. I also have them in a sunny and hot spot. Typically I will grow Swiss chard, carrots and lettuce is the shadier beds. The ones closer to the house get very warm and cucumbers, peppers and tomatoes do well there. Beans and zucchini also do well. Fresh garden cucumbers are awesome.

I have one bed that is a dedicated Asparagus bed, which i started about three years ago, and this is the first time I will harvest from it.
I grew pumpkins last year in one of the beds and it completely took over the garden, but I managed to get 5 basketball sized pumpkins out of it.
This year I will grow peas in the ground garden again, last year with the heat the peas were not that great. I do potatoes in the ground and in some bins.

I have radishes growing in containers right now and were already emerging, not sure if they will come out of this cold spell ok or not.

From about mid june to end of september we rarely buy vegetables from the store and have enough to share with family and our elderly neighbor. The garden area in total is about 40x15 ft, mostly in raised beds.

[Fuzz]

Originally Posted by undercoverbrother

Thank you Nyah for starting this thread.

Look for recommendations.

We have 3 raised beds, get good sun and heat. Each bed is 2ft x 4ft and about 1.5ft deep

We grow tomato plants in two stand alone bug pots.


I've grown Kale, Lettuce, but am looking for other ideas.

Carrots do well here, as do peas, beats, and beans. For peas just attach ~4-6 ft long 2x2's to your boxes with some netting to grow. For carrots leave them in the ground at least past the first frost. They get sweater then. Same with beats. Beans, just plant them as directed, and harvest before they get too big and nasty.

Potatoes do great as well. Plant them once second spring hits. They usually survive anything after that, but a frost blanket doesn't hurt if it snows again. By getting them in the ground now, you can harvest them as needed in mid August. They can stay in the ground long after their green bits die off, I often wait until late September, as it hardens the skin a bit so they last longer indoors. Stay away from stupid varieties like purple, and stick with russets and Yukon gold.

[redforever]

Originally Posted by undercoverbrother

Thank you Nyah for starting this thread.

Look for recommendations.

We have 3 raised beds, get good sun and heat. Each bed is 2ft x 4ft and about 1.5ft deep

We grow tomato plants in two stand alone bug pots.


I've grown Kale, Lettuce, but am looking for other ideas.

If your exposure allows you to grow tomatoes, then you can grown beans (green or yellow) and cucumbers. I would recommend zucchini too but the plant gets quite big. Peas are fine...grown them on a vertical chicken fence at the back of your bed. Carrots and beets work as qell. Most brassica will grow but again they take quite a bit of room. Try things like bok choy instead. They grow fast and upright so don't take as much room.

Keep in mind that peas and brassica plants such as kale, cabbage, bok choy and the like prefer more moisture and a cooler exposure.

[redforever]

Originally Posted by Fuzz

Carrots do well here, as do peas, beats, and beans. For peas just attach ~4-6 ft long 2x2's to your boxes with some netting to grow. For carrots leave them in the ground at least past the first frost. They get sweater then. Same with beats. Beans, just plant them as directed, and harvest before they get too big and nasty.

Potatoes do great as well. Plant them once second spring hits. They usually survive anything after that, but a frost blanket doesn't hurt if it snows again. By getting them in the ground now, you can harvest them as needed in mid August. They can stay in the ground long after their green bits die off, I often wait until late September, as it hardens the skin a bit so they last longer indoors. Stay away from stupid varieties like purple, and stick with russets and Yukon gold.

Norland is a good variety for red potatoes...mature quickly, nice even shape, and not too prone to potato scab.

[Fuzz]

Ya, red grow fine, too. I just prefer to eat Yukon and russet.

[Nyah]

How well do tulips handle cold like this? Mine are a couple inches out of the ground. Just got back into town this afternoon so I couldn't cover them up before the temperature dropped. Is it safe to say they are probably toast after last night and today?

[redforever]

Originally Posted by Nyah

How well do tulips handle cold like this? Mine are a couple inches out of the ground. Just got back into town this afternoon so I couldn't cover them up before the temperature dropped. Is it safe to say they are probably toast after last night and today?

Do they have buds yet? If no buds, should be fine.

[Scroopy Noopers]

Originally Posted by undercoverbrother

Thank you Nyah for starting this thread.

Look for recommendations.

We have 3 raised beds, get good sun and heat. Each bed is 2ft x 4ft and about 1.5ft deep

We grow tomato plants in two stand alone bug pots.


I've grown Kale, Lettuce, but am looking for other ideas.

Kohlrabi has a quick turn around time and grows happily in Calgary. I’m giving it my first try this year.

[Nyah]

Originally Posted by undercoverbrother

Thank you Nyah for starting this thread.

Look for recommendations.

We have 3 raised beds, get good sun and heat. Each bed is 2ft x 4ft and about 1.5ft deep

We grow tomato plants in two stand alone bug pots.


I've grown Kale, Lettuce, but am looking for other ideas.

As others have mentioned, any squash plants do incredibly well in raised garden beds, although they tend to take over the whole area. I absolutely love them though. If you like spicy chili's, those also do great with full sun. I've also had success with cucumbers, onions started from seed, celery (surprisingly), potatoes and most leafy greens.

If you're looking for something a little different and don't mind climbers and pretty dense greens, I highly recommend beans. I grow runner beans every year, they climb lattice or whatever you put around to support them, and they attract a ton of bees because they produce little flowers. Just don't put them near anything else youre growing, they'll wrap around it and drag it down. Learned that the hard way

[undercoverbrother]

Thank you all

[DoubleF]

Originally Posted by Bill Bumface

Where I am, the dogs are the preferred source of alley urine.

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.

[DoubleF]

Really? Hot Damn that might be worth trying then. I love shredding it into salads, but I don't typically like justifying the price. Another I'm wondering about might be celeriac, but I should buy some and cook it to see if I even like it first. Most root type veggies here are cheap that I can't justify the effort. I love using celery hearts in soups, so I thought I'd experiment with celeriac in cooking sometime. I was actually thinking of doing leek which I really like, but it's kinda pricey, but hey, maybe I should try all 3 in a planter on my deck.

Edit: if anyone wants to try something unique that grows really Damn well in Calgary and is versatile but unknown, try gai choy. It's also known as Chinese mustard I believe. Bok choy tastes bland in comparison in stir fry IMO and gai choy is hardy and versatile enough for soups too. You can even pickle it and the pickled versions are often found chopped up in things like Taiwanese noodle soups or minced pork on rice. I've seen many Chinese and Vietnamese people growing rows and rows of this stuff quite successfully.

I suddenly want to experiment with making a saurkraut/slaw with cabbage, gai choy and kolrabi w/ szechuan peppercorns. I tried making a kraut with szechuan pepper corns last year and I thought it was great .

[DoubleF]

Originally Posted by Fuzz

We've done garlic for a good 5 years, never found it that hard. They don't always get huge, but it's pretty easy. I think we have 2 cloves left from last year, was a decent harvest.

Just regular garlic? or do you do other varieties like giant garlic, black and purple? Apparently black and purple pickle well?


Damn. I said I don't consider myself a green thumb, but these few posts seem to say otherwise. My grandmother passed away last fall and I realized I spent a ton of time with her in Southern Alberta and Winnipeg area when I was young growing lots of things at home and communal gardens. I was just thinking the other day I should grow marigolds in her memory. I haven't really done it in a decade or more... But I guess I've been itching to do more lately.

[Fuzz]

I've just done regular garlic, no idea the variety as we harvested seeds from my wife's aunt's garlic in Hamilton.


You mentioned hops, I've got some. They are monsters. Give them loads of space, then triple that. It's amazing how much they grow in a season. Mine kinda grows up my fence, then my water bin, then spreads out everywhere. I keep wanting to use them for beer making, but harvest time never really lines up with brewing time, and I'm usually too busy to grab some. Maybe this year.

[Nyah]

I wanted to try hops too. Do they pretty much grow anywhere? I've heard they grow like weeds, I'd like to plant them along my fence for more privacy but it's north facing and they would only get minimal direct sun until they grow taller.

[Fuzz]

Mine are south facing, so I'm not sure. I wish they grew like weeds, then I'd have some hope of controlling it!