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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  12d ago (text post)   383 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for April 8, 2025

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service

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Gardening thread- it’s that time of year, what are y’all planting?

I have melons, squash, and tomatoes, and some Malabar spinach.

Flowers - 11 colors of Alstroemeria tubers, 9 of which have poked their first green bits out. Here's hoping that having the 2x2x10' raised bed dug out, then filling it myself with a hilariously overengineered mixture of things, works out well enough to justify the effort.

Might squeeze in a few ornamental annuals. I've got phlox, sunflower, sweet pea and cosmos seeds and I'll buy some fuchsias when they're in the shops.

Most of my gardening is reducing the size or number of things, not increasing them.

Golden lemon thyme, blueberries, lavender mint. I should probably just tear down the deck and plant some proper vegetables.

It's way past that time of year for me, but I've finally got peppers and tomatoes almost ready to transplant. I may get a few other outdoor veggies to go with them.

I'm doing a much smaller outdoor garden than I have in the past - just one 4'x8' raised bed. My wife and I got an indoor hydroponic garden a year or two ago, and it's just so much less dismaying to grow plants when I don't have to worry about heat and cold and water levels, much less rabbits or fungus or whatever kept slaughtering all my curcurbits in previous years. We've done peppers and cherry tomatoes hydroponically, even, but they take a ton of space and it's a hassle to pollinate anything indoors, so for this batch we're just planning on growing salad greens and herbs (basil, parsley, chives, dill, mint, thyme) in addition to starting plants to transplant outdoors.

Hydroponics are cool; I have an indoor system that gives me watercress(expensive and hard to find where I live) year-round. I’ve thought about outdoor hydroponics, any thoughts?

My first thought is "brilliant; I'm going to buy some watercress seeds now and see how they grow for me", so thank you. How big do you let the plants get before you harvest?

My second thought is that there are a ton of pros and cons for outdoor hydroponics, and I'm not sure where they balance out.

On the one hand it could be better than soil planting because you have full control of pH and nutrients and drainage and you shut out weeds, and better than indoor hydroponics in most locations because you get free full-intensity sun and natural airflow and insect pollinators.

On the other hand, you don't get any more control over temperature and diseases and pests than you do with soil planting, and if it's hot enough in your location then you probably need to keep an eye on your water tank more frequently to account for extra evaporation, so you lose a little of the benefit of not having to water as often.

I guess the big question is how much you want to grow versus how much space you have in full sun. If you have a bunch of ground that's not needed for anything else, you might as well put up a raised bed and plant there. If you don't have that, but you do have a nice south-facing wall or fence, I think I'd much rather go vertical with a hydroponic system than with traditional hanging planters.

Psychologically, I think the extra work in setting up an outdoor system might make a big difference to me. When I bury a bunch of seeds and half the crops grow great but half the crops die off, it feels like a fun experiment. But if I'd built a big hydroponic system instead of a few raised beds, losing half of the result would have felt like a failure. I can't always get good output from indoor hydroponic plants, but since the "growing season" is very long and the "cleaning season" is far shorter than even our mild winter, I can just replace underperforming plants with new plantings and that doesn't feel like a failure either.

For watercress? It doesn’t have to be transplanted, I just put a few seeds in the media and harvest as it gets crowded. Some of the plants get big others don’t. It’s not a picky crop when it’s in water.

I only plant garlic, but it's coming up like gangbusters this year. I'll probably have ~50 heads out of a 4x4' box. Staggered nutrient addition is a hell of a thing.

That's crazy. My biggest patch is 12 rows of 20 in a 12x12 bed. I didn't know you could double the density. How do you weed between them?

How are you fertilizing?

I mulch pretty aggressively, so not many weeds grow. The ones that do are pretty easy to pluck out by hand.

Right now I'm mostly using a mix of blood meal and feather meal.

I always manage to kill everything I've planted (including an indoor succulent a friend gifted that I keep forgetting to water even occasionally). Any recommendations on getting started gardening as someone with no discernable green thumb, and who lives somewhere with dry, sweltering summers, and the yearly bout with a hard freeze or two?

If you're planting annuals like most vegetables and flowers, then just try a little of everything, and see what survives to figure out what to focus on next year. I'm also in the heat, and some of the stuff that grows well like peppers and okra was predictable ... but also I had very good luck with some plants like green beans and horrible luck with curcurbits (cucumbers, melons, pumpkins, etc) and I still have no idea why.

Basically everything we eat loves full sunlight if it's well watered; you can get away with a little shade, but I think I lost my strawberry patch to too much shade one year.

Basically everything hates drowning, so if you get even occasional heavy rains you'll want to worry about drainage. Raised beds are popular for that, though going high with them means you either need to have or add a lot of topsoil. I only went up a few inches for my first raised beds, and I still wonder if that (maybe indirectly through promoting fungi?) was what finished off my vines and my potatoes during a wet period.

If you have trouble remembering to water, getting a drip system on a timer is a reasonable solution. You still have to kill weeds, but the timing on that is more flexible.

If you just have trouble with frequent watering, cheap LEDs have made hydroponics an affordable hobby for growing herbs now, not just "herb". Topping off (and fertilizing and adjusting pH) has to be done about once a week.

Horseradish is incredibly hardy. Everyone I know who plants it spends more time trying to keep it from spreading than they do keeping it alive.

Green crops- plant the right one for your temperature range and keep it watered. Nitrogen fertilizer.

Tomatoes- plants from a nursery in a raised bed, with a cage. Keep it watered.

Fruits- generally take sandy soil, not clay. Usually takes a lot of water.

Peppers, okra- very heat tolerant.

Squash- needs good drainage, but also plenty of water. Probably best to plant in a berm or a pot that drains well.

I'm late on everything, but the potatoes are finally up. Still reworking a few of my beds. At least lambing's almost done.

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