What Did You Do In The Garden?

Zeedman

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Planted eggplant today; Gretel, Matinik, and Striped Togo (which is orange fruited). The peppers have been germinating, now all are up except Trinidad Perfume, which usually takes over 14 days. All of the growing peppers have been moved to the growing shelf, under 6-bulb T8 high bay lights. I always over-sow, the seedlings will be thinned to one per cell when emergence stops.

We've had a lot of rain, so the ground is far too wet to do anything outside. I did drive out to the rural garden though, to check on the garlic emergence. The garden was much too wet to walk in, so I squeaked & squished across the adjoining wet lawn to get as close as possible. Most of the garlic is up, and apparently only a few need help getting through the mulch (which as you can see, will have to wait for drier conditions).
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flowerbug

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So. You are trying to confuse us!

;) Google has "garlic chives" as Allium tuberosum.

So many species in this family! I'm going with the Allium tuberosum because of white flowers on what we now have.

Steve

no, i'm the one confused. :)

the person who gave them to me called them garlic chives, and since they do taste like garlic to me i never really looked it up further. i did search before posting to make sure they were considered generally edible and saw that they were.

now, though i do stand corrected.

other than the fact that i do eat the tops of some of the garlic i grow here and i do consider that also properly called garlic chives.

so to recap,

i do not grow the plant you mention above. i grow actual garlic and eat some of those tops snipped off at times. i also eat it in the form of green garlic which is the entire plant lifted from the ground after it was previously buried more deeply than i would usually plant it to encourage more blanched white stem portion of the plant.

i also have at times eaten of the tops of the golden garlic which was misnamed by me as garlic chives. we've never purposefully spread them to eat them, but since they are yellow flowered and very hardy i really should get some of the seeds and do that to see if they are really worth growing as a small onion.
 

digitS'

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It's a wide world in the onion patch and folks like @Zeedman and @flowerbug may be found in a thicket of garlic. Since our use has been limited, I have grown little garlic. It seems to be changing with DW. Maybe it's the "personal distancing" but she is using quite a bit of garlic recently. For about the fifth time in my gardening history, there is garlic in the garden ;).

As anyone can recognize from my variety lists - I'm very willing to plant hybrids. Shallots are of special appeal and I have "dehybridized" the ones that work for me to plant from seeds. I realized that there is a variety available as seed that is not a hybrid -- I'll try that this year :).

I'm not very content with the dehybridized bulbs. They just don't seem to be of much quality. I've never grown those onion relatives that are sometimes sold as "potato onions." They do not seem popular but lately I've been wondering if they are the "walking onions" we have had around for years. Once again, I'm not much of a fan. Moreover, they are all Allium cepa. Onions. Sooo, I'm wondering if that is the "hybridizing" that the plant breeders are doing with the nice French shallot. Offspring maintain the qualities of the shallot for a generation, anyway.

It will be good if I have those qualities in an open-pollinated shallot (Zebrune). Saving sets is not difficult for me but they aren't very prolific plants and so a third of their growing space is taken up with the following year's crop of sets and on and on. Seed saving could be much more productive gardening.

One thing, to brag a little ;). I still have onions in the basement in April ! What an Onion Year 2020 amounted to! But, having sweet onions late is likely to be a storage conditions issue. I've been able to get many more months in that basement room than suggested for any variety that I have grown.

Steve
 

flowerbug

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...
One thing, to brag a little ;). I still have onions in the basement in April ! What an Onion Year 2020 amounted to! But, having sweet onions late is likely to be a storage conditions issue. I've been able to get many more months in that basement room than suggested for any variety that I have grown.

Steve

it is so nice when things work out and you have a good harvest and a good storage space to make it all useful for the longest period of time.

perhaps they had a really good cure on them? :)

here it is difficult to get onions to cure well because we get so many rains, but i was able this past year to get Mom to stop restacking things to give them more air space in the garage while they were curing so we were able to keep them into the winter months a few longer than in the past.

still in the end, we use them up pretty quickly, the garage freezes pretty hard and that often ruins onions.

the garlic on the other hand didn't even blink. :)
 

ducks4you

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I bit the bullet and tilled where last Fall's beet bed turned into a chickweed/henbit/curly dock bed, after mowing it down first. Ran out of day with my chores, but I will direct seed beets there by Friday. It's about 6 ft x 12 ft.
Finally decided to put an unenclosed compost pile right across from this bed, on the other side of the fence. I mowed it and covered it with brand new cardboard from boxes DD's gave me to burn. First thing to dump on it will be the coffee grounds I have been collecting. When I am read to use it I can shovel directly into my main garden bed.
 

Artichoke Lover

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Weeded the potatoes and onions staked off a few of the garden rows. Planted a grape vine. Watered it and the plum I planted the day before. Spent 30 minutes trying to figured out where I left the hoe. Planted some radishes. Added up all the extra seedlings I have to give away. And finally thinned the beets.
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Rhodie Ranch

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I repotted all my bean starts into larger pots. I also gave away some beans (a couple of varieties 10 beans each) to some people who wanted them on FB Southern OR gardening group.

I really like giving. One gal brought me some large delicata squash and five seeds of a tomato called Rainbow Sorbet.

I also like receiving. A gal was offering dug up lillies and I traded her a pine tree in a 1 gal pot. She is going to give it to her sis who's entire property burned down last year. Got the various colors and sizes of the lily planted.
 

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