Gardening

[cjsmith]

CA Bay Area garden-savvy folks, if you wanted to plant herbs and/or a few veggies (corn, tomatoes, cantaloupe, carrots) and you hadn't done a blessed thing up 'til now -- no seedlings in pots in a sunny room, nothing -- what would you choose to plant soon?

Comments

[mactavish.livejournal.com]

My carrots do best over the winter and into spring but struggle through summer, for some reason, so I wouldn't plant those now, that might just be my dirt.

You can start almost anything now if you start from seedlings from a nursery, but you'd be fine now with earlier-producing corn seeds (note: You need at least 10 or so plants in a grid unless you want to hand-pollinate, luna_torquill plants fewer in a tub, but she hand-pollinates). I've only grown tomatoes in Sacramento, no idea about down here.

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah, I'm fine with hand-pollinating. That's what we did when we had a big hydroponic setup in the Palo Alto apartment. We grew tomatoes, corn, and cantaloupe hydroponically. We had to put stakes in to hold the corn up, because the plants didn't bother growing any roots. For lack of anyplace else to put the cantaloupe vines we draped them up and over the fence, eventually finding most of that harvest in the neighbors' back yard. And yeah, hand-pollination for the corn. The tomatoes probably worked the best; those were for me, and MMM YUM they were good.

[racerxmachina.livejournal.com]

I would LOVE to know how to grow corn. When I had a big organic plot, we gave it a shot, and we must have been doing it wrong because it was YUCKY. Stick-your-tongue-in-library-paste bad. What might we have been doing wrong?

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

I hope somebody here knows. The first time we grew corn it turned out scrumptious, so I am no more knowledgeable than someone who's never tried. Different kind of corn?