So I’ve been growing a small garden: Cucumbers, cherry and Roma tomatoes, jalapeño and sweet peppers, lettuce, and watermelon. Well, I was sure that lettuce is a cool weather crop, but I decided to try anyway (I’m an amateur gardener). A month later after they were planted they are not doing so well. Yesterday, however, after I came home from work, I seen their doom. It’s over with. I spotted, not one, but two rabbits. I gave up on the lettuce.
The cucumbers are blossoming, however, and the tomatoes are about a foot high. Which is surprising, since I’m growing them in the good ol’ soil of Mississippi (sarcasm).
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Feel free to reply to any comment by clicking the "Reply" button.Lettuce will get impossibly inedible-y bitter in heat, that's why it is a cool weather crop. Plant around mid-March, as soon as the ground defrosts, along with peas, arugula, spinach. Then replace with squash, cukes, (started plants) as soon as it gets hot..
AnneWimsey
Level 9
June 20, 2020
1
The Mississippi soil isn't good where you are? I admit that I'm surprised. I guess I just assumed that the entire state was a fertile paradise from the river floods. Shrug. Everything I know about Mississippi comes from fiction of the last century.
Our yard has poor soil (the casualties of modern development,) so we put in raised beds for gardening. Each is 3'×6', with wire mesh underneath to stop the rodents and fencing all around to stop the chickens. (We figured we could either cage the hens or cage the gardens. We chose to let the hens stay free.)
AmyTheBruce
Level 7
June 20, 2020
0
Yeah, where I’m at it’s mostly sandy clay. Pine trees love it, though.
Chickens eat a lot 9f pests, and their fertilizer is excellent...you can rotate areas you fence off to let things flourish.
@AnneWimsey I have a very efficient system!
In late fall, I open up the beds to let the chickens eat the remaining vegetation. They eat and poop and dig up larvae all winter. During fall and winter, too, whenever I clean the coop, I toss that straw directly on the beds. Fertilizer plus mulch! Chickens also have access to the compost pile - whatever I toss in there will either be digested by a worm or a chicken (or both).
In spring, the winter's compost goes on the garden beds, and they are fenced again. Leavings from the coop go on the compost pile. The hens scratch and peck around the closed garden beds, keeping down weeds and pests. When I weed the garden, I toss those weeds to the chickens too.
All of this, by the way, is in a typically small suburban back yard. I try to use every inch!
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