Kitchen Gardening

[psyanojim]

Good news is, the tomatoes look delicious.

Bad news is, the weather has played havoc with the timing of my harvest. I have 300-400 of these things coming ripe in the next couple of weeks, then the batch planned for September has been badly messed up by the wet July weather.

Oh well, better start eating the ones I have. 20+ tomatoes per day for the next couple of weeks

[Jubal]

I picked two tomatoes today which looks like possibly being my whole crop for the year. Urban gardening is brutally low output a lot of the time

[psyanojim]

I have the complete opposite problem with potatoes in this climate.

The last couple of pots of kitchen waste I left out to compost, I had entire potato plants growing out of them simply from potatoes that got thrown out with the waste. The weather has been so wet, I didn't have to water or look after them in any way, and they yielded about 5kg of potatoes after a couple of months!!

On that note, it has just started raining again. *sigh* my poor tomatoes

[Spritelady]

I am hoping to visit a garden centre this weekend and purchase some things to begin my own kitchen gardening quest! If anyone has any tips, tricks, suggestions for good and interesting plants etc, please let me know!
Ideally, I don't want anything that will require an awful lot of extensive gardening work, as I have limited free time. I intended to start myself off with some herb plants, which I've had some success maintaining previously, but any other suggestions will be happily received.

[Jubal]

I am hoping to visit a garden centre this weekend and purchase some things to begin my own kitchen gardening quest! If anyone has any tips, tricks, suggestions for good and interesting plants etc, please let me know!
Ideally, I don't want anything that will require an awful lot of extensive gardening work, as I have limited free time. I intended to start myself off with some herb plants, which I've had some success maintaining previously, but any other suggestions will be happily received.

Probably all basic thoughts but in case useful: at this time of year you probaby don't have many other things to plant anyway - e.g. tomatoes, cucumbers, most other veg tend to go in much earlier in the year. In general, checking good time of year for things is worth doing, herbs being a fairly good semi-exception because you're just eating the leaves. For herbs having an idea of where you're going to put them and thus what light levels are available also matters, as does thinking about soil drainage, most things in the herb line want pretty well drained soil/not to get waterlogged.

[psyanojim]

I am hoping to visit a garden centre this weekend and purchase some things to begin my own kitchen gardening quest! If anyone has any tips, tricks, suggestions for good and interesting plants etc, please let me know!
Ideally, I don't want anything that will require an awful lot of extensive gardening work, as I have limited free time. I intended to start myself off with some herb plants, which I've had some success maintaining previously, but any other suggestions will be happily received.

Do you like spinach?

Its a good spring/autumn crop (it doesnt like hot mid-summers), so can be started once the weather begins to cool down. It grows quickly in small pots, yielding tasty leaves within 2-3 weeks of germinating.

Quick lifecycle and low maintenance, so an easy crop to experiment with.

[Spritelady]

Ooh both suggestions duly noted - I do indeed like spinach, and have procured a selection of herbs to begin growing.

I have also procured some strawberry plants that were on offer, believing them to be at the end of their season. I was then pleasantly surprised when a quick Google search suggested that they might go on producing strawberries until September! I shall see how that goes!

[Jubal]

I had my whole tomato crop for the year as part of tonight's dinner, both tomatoes were very good, I'm just kind of gutted I don't seem to be expecting any more.

Generally my plants aren't flowering much and the flowers aren't setting well. I wonder if I'm just really short on pollinators here in the centre of the city.

[Jubal]

So my gardening this year has an unusual drawback, which is that my decking is collapsing:



As my landlord is a useless arsehole I'm not sure when this will be fixed, it's very frustrating (and somewhat concerning for that matter).

Also, secondarily, most of my plants died over winter: even my fig tree didn't have a very good time of it, and that's a tree! Nonetheless I've bought a bunch of new plants and have planted them out: I've got a couple of cucumbers, a courgette, a tomato, an aubergine, and a pepper, and some new herbs as well (tarragon, rosemary, thyme and oregano).

Here's where things have got to anyhow and we'll see as ever how it goes...





If there's one thing that I have learned from the last few years of plant keeping it is that urban gardening is, whilst often fun, exceptionally inefficient as a way of actually producing food: in an average year I've probably spent ca 40-50EUR on plants to obtain, at a generous average estimate, 5EUR of produce. Economies of scale and better locations make a lot of difference when it comes to plant growth!

[The Seamstress]

@Jubal How's your garden doing? Did the landlord do something about the collapsing deck?

[Jubal]

@Jubal How's your garden doing? Did the landlord do something about the collapsing deck?

Nope! My garden is... overgrown, mostly!


It's a mess, the floor is still very broken, and the landlord still isn't replying to anything. But the plants are alive, the vine in particular being too alive, and I got some lil tomatoes recently:

[The Seamstress]

Wow, what a nasty landlord. Have you looked into getting legal advice, if he refuses to do something about the deck? There are a few institutions in Vienna offering free consultation, but I don't know if they do that in English, too. The websites are German only, it seems.

Hooray for tomato harvest! And that vine seems to have ambitions towards world domination

I'll probably be moving next year (if everything goes according to plan) and will have a garden then, I'm looking forward to growing some herbs and veg, and I'd like to try berries, too. Maybe even a fruit tree, if possible.