A gardening thread

This has been a terrible year for my tomatoes, after three straight great years, for some reason the climate spawned a whole ton of pests. My potatoes are good, beets are small but tasty, very disappointed in my tomatoes though.

Some slugs and some kind of small bugs, not aphids but small like that.  I refuse to use pesticides, I guess I need to find some king of good organic thing.

Mah favorite small tree with white/green themed leaves:

This was a terrible year for my tomatoes as well. Got these thorny little buggers that congregated in clumps, emitting a sticky substance that attracted ants...it was not cute. Forget its name at the moment.

I grow flowers, herbs, vegetables and fruit, though not as actively in the past few years, due to drought (not to mention I got a bit discouraged when the drought killed all my blueberries). My climate is pretty forgiving for late season crops, so I currently have tomato and watermelon growing. My mint, rosemary, passion fruit and strawberries are doing well, but my lavender is not, due to spider mites. My corn seedlings failed to germinate (I think they were too old) so I'm hoping to plant some mature seedlings by the middle of next week. Carrots, parsnips, yams and potatoes are on the planting schedule as well (I'm very late this year, I know). I just love, love love cooking and baking in fall and winter, and nothing beats using your own home grown produce.

I also have a golden pothos that, unfortunately, appears to have root rot. I transplanted it into a bigger pot, but I guess I just soaked it way too much. I wanted the roots to establish, not to grow rotten. Seems like the only indoor plant I don't kill is snake plant. 

I do gardening just for fun. The point is to have something low maintenance and tasty stuff in my yard. So I have some berry bushes like strawberries, raspberries and gooseberries, apple and pear trees and so on. Also this summer I planted some carrots, salad and peas for kids to eat.

And for the ultimate classiness:

We bought a new house 2 years ago so I am still getting the veggie garden established while trying at the same time to turn barren wasteland of a back garden into something worth looking at. It was awful, just a house in the middle of endless half dead grass, no trees, no plants... no nothing.

Current plan is tall hedging around the fence line to hide the ugly neighbours, with subtropical planting of various heights and wooden board walks and decks. The big main deck was built last christmas and the boarder Lily Pillies are in (sitting at about 5m now.. yay). Once we finish building my partner observatory at the bottom of the garden it will be onto the board walks and then I can finally get on with the actually planting something.

In the arctic? What kind of climate are we talking here exactly? I only know a handful of plants that could be cultivated in such harsh environment.

Trilobite Derby

I've been to Iceland a couple of times, sounds a lot like you're living in a very similar climate. The people there still grow tomatoes and cucumbers in little heated glass houses in their garden. So you totally can grow plants in such environment, its just a little more complicated though. (not that much IMO)

I would love to have a glass house in my garden, something similar to this

It's on my to do list I already have the glasses for it, got them for free from a renovation site where they were rebuilding balconies.

An offense punishable by the axe if you ask me.  He doesn't know a tomato from a weed?

My pear tree gave two fruits this year. Thats like 100% more than last year. Ok, it's a young tree, I planted it two summers ago. I have this idea I want to do with pears:

The bottle is then filled with brandy