Your family's gardening plans (with pics)

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:+1:

Those are good looking plants and an attractive mixture of pots.

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Here is one for you, I grew a 16 foot tall, 12 foot wide tomato plant which most here will find incredible, but when I called a nursery about it they said it happens under great conditions and with care.

Tomatoes are a perennial, they don’t die but keep producing for years and grow vine like in the warm climates we all just think of them as one season plants because of our climates.

Yup, winters here kill them dead… dead, dead!

I found this
"Tomatoes are perennial plants that are usually grown as annuals. However, they do have the potential to grow as perennials in the optimal conditions.

Yet, providing these conditions in the majority of cases represent a bigger hassle than replanting them every year. That’s the reason why the majority of us just grow tomatoes as annuals instead of perennials."

Something I thought I noticed was that they weren’t as vigorous as time went on so I would let a couple of the tomato plants keep producing for use during the winter and would plant fresh ones each season for the more robust peak production.

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Having good tomatoes all winter would be so nice. The crap we get around here from hot houses are really lacking. I call them cardmatoes… because no matter how long they sit the inside is like white carboard…until they rot…

By the way, in the right climate there is no providing conditions it is just a plant in the ground, I had a volunteer cherry tomato plant that I didn’t plant, that I never watered or fed because really it wasn’t even in my yard but on the city property that looked like mine, and for many years until I moved I would go out and pick some off it when I wanted to, and even had some Mexican woman who would ask me if she could pick some and would then bring me salsa, for years, perhaps 10.

Since the plant would drop the unpicked tomatoes and produce more volunteers and it was all in a pile of vegetation I never really knew what was what in that pile, I only knew that there were always cherry tomatoes growing out of it all year round.

I visited Lowe’s three times, and then was told that they cannot get this tree.
I was referred to a local nursery, and they told me that this tree is prone to root rot and that this tree is not suitable for the Coachella Valley. :man_facepalming:

Tomorrow, I plan to go back to Lowe’s and see if they can order one of these two trees:

Acacia melanoxylon
Acacia implexa

(I’ll post some pics later if I can get either of these.)

These two trees are closely related and are frequently mistaken for each other.
Acacia trees are usually short-lived, but these two live quite a while.
Also, both of these trees are available on Etsy, but they are expensive, and they probably aren’t all that large for the money.
If I think I have to, I’ll bite the bullet and get one of these trees from Etsy. :money_mouth_face:

EDIT:
The Acacia melanoxylon has invasive roots–meanwhile the Acacia implexa does not.
In fact, I cannot find any major problems with the Acacia implexa so perhaps that’s what I’ll get. :+1:

I feel sick. My spotted croton (mentioned above) was thriving in the basement. Okay, back up a bit. The 2 Mystery Plants all but shrivelled up into literally nothing after I plucked out all the dead/withered leaves. Literally almost just dirt in the pot. But after getting rid of the dead shiite and leaving it down in the basement, 24/7 under those LED lights (fluorescent-tube replacement), the beasties just grew and grew and grew soooooooo nicely. Now each one is a small pile of deep-green, almost emerald-green leaves.

Also, I put my spotted croton down there, too, because when it was up here by me (under the table-lamp, so lots of light, out of drafts, kept warm), the cats would jump over it or on it, chew on it, etc., and it lost a few stems along the way. So down there and protected it just thrived, too. Problem is those stems are over a foot long but thin like toothpicks, but nowhere near as robust.

So it’s down there with the other two, all of them were thriving, but my Holy Terror decided to push open the hard-to-open door and get down there into the basement. I saw the gap, but didn’t think much of it until I watched one of my others (The Pisser) go down there and squeeze through, so I ran down there and chased them up. No idea how long the door was open.

Anyhoo, when I went down there for… something, don’t recall… I looked and saw the croton all smooshed. almost every single branch was snapped at some point. One piece completely snapped off, but I “planted” the broken part in the dirt, watered them all, but it didn’t survive.

The way it looks, everything past each snapped part will eventually shrivel up, and what’ll be left? Just a small pile of twigs sticking up out from the dirt.

If I find out who did it, I’m gonna tie his tail into a knot.

And it just grew another bunch of leaves a month or so ago. Looks like a conical white/yellow flower until it unfurls and turns a deeper green cluster of leaves.

Like I said, I feel sick over it. That little critter survived so much over the years, too.

Change of plans… again! :grin:
The Acacia implexa is not available through Lowe’s, and on Etsy there’s a $35 shipping fee that kills the deal.

Now I’m interested in the Acacia stenophylla.
It has long skinny leaves, so it doesn’t provide full shade, but otherwise it’s a good choice.
It’s more drought tolerant than the Acacia implexa.
I should be able to order the Acacia stenophylla through Lowe’s, and if it’s too expensive there, it’s also on Etsy, too.
I’ll go back to Lowe’s next week. :deciduous_tree:

Hmm…
I ended up ordering something completely different.
I chose the Queensland Bottle Tree (Brachychiton rupestris.)
What’s good about this tree is that there are a decent number of sellers on eBay and Etsy that have this plant.
What I don’t like about this tree is that it doesn’t grow very quickly.
Otherwise, it’s a great fit for what I was looking for. :grin:


https://www.etsy.com/listing/1798191510/queensland-bottle-tree-brachychiton

I ordered a small tree in a 4-inch pot, as pictured above.
Here’s what the tree looks like as an adult.
When full-grown, this is a weird looking tree, which is kinda cool. :+1:

Hjeh, that tree looks like a gigantic bok choy. :skull::skull::skull:

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Nice!
I like bok choy.
Sometimes bok choy can look like broccoli when chopped up (and I don’t like broccoli) but bok choy tastes great to me. :broccoli:

I planted the Queensland Bottle Tree (Brachychiton rupestris) yesterday.
I used a metal tomato cage and some shade cloth to provide the baby tree some shade during the hottest part of the day.
It was a little windy yesterday and the tomato cage with shade cloth fell over, so today, I removed the shade cloth, I reinstalled the tomato cage, added some garden staples, and then added the shade cloth again.
With the garden staples, the tomato cage will not fall over again, but the shade cloth might detach if it gets too windy.
The shade cloth is attached to the tomato cage with some heavy duty metal clothespins. :+1:

Had you considered just a good stake. Maybe 4 or 5 feet with a foot in the ground . Then loosely tie the baby tree to it?
I have also seen people use three stakes and tie the tree from three directions. Of course in either case you need to adjust the attachment points as the tree grows.

Just a couple of thoughts from what I have seen done and done myself with small trees.

How big is the tree now?

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The tomato cage is not being used as a stake.
I’m using the tomato cage so that I have something to put the shade cloth on.
The baby tree is quite small.
Here’s an example photo with four inch pots for reference:


I don’t think the tree will require staking, but if it does, I’ll stake it.
(This tree is super wind-resistant.) :slightly_smiling_face:

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:+1:

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After a trip to japan, decided I should plant some wasabi. Which is what I did. They say it’s a hard plant to grow, so we’ll see. Likely not as hard as planting Sunchokes near deer…

We had a large living Palo Verde tree on our property that touched our roof and needed to be removed.
Our insurance company, State Farm, threaten to cancel our insurance policies if we didn’t get rid of the tree.
Today, a man chopped the tree down, a little at a time, with a chainsaw.
That man, along with a couple of other men and my mom, took the pieces of the tree to their truck.
They even took the chopped up tree to the dump, and they only charged us $350 for the entire job.
That’s a steal!
(My mom is excellent at finding people to do odd jobs cheaply.
Usually the people she hires know what they’re doing, but not always.) :grin: