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Author Topic: What do you love and hate growing?  (Read 5769 times)

Alex_

  • Joined Jul 2016
What do you love and hate growing?
« on: September 09, 2016, 12:33:47 pm »
So what plants do you love to grow? What plants do you hate growing?

Myself, I hate growing beans, I just can never be bothered with them. I have tried them in the past and got a few. My wife loved them because they turned from purple to green when cooked.

I love growing corn even though it never does very well for me (last 2 years) and achocha is great. it grows in a climbing vine fashion and its a great alternative to sweet peppers and it self seeded from last year.

Trees also have a special place in my heart ( I think I am a secret hippy)

 :tree:

waterbuffalofarmer

  • Joined Apr 2014
  • Mid Wales
  • Owner of 61 Mediterranean water buffaloes
Re: What do you love and hate growing?
« Reply #1 on: September 09, 2016, 01:36:35 pm »
well there are sooo many, but I will try and narrow it down. I love growing beans, provided I get them right, courgettes are a favourite, tomatoes are also a favourite to grow too, as well as pumpkins/squash. Cucumbers for me are tricky but am always up to a challenge :) I hate growing rocket, it always seems to bolt with me, although I love eating it, it is a nusience to grow! Thats about all really, I do love growing flowers and fruit bushes too, i think patience is key, if you can't seem to find success growing something, stop what you're doing, replace with another plant and in the meantime research what is going wrong with that certain plant, after picking up more info then try again, if it does it again then just get rid and replace with another variety of the same or something else entirely. Finding something that suits your area is the best thing. That is all for now I guess. :-\
the most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, loving concern.

BrimwoodFarm

  • Joined May 2016
    • Brimwood Farm
    • Facebook
Re: What do you love and hate growing?
« Reply #2 on: September 09, 2016, 02:00:47 pm »
At the moment I hate growing peppers because I can't get the damn things to fruit! Last year they started flowering in September - way too late - and similar story this year, even though I started the seeds off in March. Oh well, will try again next year.

Love growing a lot of flowers and veggies. I agree with [member=42855]waterbuffalofarmer[/member] about the squash; they're like triffids, climbing all over the place, huge flowers and then all the harvest. Great!

Piggerswiggers

  • Joined Jul 2015
Re: What do you love and hate growing?
« Reply #3 on: September 09, 2016, 05:09:15 pm »
Call me an oddball but I love growing courgettes. This year has been great oodles of those lovely little ones and only a few whoppers. I've never heard of achocha please tell us more as I'm a bit bored of waiting for my copious crop of green peppers to ripen.

Alex_

  • Joined Jul 2016
Re: What do you love and hate growing?
« Reply #4 on: September 09, 2016, 06:06:04 pm »
[member=140217]Piggerswiggers[/member] Achochas are climbers. very vigorous and sometimes you struggle to give them enough things to climb up.
The fruit looks like the fruit from the conker tree except the spikes are soft so you can eat the whole thing. they grow about 2 inches long. You can get giant versions that you can stuff but mine never fruited. but I have had a lot of success with the smaller type.
The seeds are some of the weirdest I have seen. They look like chipped off pieces of coal.
I am not a fan of them raw so I cut them into quarters and fry them.

They are at the bottom of this page
http://realseeds.co.uk/cucumbers.html

Fleecewife

  • Joined May 2010
  • South Lanarkshire
    • ScotHebs
Re: What do you love and hate growing?
« Reply #5 on: September 09, 2016, 08:08:35 pm »
I love starting off plants - sowing seeds, taking cuttings, dividing clumps, pinning down begonia leaves and so on. I can't wait for them to grow, and I annoyingly poke around in the soil to see if anything has germinated.

 I'm not so keen on routine maintenance like weeding - in fact I hate it  :o.

 I love tying in tomatoes, squashes, cucumbers.   

I love harvesting, especially potatoes - magical things to find in the soil.  Great baskets of beans, huge pumpkins, onions laid out to dry. 

Then we come to doing something with them in the kitchen.  Perhaps this is to do with being the gardener as well as the cook but I'm often too tired to deal with the crops straight away.  Worst is when they need to be frozen like beans, or made into chutney like courgettes.  I hate making chutney, but it's so delicious it's worth the pain.

I love having grown so many crops and having it all harvested and stored away - past tense

 :garden: :garden: :garden:
« Last Edit: September 09, 2016, 08:10:18 pm by Fleecewife »
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Lesley Silvester

  • Joined Sep 2011
  • Telford
Re: What do you love and hate growing?
« Reply #6 on: September 09, 2016, 11:54:00 pm »
I love growing most veggies except for peppers as they never seem to do well. I don't grow cucumbers as I don't often eat them and OH doesn't do salad at all. Although I like flowers, I can't be bothered to grow them as I would rather grow things I can eat. I enjoy growing my own fruit as well.


I start most of my veg from seed and, after many years, still get excited when the first ones start poking through the soil. I do restrain myself from prodding to see if anything is happening though.

sabrina

  • Joined Nov 2008
Re: What do you love and hate growing?
« Reply #7 on: September 10, 2016, 08:59:04 am »
I have a passion for trees, planted over 100 around the place and still thinking of adding more. Growing veg or should I say trying to. Some years better than others. Not so great with flowers but I keep trying different types. Strong winter winds limit what can be planted. Never had any luck with onions of any kind, peppers or squash.

laurelrus

  • Joined Apr 2014
  • Quainton,Buckinghamshire
  • Hobby farmer
Re: What do you love and hate growing?
« Reply #8 on: September 10, 2016, 11:32:24 am »
I love growing chard and feeding it to my pygmy goats straight from the raised beds. They line up by the fence to wait for it whenever I'm nearby.
I love growing berries but not keen on sharing them with the slugs (beat the crows this year by netting the bed but forgot about the slugs)
I lost all my tomato plants to blight this year which was very disappointing because I love walking past things in the supermarket feeling smug because I don't have to buy them (with our small chicken flock I haven't bought eggs for nearly a year which is great)
I'm making a plan this weekend for my new productive garden area and trying to stick to things we'll eat rather than get carried away!
2 pygmy goats, 3 Ouessant sheep, 19 chickens, 2 donkeys, 2 Shetland ponies and 2 dogs

ellied

  • Joined Sep 2010
  • Fife
    • Facebook
Re: What do you love and hate growing?
« Reply #9 on: September 12, 2016, 08:02:47 am »
I love growing things that cope with occasional neglect and are prolific in a short season.  Beans, courgette, kale, raspberries, apples, plums.

I hate things that seem appealing but prove impossible to get to harvest like peppers aubergine and sweet corn.  I had one full size pepper this year off 3 plants, let it turn red and picked finally to find a slug had taken it underneath and my hours of watering and checking wasted!  Last year I had several tiny fruits so late they couldn't mature.  I give up!

Oh and finally what I can and want to grow aren't always the same!  Enjoyment of growing and of eating would be the rasps, can't get enough!
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PK

  • Joined Mar 2015
  • West Suffolk
    • Notes from a Suffolk Smallholding
Re: What do you love and hate growing?
« Reply #10 on: September 12, 2016, 08:53:33 pm »
I keep a range of livestock on my holding but always view vegetables and fruit as my core activity so I don't think there is anything I do not like growing. Some varieties I might dispense with for alternatives. I tried achocha this year for the first time and will not be growing it again. I never seem to have problems with peppers and aubergines and always get a decent crop (this year a bumper crop). I never find them any more difficult than tomatoes except they take a little longer to germinate and aubergines need a longer growing season to get pickable fruits.
My biggest challenge is brassicas and it is a bit tedious to have to find ways to protect them from pigeons and butterflies and then to catch them before slugs move in. Even with all this, they don't look pretty but once the outer leaves are stripped they are fine. Then it makes you wonder what steps large scale producers take to produce fields of pristine crops.

macgro7

  • Joined Feb 2016
  • Leicester
Re: What do you love and hate growing?
« Reply #11 on: September 28, 2016, 10:30:44 am »
I love growing all kinds of squashes - courgettes, marrows, winter squashes, pumpkins - had a fantastic harvest this year!
- sweet corn (last year fantastic, this year hardly anything but that's my fault as I planted to many things between them and they didn't have enough light when they were small)
- fruit trees - I'm addicted to buying and planting trees - planted 2 plums, several 5 apples, 2 pears, 1 cob nut, 1 quince, 1 sweet chestnut, 1 mulberry, 1 almonds - i was so surprised to actually have almonds growing this year! After snow in April!

Peppers just didn't work... bell pepper didn't fruit at all - although in greenhouse! However chili jalapeņo had a lot of fruits.
Lost most tomatoes to blight just before they ripped  :-\ and I had so many!

Next year planting a lot of potatoes, sweet corn, more winter squashes (probably less summer squashes), plenty of sweet corn, sugar beet (for rabbits mainly although might use my great grandmothers recipe for a sugar beet cake).
Growing loads of fruits and vegetables! Raising dairy goats, chickens, ducks, rabbits on 1/2 acre in the middle of the city of Leicester, using permaculture methods.

muddypuddle

  • Joined Jul 2015
Re: What do you love and hate growing?
« Reply #12 on: September 30, 2016, 04:06:53 pm »
I love growing giant pumpkins just to see how big we can get them (I shall post a picture when we harvest) , not necessarily to eat but I still enjoy it.
I am a bit like Fleecewife as I love seedlings and get impatient and like to poke around to find them  ::) and hate weeding! Courgettes are satisfying because generally they are very easy to grow and produce a lot. I have tried growing flowers and loved my sweet peas this year they came up really well and smelt amazing.
Cabbages and brassicas always get eaten either by pigeons and slugs even if I net them etc and I always find lettuce and kale bolts.

macgro7

  • Joined Feb 2016
  • Leicester
Re: What do you love and hate growing?
« Reply #13 on: October 01, 2016, 10:33:02 am »
My lettuce, mustard and rocket bolted outside but inside the greenhouse grew fantastically well! We were eating them for months!
Growing loads of fruits and vegetables! Raising dairy goats, chickens, ducks, rabbits on 1/2 acre in the middle of the city of Leicester, using permaculture methods.

Piggerswiggers

  • Joined Jul 2015
Re: What do you love and hate growing?
« Reply #14 on: October 03, 2016, 11:35:48 am »
Macgro7 - almonds that you could eat. I'm absolutely green with envy. Please tell us more, where are you, what variety, how old is the tree? Anything else that would help. I'm just about to order some bare root trees and had discounted almonds as I'd assumed I wouldn't get a crop but you've really piqued my interest.

 

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