Please recommend a forum for asking gardening questions

June 20, 2009 2:40 PM

Please recommend a forum for asking gardening questions

I've got a lot of different gardening questions about different things. For instance, I'm growing this three sisters garden in part of my main garden, kind of as an experiment. I planted it super dense with the idea of thinning it, but I'm not sure how thin it should be, as it appears intercropping in this style generally supports much higher density than normal row planting.

My gardens are generally small, I have a lot of container plantings and a big raised bed area, I'm mostly interested in kitchen gardening, and specifically I'm growing a lot of heirloom or esoteric varieties of plants, and I'm growing more or less organic.

What are the best forums for discussing questions about this kind of stuff?

posted by jeb to home & garden (11 comments total)

Why, Gardenweb, of course! There forums contain an immense amount of information, and are frequented by a lot of experts. (For example, Dr. Carolyn Male hangs out on the tomato forum - she's written books on heirlooms and is wonderful about sharing all of her knowledge).
posted by Ostara at 2:48 PM on June 20

2nd The garden web, pretty excellent all the way around.
posted by iamabot at 2:53 PM on June 20

My only caveat is that you double check any responses you get, particularly with information from a .edu or your local agricultural extension. Garden Web is pretty good, but there is still a lot of un-scientific gardening voodoo/mythology on it, just because there happens to be a lot of un-scientific gardening voodoo/mythology in the real world. Somehow plants manage to live through most of it anyway.

As far as thinning three sisters plots, you want a minimum of three corn stalks in each mound for bean support and to insure good pollination. You won't find consensus about the number of bean plants- I personally think it depends on the bean, and the amount of corn... some people plant 6-8 of everything and don't ever thin. If they completely cover the corn to the extent that they shade it out, your corn won't be too pleased, and you'll need to do some bean plant removal. Squash/pumpkins need some room to ramble; most people I know plant their corn mounds about five feet apart, plant a couple of squash, and then thin them to one squash vine per mound. Again, you'll find all sorts of variations on this, and I think the best way to approach it is to remember that leaves need sun to make the sugars that you want in the fruiting bodies that you eat, so just make sure things don't get too out of hand. Also, avoid any overhead watering, don't overwater, and be prepared to supplement your corn with nitrogen if you didn't bury any roadkill in the mound* (if your soil is nitrogen deficient, beans may not be enough, especially for modern corn varieties).

*or otherwise supplement with nitrogen.
posted by oneirodynia at 3:47 PM on June 20

UBC Botanical Garden Forums.
posted by weapons-grade pandemonium at 4:00 PM on June 20

Most gardening forums have a lot of 'voodoo' in them, to second oneirodynia. My favorite though is I dig my garden, which is run by an heirloom seed company. I never found gardenweb that easy to use, even if it is the de facto standard, and the people around idig seem to have a lot more personality and background so that you can easily figure out who's going to be spewing voodoo.

Just don't wander into the politics forum over there. I warned you.
posted by SpecialK at 4:01 PM on June 20

Dave's Garden is another good site.
posted by evening at 4:16 PM on June 20

Freedom Gardens is also great. Gardenweb is my first stop, usually.
posted by annathea at 4:24 PM on June 20

thanks everyone for the helpful answers so far.

oneirodynia, check out the pic at the bottom of this post. Thats how dense it is now. The squash is like, really getting ahead of everything.

I read that the beans won't actually increase the soil nitrogen in a way thats accessible to the corn till the following growing season? Either way, I didn't put any rotten fish or roadkill in there, but I put a lot of really aged manure. The corn variety is the opposite of modern, its Mandan Bride from SSE (I want to make tortillas, part of a ridiculous fish taco-otaku project with my brother). I've got five or six viable looking corn plants in each mound now, but they are a bit closer together than they would be if they were row cropped. The package said to thin the plants to 8" apart.

(also, in this pic, my plan is to harvest the greens you can see early (e.g. now) and give the squash more room to roam down there.
posted by jeb at 4:25 PM on June 20

Also, oneirodynia, what's a guideline for overwatering? I haven't watered this garden in weeks because its been so freaking rainy here. But I'm planning on installing a simple drip system (this is also a little tricky cause the drip books assume you have level, row-oriented plants. I'm probably just going to do a bunch of tests with the drip emitters to see how well they soak the mounds).
posted by jeb at 4:28 PM on June 20

Hmm, yeah, that set up is a little tricky with the mounds so close together. Did you plant everything at the same time? You usually want to give your corn a few weeks head start, just so it's not overtaken right off the bat. Your corn spacing in regards to each other is fine.

The beans will slough some nitrogen as they grow; one thing you can do is not thin, but let the beans grow for awhile, then cut some down to the ground. With the tops gone, the nitrogen in the root nodules becomes available to the other plants as the roots in the ground die/decompose.

Watering: let the top 3 inches of soil dry out between waterings. For drip, I would run a line of 1/2" blind (distribution) line along the bed, then either snake or loop 1/4" dripline through the plants. The weakness of drip is the fact that most people put one or two emitters at each plant, when thorough soil moisture throughout the bed allows plants to have a larger root system and access to more nutrients.

Drip emitters are rated by gallons per hour, so you can do a test by taking a gallon plastic container, poking a pinhole in it, then leaving it overnight on your garden soil. The next morning you should be able to see the width and depth that one gallon has traveled in your soil (it of course needs to be the same type of soil that your plants are planted in).
posted by oneirodynia at 6:54 PM on June 20

Thanks all, super helpful, especially oneirodynia's info about my specific problems. I'd like to point out that so far I've received more actual gardening advice (nevermind the forum recs) from this post than I have from my Gardenweb post, but maybe I didn't post in the right area of gardenweb. Either way, scroe one for for ask.mefi.
posted by jeb at 9:00 AM on June 22