i'm looking for some advice.

i've successfully grown some veggies in our coastal climate, ie.; basil (in patio containers), potted herbs, zucchini, cucumber, lettuce (spring & fall), any kind of climbing beans.

i'd like to know what other veggies people have grown successfully in our coastal climate and plant accordingly.

thanks in advance.

ha ha tant-so-and-so

hey bijou, are we past frost warning yet? Am I safe to do up my containers?

Xtremely.. I found last summer we didn't get much sun... so cool season crops like spinach did well in my garden, and veggies that take a while to vine ripen (ie. tomatoes) didn't fare as well. This is where a greenhouse would come in very handy.. my coworker gave me a tomato plant that was the same size as his, and while it was still 4" tall in my garden a month later, his greenhouse kept one was bearing fruit. Every plant has a certain quota of 'sunlight hours' it needs to achieve before reaching harvest stage, and for some plants its more than others..

I got one of those things with 72 pead pellets or whatever and have all kinds of shyt ready to plant.

that thing is like grade 4 fun watching them grow.

I don't know what any of those things are... but I'm sure they are very nice plants.

hey... you can maybe tell me: I want to move a fern from the front to the back... can it be done or are they super sensitive? I know you can chop them down to nothing and they'll grow back crazy the next year cuz I ran it over with the lawn mower already by accident twice.

Here's a quick synopsis of a Foxglove lifespan:

A pic of what the Foxglove seedlings looked like when I planted them a year ago:



"I love this stage of a plant's life-cycle. It is a fascination for many reasons:

The Digitalis seeds are extremely small and I have a difficult time even seeing them. This is evidenced by my rather sloppy job of seeding. I used tweezers and placed two seeds per pot. But the seeds are so minuscule that I often convinced myself that I'd not "tweezed" anything... and so tweezed another."

...this is how they are now (or more like twice the size of the shovel. They are 'biennial' meaning they spend one year as a plant, one year flowering, and then they die.)



...and this is how they'll look later this summer:

Another final project pic for my class! I like how it turned out, except its a little bit 'pryde parade' in the colour range.. lol



The tall tree on the left with the light green leaves is a gutta percha (rubber tree), the orange one on the left is a cutleaf Japanese maple, the green leafy thing in the middle foreground an aucuba or azalea, the red one another Japanese maple, the tiny green dots on the right are wild ginger (a groundcover that smells like ginger when you step on it), then a fern (like lolo's?), then a random ball-shaped hedge. lining the patio is red plume grass. the grass by the far waterfall is miscanthus sinensis 'morning light' (6' tall grass.. woo!), the spiky things near the front stairs are yucca or new zealand flax, and the yellow grass by the house foundation are a stipa. and the trees in the background are red elderberry, pacific dogwood and vine maple.

lol @ ran over it accidentally with the lawn mower.

There's a gutta percha doing very well at Van Dusen.. it's maybe 15-20' tall...

Eucommia ulmoides is the one species known as 'hardy rubber tree' that can survive colder climates like ours.

I planted the sunflowers today cuz they were getting too tall and tangling up.

timed it perfect cuz it started raining the second I was done.

i have a sheety little garden plot, with the least amount of light, that requires some intensive TLC (read: weeding) and have decided that i can probably grow more with less effort in containers on my patio.
i'm about to get some pansies (never had them myself, but love that if encouraged, they will flower through until fall), and plant a few of the veggies which have time tested sucessful harvests for me (cucumbers, zuchinni, basil, culinary herbs i.e. lavender, thyme, sage, oregano.
i plan on planting some lettuces in flower boxes in row too, since they don't require deep soil.
can anyone recommend anything else for a patio garden?