My wedding anniversary is coming up and my wife and I have been giving each other the "traditional" anniversary gifts. Well coming up in January is going to be four years and fruit/flowers is the traditional gift. My idea right now is that i want to make a raised bed and plant flowers so she can have fresh flowers in the house year round. So my question is what can I plant that will produce good flowers, easy to manage, and will keep growing year round?

How is everyone tracking progress pictures of their garden and fruit trees year over year? I just have a bunch of photos scattered on my iPhone but interested in what other gardeners are doing

Has anyone ever grafted a pomegranate? We bought a pomegranate a few years back, and it turns out it’s a gold pomegranate. Not the tastiest fruit. I mean, they’re ok, just not as good as the red ones. I spent four years getting this guy to give us a decent yield, but it’s just so… meh. I wanted to see if I could cut this back a lot and stick a bunch of red shoots on, if it’ll work. Appreciate any advice or tips.

I feel so hopeless. Can anyone tell me what is happening to my tomatoes? My peppers are not looking great either. I feel like it’s a pest problem but not sure what pest. They kinda look bronze colored and then the foliage is dying.

What’s one soil change you made that actually improved your garden? Curious what worked best for everyone, compost, mulch, drainage, amendments, or just changing how you water?

This one:

https://www.thespruce.com/red-currant-growing-guide-5201212

Thanks for sharing your experience.

I am excited to share that my backyard garden is now a Certified Wildlife Habitat. When we first moved in, nothing was back there but grass. Putting the placard in the ground was like reaching a finish line. But as all of us gardeners know, there really is no finish line. We love plants, and we always find a way to squeeze one more in.

Does anyone know where I can find a large patch of horseherb to "harvest" for my lawn? Thanks!

Does anyone know of any places around Houston that has wild Bamboo growing that I could go cut down some cane poles?

From August of last year to this afternoon. I’m hoping to see blooms in the spring.

I build a garden planner (EdenVatika) and I've been asking gardeners in different regions to poke holes in it. Houston is the opposite end from where I started: I asked Nova Scotia about a short season, and now I'm asking about a long, hot one.

One question, mainly: the app works backwards from your frost dates to tell you when to sow and when you'll harvest. Here, frost barely seems to be the problem. Summer heat shuts things down, and you get a spring season and a separate fall season. So does a frost-date anchor mean anything in Houston, or should the planning start from heat instead?

Also curious if the planting calendar view actually adds anything over the bed planner, or if it's just noise.

Two ways in, no account either way:

Full app for 15 minutes: your own throwaway account, already set up with beds, calendar and harvests. Add your own beds, print, use everything:
https://apps.edenvatika.com/demo.php

Or just the bed planner, no timer, build a bed from scratch:
https://apps.edenvatika.com/demo-start.php

I'm not looking for compliments. I'd like to know what feels confusing, missing, or just not useful. I'm the developer, so feel free to be blunt. 🙂

My croton is unhappy that I missed his watering this morning. The Houston sun does not play around!

These little bastards invade every raised bed and large half-barrel planter I add. I've moved the planters, trashed and replaced the soil all the soil, even disinfected the containers.
Last year I had moderate success using a cover crop of Nemagon mustard in one raised bed. After pulling my spring tomato plants, with roots covered in galls, I carefully dug through the bed to remove any remaining infected root pieces. I densely planted the Nemagon mustard seeds and waited for flower buds to form. When most of the plants had budded but before any actual flowering happened I chopped up all of the mustard as fine as possible and dug it 6-12 inches down into the soil (a weed wacker would have made this process 1000 times easier).
I covered the bed with a tarp and didn't touch it until the following spring when I transplanted some tomatoes.
I was pleasantly surprised by how much fruit I was able to harvest from these, and how much less galled the roots were. Perhaps the results would have been even better if I had waited longer to plant again.

What are your experiences with root-knot nematodes? Are they as relentless for other Houston gardeners? I didn't harvest a single eggplant this year because the roots weee decimated, extremely annoying.