everyone else, please post too.

I love spring.

http://bp3.blogger.com/_sVhNA2EvkAs/SAJOJuodcLI/AAAAAAAAAu8/iBqZT8sddSU/s1600-h/IMG_0235.jpg

Rita its nice to see that you still pop in every so often.Have you seen a hummingbird yet .Nothing here

I also posted about this to gee_oh a bit ago:
http://gardening.meetup.com/148/

They're a group of perennial gardeners in Brooklyn who get together. Maybe we can join them, or start something similar!

I used to really love the Wildlife Forums here and the Shrubs Forums. But since I-Village took over many of the regular posters on those forums left and they are now very slow too. I mostly hang out at the rose forums and the dayliuly forums plus check the birding forums fairely often. I would love to see this forum start to pick up and get lively again.

Haven't seen any hummingbirds yet this year. Just put out my feeder afew days ago. Last summer I had my usual females buzzing around or could be they were juveniles as this was midsummer. No males here in my yard.

My gardening plan? Read, read, read then ignore it all and buy on impulse! LOL
Mina

where in brooklyn do you live- do u have any pics of your garden?

i just planted 5 different hydrangeas (god forbid i should just buy 1- no i have to buy everything my big fat eyes see)even though the space which already has about 15 plants in it, is really only big enough for 1 hydrangea when fully grown

Here in my "new" yard, the berries are leafing out and I'm waiting for the fig & persimmon (buds are now green). I think I'm going to need some weed block and punch holes to grow herbs in the center plot. It's currently covered with mazus, violets & dandelions AGAIN.

yipla that remote-watering rooftop garden and bucket-grown melons are AWESOME!

is there a forum for gardeners? this looks kinda well... just like a message board as opposed to something like a php or vbulletin forum =L

exotic, I agree and have long wished GardenWeb's interface were a little more advanced. It is a forum though, and I don't know of anywhere else with such an expert membership. I like that there are so many forums, especially this one. It's great to feel like I'm not the only gardener in this city and that people are here to discuss location-specific topics.

i did one last year here in brooklyn, tomatoes and basil mostly. buckets and rubbermaids. some tomatoes did great, some never really took off.

i had the craziest self-watering contraption as i have no faucet up there.

this year i'm movin on up to a deluxe community garden plot on the ground...

It is unbelievably hard to keep shallow containers well watered up there, though. I'm about to give up.

We spent the first 2 summers ripping out overgrown trees and shrubs (seriously who plants 9 pine trees along a 60ft property line, when there is a view of the water being hidden??). I put down a lot of the usual stuff...lavendar, montauk daisies, rhodendron, .... I'm from Ireland originally and prefer colorful flowers to landscaped shrubs, so the whole thing is a work in progress...though I did get heather do grow, and survive all winter....my daylillies were donated from my mother in law and are filling in the front flower beds nicely...when will they bloom?

I just potted a knock out rose, a mandeville, a clematis and a hydrangea in pots on the patio (which is where I want to focus this year). How is the quality of Lowes and HD plants? I know the nursery is probably a better bet, but I can't afford to get everyhting there.

I am also looking for some ideas on what else will grow in a pot / container on a south east facing patio.

Has anyone used the Raindip automatic watering system? I am seriously considering one for the patio. I know I'll forget to water once too many times.

thats all for now. I love my garden.

I haven't been to the actual LES ecology center, but I was at their table in Union Sq. I got a hand-me-down vermicomposting bin from someone who got it at LESEC, but it was in really awful shape. I ended up dumping all the worms and composty sludge into my buckets on the roof last spring. But, some of the worms made it through the winter! 3+ pounds of food a week sounds like a lot of food scraps! I have resorted to chopping up and blending my food scraps and putting them in a composting bucket I have on the roof. Blending seems to speed things up nicely.

For watering, I have a timer which goes off 4 times: once at 9 pm, 12 pm and then early in the am. Just a few minutes each time. I have never understood why house plants like to be soaked and then ignored and these seem to like regular water.

I noticed on your blog you used those water-holding "crystals" or whatever they are called. You know you can "harvest" those from (clean!) diapers? I know there must be mention of that on gardenweb somewhere!

The outdoor plants like a lot of water, especially in the summer, because it just gets so hot under the sun and wind. The water evaporates extremely quickly. Indoors, water does not evaporate from houseplant pots very quickly at all and watering them too often will make them waterlogged.

The other worry about these things is their breakdown/biodegradability. There is pretty much no research that shows that the polyacrylamides break down into monomer-acrylamides. In general, they break down into organic compounds.

All that being said, I have decided to use them in containers for non-edible plants. You may be dismayed to know that many commercial farmers use this stuff all over their fields. I would say what I do is a small risk and what these farmers do is a larger one, but again, we all have to make these decisions in our lives.

No persimmons this first year (and probably not for a few more), all the tiny starts fell off. The first set of figs fell off too, but now I've got 3 new ones growing. The birds got my first few blueberries, but I've already tasted my 3 raspberries. That's 3 individual little berries, though I do have 3 plants. And the little corner herb garden is doing nicely with the usual basil, parsley, thyme, oregano, rosemary, lavender and sage.

i guess im one of those "NYC posters in other garden forums" as george mentioned above. i guess i never spent much time navigating all the different forums that GW had to offer. well a little about myself. i live in brooklyn's bensonhurst area. we dont get much gardening space in our yards either but i guess im the lucky ones to have both an ample sized front yard garden as well as a back yard garden. flowers in the front and veges in the back.

anyone start wintersowing yet? i put some out last week and will be putting more out next month probably

Squash & zinnia seeds will get started indoors. Is it ok to sow arugula outdoors yet?

This year I'll add just zinnias from seed in my yard, but will splurge on a few hellebores for some early bloom next year. Hopefully this year will net more fruit than last year.

Inside, loofa squash and zinnia seedlings are just starting their first set of real leaves.

The bulb display is really helping my backyard look like a real garden.

There's still a lot of weed-block back there, but at least I won't have to clear out solid spans of weeds again. It will be years before I fill the garden.

It's so nice to see color again!