Here is the result of my first year gardening experience. Click the link to see the video in Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74-nGiDCWKI I used pots and boxes with water reservior and hope can move some of them into sunroom during the winter season.
What a wonderful vegetable garden you have Nan - so much colour!! I love the mix of flowers, veggies and wild planting. Those cucumbers look really healthy and you're growing one of my favourites - rainbow Swiss chard!!! WELCCOME TO GARDENSTEW. Please introduce yourself to our members as we'd love to get to know you. :-D
Thanks every one! I started greens, beans, tomatos, peppers, and eggplants indoor in January. By the time people start seedling outside in May, I already have muture plants to be tralplanted outside and ready for fruit harvest. But I failed in tomatos and cucumbers because I did not use the kind suitable for containers. They grew tall but week and were already dying when the wheather got warm and they never come back after transplant. The cucumbers you see in the video is the one I started from seeds in March. They are very produtive since the beginning of June. Someone told me that snake gourd cannot grow well in Chicago because the summer is too cool to get tropic plants to bear fruit. However, I already see fruit start forming and hope that they are as produtive as cucombers. I do have some problem with my tomatos, I think. They start to form fruit six weeks ago but the fruit still stay green. The plants are unusually big (twice as big as what I see from my neighbor). Perhaps, they have too much water, or too much organic fertilizer? I am looking forward to reading other's tips and experiences!
Very cool - is that unusually long for them, or do they get longer? All it needs is a set of googly-eyes glued on the end!
It will get longer, but I already made soup from it. The type we get from the glocery store is shorter(only 1-2ft long) and fatter with coarser texture, and a little bit bitter, and my kids don't like it. But this one from our own garden is very tender and delicoius. Its scientific name is "Luffa cylindrica". Its interior contains white flesh, and when get old, becomes a fibrous structure that can be used as a sponge.
Funky - first of all, I didn't know any kind of luffa was edible, heh... secondly, how did you get the white background/cutout effect for those pics?
I put an Elmer's display board as a white backdrop when took those pictures. This way, I can remove the background of the picture and make it tarnsparent and do some graphic composition. As you see in the following video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5LPJ3Oa2jY In the opening aniamtion, I put a couple of photos with background removed in a 3D scene and set a virtual camera to move in the scene. With background removed I can add a different background, as in the following picture: There were leek and chive in the center of the following container. At the time I took the picture, they were cut away. So I digitally added daffodils in the center:
