Your houseplants and gardens - Yellow leaf means underwatered AND overwatered?! What a country!

[Tandemaus]

What’s led you to think there’s a fungus problem? Most fungus is safe and is a natural part of the ecosystem in soil that keeps everything healthy- breaking down dead plant matter. If you’re having root rot, drainage is an issue, as in your soil is staying too wet. The roots are going slimy and sick in the excess water and bacteria is thriving. Peroxide will help kill that bacteria. If you can describe what adverse issues you’re having we can work on narrowing down if fungus is actually an issue or it’s a problem you can fix by tinkering with the soil mix or watering schedule.

I feel like you pretty much confirmed what I’ve been suspecting.

Had an issue with a neighbor for quite a while due to them always leaving their sprinklers on for hours, every day, for what felt like months. The reason it started to effect my yard was some of their sprinklers were directly pointed in my direction instead of their own. Despite asking them to fix the sprinklers in question, nothing came from it. Eventually I had a fence put up to block them. There’s been a lot of improvement since however still have some areas where my plants/grass seem to struggle to grow.

I brought up the fungi because I noticed a ton of mushrooms were sprouting everywhere. Normally I wouldn’t worry about a couple mushrooms, but the amount that would pop up felt concerning since I had never that many before. I suppose that means there’s a lot of decomposition going on. Should I be worried? Or just wait for nature to do it’s thing?

 

[AltisticRight]

Does anyone here grow mushrooms at home? I've been bombarded with mushroom growing kits and setups on Instagram and thought about it. I can only find the common 5 types of mass farmed Chinese mushrooms from local stores and kits seem to offer superior variety. I'm just wondering if it's worth spending the money for a good kit of just stick to cheap supermarket fungi.

 

[Accept Only Substitutes]

I transplanted my roses last weekend. One looks kind of wilted and droopy but still bright green, and has for a while. The other has gotten a few yellow leaves near the bottom of the plany. Is that transplant shock? It may be not watering enough, I'm doing it once a week but I don't know how much to water.

The internet says they need "one inch" a week but how much is that from a watering can? Other sites say a gallon every two-three days while getting established after transplanting.

The one with yellow leaves is getting new growth, the droopy one has been droopy since before I transplanted it but had new growth a few days before I transplanted it.

My lilac looks great. Now that the trees have sprouted more leaves I don't know if it's getting enough sun, but there's new growth so it's not dying at least. Time will tell, I can transplant it again later if it isn't getting enough sun.

If there's rain in the forecast should I stick to my normal watering schedule? Spring in Texas tends to be pretty stormy and I don't want to overwater, but I don't know if I can rely on the rain to provide everything.

I'm so confused.

 

[Otterly]

Any suggestion for a no-mow lawn that would survive typically Britfag conditions, plantfolks? It's on a fairly unpleasant slope for mowing and I hate mowing.

Depends on how hard wearing you want it to be .
Mountain thyme, or creeping thyme, whatever it’s called. Thymus serpyllum. Smells nice
Chamomile - smells nice.
Clover - Dutch white clover, but lots of the clovers make that compact harwearing ground cover.
All the above can just be seeded onto the lawn. Rake the lawn, now in spring, then spread a layer of soil over it (no need to be thick layer just shove a few bags of soil on and spread it around. Mix the seed in with a bit of sand and chuck ot everywhere and water it in. A mix of clover and thyme and chamomile is lovely. It’ll take maybe two years to take fully, don’t mow it too short but do mow it or it’ll get too long before the others take over
if you’re in Scotland and near the sea look up the plants that make up the machair and do similar

 

[NoReturn]

I have had a couple of plants that seem to always look sickly and I read earlier in the thread that you can use hydrogen peroxide for root rot. Does this also help control fungi issues in the soil? I just started getting interested in gardening so I’m slowly learning from my mistakes, but I have a suspicion that my yard has developed a fungi issue and I’m unsure what is the best way to get it under control. If anyone has any recommendations they would be greatly appreciated.

Gonna shill this book again:

I brought up the fungi because I noticed a ton of mushrooms were sprouting everywhere. Normally I wouldn’t worry about a couple mushrooms, but the amount that would pop up felt concerning since I had never that many before. I suppose that means there’s a lot of decomposition going on. Should I be worried? Or just wait for nature to do it’s thing?

Mushrooms aren't the "body" of the fungus, just the "fruit". Them appearing just means the fungus thinks the environment is a safe and wet enough place to have babies.

 

[glioblastoma multiforme]

Gonna shill this book again:
View attachment 4957804

yessss!!! shill that book. it is fucking awesome. i loved the section about lichens its just so mad these random patches of colour on stone can be so complex and that all are different. the wood wide web stuff is cool also. basically the entire book. its brilliant and well explained for someone who knows nothing about funghi/plants.

First time my zebrina has flowered. I love spring

that's well cool. never even knew what it was but i have one of these too. did you do anything in particular to make it flower?

thread, tax, well proud of my daffodils. dunno what type this is cos i planted a load but its well cool:



got dahlias all potted up, so i can bring them in if we get another frost, will plant them out once the spring bulbs are done.

 

[AndreanSandDunes]

Does anyone here grow mushrooms at home? I've been bombarded with mushroom growing kits and setups on Instagram and thought about it. I can only find the common 5 types of mass farmed Chinese mushrooms from local stores and kits seem to offer superior variety. I'm just wondering if it's worth spending the money for a good kit of just stick to cheap supermarket fungi.

I’ve grown golden teachers before from a kit, had a try of DIYing them because I had plenty of spores left after using the kit (using uncle ben’s tek which is meant to be the easiest!) but it was really a lot of hassle (for me at least) and the hobby died at that point. If I was doing it again I would definitely just go for a kit.

I’ve set myself a challenge to see how many succulents I can propagate before my wedding in a couple of years - I’d love to make favours or something if I can get enough. If I’m being honest I just find watching them grow quite addictive, like man it really is the cutest thing ever watching a teeny tiny plant grow out of a leaf so this is just an excuse to do that. I set some rules at the beginning that I’m not allowed to buy any full plants, only cuttings, but I broke the rule today lol. Anyway that blurb was just leading up to a question - when people have all these interesting coloured ones is it always because they are light stressed? Why don’t mine do that even though they are under grow lights?! Any pointers? I may just be being thick.

Editing to add an example - I got a yellow variegated crassula gollum cutting 2 years ago and it’s an actual plant now but is just completely green even though it had some colour on the tips of the leaves when I got it?

 

[Fareal]

I’ve grown golden teachers before from a kit, had a try of DIYing them because I had plenty of spores left after using the kit (using uncle ben’s tek which is meant to be the easiest!) but it was really a lot of hassle (for me at least) and the hobby died at that point. If I was doing it again I would definitely just go for a kit.

I’ve set myself a challenge to see how many succulents I can propagate before my wedding in a couple of years - I’d love to make favours or something if I can get enough. If I’m being honest I just find watching them grow quite addictive, like man it really is the cutest thing ever watching a teeny tiny plant grow out of a leaf so this is just an excuse to do that. I set some rules at the beginning that I’m not allowed to buy any full plants, only cuttings, but I broke the rule today lol. Anyway that blurb was just leading up to a question - when people have all these interesting coloured ones is it always because they are light stressed? Why don’t mine do that even though they are under grow lights?! Any pointers? I may just be being thick.

Editing to add an example - I got a yellow variegated crassula gollum cutting 2 years ago and it’s an actual plant now but is just completely green even though it had some colour on the tips of the leaves when I got it?

If you do end up using tiny ones as favours (which is both cost effective and very cute), get a few bottles of a highly metallic food colouring paint (or one of the dusts that you make up with Everclear) and drybrush the edges of the leaves. You need very very little, edible metallic paints (esp gold and silver ones) are pretty much all inert metal dust so safe to use/handle, and it looks cool. You can pick up tiny terracotta pots in bulk for a song.

@Otterly dear god I'm not so unlucky as to be an islander. Thanks for the recs, I'd been looking at thyme as the likeliest candidate. People talk about phlox but I suspect it would dislike the conditions. Thyme ought to survive. The lawn's not walked on due to it being at a 40-odd degree angle (this is why I fucking hate trying to mow it, have ended up hand mowing it with a trimmer) so it doesn't need to resist foot traffic. Just continual rain and dreich skies.

 

[Honored guest]

@Gay Mouth I've been doing hugekulter, and similar methods for awhile and I can attest to its effectiveness, once my plants get established my watering needs drop significantly, I can go over a week without watering during the summer if there is a good soaking rain, or I heavily water before hand.

Does anyone here grow mushrooms at home? I've been bombarded with mushroom growing kits and setups on Instagram and thought about it. I can only find the common 5 types of mass farmed Chinese mushrooms from local stores and kits seem to offer superior variety. I'm just wondering if it's worth spending the money for a good kit of just stick to cheap supermarket fungi.

I casually grow mushrooms in my garden, and I find it rewarding. At the moment I've only grown winecaps on my garden paths & raised beds, and I'm planning on setting up tall woodchip beds for growing oyster mushrooms this year, so I can only really offer advice from the perspective of a novice. With that said if you are looking into growing mushrooms start with either kits or if you want to grow outside (like myself) start with easy to cultivate mushrooms. If you're a foodie and love mushrooms go for it, if you like growing or trying new things go for it.
https://northspore.com/ has good info, and sells both growing kits and spawn, I've purchased from them a few times and so far they've been good. Some mushrooms have very specific growing needs so look into them before you start buying anything.

 

[NoReturn]

i loved the section about lichens its just so mad these random patches of colour on stone can be so complex and that all are different.

I've caught myself staring at trees with singular licen patches on them now, too. Knowing how they work, sometimes it's like "How'd you get up there?"

I’ve set myself a challenge to see how many succulents I can propagate before my wedding in a couple of years - I’d love to make favours or something if I can get enough.

If I’m being honest I just find watching them grow quite addictive, like man it really is the cutest thing ever watching a teeny tiny plant grow out of a leaf so this is just an excuse to do that. I set some rules at the beginning that I’m not allowed to buy any full plants, only cuttings, but I broke the rule today lol. Anyway that blurb was just leading up to a question - when people have all these interesting coloured ones is it always because they are light stressed?

I'd say yes, and to prove I'm not talking out my ass, here's one of mine I just started stressing. You can see the pink coming in.

Photo completely unfiltered so you can get a realistic idea of what it looks like at first.

If you do end up using tiny ones as favours (which is both cost effective and very cute), get a few bottles of a highly metallic food colouring paint (or one of the dusts that you make up with Everclear) and drybrush the edges of the leaves. You need very very little, edible metallic paints (esp gold and silver ones) are pretty much all inert metal dust so safe to use/handle, and it looks cool. You can pick up tiny terracotta pots in bulk for a song.

Polite disagree because even though it will look pretty, it can block the stoma and then they'll have a harder time surviving the transition from wedding-favor to their final homes.
Painting the pots or putting the dust on the soil, though? Hell yeah.

 

[Jacinda Ardern IRL]

My tulips are coming up for spring! I'll try to get some photos when they start blooming.

My favorite thing about the tulips is that the squirrels in my neighborhood like to help out with my garden arrangement. I'll do something basic, like centralize my tulips, and alternate pink, purple, and white. Then over fall and winter, the squirrels will make my boring arrangement exciting. I end up with tulips popping up randomly all over my flower beds. The squirrels like to move some of my tulip bulbs to the neighbors' gardens and vice versa, so I always get some reds and yellows showing up. It's always fun to find out what I'm going to get in a given year compared to what I planted and what there was last year, because it's never quite what I expect.

 

[Aunt Carol]

Mushrooms aren't the "body" of the fungus, just the "fruit". Them appearing just means the fungus thinks the environment is a safe and wet enough place to have babies.

There are a couple of giant tree stumps here that are on the neighbor's side of the fence and he's too lazy to deal with. Not a problem except that it's elms and the massive zombie root system kept sending up suckers in my yard (and everywhere else). Any time I dug in the yard, I was hitting huge, healthy roots.

Mostly out of curiosity, I bought some elm oyster mushroom spores (in dowels) and put them in the bigger roots I kept finding on my side of the fence, trying to encourage decomposition.

Years later and ten yards away, oyster mushrooms keep growing on top of the tree stumps in my neighbor's yard. The squirrels eat them. It's kind of a cross between a lawncare shitpost and a 3rd grade science experiment, but it's fun.

The squirrels like to move some of my tulip bulbs to the neighbors' gardens and vice versa, so I always get some reds and yellows showing up. It's always fun to find out what I'm going to get in a given year compared to what I planted and what there was last year, because it's never quite what I expect.

Squirrels, the zoologists say, absolutely do not remember where they hid their acorns. They dig holes and hide things, and then they look for places where the dirt looks like it was recently disturbed and assume that that's where they (or another squirrel) put something delicious.

My squirrels don't replant bulbs. I hate it when they dig up every single daffodil bulb, take one bite, and then abandon it on top of the soil. Obviously you don't like the taste of daffodils, so knock it off, you dicks! Strewing dead leaves or just dry dirt after planting seems to work as camouflage, and the coyote urine crystals work too.

 

[Jacinda Ardern IRL]

Squirrels, the zoologists say, absolutely do not remember where they hid their acorns.

Squirrels are my favorite little garden retards.

 

[Accept Only Substitutes]

Squirrels, the zoologists say, absolutely do not remember where they hid their acorns. They dig holes and hide things

This explains a tree that popped up in my yard a few years ago. It looks nothing like any other tree I have so I wondered how the hell it got there. My neighborhood is in the remnants of a long-ago pecan orchard so there are squirrels everywhere. (I love them)

Off-topic a bit, I saw an opossum this morning in my neighbors yard! I was super excited to see him. I love opossums, they eat bugs.

 

[Otterly]

40-odd degree angle

I once saw a bloke doing that with a flymo by tying a bungee cord on the handle and literally throwing it down a hill. Not sure I’d fancy that. Phlox is a little high for a lawn - I’d go for thyme and clover mixed in. I’ve got some thyme I planted last year cascading over a small path and the plants went from small plugs to dinner plate sized in a couple of months, plus they bloom a lovely purple. I’ve got a load more as seedlings just now, a pack will get you a few hundred seeds. Few of them in late April and just water it in and keep the birds off it for a few weeks

 

[NoReturn]

There are a couple of giant tree stumps here that are on the neighbor's side of the fence and he's too lazy to deal with. Not a problem except that it's elms and the massive zombie root system kept sending up suckers in my yard (and everywhere else). Any time I dug in the yard, I was hitting huge, healthy roots.

I wonder if it's not a zombie so much as a species of tree that lives after "death". Kind of like how aspen patches are all the same tree.

Patches of aspens are all the same tree, there's even one in Utah that's a forest.

Mostly out of curiosity, I bought some elm oyster mushroom spores (in dowels) and put them in the bigger roots I kept finding on my side of the fence, trying to encourage decomposition.

Pro-move, expect level play.

Years later and ten yards away, oyster mushrooms keep growing on top of the tree stumps in my neighbor's yard.

This means the fungus you brought it has "infected" the whole tree system. The mushrooms are just the part you can see. The mycelial network will be within the entire root system.

Off-topic a bit, I saw an opossum this morning in my neighbors yard! I was super excited to see him. I love opossums, they eat bugs.

And their body temperature is so low they actually don't carry that much disease (comes at the cost of short lives, but still amazing little animals).

 

[Aunt Carol]

This means the fungus you brought it has "infected" the whole tree system. The mushrooms are just the part you can see. The mycelial network will be within the entire root system.

When the fungi take over, I hope they remember my aid to their cause.

I picked spores for an edible mushroom, just in case, but I'm not fighting the squirrels for 'em.

 

[one_time_user]

On the topic of mushrooms, all of my newest plants, once repotted, are growing mushrooms. I cannot describe tge levels of 'freak the fuck out' that I started to spiral into but google says it's actually just a sign of really good soil. I don't know if it was the soil or the worm castings that did it but whew, no harm. I got some mild fungicide and stopped stressing.

 

[anliteralidiot]

On a similar vein to the squirrels and nut growth... My chickens have started growing this sunflower. The stem is like a nickel diameter in width! It's so big!!

My husband was so confused, but then he remembered that there were sunflower seeds in some of their food mixes. There might be some.corn sheets too, but fuck this thing is huge!

 

[NoReturn]

On the topic of mushrooms, all of my newest plants, once repotted, are growing mushrooms. I cannot describe tge levels of 'freak the fuck out' that I started to spiral into but google says it's actually just a sign of really good soil. I don't know if it was the soil or the worm castings that did it but whew, no harm. I got some mild fungicide and stopped stressing.

What kind of mushrooms?