First year that I can have a real garden

It’s the first year in a really long time that I can have a real garden …I have lived in apartments or only had a yard the size of my back deck, so could grow things in containers only for the last 20 something years, after having lived places where one or the other of my parents always had some sort of garden that I always helped them in, it’s been rough to not feel the soil between my toes and under my fingernails…I love gardening, but am highly out of practice, so I am starting small this year and hoping to double or triple it next year.
I am sitting on my back deck looking at my sad container planted basil and overlooking my tomatoes with thier basil, pepper and zucchini friends in the little bed below…I intend to create 1 more such bed this summer for growing greens.



One of my son’s made the bench to sit on and admire our garden.
We have extremely sandy soil, so I have to buy bags of soil and compost so that I can grow anything.

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Very Nice @Sammie76 I love the bench! Gotta have a bench in the garden!

Looks like something is really munching on the basil. Something got after mine and it’s almost gone. I trimmed it up and sprayed it with neem oil and spread DE around on the ground to give it a fighting chance! I took two cuttings that I’m hoping I can get to root in water. If so we will be back on track here in a couple of weeks!

I have had a decent garden the last few years, but between the lack of rain and heat wave last summer I barely had any harvest to never ending rains this spring, I decided to make mine a compost pile for a year.

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I had and some rosemary in with the basil but it died off, I was thinking of DE on the basil. The ones down with the tomatoes are doing fine, which is good.

yep DE will work fine. I did the neem because there isn’t much left of mine and none of what I sprayed will be eaten any time soon anyway. As soon as I get new leaves I’m gonna cut off all the old.

I thought a slug or two got into mine, though I didn’t spot any trails so i’m not sure. @Sammie76

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@Sammie76 love the bench! Even more so because your son made it.

Looks like you might have slugs eating your basil. They are the nemesis of my basil plants. You can try spent coffee grounds around the stem of the plants or small containers of beer. If your not a coffee drinker your local Dunkin or Starbucks might have some. The stores around here actually leave them at the drive thru for customers who need it. Diatomateous earth (sp) works best. For slugs I make a circle around the base of the plant so when the slimy suckers slither through it, it gets all over them. That has worked best. Sometimes I will go out at night too with a flash light when I take the dogs out and catch them in the act.

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Fun and worthless fact: the diatomaceous earth that you are using is mined right behind my house! In a little town called Lompoc (pronounced lom-poke). The only currently mined source is here.

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@AnneBonny @Sammie76

Here is whats left of my Basil and the two cuttings. Did someone mention Dunkin Donuts??

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Those are some crafty slugs if that is what is getting my basil, it is on the deck, on the second floor in a container, but you never know, i’very seen some strange things happen to my container plants over the years.

What else eats basil? Cause I didn’t see any signs of slugs either but you saw what mine looked like. I circled it with DE two days ago and no slug trails at all. So it must have been something else that got after mine. 48 hours and it was almost totally devoured. @Sammie76 @AnneBonny

Looks there could be several culprits @bob31 @Sammie76

https://www.gardeningknowhow.com/edible/herbs/basil/holes-in-basil-leaves.htm

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