December Harvest/Planning/Conversation Thread
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7 years agoOkiedawn OK Zone 7
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Incredible Edibles planning thread
Comments (39)Yeah, all of the swaps are covered!!! Before posting the schedule though, there is one more thing I'd like to discuss. I had planned to do a Fabulous Fruits Swap in February, but when I started to research growing fruit from seed, I discovered a few things. 1) the only commercial fruit seeds I found (other than melons, which are already covered in another swap) were strawberries 2) all of the articles I found did not recommend growing fruit trees or berry bushes from seed, because most are grafted onto a disease resistant, and/or dwarfing rootstock, so if grown from seed, and will not come true from seed. 3) fruit trees grown from seed can 5 - 10 years to produce fruit. Soooo, with all this in mind, I'm not thinking a fruit seed swap would really be practical. The 2012 Incredible Edibles Swap Schedule is NOW POSTED : ) Happy Swapping!!! Bonnie Here is a link that might be useful: 2012 Incredible Edibles Swap Schedule...See MoreFebruary 2017 Planting/Conversation Thread
Comments (286)Hazel, It has been a good week to be productive. I've been spending as much time as possible in the garden and have the aches and pains to prove it. My body always objects when I switch over from indoor winter laziness to outdoor hard labor. This week I'm paying the price for abandoning the garden last summer/fall to work on the kitchen remodel. All around the edges of the garden, persistent pain-in-the-neck plants crept into the garden despite the heavy mulch, so I've been digging out lots of bermuda and Johnson grass. It takes forever, but I'm determined to dig up all I can find and get it out of there before it can make headway and take back more garden space. I'm about 2/3rds of the way through the front garden and ought to have it back under full control in another week. Then I'll tackle the back garden. I guess digging out weedy grasses is a good way to kill time when most of the cool-season plants and seeds already are planted and it is still too cold to plant the warm-season ones. I am going to buy heavy clear plastic to solarize the area east of the garden where I want to expand it to make up for the northern and western areas that are getting too shady. I'd rather solarize for the entire warm growing season than rototill and dig out roots and go through all that this Spring. It is awful clay there which is why we haven't expanded eastward before now, and I'm dreading all the work it will take to turn it into good soil, but we started out with bad soil in 1999 and have made a lot of progress with the soil since then, so now we'll just start over with that process in a new area. Nancy, The worms will come. We had precious few in our early years but just kept working on the soil, and before we knew it, we had earthworms everywhere. This year there's a huge number of them. I don't know if there's more than usual, or if they are just more active earlier than usual since it has been so warm overall. When I want to attract earthworms to a new garden plot, I just put down cardboard and pile mulch over it. Earthworms love to eat cardboard and turn it into worm castings, so worms always show up soon after cardboard. I don't even know how they find it and know it is there, but they do. I love hugelkultur as a concept. It improves soil like nothing else. Many hugelkultur piles are built high above the ground in order to allow for the fact that the wood will rot and the level of the bed will fall. That is one thing I can't do because if the hugelkultur material is above ground in a mound-like shape, the rodents and snakes move in. I guess that is one of the hazards of living so close to the wild land alongside the Red River---wildlife is too abundant. So, when I build hugelkultur beds, I dig out a trench and bury 100% of the hugelkultur material. It means I have to keep adding more compostable material on top of the beds as the wood rots, but I don't care. I just pile on the mulch really thick and deep and let it decompose in place. We have a great many timber rattlers here (and their venom is very, very bad) and they come out of the woods and head for the garden, so I have to be careful that I'm not creating anything that makes the garden more attractive to them than it already is. While we also have plenty of copperheads, diamondback rattlers and pygmy rattlers, it is the timber rattlers that are the worst garden problem, followed by the copperheads. Generally I only see diamondback rattlers along the creek banks and pygmy rattlers in the woods. Water moccasins aren't a problem around the house ever since we removed the lily pond after the water moccasins moved to it in drought when the ponds and creeks dried up. I miss my lily pond, but having water moccasins in it eating the frogs made it too much of a hazard to keep. Sometimes I think about how much easier gardening would be if we lived in more of a city area where the wildlife is not so abundant, but I do love living in the country and never intend to leave. I just have to be a lot more careful. All my friends here are amazed I've never been bitten by a venomous snake considering how much time I spend outdoors and how many snakes we have here. I am grateful it hasn't happened yet, and won't be shocked if my luck runs out one day. I know how many close calls I've had, and I, too, am amazed that a snake hasn't bitten me yet. There's been at least two occasions when I was so close to a venomous snake that I can't even explain why I didn't get bitten, but I'm thankful it didn't happen. I'd build tons of hugelkultur mounds everywhere if I didn't have to worry about snakes crawling into their nooks and crannies. As it is, I have snakes in the compost piles all the time, so my actual compost piles never get turned once in the warm season because I don't want to stir up the snakes. I don't even want to see the snakes, and I'm careful to only load/unload compost nowadays with a compost scoop or shovel. I used to wear leather gloves and use my hands to lift compost from the wheelbarrow and drop it onto garden beds, but picking up a snake (non-venomous, but still.....) one day broke me of that habit. Most people here in my area (and by most, I guess I mean everyone but us) piles up brush and downed trees and burn them. We don't. We just find a place on the edge of the woods far from the house and make huge brush piles as if we were going to burn them, and then we never burn. We just let them sit there and decompose. I've done the same thing to fill in eroded areas where rain runoff has cut ravines and gullies. I just fill them in with brush and let it decompose in place. Add more to that year after year and the materials decompose and fill in the eroded areas gradually and then plants grow in the enriched soil and you stop the runoff from carrying off topsoil. It is a long, slow process, but we have healed a lot of badly eroded areas that way. It is sort of like building a hugelkultur for Mother Nature. After enough of the woody material breaks down, you end up with nice rich soil that supports native plants. Long before you even get the growth of the new plants, the piles of brush themselves hold the soil in place and stop the soil erosion almost right away. I'd rather be outside working than inside any and every day of the week. For a very long time, Tim worked evenings so I didn't even have to stop working outside until dark since I was the only one home. I was happy if dinner was just a bowl of cereal or a cold sandwich. Eventually he moved to day shift and I had to adjust to having someone coming home at night and expecting an actual home-cooked meal each night. It was really, really hard for me to drag myself into the house before dark, but I learned ways to work around it---the slow cooker, for instance, or cooking only every other day and making enough dinner to last two days, even though Tim is not a huge fan of leftovers. He still works days now and is unlikely ever to work nights again, but his workday is much longer, it seems, since his last promotion, so I still can work outdoors until almost dark, at least at this time of the year and still make it inside and cook dinner before he arrives home well after dark. During the height of the canning season, I generally don't stop canning just to cook dinner though. Either he brings home dinner or we eat leftovers or something that is easy to microwave. Usually after a long day of canning I am too hot and too tired to eat anything anyway, and he knows that and respects that because he does understand the amount of work that goes on in the kitchen during a full day of canning. The one things that having venomous snakes will do for you is that it will train you to get out of the garden and get the garden gate closed and latched before the snakes come out in the evenings. Our snakes use the gravel driveway like a snake highway and I need to be out of the driveway before they come out. I don't want to walk up the driveway to the house in the dark for sure. Some of my scariest snake encounters have been right there in the driveway, especially near the garden gate. It sort of makes me laugh to think that the snakes use the entrance gate area if they can, but it is true. We have 1" chicken wire fencing attached to the lower 2' of the garden's woven wire fencing in order to keep out the baby bunnies, and the snakes sometimes get hung up in that chicken wire, so they prefer to enter/exit through the gate area. Kim, I saw a news story on Facebook about the Tulia fire. My niece, who lives near Abilene, linked the story so of course I had to click on the story and read it. What an awful fire that was! It has been a long time since we've had a fire that large here and I'm grateful for that. Even though we're greening up early here, we haven't greened up enough yet to significantly lower the fire risk. At least a couple of fire departments are out daily fighting fires, but we haven't had a fire ourselves since last Saturday when we had a string of fires along I-35 that briefly threatened at least one home....and made a lot of people really nervous for an hour or two. I've been enjoying the quiet week and getting a lot done, but don't expect the quiet spell will last. I'm glad your greenhouse held up in the wind. With a new greenhouse, you never know at first how it is going to do in wind until you actually have that strong wind occur, so it is good that it seems like it can tolerate your west Texas wind. I've never yet seen a greenhouse here go airborne, but with some of the small ones that aren't anchored to the ground, I imagine it probably could happen. Dawn...See MoreMarch 2017 Planting/Conversation Thread
Comments (394)Hazel, Yes he is very much a typical coyote in appearance. His coat might be slightly more golden than what I usually see, so I think there is a slim chance he has some domestic dog DNA in his heritage, but he is not at all the sort of coyote-domestic dog hybrid we sometimes see here, so if he has domestic dog DNA, it is a small amount. I had to deal with a coyote one year that was a clear coyote/golden retriever mix. About the only part of him that looked like a coyote was his head and his tail. He had no fear of humans and would try to walk right up to you, which is extremely dangerous and cannot be tolerated. I ran into that one occasionally while walking my dogs and he would try to walk along with us, not in a menacing way, but because I knew he was a coyote, I always reversed course and headed straight back home. If a car came along, he'd run right off. Otherwise he'd pace us from about 20 yards away. This one is not like that, but he also doesn't exhibit much fear and he certainly doesn't slink off with his tail between his legs like coyotes often do. He is probably 2 or 3 years old---a young, muscular healthy one that is eating very well, not looking at all like the lean, skinny half-starved ones we often see in drought years. Clearly he roams our neighborhood a great deal and is used to humans and the noises we make because he does not startle easily and he also has taken to standing his ground a bit and staring back at me instead of just turning and running off. We probably should have shot and killed him long ago, but the longer you live with wild things, the more you know that all of them have an important role to fill in the ecosystem and the more you understand that it is better to divert them, to try to prevent them from becoming habituated to your presence/your habitat, etc., instead of killing them. And, truthfully, killing a coyote or a bobcat doesn't really protect your animals because another predator moves right into the available territory as soon as you kill one. I have studied his trail and no matter which wildlife trail he uses to enter/exit the woods near our house, it appears that once he gets deeper in the woodland he is utlizing a fallen log that rests across the creek bank about 10' above the waterline as a bridge to cross the creek. So, also on our list of things to do must be for us to go into the woods (ugh, in snake season already) with the chain saw and cut that log into several pieces so it no longer serves as a bridge. It is a very large tree trunk, possibly a walnut that the idiot beavers chewed/girdled but couldn't bring down due to its huge size about a decade ago. I've only seen it from the road's bridge over the creek, but tomorrow I think Tim and I will put on our leather workboots and such and venture into the woodland to check it out. With free-range chickens, you expect to lose one to predators here and there, but it really doesn't happen that often here. Except in the past year it has happened too often. I worry more about the coyote getting one of our cats than our chickens. Still, when a coyote is coming into your yard while you're outside working in the garden and not that far away, you do have to take action, if only to establish that you're a threat and that the coyote needs to stay away. So, that's where we are now. I left all the poultry inside their individual chicken coops/runs today, and they are not happy even though their fenced runs are large and fully covered with fencing so they are safe. Once poultry is used to free-ranging, they're never really happy confined. I don't care if they're happy today, because at least they are safe. Our chickens would rather be free than be safe, but their vote didn't count today. Only mine did. I kept the cats in, and the dogs are in their fenced dog run with the 8' tall fence to keep the coyotes out. So, I am not worried about the dogs, but I do always bring them indoors from the run if I have to leave the property. Kim, The thought of the blood doesn't bother me. We use blood meal and bone meal, after all, as organic fertilizers. I'm glad you and your little man are having so much fun together. See there---he'll be like me---growing up gardening and having it in his blood, which is a wonderful way to grow up. When kids understand where their food comes from and how it is grown, they automatically understand concepts that non-gardening children (and adults!) do not. Amy, I think Tim would have a stroke if I suggested he bring home some Zoo Doo (lots of zoos do sell it!). He told me yesterday he'll take care of the coyote himself. I love my husband, but I rolled my eyes. When I was having cougar encounters in the yard and was terrified and just trying to make it back to the house alive and in one piece, where was he then? Sitting on his butt watching TV and not paying any attention to any noise outside, not answering his phone (which he conveniently leaves in another room so the noise will not interrupt his TV viewing of some stupid movie he has watched 10,000 times before) and completely clueless, even though after the first cougar encounter he KNEW I was terrified and wanted him to keep his phone with him at all times. If I ever kill him it will be because he walks into his office, closes the door and tunes out the whole world including me and any predator that might be out in the yard with me. If I do not specifically tell him "I am going outdoors, there is a coyote lurking around, keep your phone right beside you", he won't have his phone handy. It makes me nuts. The odds of the coyote coming into the yard when Tim is home on the weekend are between slim and none. In the last year, that coyote has killed dozens of Chris' chickens (he built his coop too close to the woods and knew better and wouldn't listen to us, so what do you do?) and comes into the yard all the time when I am outside and when Chris is working on his house on weekdays, but never on weekends. That could be because we have a weekend neighbor whose property, which sits between us and the river, is not here during the week but often is here on the weekend, so it might be his presence that keeps the coyote from coming up through the river bottoms, crossing through his land and coming onto our land. I have thought about ordering cougar urine though and using it there on that edge of the woodland. Nancy, We have long had dogs---anywhere from 3 at one point up to 8 (a stray dog adopted us and then had puppies) and now we are down to 2 very old, grey-haired, more mellow ones and two hyper-excited ones that I guess are about 3 years old now. It is the easily excitable younger, smaller dogs who sound the DefCon 5 Coyote alert. They are ferocious barkers when a coyote is near. I believe all our dogs have prevented us from being burglarized on several occasions. Once, the word got back to me through a third party that a less-than-honorable person was prowling around our property looking for stuff to steal and our then young and healthy dog named Biscuit (who was a big softy but had a very ferocious attitude towards strangers) went ballistic over his presence. Supposedly this idiot fled and then told all his friends and acquaintances to stay away from our place because "they have a dog that will tear you up". Biscuit crossed over the rainbow bridge several years ago and we miss him so very much. After Biscuit, Duke was our main protector. He died last year. He was a Rottweiler-terrier mix and looked mean. He could act mean and just his appearance terrified people, but he also was just a big wussy. Luckily, no one but us knew what a wussy he was. His brother, Jet, is my big protector now and he has become extra-protective since Duke died. He even barks at Tim and Chris and doesn't really want them coming too close to me, which just makes me laugh, but it makes them highly irritated. I tell Tim it is his fault, When he leaves for work, he tells Jet "you take care of Mom today" , and Jet does just that. The problem is that Jet doesn't really turn off his protective instincts when Tim and Chris come home from work. It is easier to have 4 dogs than 8, and when our two older ones cross over the Rainbow bridge, I don't intend to replace them. We'll still have the two younger ones, and they think they are tougher than they probably are so they bark at anything. I mean if a car comes up our driveway, they have a full and total conniption fit. It is hard for anyone to sneak up on us with all these dogs, and that is a good thing. Amy. I'm so sorry about your dog. It is so hard when we have to let our furry companions leave us. My garden still is too muddy to do much, which is frustrating. I am going to try to weed today and then add some mulch to the just-weeded areas. Baabaamilker, I was going to say dianthus (specifically Sweet William, which is Dianthus barbatus) and bachelor buttons, but I see you already have it all figured out. Kim, How odd that the lettuce seeds did not sprout. Are the seeds fresh? Hazel, You can grow lettuce and pretty much all greens indoors under lights in the summer, preferably in an air conditioned room that stays below 80 degrees. Both heat and lack of water make lettuce taste bitter, and I think it really is a moisture issue more than a heat issue, at least until the lettuce begins to bolt. You will have the best success with leaf lettuce or with summercrisp lettuce varieties, not iceberg. Iceberg types are nice and crunchy but take too long to head up here and hit that wall of heat pretty early. Tim likes the crunch of iceberg, but leaf lettuce is more acceptable to me and I like the crispness of summercrisp ones. I really don't think it is a variety problem---I think it is our heat and lack of abundant moisture. Every lettuce variety I've ever grown has done well as long as it is well-watered and as long as it has shade from noon onward in the hot months. Eventually even well-watered, well-shaded lettuce will bolt though, and growing more indoors is one way to work around that. Amy, I'm sorry you're disappointed with the work done in your bathroom. That's why I like for us to do it ourselves, even if it take us 100 years to finish one project. Katie, I hope you're enjoying the chickens and hope the weather stabilizes soon so you can get plants in the ground. I have almost everything in the ground now but I am very far south and have been having awesome warm weather for a long time. I also have frost blankets if the cold nights come back, as they are sort of threatening to do late next week. Your lettuce looks fabulous! Dawn...See MoreApril Planting/Conversation Thread: The Sequel, April 19 & Beyond
Comments (193)Amy, Congrats on the turnips and I think the parsnips will be fine. With all the cloudy days we tend to have at this time of the year, even if the parsnips leaves sunburn a little in the first couple of days after you harvested the turnips, I'd think that new growth will appear and the plants themselves will be fine. Turnips grown in the fall can turn woody too if the gardener leaves them in the ground too long. I know people who are stuck in that bigger is better mentality (with which I strongly disagree) and they leave their turnips in the ground until they are huge and woody and not fit to eat. Bon, If you were out in the wind and cold pulling weeds yesterday, I'm fearing you're crossing over to the dark side. The wind here was gusting in the upper 40s and lower 50s and I stayed indoors as much as possible as did Tim, the dogs and the cats. The chickens didn't like the wind either and spent a lot of time huddled under the shrubs and even came up onto the porch and huddled up close to the exterior of the wall to stay out of the wind. Augustus the turkey spent most of his day huddled underneath the gigantic Burford hollies on the south side of the porch, gobbling away. That wind was strong and cold. I hate ivy and all kinds of it try to invade from the northwest corner of the garden. I have some smilax, poison ivy and Virginia creeper vines to pull out of the corner of the garden this week, as well as some unknown ivy-looking creeping and crawling vines that I don't want there either. Where does all this crap come from? I blame the wild birds. I think they sit on the fence and plant things. Dawn...See Morehazelinok
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