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Shifty Pony posted:It isn't the human (or animal) waste content that is the problem. The issue is all the other stuff that goes down drains both in houses and from commercial/industrial users. There are multiple treatment plants in my city. Some I wouldn't have any qualms at all about using compost derived from them, but I would not like to use the one which gets the wastewater stream from the semiconductor fabrication plants. I agree, every area is different, my area is surrounded by vineyards and ranches. I might not get their compost if it was more industrial.
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Mar 20, 2017 01:42
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How do y'all deal with squirrels? They've never been an issue for me before, but this year they're digging up everything. Repellents seem to have mixed reviews. I don't think I can throw chicken wire over everything. I wish I could just shoot the things, but there are houses behind ours, so...
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Mar 21, 2017 03:29
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I feel like I'm out of my element here, but I can't imagine a pellet gun could hurt someone.  When I was a kid I used to shoot bb guns and pellet guns in suburbia.
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Mar 21, 2017 05:32
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Internet Explorer posted:I feel like I'm out of my element here, but I can't imagine a pellet gun could hurt someone. My brother and I absolutely killed pigeons with pellet guns. BB guns are much less dangerous but I still wouldn't want to be shot by one.
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Mar 21, 2017 05:43
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Fitzy Fitz posted:How do y'all deal with squirrels? They've never been an issue for me before, but this year they're digging up everything. Repellents seem to have mixed reviews. I don't think I can throw chicken wire over everything. I wish I could just shoot the things, but there are houses behind ours, so... At my suburban/city house: hex netting over everything they eat and landscape fabric wherever they dig. At my parents house: a scoped 22 rifle or a 20ga shotgun. Don't listen to anyone who suggests live traps as a humane solution. The territoriality of squirrels and the stress of trapping/relocating means it is just as much of a death sentence as a bullet, but much slower. Anyway shooting or trapping is futile in a city or neighborhood because there are just so drat many of the bastards.
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Mar 21, 2017 11:26
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Shifty Pony posted:At my suburban/city house: hex netting over everything they eat and landscape fabric wherever they dig. What predator used to kill squirrels before we hosed over the environment and let them reign over us? I'm thinking about how extinction of the wolves led to booms in the deer population.
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Mar 21, 2017 12:36
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100YrsofAttitude posted:What predator used to kill squirrels before we hosed over the environment and let them reign over us? Basically all the ones bigger than squirrels. Mainly foxes, I'd guess.
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Mar 21, 2017 13:14
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100YrsofAttitude posted:What predator used to kill squirrels before we hosed over the environment and let them reign over us? Hawks, owls, foxes, coyotes, bobcats, and cougars. The bigger issue is they can stuff their face with birdseed.
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Mar 21, 2017 13:31
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Hawks kill a lot of squirrels. I see them fighting all the time. I think it's too risky to fire even a pellet gun in my neighborhood. It would probably just hit a tree before reaching someone's house, but it's not worth it the chance to me. I'd also have to go buy one, because I just have a .22 at home. I guess netting is pretty cheap and will last for a long time, even if I can't cover everything.
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Mar 21, 2017 15:00
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If you do shoot you some food, I have a great jamaican jerk squirrel recipe.
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Mar 21, 2017 15:40
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A dog works well.  One of those fake plastic owls might help, at least for a few weeks before they understand it's not a real owl. That might give you time to come up with a more permanent solution.
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Mar 21, 2017 15:45
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Suspect Bucket posted:If you do shoot you some food, I have a great jamaican jerk squirrel recipe. Would that work with other rodent-like meats? Say rabbit? 100YrsofAttitude fucked around with this message at 16:05 on Mar 21, 2017 |
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Mar 21, 2017 15:57
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Internet Explorer posted:I feel like I'm out of my element here, but I can't imagine a pellet gun could hurt someone. A good pellet gun can be quite dangerous - not quite on the level of a .22 rimfire, but you can absolutely injure and/or blind someone with it. Actually killing someone isn't likely, but it isn't impossible. Fitzy Fitz posted:I think it's too risky to fire even a pellet gun in my neighborhood. It would probably just hit a tree before reaching someone's house, but it's not worth it the chance to me. I'd also have to go buy one, because I just have a .22 at home. If you find your resolve wavering, please don't shoot at squirrels (or any other animal) with a pellet gun unless you know what you're doing well enough to 1) know how to get a good/powerful enough air rifle to make clean kills, and 2) be a good enough shot to kill them instantly. With an air rifle, you're not likely to get a second shot off in time to finish the job, and I hope you're a good enough person not to want to cripple any animal and have it crawl off and die miserably. (Except mosquitoes - gently caress them.) A squirrel is a pretty small and fidgety target - I wouldn't want to shoot one with a pellet gun, just because there's too much chance for a bad shot. At least with a .22, you hit it with a little more punch, and have a better chance to get off a second shot if you need to.
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Mar 21, 2017 16:53
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Oh, we used to plink at birds and squirrels plenty when I was a kid, but we lived in the country so it wasn't an issue. First thing I ever killed was a cowbird nesting in the attic above my room. I do have a traumatic memory from my childhood of a crippled squirrel dragging himself away by only his front two feet after a bad shot..
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Mar 21, 2017 17:02
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Yeah... I'd want a lot of target practice before I took a shot at a squirrel. I did in fact murder an apple with a pellet gun once - one shot straight through the core and almost out the other side. (It was target practice). Those guns pack a bigger punch than some folks think. If you don't have a dog, have your friends or family with dogs donate some fur after they've been groomed, and put it in net bags or tied bundles near your garden beds. You don't want it blowing annoyingly all over the lawn but the smell of an unfamiliar predator animal will give the squirrels some pause, especially if you have several dog-owner friends who can donate fur and make the squirrels very confused about which one is in your yard at any given moment.
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Mar 22, 2017 00:56
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kedo posted:A dog works well. If you live in a populated area you have to just accept that squirrels have seen and learned all the tricks. When you finally give up and put up netting be sure to go with metal wire. At least in my neighborhood the squirrels know they can gnaw through the plastic stuff.
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Mar 22, 2017 03:23
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100YrsofAttitude posted:Would that work with other rodent-like meats? Say rabbit? Sure, just keep in mind to adjust cooking times as needed due to size of the animal. 165f at the bone at the thickest part is what the USDA considers safe, but game meats are prone to being dry and gamey when over-cooked. Use your best judgement as to what constitutes the best balance between flavor and safety though. I was going to re-type the recipe from a card I wrote out years ago, but someone seems to have had the same idea and possibly source (a 1990's era geocities website) as I, or WWOOFed at the same farm as I did and took the recipe as I recorded it in the WWOOFer notebook because they are pretty similar. Anyhoo, they made a blog post. The only real difference is that I par-boiled, then dry-rubbed my seasoning on without the acids, let that sit for an hour, then pan-fried and served over rice. They suggest a wet marinade for 4-18 hours. If you're using a young or farm-raised rabbit, you may not need to par-boil, but it;s suggested to in order to remove gameyness. Oh, and I just quartered the squirrel rather then breaking it down into a bajillion (8) parts. Rabbit, particularly a big one, you might want to break down like he bothered to. http://foodforhunters.blogspot.com/2014/07/jerk-squirrel.html And for fun, if I could go and shoot those drat canadian geese that are my corn shoots, here's how I'd do it, brought to us by my favorite internet butcher Scott Rea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybsUS7f9WzU Share your favorite garden pest recpies! Oh, and going back several pages, I meant corn shoots, not starts. Brain fart. They were direct sown and only two inches tall when CUT DOWN IN THEIR PRIME BY THE CANADIAN MENACE Suspect Bucket fucked around with this message at 18:10 on Mar 22, 2017 |
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Mar 22, 2017 04:33
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So I've just moved house, and now live amongst the elderly, and it turns out there are community allotments a 2 min walk from it and they have plots going. It's a proper community thing with large equipment free to use and shared compost and water, also plots are ony £3.75 - £7 a year. The question is what size plot do I want as a beginner. I'm sure the 10m plot is too big but 2.5m may be too small, 5m?
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Mar 28, 2017 06:30
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learnincurve posted:So I've just moved house, and now live amongst the elderly, and it turns out there are community allotments a 2 min walk from it and they have plots going. It's a proper community thing with large equipment free to use and shared compost and water, also plots are ony £3.75 - £7 a year. The question is what size plot do I want as a beginner. I'm sure the 10m plot is too big but 2.5m may be too small, 5m? Are those measurements actually in meters squared?
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Mar 28, 2017 16:21
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Oh shoot I posted too early in the morning. The large plot is 100m2 or you can have a half or quarter plot.
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Mar 28, 2017 16:35
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Is it your very first time gardening at all? If so, I would take the quarter plot (or whatever's smallest). It should be big enough to grow a few varieties of herbs and some vegetables without getting overwhelmed with weeding and maintenance. Then next year you can get a larger one if you feel like you could handle more. What are you planning to grow?
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Mar 28, 2017 16:40
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learnincurve posted:Oh shoot I posted too early in the morning. The large plot is 100m2 or you can have a half or quarter plot. That a friggin big plot. You should probably be able to easily fit between 2-4 plants per meter squared depending on type of plant (zucchinis, broccoli grow wide, while tomatoes, cucumbers and other climbers can be trained upwards). I figure that you need to use half of the plot area as walking paths between rows of crops, so you could grow something like 150 plants on the full plot, 75 on the half, and around 38 on the small plot, max. For just my families consumption (wife and I), we had 4 pepper plants, 2 cucumber plants, 8 tomato plants (canned sauce), 2 basil plants, oregano, 2 broccoli plants, 1 eggplant, 1 zucchini that was plenty of veggies for us. Depending on how much you want to grow, the small or half should easily fit the needs of a single family, but also the cost difference between the large and small is like... almost nothing. e: vonnegutt has a good point on the weeding.
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Mar 28, 2017 16:51
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The weather is doing its best to kill my vegetable garden this year. We had a deep freeze after weeks of early spring weather, and now we've had two hail storms combined with flash flooding. Apparently this year's blueberry and peach crops in GA were devastated.
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Mar 28, 2017 16:54
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Should have mentioned that I'm in the U.K. Bang in the middle of the country and north but we don't get extreme weather as we are sheltered by the Pennines which tends to catch it. Weeding: My grandad was a proper gardener, as in he was head gardener for a whole city (schools, parks, other public spaces), and he went through about 50 years of ridicule for insisting that chemicals would destroy the bees. He did live long enough to see himself proved right though. Weeds I can obliterate without any kind of weed killer thanks to grandad. It's a really strange thing to know exactly how to kill plants, but to not have ever grown any. The allotment has to be simple as disabled children will be working on it. I've discovered today that the soil in my garden is absolute poo poo. It's top soil and then what is known locally as pot ash (not potash) and it's where they demolish old Victorian factories, flatten the rubble and then build houses on top. Fantastic for drainage so it will be fine to put in raised beds for flowers but terrible for edibles. I'm thinking potatoes, carrots and rhubarb to start but to use the rest of the plot as a nursery garden. The allotments have community gardens and I plan to donate what won't fit in my own beds to that. My biggest problem is not knowing how much space I'll need.
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Mar 28, 2017 19:43
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Fitzy Fitz posted:The weather is doing its best to kill my vegetable garden this year. We had a deep freeze after weeks of early spring weather, and now we've had two hail storms combined with flash flooding. That sucks, I remember all the local apple orchards had that happen in March about 5 years ago here. Im hoping theres no april snowstorms here either this year. The last of our snow is almost all melted today.
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Mar 29, 2017 02:41
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It begins.  Blueberries are coveted as well. I need to get the bird netting up.
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Mar 29, 2017 02:50
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My tomatoes and peppers have sprouted! I planted way too many seeds in the little peat pots because they were 1yr+ old and I wasn't sure of their germination rates... turns out they came up just fine and now I have 5 Lemon Drop cherry tomato seedlings in one 1" peat pot and 2-3 each in the others. Oops.
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Mar 29, 2017 03:46
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Went and scouted out the allotments and they have the space for about 50 full plots, maybe 7 are being used with 5 properly maintained. The community garden section is looking very sad, not the spring kind of sad but the weed infested kind. Good points are that the compost and manure heaps are amazing. I'm thinking about getting a half plot but splitting it, half for veg and then make the other half as a nursery area for my planters and the community garden. Place could do with some fruit trees as well so I might ask the nice lady if I can donate some and create a little wooded fruit area. What that place really needs is for a television program to come in and give it a makeover.
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Mar 29, 2017 10:00
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Last frost is mid-april here. I'm planning to plant two 4x6 raised beds. It will be my first year growing at home but I've done community gardens for several years so I think I can handle this much space. I'm leaving the row after my tomatoes and cucumbers empty because those plants tend to expand everywhere. I'll probably put some basil in there as companion plants. Living in Illinois I probably don't have a good environment for growing tomatillos or peppers but my wife loves them so I thought I'd give them a try. Any comments or suggestions? I'd love to get some advice. LLSix fucked around with this message at 17:17 on Mar 29, 2017 |
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Mar 29, 2017 14:49
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I kept seeds from one of my sequoia peppers from last season, but they don't appear to be germinating.  Any advice on how I can better save seeds this year? All I did was cut open a pepper, pull out the seeds, discard any obviously bad ones, and allow them to dry on a paper towel for a few days before putting them in a plastic bag in the fridge.
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Mar 29, 2017 17:44
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kedo posted:I kept seeds from one of my sequoia peppers from last season, but they don't appear to be germinating. Peppers need higher temps to germinate. Also they pepper they came from should have fully ripened. Were the seeds a nice golden color when dry or more pale?
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Mar 29, 2017 18:12
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Cpt.Wacky posted:Peppers need higher temps to germinate. Also they pepper they came from should have fully ripened. Were the seeds a nice golden color when dry or more pale? I should clarify – I'm germinating them under all the right temperature and moisture conditions and have some store-bought cayenne seeds that have successfully germinated right next to them. Here's a picture of some of the seeds – the ones I planted were of the lighter yellow variety rather than the dark brown ones.  E: now that I think about it, I definitely didn't get these from a fully ripe pepper... I harvested all of them while they were green instead of waiting for them to turn red. Rats. kedo fucked around with this message at 18:36 on Mar 29, 2017 |
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Mar 29, 2017 18:30
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Score! Finally after asking for 6 months, I got a load of wood chips. Going around my raised beds, should help to keep some weeds out.
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Mar 30, 2017 03:00
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LLSix posted:Living in Illinois I probably don't have a good environment for growing tomatillos or peppers but my wife loves them so I thought I'd give them a try. Any comments or suggestions? I'd love to get some advice. I live in Madison, WI and I grow peppers every year, and have grown tomatillos quite successfully (i.e. they were like weeds). If you're buying starter plants, just make sure you get ones that are pretty large/mature so they start producing earlier in the season. If you're growing from seed, you probably should have started them already, but it might not be too late to get some going, especially if you can use a hoop house to extend the season or something. You might also look for early-producing varieties. Also, I seem to recall reading somewhere that you should plant multiple tomatillo plants. I don't remember if it's because they don't self-pollinate well, or because each plant is only male or female. Probably the former, and you should double-check that anyway. I will warn you that just a couple of thriving tomatillo plants will get pretty large, and produce more tomatillos than any sane person could want.
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Mar 31, 2017 05:38
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Peristalsis posted:I live in Madison, WI and I grow peppers every year, and have grown tomatillos quite successfully (i.e. they were like weeds). If you're buying starter plants, just make sure you get ones that are pretty large/mature so they start producing earlier in the season. If you're growing from seed, you probably should have started them already, but it might not be too late to get some going, especially if you can use a hoop house to extend the season or something. You might also look for early-producing varieties. Awesome. Thank you.
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Apr 1, 2017 23:01
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I've got about 20 square feet of a south-facing balcony to grow stuff on, but I don't get to start until the middle of May I figure I'll put whatever full sunlight vegetables (tomatoes?), and and the partial shade stuff behind that. It sucks that I'll be getting a late start though.
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Apr 2, 2017 02:50
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Hotdog In A Hallway posted:I've got about 20 square feet of a south-facing balcony to grow stuff on, but I don't get to start until the middle of May What zone are you in? If it's zone 6 (USA) or more north, the middle of May is exactly when you're supposed to plant tomatoes. They tend to like warmer weather and while you can start them earlier, they don't really do much til the soil is consistently 50 deg F or so 24/7. If you're worried, buy transplants - I always do for tomatoes. You should have plenty of time for summer vegetables. For balconies I have had luck with cherry tomatoes and herbs the most. Salad greens, carrots, and radishes are good container veg as well.
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Apr 2, 2017 03:20
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My container carrots did terribly last year, they produced a single sad bad tasting carrot
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Apr 2, 2017 04:48
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Hotdog In A Hallway posted:I've got about 20 square feet of a south-facing balcony to grow stuff on, but I don't get to start until the middle of May As a fellow balcony grower I'd suggest keeping track of the number of hours of sun your balcony gets. I've tried tomatoes several times, but my south-facing balcony only gets a maximum of 4-5 hours of direct sunlight per day due to the way my building is shaped and thus my tomatoes have done poorly every year. I'd get maybe one or two tomatoes per plant, and the plants themselves were extremely leggy, unstable and sickly looking. In terms of food plants, peppers have done great. I'm sure they're not quite as productive as they could be, but the lower light also means they don't become quite as massive as they otherwise could and thus they're a bit easier to manage on a small balcony. Also if you're concerned about having enough space, consider going vertical instead of putting pots behind other pots. I constructed a small bench out of some old pipes and cast off wooden bed slats from Ikea. I put anything short (herbs, strawberries, onions, etc) on the bottom and taller plants on top. It doubles the amount of space I have. The picture below is terrible as I haven't started doing any growing outside yet this season. 
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Apr 2, 2017 16:40
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Let me just say gently caress you squirrels.
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Apr 3, 2017 00:14
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