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Dried scallions are amazing. I had like a gallon of them that I used over the winter the year that I had way too fuckin' many scallions. This year it's gonna be leeks.
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Sep 13, 2021 14:06
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Is there a thread recommended dehydrator?
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Sep 13, 2021 14:22
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spf3million posted:Are you cutting full sized tomatoes into slices before putting them in the dehydrator? Quartering cherry tomatoes? Also do you use the grate or the solid silicone sheet? My dehydrator is a Nesco Snackmaster Pro (Nesco FD-75PR), which comes with five trays and can dry up to twelve; I think we have nine total. It's a good cheap starting point at $80.
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Sep 13, 2021 15:12
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c355n4 posted:Is there a thread recommended dehydrator? Don't know, but I have the COSORI one and while expensive, man it's nice. (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07PY5M579/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1) We dehydrate a LOT of stuff so it's worth it for us. The thing pretty much lives in out kitchen as soon as the growing season gets underway.
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Sep 13, 2021 15:55
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Just do what I did get a dehydrator that was your grandfather's and which has sat in your mom's closet for 20 years, lend it to a friend to make beef jerky, have your friend break it by overusing it for like 3 years straight, have him buy a new dehydrator before losing interest in beef jerky, and then borrow that new dehydrator and both of you forget to return it because between the two households you do like 2 dehydration projects per year. Easy peasy.
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Sep 13, 2021 16:05
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c355n4 posted:Is there a thread recommended dehydrator? I have one of the non-digital 9-tray Excalibur units. I've seen them on Woot for $100 cheaper than I paid circa 2009. The thing's built like a tank and has survived multiple moves. It also works well enough to get things dry in an area where relative humidity tends to bounce between 50 and 100%. It was definitely a "buy once, cry once" purchase. My only complaints are that the trays don't fit in most dishwashers and it's not quiet. The features I would suggest looking for are a rear (rather than bottom) mounted fan (so trays don't drip into it), a wide temperature range, and the ability to run the fan without heat. It's nice to be able to dry herbs and other delicate things at low temperatures or things with super high moisture content (like soups) at high temperatures. Being able to turn the heat off entirely also helps cool things to ambient quickly so you don't have to wonder if something's soft because it's under dried or just because it's warm. Don't forget to check vertical height for your unit if you're planning on running it on a counter top below cabinets or something.
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Sep 13, 2021 16:13
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We have a L'Equip dehydrator. No extensive research before buying, it just showed up at the thrift store one day. Once we got into it the temperature adjustment is more useful than I thought it would be. Fixed temperature units are not recommended for beef jerky because they usually aren't set at a high enough temperature. While we don't make a lot of jerky it's nice to have the option of that and not turning your parley into dust because you got distracted for half an hour. Timer is nice but not critical. Berries especially seem to need much more time than recommended so we end up adjusting the temperature, setting it to run continuously, and checking progress regularly. Sometimes we use the timer as a backup when something delicate is close but will be too crispy if we forget to check it for several hours. Expandibility is easy - you can stack up to 20 trays on it. We're up to 10 now from the original 6 and I'm not sure that we'll need more, although there's one dried apple chip eater in the family that might force another expansion. We've had it for seven years so far, still running flawlessly. It's hard plastic though and probably won't survive well if anything gets dropped. I'd like more metal. Biggest reason I would not recommend L'Equip is the trays and screens not being dishwasher safe. Dried cherry residue was really hard to clean off this year. I had to stack the trays vertically in a large sink, fill it with water, soak one end of the stack for a couple of hours until that end could be cleaned, flip the stack and repeat. Not ideal. ed: poeticoddity mentioned the side vs bottom mount fan. Good point. The L'Equip is bottom mounted and you have to fart around making baffles out of aluminum foil on the first two trays if you want to avoid flooding the fan with jerky juice. Hexigrammus fucked around with this message at 17:39 on Sep 13, 2021 |
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Sep 13, 2021 17:33
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It's funny that the conversation is about dehydrators as I'm finishing my cherry tomatoes in the oven today. They don't take that long, but would take less time with a fan. I also turned a good number of pounds into tomato soup for the freezer, and got to use about half of my tomato skin puree from when I did salsa a couple weeks ago. The tomatoes are about done and I'll probably pull them in a couple days and use the green ones with a bunch of tomatillos for another salsa. Hot peppers are really starting to ripen, and the chocolate moruga scorpions are this strange tan color right now before moving to the darker chocolate. It will be a much smaller harvest than hoped for, but better than expected with the weather. Big winners are the Chi-Chien heaven facing and the Erjingtiao milds. I'm going to have 150 of the heaven facing to dry at least, and the erjingtiao are turning red and I'll have probably 50-60 of those left now that I stopped picking a dozen a week. The Bird Aji are a close third for production with many small fruit but completely unripe still. Can't wait to build out the tunnels and keep things happy and living all winter so they can just start growing when there's enough sunlight to make them warm again. Horned mustard greens, radishes, and pea sprouts are in and growing for autumn too. And winter cabbages are getting big too. I'm really starting to understand this 4-season growing thing, but so much room for improvements next year. Water cress is my favorite thing starting to grow well right now.
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Sep 13, 2021 23:30
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Chipping in my rec for the Excalibur. I run my for weeks at a time throughout the year and have had it for almost a decade now.
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Sep 14, 2021 01:18
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Random question - is there a goon recommended gardening website? I want to put together a binder with a single sheet for each type of plant we have in our garden and the basics of care for them.
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Sep 14, 2021 16:30
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Arsenic Lupin posted:We cut full-sized tomatoes into slices; we also did some cherry tomatoes cut in half. You use the grate because tomatoes are very juicy and need a lot of airflow. Thanks for the rec, just arrived today. I didn't want to commit to a fancier one until I knew what drying was about, but I'm thrilled to have a plan now for my peppers, green onions and herbs. (And my wife loves jerky, but that may be a winter project.) And what a relief it was just now cutting up my big sack of slicing tomatoes and doing something before the rot/fruit flies got to them. Saved just enough fresh ones to replenish our jar of salsa, but all the rest are now processed or processing.
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Sep 14, 2021 20:16
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Johnny Truant posted:Random question - is there a goon recommended gardening website? I want to put together a binder with a single sheet for each type of plant we have in our garden and the basics of care for them. The Territorial Seed catalog pretty much does this.
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Sep 14, 2021 21:22
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Johnny Truant posted:Random question - is there a goon recommended gardening website? I want to put together a binder with a single sheet for each type of plant we have in our garden and the basics of care for them. There really isn't one single site that's going to have reliable information about every plant, but cross posting from the horticulture thread: Wallet posted:I find myself googling various plants/cultivars all the time because I don't trust nursery labels or listings to not stretch hardiness or sun requirements to sell more (anyone putting Sun to Shade on a plant label is a butthole) and they're often missing important pieces of information like flowering season or whatever. Of course often what you get when you type a plant name into google is a bunch of nurseries selling it. It's geared towards ornamentals so may not be that useful if what you want information about is, like, tomato cultivars. Wallet fucked around with this message at 21:39 on Sep 14, 2021 |
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Sep 14, 2021 21:36
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Pretty good podcast about permaculture and such. Really relaxing. No loud commercials or obnoxious poo poo. https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/permaculture
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Sep 15, 2021 06:02
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For those that love the heat that peppers can give, I finally got a ripe Guatemalan Chiltepin. I have four of these shrubery (they're 4' tall, I don't know what else to call them), and the one I put in the front is just large and full of tiny fire filled peppers. They have a fruity sweetness to them, and are around a good habanero for heat level. They're easy to compare to all the other chiltepin and bird chiles, and are fairly similar in flavor, but this one does have a sweetness that the others don't seem to have. It was also very oily, so it coats the mouth really well. It's a really huge plant, and next year (#3) I'll expect it to get about as large, but bushier and just covered with fruit. I put them in 4 different spots in the yard, and while this one lives under a birch tree, it's the largest and happiest, so I may put two up there next summer. So compared to the Aji Charapita and Bird Aji, it fits right in on flavor, but boy is it a beautiful plant.  
Jhet fucked around with this message at 00:09 on Sep 16, 2021 |
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Sep 16, 2021 00:06
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is it possible at this point to cut this ridiculous tomato plant back to something resembling one vine without killing it in time to get more fruit out of it? This is in coastal VA where we may or may not have a hard frost coming at all, so it might have a good few months left. I'm putting a few gallons of fertilizer-laden water into it everyday now, and I'm trying the weed hack of cutting way back on the nitrogen component to discourage further vegetative growth but lol it's just not slowing down. It has lots of blooms though. So I'm kinda torn between pruning it heavily for science, or just continuing to go hard on the feed while starving it of nitrogen to see if I can force it to do what I want. In related news, my aji limon is going absolutely nuts, and I'm about to be drowning in sweet/hot little yellow peppers  This was a seed in may and it absolutely dwarfs all the peppers I bought at the garden store and moved outside early in the spring in size and yield. Except for maybe the numex peppers which are stumpy but full of huge fruit.  e: If my tomatoes and peppers had septoria/bacterial leaf spot early on, but have recovered, and the leaves and fruit now seem totally healthy, does that mean it's ok to compost healthy leaves/stems and save seeds? Or do I still need to worry about that stuff carrying over to next year? poverty goat fucked around with this message at 17:34 on Sep 16, 2021 |
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Sep 16, 2021 17:28
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poverty goat posted:e: If my tomatoes and peppers had septoria/bacterial leaf spot early on, but have recovered, and the leaves and fruit now seem totally healthy, does that mean it's ok to compost healthy leaves/stems and save seeds? Or do I still need to worry about that stuff carrying over to next year? Those are beautiful peppers. If they had bacterial spots I wouldn’t compost and put it back in my garden unless you know it can get hot enough. If it’s a small pile it’s not going to hit above 160-180 or whatever the range is then I wouldn’t. The tomato probably won’t have time to completely recover, but what is there to lose? If you aren’t getting much from it now, give it a chance and see. Never know when that first frost will actually hit anyway.
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Sep 16, 2021 18:16
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Johnny Truant posted:Random question - is there a goon recommended gardening website? I want to put together a binder with a single sheet for each type of plant we have in our garden and the basics of care for them. The first place I always look for how to take care of my plants is my state university extension website. Maybe your state uni has something similar. https://extension.umn.edu/yard-and-garden
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Sep 16, 2021 21:39
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Jabronie posted:https://www.groworganic.com/products/cold-zone-soil-builder-mix-raw-lb?_pos=3&_sid=870440494&_ss=r Thank you for the recommendation. Finished up these 2 additional containers. I employed a bit of what I learned with the first raised bed to improve upon this. Put a lot more decayed wood & a good bit of recently trimmed green material in the base to keep dirt from falling into the cracks & reducing the overall bed depth. Also ended up putting a lot more dirt & compost into this one after the fact. Living and learning. Might end up shifting planting over to these & figure out a better situation for the first. I'm going to try to take advantage of the existing clothes line end piece to make a trellis to support plants. We'll see how it works out.    For the other container I picked up a blue berry bush. Then I found out I need 2 bushes to get decent sized blue berries. Guess I'm getting another one soon unless I want to take on cloning & rooting anther. Sounds like that would a big delay on what I want though. Also I've been reading about container lemon trees. Anybody have any suggestions there? Worth it or not? onemanlan fucked around with this message at 15:38 on Sep 17, 2021 |
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Sep 17, 2021 15:33
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onemanlan posted:For the other container I picked up a blue berry bush. Then I found out I need 2 bushes to get decent sized blue berries. Guess I'm getting another one soon unless I want to take on cloning & rooting anther. Sounds like that would a big delay on what I want though. Also I've been reading about container lemon trees. Anybody have any suggestions there? Worth it or not? I think with blueberries, one bush will give you a few berries. But you really want a second variety of blueberry for max pollination and fruit production. Not just two bushes of the same type. Cloning the one bush wouldn't help.
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Sep 18, 2021 00:45
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onemanlan posted:
there's some pollination compatibility charts out there to find a good pair.  I've been hesitant about trees inside. Sure, you can prune them to keep short but i've been reading about the hassle of having to re-pot them to trim their roots as they grow. It'd seem stressful to me to make a mistake after a few years before they become fruitful.
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Sep 18, 2021 01:36
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What's up with the giant pipe which appears to empty onto your garden?
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Sep 18, 2021 08:08
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onemanlan posted:Also I've been reading about container lemon trees. Anybody have any suggestions there? Worth it or not? Sure. I wouldn’t do it for a lemon tree, but I would for something like a sudachi or a finger lime that are more interesting to me and I can’t reliably get at the store. Jabronie posted:I've been hesitant about trees inside. Sure, you can prune them to keep short but i've been reading about the hassle of having to re-pot them to trim their roots as they grow. It'd seem stressful to me to make a mistake after a few years before they become fruitful. Citrus take root disturbance pretty well. Avocado is an example of a plant that doesn’t. A trick of the trade is to use fabric pots or containers painted with copper hydroxide (brand name is ‘SpinOut’). Either solution stops the roots at the edge of the pot and encourages interior growth. You can get a bigger plant growing in the same size pot and it becomes less critical to slip the plant out and prune its roots on the regular. pointsofdata posted:What's up with the giant pipe which appears to empty onto your garden? It’s this T thing at the end of bed. The perspective is just slightly confusing.
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Sep 18, 2021 08:58
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Platystemon posted:It’s this T thing at the end of bed. The perspective is just slightly confusing. That makes a lot more sense, I thought there was an abandoned industrial plant by your house!
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Sep 18, 2021 10:49
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Or his neighbor is in a stand off with his other side neighbor and OP is the dmz
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Sep 18, 2021 13:48
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Jabronie posted:there's some pollination compatibility charts out there to find a good pair. Thank you all for the helpful advice! Also we don't talk about the DMZ neighbor for fear of upsetting them. My garden is on the best side of the DMZ.
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Sep 20, 2021 12:06
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2 months ago I thought my gourds were goners to squash vine borers. I went and weeded my garden yesterday for the first time in months (chamberbitter/mimosaweed  )and nope, after getting rid of all the weeds and played out zinnias, it's all a giant gourd vine now with half a dozen basketball size gourds. Is there anything special I need to do to season or dry them when I do harvest them? They're just decorative- I was gonna give them to the neighbors for their kids to paint faces on or something.
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Sep 20, 2021 18:15
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Wallet posted:There really isn't one single site that's going to have reliable information about every plant, but cross posting from the horticulture thread: For roses, clematis, and peonies, you want https://www.helpmefind.com . Arsenic Lupin fucked around with this message at 18:33 on Sep 20, 2021 |
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Sep 20, 2021 18:31
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My bitter melon vines have not been especially prolific (surprising, really, given how many flowers they have), but boy are these melons huge. Two or three times larger than the ones in the store.
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Sep 20, 2021 19:47
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Had a big weekend picking and canning because we also had the first big rainstorm of the season. Please pardon the clutter you might see.  San Marzano Giagante  Had to pick all my tomatoes at once, filled around five of those large plastic bags you get with grocery pickup. Upper left are Pineapple, upper right is San Marzano Giagante, lower left is a mix of the two and lower right is Sweet Millions. The rest will be made into salsa and similar stuff.  Canned and pickled carrots (I believe Purple Snax and Red Samurai), cucumbers and cherry tomatoes with herbs.  Even after processing, the color is really intense.
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Sep 20, 2021 22:33
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Just a heads-up because it's been discussed in the thread before: onegreenworld appears to be taking orders for Sichuan peppercorn plants for shipment this Fall. US$25, 1 gallon. They use the spelling "Sechuan Pepper". I got one from them several years ago and have been happy with it, but don't have any other experience with using them.
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Sep 24, 2021 23:16
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That was me, and I will go look tonight. I’m redoing my front garden and I just need to decide where everything is going. This is just fantastic timing.
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Sep 24, 2021 23:24
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SubG posted:Just a heads-up because it's been discussed in the thread before: onegreenworld appears to be taking orders for Sichuan peppercorn plants for shipment this Fall. US$25, 1 gallon. They use the spelling "Sechuan Pepper". thanks for the heads up!
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Sep 24, 2021 23:41
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 tomato got those vaccine balls
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Sep 25, 2021 00:57
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titers went from grape to beefsteak
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Sep 25, 2021 01:09
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SubG posted:Just a heads-up because it's been discussed in the thread before: onegreenworld appears to be taking orders for Sichuan peppercorn plants for shipment this Fall. US$25, 1 gallon. They use the spelling "Sechuan Pepper". Thank you! I order one of those and one Sansho to pollinate it.
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Sep 25, 2021 02:32
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Motronic posted:Thank you! I order one of those and one Sansho to pollinate it. Different sources claim different things about what's needed to produce peppercorns and/or viable seed. I only have the one plant and it's been happy producing peppercorns every year (with an asterisk next to this year because it looks like the harvest is going to be smaller than previous years). I've never successfully germinated any of the seeds it's produced...but I've never successfully germinated Sichuan peppercorn seeds from any source, and I've tried many.
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Sep 25, 2021 02:45
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I spotted one at the Woodland Park zoo in Seattle, and it did have berries on it in August. I bought two+one so that I might get good production out of it. They’re all going into the same corner of the yard, and they’ll just be on the outside of a birch tree’s shadow. I’m looking forward to watching them grow into bushy things. I expect they can be pruned okay to get dense enough to fill the space, but I expect they will have some space underneath as well, and I have some great plants on my list for that short height too. I have been cooking with peppercorn more often to get everyone ready for many future years of numbing flavors. Someone in the horticulture thread liked Annie’s Annuals and I’ve just spent a week starting a list of things I want to put in these semi-edible garden spaces and it’s going to be a problem.
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Sep 25, 2021 03:14
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SubG posted:If you plan on trying to germinate the seeds let the thread know how it goes. I'm not trying to germinate (I mean, maybe I will?) but I've always understood you get a better harvest with a compatible pollinator. Figure it's worth a shot for an extra $25. I'm no moving anytime soon, so these can be long term trials.
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Sep 25, 2021 03:30
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Motronic posted:I'm not trying to germinate (I mean, maybe I will?) but I've always understood you get a better harvest with a compatible pollinator. Figure it's worth a shot for an extra $25. I'm no moving anytime soon, so these can be long term trials. I tend to treat dioecious plants the same way. One of each will encourage future production maybe? It just seems like they'd be happier with more than one around anyway. I'm not planning on moving again for a very long time, so an extra $25 for many years does not sound like a big investment. I grabbed a couple Korean tea plants too, because I can? I have the right climate so I figured to just give it a shot.
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Sep 25, 2021 04:39
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