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It's getting to be about that time - I need to figure out where I'm planting this hemp dogbane. I want a good sized patch of it. Internet seems to indicate it will grow just about anywhere but provides little in terms of advice on getting it to grow well, so I guess I'll probably pick two or three different places to grow patches, throw down a bunch of seeds, and see what happens next year? I'm assuming I should get rid of whatever is growing in those places first but honestly I got no idea, this will be my first plant I'm throwing down. I figure I'll put some in the nearly full sun front garden, some in the woods off behind the shed, and some in the somewhat shaded area on the edge of the lawn next to the poison ivy patch next on the neighbours property where they can fight each other. They say to fight poison with poison, right? Whichever of the three grows best will guide me on future plantings. Experimentation! Then I gotta figure out how to care for and prune it and stuff since there's the whole "it will do very bad things to your heart including cardiac arrest if you touch it too much in a way it doesn't like" aspect, at least until its ready to harvest (by the end of fall/early winter all the poison is supposedly gone and I can see how much I actually get out of a patch). Supposed to be easy to grow if you get it going, though, so here's hoping this works out.
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Sep 26, 2023 07:02
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What are you planning on using it for? It sounds quite noxious Edit: I meant to post about all these feral tomatoes I’m finding      tuyop fucked around with this message at 13:55 on Sep 26, 2023 |
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Sep 26, 2023 13:36
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It's the best of the best in terms of native North American natural fibers. I mean, arguably milkweed fibers are finer, but they're also like an inch long and I plan on working them manually so that's a no go, I don't hate myself that much, hah. It produces fibers that are 6+ inches long, that don't require any sort of retting or degumming. Huge labour savings compared to the other options. It is also a favorite plant of a lot of local pollinators. In terms of other native fiber species in North America, you mostly have Milkweed (fine fibers, but too short to realistically work by hand) and stinging nettle... which unfortunately is stinging nettle. I plan on growing some milkweed anyway because it also produces really good floss which is useful for a bunch of stuff, but for the baseline fibers I'm going to want the dogbane or something similar. I mostly use the fiber I collect for cordage (necklace cordage for the bone jewelry I make, stuff to tie leather and fur together) but the dogbane is high enough quality I could work it into actual fabric if I wanted to as well, and that is actually something I'd like to try at some point. GlyphGryph fucked around with this message at 14:19 on Sep 26, 2023 |
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Sep 26, 2023 14:13
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Wow that’s extremely cool!
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Sep 26, 2023 17:40
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GlyphGryph, that and you sound awesome.
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Sep 26, 2023 17:59
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Now I just need to overcome my gardening handicap where everything I try to grow intentionally dies a horrible, miserable death or otherwise fails to flourish! (with the exception of carnivorous plants, who thrive in terrible conditions and thus consistently flourish under my watch. Seriously, it's the only thing I've ever been able to keep at a state better than "slowly dying")
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Sep 26, 2023 18:12
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When I see "needs just a little more attention" on the page, I hastily flip it over/click next. My plants are lucky if they get "some attention". You could do worse than get a soil test from (assuming you're in the US) your local county agricultural extension agent. They sell them to you and then you mail them back for an interpretation. You may have soil that some plants hate (clay and sand are frequent culprits) or a weird chemical imbalance.
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Sep 26, 2023 20:51
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16 quarts of tomatoes on the shelves this year. Highly recommend Lahman Pinks. Outproduced my Amish Paste and San Marzanos and the fruit was fantastic for slicing with smooth, meaty flesh but also canned really well. 
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Sep 28, 2023 14:42
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Any of my fellow northern hemisphere types interested in producing and reading year-in-review posts? I'm going to do an effortpost later today or tomorrow about the potato growing method that I'm retiring after 5 years, but I couldn't resist the urge to post something now and bump the thread.
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Oct 7, 2023 19:28
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CommonShore posted:Any of my fellow northern hemisphere types interested in producing and reading year-in-review posts? I'm going to do an effortpost later today or tomorrow about the potato growing method that I'm retiring after 5 years, but I couldn't resist the urge to post something now and bump the thread. Yes 
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Oct 7, 2023 20:46
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Potatoes in mulch: 5 years of learning comes to an end. Preface: I'm a big fanboy of RED Gardens, so I'm just putting that upfront. I'll be borrowing a lot of his vocabulary here, and running my own growing parallel to his multi-year potato grow bag experiments has allowed me to better understand what's happening in my own beds. He's just my favourite gardening youtuber - closest climate to mine that I've found, and a similar attitude toward growing. As a grower I have a decent amount of space to work in on a 2-acre lot in a zone 3 semiarid climate. I have a polytunnel where I grow from like April til... well we're still picking tomatoes and cucumbers even though it has frozen multiple times outside. My goal is some degree of food independence - I store as much as I can, and I'm always proud of myself when my cellar, frozen, canned, or dried veggies keep feeding us into the next spring. So for the last 5 or so years I've been growing potatoes in mulch. At first it was mostly leaf mould and yard waste in cardboard boxes on the ground. The last few years, since i moved to a rural acreage, it has been straw and sawdust enriched with, depending on the year and what I had available, compost, manure, chicken bedding, yard waste, or concentrated fertility products. I'd pile this stuff up in long rows - up to 60 feet long on either side of my hoop house - stuff the seed potatoes in there and.... that's about it. I'd make sure that there was enough mulch to cover everything, but there would basically be no intervention until harvest time. The mulch retained so much water that I'd never even really need to water them - but more on that in a moment here. The plants would put small roots down into the soil beneath and draw from that in the basic no-dig paradigm. It was never the idea to get a optimal yield, but rather to get the best possible yield-to-effort ratio. When I started growing them like this it was just to make use of a weedy corner of my yard. It was pretty successful on that front: it produced perfectly good potatoes which were nice and clean immediately. It's also extremely easy to "rob" the plants to eat from them without fully pulling them up. The problem was that the potatoes were often mostly too small - I learned from the above RED gardens experiment that this indicates a lack of late-season nitrogen. This pushed the yield down quite a bit - to about 2/3 of the returns that I'd hope for. This past year I was trying to compensate for that by adding full-fledged fertilizer, but the gain wasn't much. A big problem too was slugs - out of the various beds I have in different places, some would often get slugged out and ruin many of the tubers. Interestingly, different beds had this problem in different years, which I can't account for - I would have assumed the damper, shadier beds would be worse, but that hasn't been consistently the case. That yield though is why this method of growing is no longer for me. I don't feel like tinkering with it anymore. It was great as a way of helping to establish my garden and growing area; it was a fun way to do something "Extra" on the side of my actual well-planned garden projects, but I want better yields next year, so I'm going to till my mulch into the ground in these areas and do more traditional approaches next year with hilling and hoeing, and being more careful about spacing the plants properly. I am a habitual plant crowder. Now this is why I felt like discussing this: I don't feel as if the experiment was a failure. I've started thinking about growing as a contextual negotiation where space, effort, and cost are proportional to yield. If stuff on one side of the equation goes down, yield goes down unless something else goes up to compensate. In the right context this is a very good way of growing potatoes. Right now my assets are space and time, and my goals are to increase yield. So I can switch my approach, put more time in, abandoning the low-effort framework. But for someone where time is the greatest restriction without massive yield ambitions, perhaps someone who is growing away from their home (on a friend's farm? a community plot?) where actually going to the garden is work in itself, and who is more interested in having some nice home-grown potatoes than in maximizing yield, I would encourage at least thinking about this approach. It would likely need more tweaking: if I ever try this again I'm going to till the ground before setting up to further improve drainage, I'll plan to do even more fertilizing through the year, and I'll probably mix wood ashes into the mulch to help to discourage slugs. So that was the most acute thing I learned/decided this year. I might post some more year-in-review thoughts, but none of them will be this long. I'd love to hear what everyone else learned because that's what gardening is - learn every year until you die.
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Oct 8, 2023 02:15
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So like the Martian but on earth
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Oct 8, 2023 02:21
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Any idea what these black specks are that I randomly get all over my veggies? They vary a bit in size, usually around 1-2 mm. They're also raised up from the surface. They're hard, but scrape off pretty easily leaving no residue and no apparent harm to the veggies. I'm in Pennsylvania if that helps. I mostly see them on my peppers, but this is a butternut squash:  Bug eggs? Bug poop? Some type of fungus?
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Oct 14, 2023 15:15
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It looks like artillery fungus spores to me
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Oct 14, 2023 15:20
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Soul Dentist posted:It looks like artillery fungus spores to me As someone who has these fuckers pockmarked all over my car because of the mulch by my driveway, this is 100% it.
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Oct 15, 2023 02:41
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Thanks, looks like that's it. Apparently it's more of a nuisance and not really harmful in a garden, but I'll look into some of the control measures I'm seeing. Harmless nuisances are still annoying.
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Oct 15, 2023 15:04
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It's really annoying when it gets on stuff that's difficult to wash, like cedar shakes or leafy salad greens. IIrc it mostly comes from commercial mulch, so that might be something to avoid. PS I forgot to post yesterday but it's the ides of October here in 6A and this is my weekly haul:  
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Oct 15, 2023 16:19
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His Divine Shadow posted:The greenhouse was purchased. Been the plan for years that I would design and build a greenhouse (from wood) but it appears I keep finding and doing other projects instead of what my SO wants. So she finally got tired and bought a greenhouse, then demanded I help her build it. The plans that came with were terrible. Looks great
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Oct 15, 2023 16:28
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Is there any way to reliably "save" apples that have already fallen on the ground? I pick apples, then I carve them up with a knife, so I can freeze them by wight and use them for blending or cooking over the winter. I can pick the ones that look nice and cut away any damage portions. But the skin has still been in contact with the ground, which is a risk. Feliday Melody fucked around with this message at 19:27 on Oct 15, 2023 |
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Oct 15, 2023 19:24
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Boil them for a minute? If you're freezing them anyway, it shouldn't be a problem for the end result.
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Oct 16, 2023 04:26
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Feliday Melody posted:Is there any way to reliably "save" apples that have already fallen on the ground? What are you worried about from the ground? Its full of good stuff.
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Oct 16, 2023 05:28
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sexy tiger boobs posted:What are you worried about from the ground? Its full of good stuff. Animals come by and eat apples and then poop on the ground, which has a lot of bacteria. Supposedly, including ones you can't boil away. That's what I read, anyway.
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Oct 16, 2023 05:46
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I think with sufficient heat you can boil anything away
Son of Thunderbeast fucked around with this message at 07:26 on Oct 16, 2023 |
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Oct 16, 2023 07:22
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Feliday Melody posted:Animals come by and eat apples and then poop on the ground, which has a lot of bacteria. Supposedly, including ones you can't boil away. Almost every commercially harvested apple has been shaken off the tree mechanically and fallen to the ground before being picked up by hand or by a machine. The ground is not treated or cleaned in any way before this happens.
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Oct 16, 2023 13:59
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Motronic posted:Almost every commercially harvested apple has been shaken off the tree mechanically and fallen to the ground before being picked up by hand or by a machine. The ground is not treated or cleaned in any way before this happens. They don't sweep the ground for rotten ones before they start shaking? I did look at mine and I decided against it this season. I picked the last ones off the trees. Which after sorting, cleaning and chopping ended up with 6 kilograms of apple wedges which is fine. I had hoped for 9, but I'm happy with this.  
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Oct 16, 2023 14:21
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We talking apple harvests?   That’s the second batch of 25 ish lbs. the world is seriously abundant and good
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Oct 16, 2023 21:20
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After few days of finding peppers eaten and unsure as to the culprit. Caught his rear end red handed. Guess they don't care about the heat or my jalapeño are not that hot. 
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Oct 17, 2023 01:31
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gently caress a hornworm
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Oct 17, 2023 01:32
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Kaiser Schnitzel posted:gently caress a hornworm wish I could feed those + other garden pests to my reptiles. Unfortunately they bioaccumulate pesticides/herbicides/fertilizer/lead/mercury/parasites so I can’t/won’t (and you definitely shouldn’t feed them to your pets either)
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Oct 17, 2023 01:50
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We used to toss them into the chicken run. You really got to see the dinosaur DNA come out when one had a giant worm that the others wanted. Always ended in tug-of-worm because the hornworms were too big for one chicken to eat.
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Oct 17, 2023 02:55
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If I want to plant a three sisters bed in the spring, how important is it to prepare the bed (like clear and mulch with landscape fabric) in the fall vs spring?
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Oct 17, 2023 12:10
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In my experience, it doesn't matter at all. My advice is to use a heat-resistant bean that will last for the weather when your corn is up and ready to be trellisable. The squash will cover anything you bother to mulch anyways.
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Oct 17, 2023 13:52
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Thanks! Fall is packed for us so I’ll take it easy on that
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Oct 17, 2023 16:06
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Late first freeze this year. I grew a poo poo ton of jalapeños and they are still happily growing in a frenzy since the weather cooled off. I guess I’ll be eating a few hundred jalapeño poppers in the coming weeks since I only have one potted plant to move inside and the rest are soon to die. I find the listed scoville range of jalapeños laughable. I have eaten jalapeños that had zero heat whatsoever, definitely below 2,500, and I have had a few jalapeños this year that were literally hotter than any whole mature habanero I have ever eaten. Like throat burning and nose running heat from just jalapeños. Granted I’ve only eaten whole raw habaneros like six times in my life, but even if they were lower end on heat that’s still way outside the ~8000 max SHU you see attributed to jalapeño. Also: man, I love the stuff posted in this thread
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Oct 19, 2023 21:35
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freeedr posted:Late first freeze this year. I grew a poo poo ton of jalapeños and they are still happily growing in a frenzy since the weather cooled off. I guess I’ll be eating a few hundred jalapeño poppers in the coming weeks since I only have one potted plant to move inside and the rest are soon to die. I'm very interested in why that is. Everyone I know who cooks with peppers agrees with you. It's a crapshoot!
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Oct 19, 2023 22:16
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StormDrain posted:I'm very interested in why that is. Everyone I know who cooks with peppers agrees with you. It's a crapshoot! Most jalapeño seeds/plants you can buy are hybrids. OG jalapeños are fairly hot. It’s the grocery store needs that cause the idea that hot is bad. Buy the old seeds and you’ll get a lot more of a consistent heat profile. Real habaneros (not the average grocery store ones) are a lot hotter than people tend to expect too. The peppers I grow are pretty consistent in heat, but I’m selecting seeds for that specific reason.
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Oct 19, 2023 22:27
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Are you controlling pollination as well?
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Oct 19, 2023 22:43
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Missed quite a few bulbs of garlic when harvesting so they started to sprout. I transplanted them into rows so we'll see what happens.
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Oct 19, 2023 22:54
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StormDrain posted:I'm very interested in why that is. Everyone I know who cooks with peppers agrees with you. It's a crapshoot! Italian "long hots" are very much known for this. Seems like 10% of them are burn your sinuses out hot.
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Oct 19, 2023 22:58
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Submarine Sandpaper posted:Are you controlling pollination as well? This only matters if you're collecting seeds and replanting next season. Cross pollination doesn't effect the initial plants
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Oct 19, 2023 23:04
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