Posted on 07/07/2017 7:40:57 PM PDT by greeneyes
Every time I am in the garden especially watering by hand I feel very close to my Dad. He could grow just about anything in his small garden in south Chicago. Used lots of carp and fish entrails for fertilizer.
Im sure thats it...and it only makes all the fungal disease here worse...2 day’s without rain so far!! These are raised beds...with lots of compost matter and sand in them..
The potatoes are doing well and are flowering now so I an taking care to water well. Lots of other critters beside chipmunks that could eat the garden. Had a bull moose in the yard a few days ago.
Question: Do you make your own soil (composting)?
Well just got back in from transplanting a tomato plant and two of his buddies (whatever they are - guess I’ll find out).
Don’t know if he was from package seeds or fresh seeds. He’s got his little yellow bells so he’s gonna start popping tomatoes before too long.
Was afraid I might be wasting my time with the Bush Early Girl - she still has about 7 tomatoes growing and surprise, 6 new starts in the yellow bells. Looks like she’s ready for 8-10 more there. So she’s still going.
Harvested a Marconi pepper because he had a spot. Already carved him up and replanted the seeds. Along with some seeds from a store bought tomato from Sprout’s.
DID plant another package of radish seeds. Hope to find more of the 20 cent packages at some outlying WalMarts. The radishes grow strong and quick. Got several plants up. Haven’t checked how big their radishes are yet.
California Green Pepper plant is back in business. Took about 5 hours but he looks strong and healthy again. It will be another story by noon tomorrow. Gonna pull him out of that heavy clay but keep the roots and clay intact. He’s already got at least 6 peppers going. Some may be ready in just a couple of weeks. They’re not quite golf-ball sized yet.
Yes I am happiest gardening. We have built up our soil with goat manure and composted vegetable scraps. We have the big black square bin, and start it up new after getting last year’s on the garden. We use a bale of straw, leaves, vegetable scraps and garden scraps and weeds before they go to seed. That gets some soil into the mix too. Every now and then we use a pitchfork and turn it over, add water if it looks too dry. Besides what we grow we buy and can so we have a good amount of veg waste.
They’re much more prolific in wet seasons, and you need tall grass or weeds. ;)
I lost my wonderful Grandma, Anita, when I was 26. She pretty much raised me from a pup, as Mom worked full time and Dad was earning little-to-nothing while going through his various apprenticeships, which set us all up for The Good Life in the future!
I miss her EVER day - there is something every day that I see or do that reminds me of her. She and I spent MANY happy hours in the garden growing veggies, cooking & canning together and baking her ‘World Famous’ everyday loaf of bread. A trip to the Farmer’s Market each week to supplement what we didn’t grow and to sometimes buy a live chicken for supper, was always magical. ;)
She was one of those people who would give you the shirt off their back or the last dollar in their pocket. She came from little herself, but she was generous beyond belief.
G-d worked through her, that’s for sure!
Anita? It’s been Thirty-One YEARS and we all still love you so very, very much. You will never ‘leave’ us.
(Thanks for letting me prattle on. I’ve been so LUCKY to have someone show me how to do the ‘basics’ in gardening and throwing together a meal from pretty much roadkill and some boiled potatoes, LOL!)
In all fairness, my Grandmother Edith (NEVER, ‘Grandma,’ LOL!) Dad’s Mother, was the ‘Artsy’ one, so she taught me how to grow & arrange flowers and to paint in oil and watercolor. We’d have AMAZING ‘Afternoon Tea’ dates at fancy restaurants, and as soon as she could get me out of my gardening clothes and into something FRILLY, the better! She took me to movies and live theater. I had the best of both worlds growing up, for sure!
The pond died in 2011. I hired dirt guy to cut the dam that fall, with plans to have him back the next summer to clean it out and re-core the dam.
Then I bought Nanner in the spring of 2012 and got the idea to clean out the pond myself and get back what I paid for Nanner by not paying dirt guy the $11k he estimated that it would take to clean out the pond and re-core the dam.
So... I’ve been working on the pond since early summer of 2012, and by doing that have recouped the cost of Nanner and more. I’ve traded some of my valuable free time doing the work for keeping a whole lot of Benjamins in my wallet.
Was a good trade.
Now I just need a little bit of dry weather so I can finish digging the basin to the depth that I want and get the fishing/swimming dock built. When that’s done a buddy of mine is going to bring his track loader and re-core the dam for fuel, beer, and BBQ.
Sounds like you had done your home work before starting to build. I have similar but smaller shed down in the old orchard but that location is a little inconvenient as I age.
Can we come live with you. It would save me much gardening distress. The Jap Beetle fight is in its 10th day here in Missouri. My peach and apple crops are most at risk. The traps with the attractant are catching several thousand a day. I have also been forced to spray Sevin.
There is an air tractor spraying a field on the SE side of our farm. I never cease to be amazed at the skill of these pilots. There is a tree line next to the field he must contend with at every pass. Amazing, absolutely amazing.
https://twitter.com/FluffSociety/status/884864911385538561
Saw that video and thought of you. (it’s a raccoon in a swimming pool)
About all I can say about jap beetles is mine and 2 friends experience. Both live a few miles away. Both put out traps and more traps and just got more beetles in their yards and the neighbors less. They were both filling up 10 gallon buckets with dead beetles. I mentioned to each of them that maybe the traps were making things worse. Sure enough they quit and now never use them. In our yard we only get a handful or so on one rose bush - a rosa rugosa. For some reason they really like the flowers. They don’t bother anything else. It’s not a problem because I don’t cut the flowers for the house and we have a birdbath to attract the many bug eating birds we have in our woods. They do a great job eating what beetles we have plus anything else crawling around in the vegetable garden. The birdbath is rigged with a freshwater dripper too, insect eating birds are really attracted to it.
We had made the decision we were going to remove them tonight not an hour ago in a conversation with my wife. You must be proficient at mental telepathy. Thank you.
I love this thread! Plus no politics .
I’ve pulled my garlic and I too had to dig out some of the cloves when they broke off the stalk....next time I won’t plant them as deep...
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