Posted on 04/01/2024 6:23:19 AM PDT by Diana in Wisconsin
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Thanks for that link! There’s one nest box that I allow the HOSP to use, but I keep removing nests as they start to build them. So far this year there are no eggs, maybe because they have to rebuild? They seem to not bother the bluebirds so much anymore either.
6-packs of plants (veggies) have really gone up in price, it seems, except for Menards, who still has them @ $2.99 / pack less the 11% rebate (and often there are 2 plants in a section, that can be carefully separated). However, so far Menards’ selection here (mid-South) has been lousy: Not bad on tomatoes, a few lettuce and cabbage, some herbs, not much of anything else. I have yet to see a 6-pack of pepper plants. Luckily I have a few starts of sweet peppers from seed packs, and some of the seeds I saved from last year’s Thai Hots have sprouted and are doing well. One of the overwintered Thais looks pretty sad but is holding its own, the other is even starting to take off a bit. So, wifey will be happy.
I have to run to town tomorrow, so I’ll give Menards another shot...
Is anyone else selling 6-packs for $2.99?
Here's a pic ... part closest to the camera is the part that has not been done (good samaritan weed eater guy ran out of gas). The bank does not look that steep in the picture - very deceiving. Near the bottom in some places, it drops off almost straight down.
Sparrow Spooker Designs & Instructions
https://www.sialis.org/sparrowspooker/
We’ve had a stray cat show up. He’s very scrawny, but quickly became friendly. Looks a lot like our adopted Tom, but skinny. The shelters are full, as they ALWAYS are, no help there. I really don’t want a 3rd cat, 2 are one too many, but I don’t have the heart to put such a friendly guy down. Talk about starved, he was even eating small garden worms after a rain several days ago. Raw bluegill, ditto. He likes slightly salty scrambled eggs - we have plenty of extra eggs. (I’m now also using older raw eggs for fertilizer when planting, too. Make the hole slightly deeper > drop in the egg > drop a little potting or garden soil > drop in the plant > fill more soil around plant > stick in a plant label > water in.)
Anyway, we are trying to see if any of my daughter’s friends will take the new cat. He really does have a good disposition, except for climbing on things if let inside. Might offer to split the cost getting him checked out and fixed. BUT, if he’s a good mouser, I might let him stay. He’s so skinny, I have my doubts.* If he has serious medical issues, unless someone would assume the costs of care, I’ll HAVE to put him down.
*Our tabby is a better “mole’er” than a mouser, and occasionally kills a squirrel. Killing squirrels is ok by me, but then the cat is too lazy / full to go after mice efficiently! Our Tom is a lazy bum. Just super friendly.
BTW, the squirrels we do have have been chopping branch ends / leaflets out of our hickory trees, again. They seem to do this only to the hickories and not the oaks - not sure why? They don’t come down to feed on them even when the cats are not around. Might be making nests but dropping every other cutting? I’ve read some Foresters think they are literally bored.
good stuff! Thanks!
I was able to get all of the mowing done Saturday while Mrs. Augie, three of our kids, two DiL, and five of the grands went to the zoo in St. Louis. After that was done I ran the tiller over the patch in the back where I used to plant the sunflower field, seeded it with Kentucky bluegrass, timothy, and fescue, then dragged it in with a cattle panel behind Mrs. Augie's golf cart. After THAT was done I spent a couple hours moving dirt from the giant heap into the new garden space. It will be a few days before it's dry enough to get over it with the tractor and tiller, but it needed some rain to help the loose dirt begin to settle.
I have three Dunstan Chestnut trees that still need to be planted. All of the spots in the grove along our driveway have been filled. I planted three others in the front yard where the kitchen garden used to be. I'm thinking I'll put the last three in the field that I sowed to grass on Saturday.
The yukon gold spuds that I buried at the edge of my compost heap have sprouted and are looking healthy. If they make a good crop I'll try it the same way next spring. Anything I can come up with that reduces my maintenance time in the garden is likely to happen at this stage of the game.
We have an old tomcat that was born in the pile of construction waste that was left over from when we built our house in 2007. In March of 2008 we were sorting through the scrap heap, burning the small scraps and sorting out the lumber that was still useful for something.
I saw something fuzzy down in the pile and figured that it was a bunny rabbit nest. Nope. It was a litter of ~2 week old kittens. There were three charcoal gray and one yellow tabby. The yellow tabby went home with one of my 4H ham curing project kids. Two of the gray ones met with untimely ends. Steve went through the serpentine belt on my '99 Dodge pickup and Shanaynay got dog-chomped, but old Snoopy is still kicking.
Anyway, Snoopy absolutely loves raw fish. He will eat fish scraps until he can't choke any more down and if I don't keep them coming at a rate that suits him I'm liable to wind up with a bloody leg because he will literally use me for a climbing tree to get onto the butchering table.
It's quite a nuisance, actually, but he's been here almost as long as we have so I let him get away with pretty much whatever he wants to do.
Here’s our sloped area.
Like you said in your post, the angle is deceiving, but it’s maybe only 10’ x 12’. The two bluebird houses are about 8 feet apart. I purposefully put them that close so that if the sparrows tried to take over a house, they could retreat to another one. It has worked out ok. We only have about 1-2/3 acres, most of it is wooded. There’s a small creek about 50 yards from the end of the lawn, but we can’t see it from the house once the trees leaf out.
Here’s another view of our property, looking back up to the house from the same point I took the other photo. Friends who visit say it feels like we’re in a tree house because we are so high up. The tallest trees are higher than our upstairs, but we are near the middle of the height of the trees for most of them. These are the steps that lead to the backyard and the woods. Sorry, I do not know how to adjust the size of the photos.
You’re going to have the perfect set-up for growing for profit! I enjoyed my days working with my In-Laws when we sold to restaurants and did a Farmers Market on Saturdays and sometimes Wednesdays if we had extra produce to unload. My ‘Honor System’ Farm Stand at my other farm was a success as well. Never was ripped off.
I doubt I would do the farmer's market. They're pretty lame out here and I'm not a people person. Plus I'm not from MO originally and the locals can tell. I could go 100 miles and find a decent market but booths/spots are pricey.
I know there's some good restaurants that I'm sure would be interested in fresh veggies of more flavorful varieties than what they can get.
I’m glad we’re living in a time when locally grown and fresh is a Big Deal. I’ve read that Herbs (of all kinds) get you the most dollar for your efforts, with salad greens and tomatoes right up there, too.
They do sell fresh herbs at the grocery stores here but I don't know how much they sell. They must sell more than fresh green beans because they don't bother selling those as of last year.
It wasn’t unusual for us to make $3K on a Saturday selling Raspberries. Of course, that was five, 8-hour days of MIL and I picking, but it was good, honest work and we got a lot of the world’s problems solved while we picked in long rows, face to face all day. :)
We have acidic soil with wild blueberries and blackberries going everywhere so I really need to get into that. Me and the kids went for a drive and picked a bunch of wild blackberries and I made jam. Lot of work but it was good. Tunnel strawberries are a thing.
Picked up 10 two year old elderberry seedlings from the State Nursery a couple of weeks ago. Gave 4 to my buddy and put 5 in 3 gallon pots because that's how many I had. Ignored the lamest looking one. I need to fence out the ruminants, goat and deer from the garden area. Then I can work on fencing the goats in the perimeter again. Buying trees makes the garden area get big quick.
Beer can shown for size reference
I haven't seen a whole lot more gardening going on around here yet like I did in 2021 but most people here tend to start in May when the soil's not waterlogged because everyone likes to till hard every year. Like our silty loam isn't fine enough, let's beat it to death, kill a bunch of microbes and make a hard pan 6 inches down. In a couple of months, we'll give it a good dose of white powders and kill some more soil life.
I took to the tunnel area with the grader blade and dug around it so that rain will drain away instead of running through it. The soil was darker than the usual(yellowish brown instead of brownish yellow) because I fed hay to the goats there for two Winters in a row. Not this past Winter but the two before that. Hay itself is a good feeder of soil. I used it as mulch the first year of the front yard garden. Mix in plenty of goat urine and manure and it really does well.
I know my uprights will eventually rust near the ground so I already have a plan in my head on how to convert it to moveable.
Now the gears are turning thinking about some sort of rotation with movable tunnels and animals combined. Maybe a fodder cover crop. With the right plan, one could feed animals while feeding the soil via animals while making material for compost. Make the rotation 3+ years and it would qualify for Organic Certification without having to monitor the compost temperature or being concerned about raw manure being deposited directly onto the soil within a certain time of growing food plants. And of course the animals themselves are food. Oh my. I need mo land and mo tunnels and mo money.
Yeah, I'm a dreamer but we wouldn't have all these modern amenities without all us dreamers.
This new cat stopped eating the raw bluegill once he realized he could get better stuff out of us.
I’ve never seen a housecat, including quite a few strays that have shown up here, act so desperate for food in the 1st couple days. Not in his “begging” but in how he goes after the food and gulps it down once placed before him. The rest of his behavior is so sweet, the contrast is jarring. :-(
So, now, even if not fed for a while, he disdains the raw bluegill, but put a piece of scrambled egg in front of him and you’d think he had not eaten for days.
(We had a very cute stray kitten show up by getting in the belt of our minivan. I thought it was a goner, but it survived - with slightly messed up rear leg. My wife called him “Pingkao”, which in her native language apparently means “broken leg”. Another real sweetie but determined to be 99% an outside cat and thought it owned the road by our house — eventually got run over by someone.)
I moved two small (~ 1-1/2 ft. tall) buckeye trees yesterday B4 our series of light rains got here. Stuck a couple raw eggs in those holes too! Two hummingbirds are like usual visiting our bigger buckeyes that are flowering like crazy. Need to make up “nectar” and get the feeder filled to try to get the hummingbirds to stick around long enough for some of the summer flowers to get going. :-)
Guess I'll drive the truck today so I can go to Menard's and pick up 4 more pieces of top rail. Then I'll have everything to do the truss angle braces. I'll definitely be sending in my Menard's rebate stuff.
Not a whole lot to choose from, yet. I bought a Purple Basil (forgot to start those, but I use them as a filler in pots) and a SINGLE Jalapeno plant (last year just ONE gave me so many peppers) and a few filler flowers. And a flat-leaf Parsley plant.
About 10 tomatoes to choose from, and hardly any peppers yet - no Shishito here, either! Their display of trees and shrubs in the parking lot looks very tempting. :)
That’s another free-bee from Mother Nature! We have plenty of that ‘weed’ here, too.
Read a cute short piece the other day. A woman was asked by her neighbor if she would take Rhubarb off his hands - he had SO MUCH! She said yes, and he delivered bag after bag after bag...of BURDOCK! LOL!
That looks like part of the circle in our house yard that I mow. I would do the flatter part back and forth across, then the slope up and down. It was nerve-wracking for me first few times I did it, but now I can handle it with ease - on a Zero-Turn with NO roll bar. ;)
Beau filled up the tank for me, and today looks like the only dry day this week, so I’ll be mowing my ‘hay field’ again, today. He’s off to the cabin hauling bear bait for the upcoming season, so something will go wrong with the mower; you can bet on it! :)
“Anything I can come up with that reduces my maintenance time in the garden is likely to happen at this stage of the game.”
Great idea on the spuds!
And, Amen to THAT! I hate weeding. More straw, please! :)
Ping to Post 472 for a Shishito Fix, LOL!
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