Merry Christmas to all our
gardening FRiends!
And a Happy New Year!
Posted on 11/30/2024 6:46:42 AM PST by Diana in Wisconsin
The MONTHLY Gardening Thread is a gathering of folks that love soil, seeds and plants of all kinds. From complete newbies that are looking to start that first potted plant, to gardeners with some acreage, to Master Gardener level and beyond, we would love to hear from you.
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I have just loved reading all your holiday reports. Thank you all for sharing. It was just the two of us, we had a very nice meal and enjoyed nice music. Church was beautiful. We haven’t had a tree for years and this year I had some mixed evergreens in a dry vase on the table with some red ribbon and jingle bells. All our Christmas cards were around it.
Now it’s time for the amaryllis to be on the table. Two on there now, one opening today and another in a few days. Rest of them assorted varieties (7 more) are lined up on the tile floor in front of the glass slider. I’ll rotate them up on the table and it will be a nice parade. Last years was great. They all open at different times. Only thing in the garden that’s green is the garlic and the ground cover in the garden, natural chickweed. A beautiful green carpet. We have had a few good snows inches worth each time but it is melted now and raining today. (west Michigan). We are certainly already looking forward to spring. Wishing you all a very Happy New Year. We both have birthdays, mine was last Sunday and hubbys is tomorrow. On mine I got a trip to the Meijer Gardens in Grand Rapids, they go all out for Christmas. Besides the various trees decorated to honor the different countries, their victorian garden rooms are decorated with miniature building all made from plants plus an elevated train set. The landscaping around these buildings are phenomenally done. This year someone actually posted a youtube so I am adding a link. After our visit we had a great mexican take our dinner with tres leches cake to go. Again Happy New Year!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3jQ2C_YcEU&t=1s
The lady is a little on goofy side but she is not on there much and I appreciate she posted this.
We made come killer bluberry preserves from berries from a large local farm that has 80 varieties of blueberries and we got two 10 pound frozen boxes and made two batches of preserves. The flavor is incredible and they did not need much sugar. I have been making turnovers with some of them, so easy (and I look for easy these days). One sheet of puff pastry dough. Let it just barely thaw so you can open the sheet, cut into 4 squares. Put a teaspoon of preserves (silverware teaspoon) and fold and get in the oven right away. 400 degrees for about 15 minutes just watch them. Oven must already be hot and you have to pop them in as soon as you can fold them. They will rise beautifully. I top with a simple glaze of powdered sugar and evaporated milk. Your scones do sound delicious maybe some day when I have more time I can try them.
Mouth watering blueberry recipe you have there.
It’s all in these berries, depth of blueberry flavor we have never had before. I also trade off and make apple turnovers with homemade apple preserves . And is I have any soft goat cheese I’ll make blueberry/cheese.
yum........
And a Happy New Year!
Your post made me think of my FaceTime call today with my younger sister in Florida. She has a vegetable garden already growing, and some hanging baskets in a covered tent that’s sort of like an open (on one side) greenhouse. So jealous.
Seasons. Can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em. I need to move someplace to retire. Simply cannot decide what kind of weather to select, because every climate has pluses and minuses. So don't stay jealous long! :-)
We have decided that we are staying put for retirement, but when I yearn for Spring by March 21st, I can go vacation there.
The last full week of 2024 was mild and damp here in Central Missouri. Temps are forecast to gradually drop this week leaving us all hog-tied in the freezer by this time next week.
Had a houseful of kids and grandkids over the weekend. It was warm enough outside that the grands were able to enjoy the new swingset and go on a few golf cart rides. Ham, turkey, and all the fixin’s on Saturday. We had a great time and were once again reminded why Young People have kids - Old Folks can’t keep up with em!
Tomorrow marks 33 years of wedded bliss for Mrs. Augie and myself. We don’t get too wild on New Years Eve like we used to back in the day. Now it’s go downtown, have a nice meal with friends, have a drink or two, then back home by 10:00pm before Amateur’s Night Out starts getting serious.
I’m on furlough from the salt mine tomorrow and Wednesday. My goal is to get the last cattle panel up on the new hoop house and get the ends framed in over the next two days.
If I can make that happen Nephew and I should be able to get the plastic film installed by the end of the weekend. That would be a big win to start the new year off right.
Happy new year to everyone! It got up to 4 below zero this morning so I got the smoker going and put in a run of bacon. Still in the -20’s in the bottoms.
“That would be a big win to start the new year off right.”
I hope the weather cooperates for you - no big winds!
I’m excited for the January Garden Thread - some fun ideas coming up. :)
Not sure if he's serious and doing it for class credits or he's a Nigerian Prince.
Regardless, others chimed in and I had looked at farm planning systems and spreadsheets before and you know me and tech and being a DIY guy.
Yeah, I'm making my own website app.
I wouldn't have bothered but I'm planting fruit and nuts trees over the next few years, something I should have done 10 years time ago. Some of them will hopefully outlive me.
I'll need something better than my notekeeping PC program that's kinda rambling thoughts(who'da thunk it?) jotted down when I happen to have it in front of me.
I need self set rules to prevent ramblings; or at least help.
Here's a little example, the best so far. I left out the Notes part because this is testing content and there are no real notes and I'm not writing a paragraph about an imaginary tree.
Anyway, This is an Orchard Note that links to my First Chestnut Tree planting event(doesn't exist yet). Clicking on the Tree Planting Event brings me to it, but I still need to link back from Tree ID 1494 Planting to ALL Orchard Notes for any given tree.
I've done a lot more than this based on my wants, plus other people that make a living on Market Gardening. It's turning into quite something.
I can go to an existing Tatsoi Planting and take a pic of a bug, insect or plant condition with the phone, upload it and later see it bigger on the PC back at the house, click a button that puts the image url in the clipboard, paste it here and ask; "What is this?"
More. I now have more top level menu items and the native wordpress menu.
I'll make a long post here in the next day or two. Might be an update or two on next month's thread but I'll try to keep it brief. No promises:)
How's the job search going?
Look! I posted something to you that wasn't sparkly or seizure-inducing. ;)
Eating from the Garden/Our Own Hands/Homemade
Brunch this morning is:
One-Eyed Connley’s (Toad in the Hole) made from Mom’s homemade Red Onion Pecan Bread (Christmas Gift) and Eggs from our own chickens
Hash made from a leftover pork chop which was raised by the neighbor along with his gifted potatoes and other veggie odds and ends I had on hand (Sweet Potato, Mushrooms, home-grown frozen Peppers)
Homegrown/Canned Grape Juice
Yogurt from the Dairy Farmer neighbors. They have their own line of Greek Yogurt and various Cheeses made from their cows that we graze for them Spring through Fall. In the winter they eat the food crops that are grown on our land. They also gave us a block of Colby cheese, made from their milk. :)
Can’t get much ‘closer to home’ with the ingredients in this brunch! :)
My Farm App made by creating Custom Post Types to go beyond regular wordpress posts. Instead of just a title and post content, Custom Fields can be added.
I had everything in the admin menu but it was getting cluttered so I put links to things that don't change often on a settings page. Land, Structures etc. Field Notes, Orchard Notes, Plantings, Harvests etc stayed in the admin menu.
Here's what adding a Harvest looks like
Taking seeds out of Inventory. I added a calculator.
Editing an existing Planting event. Zoomed out but still couldn't get it on one shot.
Here's what it looks like published. Settings: X-24 Roller should be on one line but I'll fix that later. The X-24 comes from the Equipment Settings Custom Post Type. I added a Jang Seeder as Equipment and then added Equipment Settings and those can be selected when creating a Planting event. Someone on No Till Growers mentioned his biggest problem was getting out there to direct seed a row of veggies and not knowing what roller or settings to use. Someday maybe I'll get a seeder and this feature will come in handy.
Here's the Equipment Settings page. Choose the Jang, choose some crops, add settings.
Field Notes - gotta have those and being able to take them in the field is better than trying to remember things:) I can take pics with the phone and upload them right into this. I tested it but most images are whatever I had handy.
Published. Tried to make as many things as possible be drop down selections because I hate typing on a phone. Also keeps things normalized so it doesn't end up being Jang on time and Seeder the next and some cuss word the next time when it's not working well.
I can certainly understand why that guy needs something to look up rollers for the Jang because dayum.
In reality, most people probably have the roller starter pack. The Jang JP-1 plus starter pack is over $600 so like most people, I'll be getting the $169 Earthway first.
It's been a fun project and I don't think I can go much further. Time to clean up what I've got. Little things like the above field on seeder settings being named Plant Family when you actually pick Plant Varieties. I had to rename a couple of fields before even taking the screenshot because they were named Field 1, Field 2 etc.
Got some more linking together of things like I did with Orchard Notes and Tree Planting event.
I haven't figured out how to choose a single tree and list all orchard notes for it yet. At least not for free. There is a plugin that would make it so Tree ID 1494 could be made clickable for $80/yr for a single site. You can spend $80 and never update it and never have to spend another $80 but that won't last forever because someday, server software will get an update and the plugin will break. They do have a lifetime license for $469 for unlimited sites.
Picture show's over, time for ramblings,
That's actually a wordpress post_id from when I created the Tree Planting for My First Chestnut Tree. In wordpress, everything is a post and gets assigned an auto-incrementing number. They add up quick which is why it's Tree 1494 and Orchard Note 5005. When I started out, I was going to make up my own Tree ID numbers but that would become a mess and allow duplicates. I have no way to add a custom auto-increment number field so I'm using the safe way. Post/Tree ID can never be changed, only deleted(like when a tree dies). I would probably just leave it though and find a way to mark it dead. If I deleted a tree, I'd have a bunch of orphaned orchard notes for that tree.
Speaking of spreadsheets. There's a group of gardeners that are really into them and get crazy detailed. There are people selling pre-made spreadsheets and a guy that started with tutorials on youtube and got so many followers he now has Garden Spreadsheet Courses he sells.
I haven't tried to delve into garden planning with this app thing. That guy that wants to be able to look up seeder info in the field also wanted to choose a bed, mark how many grams of seed he used -- easy/done -- and have it send him reminders. There are plenty of calendar apps for the phone. I couldn't find any decent calendar plugins for wordpress and it wouldn't tie into this little app thing anyway. There are some automation plugins so I might try that. They work similar to that IFTTT.com If This Then That. If this happens, do that.
Anyway, I'm going to look over existing farm apps and a few spreadsheets to see if there's anything obvious I missed or just something I'd like to add. I started out looking at FarmOS which is free open source. It runs on Drupal which is kind of like wordpress but I never liked it. It's too bad they didn't use wordpress because I would have been good to go. FarmOS also doesn't give you any public facing pages, at least not in the demo. I can definitely tell they're developers first and gardeners(maybe) second. It's also trying to be everything for everyone which never works. There's a big google map on every single page because they designed it for market gardeners and "up to Enterprise Farming" level that might have several farms in different regions.
I started doing that and then looked out the window at the yard and I can see every bit of flatland worthy of growing, so I don't need a map. I can make html tables to represent bed blocks with rows of beds and type right in them. OK one more pic. I uploaded a csv from my temp/humidity sensor that I had outside in the shade and made a chart from it.
Hourly log entries started at 10pm, Mar 12 and ending at 7pm, Mar 19. Lowest temp was 54 and highest 86. Yeah 86 in March. I think I put the shade cloth up right about then. I have it done as a sortable table too which is how I know the high and low. The chart looks way cooler though.
I think I posted here about growing garlic from store bought. Just noticed this morning that the garlic I bought back then has one clove with a little green tip growing out of it.
Not sure if I should stick them in the ground or in a 18 cell seed tray and keep them in the cool/cold, bright room. I quick search and reading of a Spruce article makes me think the latter for softneck. It's been a mild winter so far but that doesn't mean it won't drop to -10 in a month. I've run the wood stove on just a few days so far.
Oh yeah, I forgot something on the big post. On the My Farm settings page where you can put in the farm name and address, it has this [Farm Info shortcode] that can be reused anywhere on the front of the site.
Here it is in the footer or could also be used in a sidebar or put on a Contact Us page. Footer plus Contact page would be typical. It can be used to automatically inject the info into emails sent by the site as well.
There's a lot of content shortcodes that can be used in lots of places. That's how I added a calculator to a wordpress admin page. I've got three calculators I made. I'll have to put them on a public accessible site and put a link to them on my profile page.
This one's real handy. It deducts 1 from the bed length for that half space on each end. Johnny's has the same thing but why visit another website when I can have it on my farm app site? I tested mine with theirs to be sure I had my math right.
I like this Calculated Fields Forms plugin. No submit button required. It calculates on the fly. It even has trig and calculus which is way over my head. Also logical, financial, distance and more. Dude must be a supergenius.
Magic Tags are the things in curly braces that pull in data from the Custom Fields for a given post.
I have since changed field_note_pics) and (note_to_self) to just (pics) and (notes) and did the same for all custom post types. That way I can style them by targeting just two things with css. A class in css is (.class) or (.notes). If I decide I want to target just one of them, I can add an ID which is (#id). In that case, I'd swap back to field_note_pics and do (#field_note_pics) to target that single thing. A Class can be used for many but ID should only be used one time.
Got this tedious, boring stuff done. Now it'd on to linking more things together because like typing on a phone, I don't want to have to go back to some main menu with two levels which means at least 3 taps on the screen. I want to have a link on every page to a related page or one level up, whichever is best.
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