Posted on 09/04/2009 4:00:01 AM PDT by Red_Devil 232
Good morning to all of you gardeners. A couple of FReepers have sent me alerts to threads posted on FR that many of you gardeners might find informative or interesting. I have posted links to them below the Gardening Banner. Thanks to Freepers tubebender and Califreak.
Their have been pot growing operations found all over the forests in Colorado. Materials found at the sites are usually printed in Spanish leading the Forest Service to worry these are organized Mexican crime gangs. There are worries about hikers being attacked if they stumble onto these operations.
Thanks,
I’ll give that a shot.
I’m also somewhat handicapped in this area because my wife purchased a bunch of boutique styled spuds. I think some of them are supposed to be blue and the others are fancy, as well.
I assume they’ll taste fine with butter on them.
Too busy to post much. Still need to dig over 200’ of potatoes.
Apples are ripening. Until we bought the place, the trees hadn’t been pruned or fertilized for over 25 years. Working at them a bit each year, they are slowly starting to bear larger and less sour fruit.
The tomatoes are finally ripening...never seen so many on vines.
Squash still producing, and the volunteers are now bearing as well; keeps the Ministerial Assoc food pantry happy.
Beans are nearly done, and most tilled under, including the shell beans. The few Limas that survived the cool summer are going to give us about a decent meal’s worth.
Fall peas are sprouted, even as the die-hard early peas are starting to croak.
Speaking of croaking, we’ve seen several toads in the garden this year. Anything that eats what bugs me is welcome.
Sweet corn is in the freezer, and the stalks tilled in; late corn is in full tassel, with ears silking.
First melons have slipped from the vines, and the pie pupmkins have born beyond all reason, and are really coloring up.
Final planting of beets are about ready to pull.
First eggplants are finally about ready to pick
Peppers are coming along nicely; the paprikas are truning red, though the pimentoes are still green.
The cauliflower was a total washout.
The grasshopper plague ag-disaster declaration has now been extended to three more counties.
At least the wild turkeys are feasting; they just look at me as I work in the garden, say, “oh, just him,” then go back to work exterminating a few rows away. They don’t bother any of the crops, so they are more than welcome.
Hey guys and girls!
Sorry to be awol for so long! We had a couple weeks of miserable heat and all I did was water. Then we got an unexpected, early cool snap—cool for us—and we have been selling fall veggie plants like they were going out of style.
I’ve already sold out of some things, low on others, and sold today what we hadn’t planned to sell til next week. Small, but we’re out of bigger stuff. I’ve been sowing and transplanting like crazy, but that stuff won’t be ready for a month or so. I keep records so I can tell you that we planted significantly more this year and can’t keep up.
Our big week in the fall is usually middle of Sept. All I can hope is that everyone started early this year. If not, I’m in deep doo-doo. :) If I get time, I intend to plant my fall stuff next week—if I have any plants left! LOL
On another note, y’all might find this interesting. A friend called and asked if I’d do something for him. Brain is always screaming NO but mouth always says YES before I even know what “something” is. Anyway, what he wanted me to do was sow some seed for him. Not a problem. Turns out, the seeds are tobacco seeds someone found in KTY/IND, not sure on that part of the story. In a pottery jar, in a cave. They’ve been dated—guess they dated the pottery?—and the seeds are 2000 years old. How cool is that? Even cooler, I sowed a few Sat and they were up Mon. Can’t wait to see what happens. It’s not big leaf tobacco like what we do here, probably more like burley. I’ll keep y’all posted.
Have a great and safe weekend!
Wow you got a farm not a garden! Good to hear things are going well way up north. How big of an area do you plant?
That is quite a heating and hot water system. How big of an interior area do you heat with that syatem? Is the tank split 40-40?
Hi GG,
That is amazing about the tobacco seeds. Fascinating.
As you probably already know, eastern Kentucky/Tennessee/Virginia were the tobacco growing capitals of the U.S. at one time. In fact, the early colonists found a lucrative crop that was so popular in the the “Old World,” and grew so plentiful here, that it, at one time, was very valuable (and helped launch the Revolution, over unfair taxation). I think the American Indians introduced the Europeans to this intoxicating weed. In certain areas here, families still depend on this crop to make it.
In popular literature, people read about the former slaves raising cotton, but most in the eastern seaboard were working tobacco fields.
Now, of course, tobacco is evil and socially unacceptable. I won’t argue the point of whether it should be or not.
Anyway, both my grandpas, and great grandpas, had tobacco allotments and used to make most of their living growing it back in the early 20th century. Mama said the one pair of shoes that were bought for them in the 1920s, ‘30s, were bought when grandpa sold his tobacco on the market.
Save those old heirloom seeds. Who knows, maybe someday they can be sold to researchers, or used in whatever way, to discover the cure for a number of things.
I just think it is fascinating to have those old seeds that someone thought were valuable enough to protect. You never know.
How is your Love in Mist doing? Mine were horrible this year. I started out this spring with so much enthusiasm, then Mom got sick, and I spent most of the summer away from my home. Everything went downhill. But I have hope I will revive all of it.
The house interior is tri-level, about 3,200 sq ft, some rooms with 16 ft vaulted ceilings so it is a lot to heat. The deck is about 1,800 sq ft that partially wraps around three sides of the house. We have two fireplaces, one I put in a pellet (compressed sawdust pellets) stove insert that has forced air heat exchangers in the blower path. In the other fireplace I put in a wood burning stove insert that has dual walls and forced air heat exchange between the two walls.
The new water tank is 80 galllons, single tank with two heat exchanger closed loop coils. The heat in the tank stratifies with the hottest on top where the domestic HW comes off and colder in the bottom where cold water comes in. I have two thermostats in the tank, one in the top and one in the bottom. The tank has about three inches of closed-cell foam insolation moulded around it so it doesn't cool down very fast. I have seen the top at 165F and the bottom at 90F at the same time! I am still playing with settings on the anti-scald valve on the HW output that mixes in cold water to bring the temps down to a safe level. The top heat exchanger coil in the tank is the propane furnace-powered closed loop with about 80/20% water/food grade propolyne glycol mix to provide hot water on cloudy days. The bottom and larger coil is a closed loop to the two 4X8 ft solar panels on the roof facing south. The mix here is 50/50 water/glycol that will go down to -25F before the fluid would turn to gel, but not freeze. I have seen the solar panel fluid temperatures at 185F at the panel output! There are thermostats everywhere and a LCD display to view them. Way too many gadgets. Luckily I did work on rocket design about 25 years ago which helped me working with the installers putting in air purge valves and shut-off valves at all the proper places.
The heat for the house is from hot water baseboard radiators in four zones. We keep unused rooms set colder, at the lowest thermostat setting. The heat for this system comes from a dfferent circulating path and different pumps from the top hot water heater heat exchanger coil, but shares the water/glycol mix that should be good to 20F if the power were to go out (but still with the wood burning stove to provide heat even without the blower). When this baseboard heater path turns on, the propane furnace has an outside thermometer to determine appropriate water heat and on days when the temp is 0 degrees F and above, the furnace modulates the water temp lower to take advantage of higher efficiency on the furnace efficiency curve. I am already trying to figure out how to set up a greenhouse that can benefit from all the excess passive hot water form the solar collectors.
Until last year, it was 75X50; this year, I doubled it. Minus the untilled boundary buffer inside the fence and the part of the new area not planted, it was about 5,500-6,000 square feet planted.
Thanks to tilling in low-temp compost, and digging in kitchen waste over the winter, about 100-120 squash & pumpkin volunteers came up. Some recognizable, others obvious crosses. We left them, so they can be tilled under when they quit bearing.
New for next year are two old bath tubs with 12-14” of a planting mix I put together. They’ll mainly get carrots; our soil is a little too heavy for good ones.
Put a gallon jug of water on each side of the plants under the plastic. Uncover during the day, but leave the jugs in place to absorb heat; they act as thermal mass under the plastic, radiating heat all night.
Raising 1 pint of water 1F = 1BTU; 2 gallons = 16 pints times X-degF temp rise = 16X BTU/ night/plant.
A 20-25F difference between the heated water & night air temp is common; ~1,000BTU of free stored heat/plant, around 300 watts/night/plant --> about 25-30 watts/hour of free tomato heating.
Beats an extension cord & drop lights.
If I need to cover, I dry-connect 1/2" PVC pipe to make a frame, since I always have an abundance of Tees, Ells, 45's and straight connectors sitting in the barn. Push the vertical legs into the ground, top with a 45 & a 'rafter' to a tee & connect the slightly staggered leg sets together with a ridge pipe, then toss on the plastic & seal the edge to the ground with what ever is handy--usually just dirt.
I should have read about your heating system, before posting the Hippie-Dip ‘solution’ to keeping tomatoes warm at night.
Hey!
I am so tickled about the seeds I can’t stand it, and thrilled to be a part of growing them! LOL
Your gpa’s might have had tobacco allotments, but mine were into more...liquid assets-LOL- and mining and general farming.
Tobacco is about as harmful as liquor—all depends on how you use it. Or abuse it. There is no more tobacco in our county here. A sad thing, because most of the farmers made their money that way. Kids today have no idea about working in a tobacco field. Back breaking. They’d never make it, even if labor laws would allow the farmers to use kids. That’s how we made our spending money, and were glad to do it.
Labor laws cause way more problems than they solve, but that’s another story. Sigh.
How’s your mom doing? Great, I hope. LIAM’s fared rough but I got a few big enough to save seed from. I’ll try again next year, or maybe I’ll bury them in a jar and hope someone finds them a couple thousand years from now!
I have been working with the installers with the new furnace and solar panels for the last 10 days. No real time for thinking about gardening, but seeing the solar panels heat up the water tank until hitting the shut-off temperature early in the afernoon got me thinking that I could switch the system over to heat other things too. The water-filled jugs sound like a good idea until I figure out what I am doing with excess solar hot water.
Missed you guys! Between the unrelenting heat and work... LOL I’m exhausted when I get home.
I’m so glad your fig is doing well! Your fig will change color when ripe, to a nice purplish bronze. Keep an eye on the mockingbirds—they are geniuses at getting the fig seconds before you do! The ones here have been ripening for about 3 weeks. The mockingbirds are finally getting their fill and we are starting to get a few.
Meant to tell you...terminal short term memory loss!... watch your drip tubes for rabbits. I have no idea why they love a drip tube, but we lose 5-25 every night because the wabbbits chew them in two.
We have 500 mums out on drip irrigation. I’d turn all the wabbits into hossenfeffer if I thought I could get away with it. We’re right in the middle of town and can only trap them.
I KNEW there was a reason not to buy one of those!
IF we ever get around to either re-remodeing this kitchen, or building the new house, the 6 burner, 2 oven, griddle, etc etc Wolfe we bought for the last house-—then didn't use in it because we decided to sell it-—will go into the kitchen.
Right now, just because of the location, we have a standard propane range, that does not require—no, not even an oven light! —any electricity to operate. I got stung ONCE by having the power go out while baking, and discovered that that stove, though gas, HAD to have power connected or the oven burner would not light. Pilot, yes; main burner, no. Had to do with the oven timer, and was a rotten way to design it.
In addition, we also kept the original Great Majestic wood/coal dual fuel range in the kitchen, for winter use to slow-simmer stews, beans, etc; for primary heat; and for the humidifying water kettle.
Of course, I learned a great lesson the winter I was in fifth grade. We had both propane and electric; our land lord had a certified All Electric house. We got a freak storm that dumped 18” of wet, gloppy snow that closed the roads & cut power for over a week. We kept warm, and cooked, and were able to melt plenty of snow for water; and pulled out extra blankets. They had to use a charcoal BBQ grill to cook on their covered patio, and sleep bundled up because they only had an electric blanket.
Actually, it taught me TWO lessons, the second being that it is much better to learn from somebody else's mistake, than your own.
Among other stuff in the barns or garage or basement, there's also four or five wood stoves, the white gas Coleman 2 burner; and the white gas/unleaded gas dual fuel Coleman 2 burner; and the single burner propane "crab cooker"/"turkey frier", plus the 12V cooker & coffee pot.
City folk park in their driveways because the garage is stuffed. Farmers & ranchers park their trucks AND tractors outside becasue not only is the garage stuffed, but so are the barns!
WoW!!! I envy you and I dare not tell FW about your treasures. It irritates me to no end that I have to share MY garage with HER 95 Riviera. We have a kitchen slightly smaller than a fishing boat Galley. We do have a electric Dacor Convection Oven as my First Wife bakes 40 to 60 dozen cookies a week and she bakes on three heavy gage cookie sheets that hold two dozen good sized cookies each. The oven will do twelve dozen (144) cookies at a time but at this point in her life she only has two arms and two hands. she has a permeant callus in the palm of her right hand from the scoop spoon...
Are you sure you're not my husband posting under another name? LOL!
I'd cook over an open fire every day before I'd have one of those glass-top ranges. I haven't met anyone that's happy with theirs and didn't send it back.
I'm saving up for a Wolf Range.
Foodie Porn:
$5,800.00!!
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