Posted on 03/19/2022 7:58:55 AM PDT by Diana in Wisconsin
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One of these days, I’m going to go daffodil digging somewhere around here. It’s the first color of the year and I want some for my property. They line the sides of the roads but I don’t want to dig them up on someone’s land so I’ll find some on a power line or something. Just need a few to get started. I’ve got the orange lilies, white and blue/purple irises and some surprise lilies that way. The surprise lilies actually just popped up out of the orange ones a few years after planting those. I separated them out a couple of years ago when thinning the orange ones.
Evidently, I found a spot for the lilies that they really like because mine get 5 foot tall. Gave some to a neighbor up the road and when I dropped them off, they were in bloom and 5 foot tall. I dropped them off in big clumps 1x2 foot with plenty of dirt attached and set them off on the ground. They kept on blooming. The next year after he had planted them, they grew to 2-3 foot tall for him. He tends to mow them after the flowers are gone which might have something to do with it.
Gleeaikin; Local zoning laws; My neighbors had chickens, but the city came in and ticketed them. The only chickens here are the ceramic ones the Mrs. keeps on the top shelf in the kitchen!
Out to plant stuff before the rains!
Got the chicken locked in the coop later that day. She’s laying an egg every day and will probably start setting on them soon and I’ll start sneaking some fertilized eggs in there. With any luck, she’ll hatch them out in a few weeks after that and hopefully raise them up to be like her. She’s survived since the rest got picked off by hawks two years ago and kept on laying eggs after I quit feeding her, also two years ago. Can’t beat totally free eggs from a zero input hen who has good survival instincts.
My single untouched pea plant that I set a circle of chicken wire around remains untouched. The ones that only had the leaves chewed off of are growing new leaves and I’m working on fence to put around the front yard garden. Got half the old dog pen taken down yesterday and will finish that and use the materials for the front yard garden today. I do have voles/moles so it could have been that. My field fence actually does have smaller openings at the bottom and should prevent rabbits from going through so I’m just going to use that. When/if I run across my big roll of chicken wire, I’ll add it around the bottom. I’ve grown peas, maters and taters in this spot before with no fence and didn’t have a problem.
We have several different varieties of daffodils here.
We didn’t buy any of them. Some came from the old home place, some came from road ditches, some came from two different abandoned farmsteads across the road, etc.
Three different iris that came from the home place, surprise lilies gifted from one of daughter’s friends, Tiger lilies from Mom’s garden that we started from seed, and ditch lilies from the road ditch.
Our surprise lilies only make it to that 2’-3’ size, Most of them are in nasty clay so it’s no wonder they don’t thrive. Our first house had a patch of them in good loamy soil and those would knock on 5’ most years.
In with the new (maters and peppers)
Lettuce, komatsuma and cabbage will come out of the seed trays this week to go in the ground. GoldCal is golden california wonder bell peppers. PS Jal is Pumpkin Spice Jalapeno and Kalugerista is a hot pepper. All below that are maters including Barry's Crazy Cherry. Some Tokyo Turnip seeds came in today so those will fill the empty cells from lettuce etc. At that point, I will have started a little bit of everything that gets started indoors. Might start some more of something like Tokyo Turnips, cabbage for succession plantings and maybe some more mater/pepper plants to sell or give away.
The robins arrived at our house on Saturday. The killdeers showed up last month before the snow was all gone. I've seen a few bluebirds scouting for nesting sites. And that dang woodpecker is hammering the aluminum fascia on the house every morning at 5:00am.
Love Love Love your fish pictures I remember when you posted way back about stocking your pond and all the excavating shots. Greenhouse looks great too you have been busy!
We have different daffodils too, mostly bought but we have a patch from our old house that we dug and moved some here. They come up and bloom every year. We moved them in 1984 when we had the house built and we were at our old house for 11 years, so they are older than 49 years. They are different too, no big inner cup, a small orangish one.
I’ve been hearing more songbirds than I have been seeing.
1st piece of field fence pulled from old dog pen is 42 ft long. 2nd piece is 63’
Assuming a square which is more efficient than a rectangle as far as maximum sq ft and a square fits the area pretty well, I threw a tape measure around a potential final area for the front yard garden and it was approx 56’ perimeter aka 14x14 aka 196 sq ft and 56’ perimeter ft minus 7’ gate is 49’ of fence required but my fence pieces are 42’ and 63’, not 49’.
Could either go a little bigger and use longer piece or a little smaller and use shorter piece
42 fence + 7 gate = 49 perimeter divide 4 sides = 12.15 (12.25 by 12.25 = 150 sq ft) (for a square)
63 fence + 7 gate = 70 perimeter divide 4 sides = 17.5 (17.5 by 17.5 = 306.25 sq ft) (for a square)
Guess I’m going with the 63’ fence plus 7’ gate for double the sq ft. Amazing how much sq ft you gain with a little extra perimeter.
A circle has the most sq ft for a given perimeter but kind of hard to do with fence. LOL
I’m probably not going to end up with a perfect square due to a couple of stumps. It will be pretty close to a square but likely with one side being angled.
Gotta take a break and go to the woods to cut down some dead trees to get us through this next cold front coming in. Gonna rain tonight too as it always does here in the Spring when either a cold or warm front comes in.
Good poltery technique! Hope you get your survival chicken and that your peas grow back. I know that chipmunks and squirrels can be controlled with chewing gum, but not sure if it works for voles!
Links to prepper type poultry articles:
(One Missouri Source for poultry and game birds)
They have some very nice pictures of their breeds! They also sell duck, Geese, Quail, Pheasant and Partridge.
Specialty poultry like quail might be a good way for a homesteader to generate income if they can develop a local market. Quail may not take up as much space.
Perch are an excellent fish! Looking forward to pictures of yours! Good progress on your greenhouse. Careful to keep the bottom fenced off! Chipmunks will get in and dig around your pots looking for seeds and nuts.
See my post to Pollard with a source for Guinea fowl, chicken, and other game birds.
Great chicken links, Pete! When I get Beau off of center and we build our new pole shed, I’m going to raise Heritage breeds to sell to others. That’s always been a dream of mine.
Of course, I’ll keep a flock of Buff Orpington strictly for personal use. LOVE that chicken breed! :)
If anyone has any of my cloud files bookmarked, you’ll have to update them. I downsized web hosting to save some money. I had two hosting accounts, one for a single website and one for the rest and it was renewal time and would have been $500 to renew because it wasn’t el cheapo hosting. I was able to add domain names to those old accounts but with the new hosting, I can only have one domain name per account so a few stand-alone websites are now subdomains of one site.
$100/yr is way better than $500/yr
(permasteader.com) is now (permasteader.route66custom.com) and as such, all the cloud file share links are new. Got the cloud reinstalled on the new subdomain this morning and just finished updating the 34 share links on my profile page. Had to recreate them within nextcloud which took a little while waiting for 34 pages to load, copying the links and pasting into my profile page html file.
https://freerepublic.com/~pollard/index
Bucket carrots? Tell me more. I have heavy acidic soil and they don’t do well here. I was going to build a raised bed but buckets sounds easier.
FYI Ping to Post #116.
We also have some very heavy soil in spots and my garden is in an area that tends to have water pond on it if it’s really wet out. Plus rocks. This is NH. Rocks grow best here.
Mr. mm cut the bottoms off some typical food grade buckets, the kind you can get from grocery stores in their bakery. We just made sure they weren’t used for paint or plaster, or whatever. Even new ones from Home Depot for example, although I prefer to scavenge them instead of buying them.
Then I made a mixture of peat moss, well composted manure, a little bit of sand, and you could throw in some spent potting soil from houseplants you repotted, or maybe just some regular dirt. With it being so well mixed with the rest of the stuff, it’s heaviness won’t be an issue.
I mix it well and put fill up the bucket and plant the seeds in there. They did fairly well. The buckets don’t need to be taller than however long your carrots are supposed to grow, obviously. I figure there is no point in wasting the mix by over filling buckets.
The only thing to watch for is them drying out. If you are in a dry spell, you will need to be aware of that.
I do something similar for my potatoes only use wood chips instead. This year mr. mm cut up some culvert pipe he replaced, and I plan on trying that.
I lay the potatoes directly on the ground inside the bucket, add some bone meal, and then cover the seed potatoes with wood chips. As the plants grow, I add more wood chips.
This year with the culvert pipe ones, since they are deeper, I am going to try two layers of potatoes offset from each other. Once the first set of plants is far enough along, I will add another layer of soil, some more manure and bone meal, and then put in another set of seed potatoes.
Maybe I can get a double crop from each bucket.
The bucket potatoes I grew last year did very well. They were a nice size and came out very clean. The ones I had in the ground got half eaten by slugs. UGH!
Seems like the slugs do not like crawling through wood chips.
Rumor has it that if you bury the potato plants deep, they will produce potatoes all the way up the buried part of the stem. I have never found that to happen, and Ellendra says that no, it does not happen.
Have you actually done that? And what kind of gum?
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