What have you picked/planted today?

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george47

Banned
Aug 14, 2015
194
0
North Gulf of Mexico
I am in a relatively hot climate and am planting the autumn veg. Last week I bought 200, quite good sized, peat pots for $3 at 90% reduced closeout price. And a bunch of the 4/$1 plant seed packs reduced to two cents each. And stopped at the farm supply store for some seed they sell by the ounce - mostly $1 - $2 an OZ (28g) for the brassicas and same price but different amounts of weight for carrot, beet, beans and others. And some crushed oyster shell for the chickens. $8 for fifty pounds.

So I planted a couple peat pots of cauliflower, broccoli, turnip (the kind for greens rather than root) nasturtium, black seed Simpson lettuce, pickling cucumber, last week and they were all ready to go into the ground. Now I wait and see if something will come out and eat the seedlings over night. I would normally plant this stuff right into the ground but had these pots....Then beets into the ground and to go tomorrow is green beans, Siberian Kale, Chard, carrots, odds and ends, and purple potatoes. My wife picked up a bag of the gourmet tiny purple potatoes half price and they go into the pots tomorrow. I always grow some for fun, just using the ones at the supermarket, they are great fun.

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Last year, purple potatoes and yellow carrots - but this year I forgot to mail order the colored carrots, so just orange ones. Will do the 4 colour ones this spring.

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Fall garden, we load up on greens. I should have put in so much more but tend to run late - Mid August they should have been begun.
 

Robson Valley

Full Member
Nov 24, 2014
9,959
2,664
McBride, BC
Mix the carrot seeds together = kids love the surprise. I've got orange and purple/orange core.
Garven is over here except for picking peas & beans, the carrots can wait, the beets are pathetic.
Have to do some pruning (10' spouts) to get the bird nets up on the grapes. Bush robins will eat it all.

Do have some really good-looking pots of herbs that I plan to bring in and keep(?) under the lights this winter.

The dogs are raising Hello. The dang coyotes are yapping in the moonlight. Gotta be bedtime
 

nephilim

Settler
Jul 24, 2014
871
0
Bedfordshire
Picked - about 1 kilogram of blackberries. I've scattered the seeds around from the last batch, with a bit of topsoil to encourage new growth in the area

Sent from my C6833 using Tapatalk
 

Goatboy

Full Member
Jan 31, 2005
14,956
17
Scotland
A pile of wild raspberries and a pocketfull of little vetch peas (they're fiddly but I love them and very little makes you feel full; think they used to be used as an appetite suppresant at one time). Anyway they'll go in the side salad for tea tonight.

Sent via smoke-signal from a woodland in Scotland.
 

Fraxinus

Settler
Oct 26, 2008
935
31
Canterbury
Dug a bit more garden today and planted some carrot and onion seedlings, yesterday had a mooch about and found a few fat blackberries and some (rather small) damsons, near where I was working.

Rob.
 

santaman2000

M.A.B (Mad About Bushcraft)
Jan 15, 2011
16,909
1,114
67
Florida
Blackberries have come and gone here I'm afraid. As have the blueberries, but the huckleberries are still coming in. Yesterday we picked some banana peppers.

George you've just nudged me to plant some greens! Never tried them potted before; do they do well potted?
 

george47

Banned
Aug 14, 2015
194
0
North Gulf of Mexico
Sant, I do Siberian Kale more than any other green - it is fantastic. You pick the lower leaves and it keeps growing taller and putting out more till late it looks like a palm tree. I would do those in pots. the standard pot thing Chard I do not have such luck with, it never crops anything like as much. I cannot do well with collards here, but have elsewhere, and others grow massive ones.

I am the cook of the house and have become very soul food leaning from years in the deep South. (unless you are in the Fla Northern interior I do not think of Fla as being Deep South) Also the local Cajun and Creole. Boiled greens are served as one of the main veg and we have developed a taste for them. I also juice them with anything else in excess.

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george47

Banned
Aug 14, 2015
194
0
North Gulf of Mexico
Blackberries are long finished here. I grow Kiowa and some Navajo - raspberries do not traditionaly grow here but I am trying a new, hot weather, variety. This is in front of my pond, the first raspberries this year - I had planted the berry late winter so it was on its first try. I hope for a good next year and am trying to propagate more; this variety developed in Mississippi for Mississippi. I bought some supposedly suitable black raspberries also but the heat mostly killed them this summer. I froze about 8 gallons of blackberries and am canning them two gallons at a time when I feel like doing some. It is easy and not much effort - and I need the freezer space for winter. (two gallons whole frozen berries produces 6 pint jars of highly reduced seed blackberries.)

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This is my greens from earlier fall/spring gardens. Lettuce in front, in the middle carrots on the right, beets on the left.

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So today, plant kale, chard, carrots, purple potatoes, beans and some other stuff. And clear out the upper raised beds and plant there - same things with some broccoli and Brussels sprouts. I would dig in compost but am out of it. I compost 5000 pounds of leaves a year but have used that all - the new pile is just beginning, it takes a full year to compost.

Also this year I have decided to use some chemical sprays for insects if necessary rather than losing the crop, as I often do. Any you buy have been sprayed, even the organic (they just use different pesticides) so why not - and be realistic.
 

santaman2000

M.A.B (Mad About Bushcraft)
Jan 15, 2011
16,909
1,114
67
Florida
.....I am the cook of the house and have become very soul food leaning from years in the deep South. (unless you are in the Fla Northern interior I do not think of Fla as being Deep South) .......


Nice garden patch. Thanks for sharing that.

Yeah I grew up just a little north of Hattiesburg in a little village called Sanford. Had family on the Coast in Gulfport and Biloxi (still have some in Waveland) and in New Orleans. I'm in the Western Panhandle along I-10 40 miles or so east of Pensacola now. This part of Florida from here down to the beach has two nicknames: 1) L.A. (Lower Alabama) or 2) The Redneck Riviera.
 
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Macaroon

A bemused & bewildered
Jan 5, 2013
7,209
362
73
SE Wales
I picked and ate Blackberries, wild Rasberries and a couple of early (for here) Apples and ate them as I walked into the woodland to get some soil which I've used to see if I can get some native Bluebell seed to mature up over the next few years. I've got a nice spot where I know they'll not hybridise with the Spanish ones which seem to want to take over the world :eek:
 

george47

Banned
Aug 14, 2015
194
0
North Gulf of Mexico
Hello Paleocory (fossils?) How are you liking England? I have a lot of relatives on Vancouver Island. Here our blackberries are finished in June, but my Mother in London is picking them - she has a few tiny, black, grapes too and makes a sauce with both of them for their morning oatmeal, or after dinner yogurt - excellent flavor, more than my domestic blackberries.

I am in for a drink to cool off, I have been working the garden and just planted: Siberian kale, root turnips, vates collards, danvers carrots, Alaska peas, black seed Simpson lettuce (a favorite because you cut it and more grows back - like the S kale, endless. Next I need to clear the upper pond raised bed - 4ft X 8ft and I think I will go with mostly Siberian Kale. That is a dry bed, sandy, and Siberian handles it well. I will let the peppers and zinnias keep going in it though. I will wait to do the pond library raised bed till my wife is able to help - time is almost gone.

I have the commemoration at 4 (in an hour) then the full moon drum circle at 8p.m.

Rainbow National Gathering; hippies

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george47

Banned
Aug 14, 2015
194
0
North Gulf of Mexico
That is a pie. I would make a pear/plum/blackberry/apple pie! With whipped cream! I buy the whipping cream by the quart we use so much, and just bought one on the way back to the house a bit ago. (whipping cream lasts 2 weeks in the refrigerator easy - longer even, so buy the big size.) I make pies at least once a week and the last one was pear/blackberry, from local gardens.

And if you can bring in loads of the same - I would can a case of it for the rest of the year - easy to do, lasts indefinitely, make a fruit dish in minutes.


Edit - what a bolete in your flickr pictures. Two chicks in my incubator have just hatched and 5 other eggs are pecked. I just put the chicks under the broody hen I have been keeping in a cage in the henhouse, naturally she took no notice, it was getting dark and the hen was in her trance. 26 eggs and I tend to get 60% hatch, it is a very, very cheap incubator, $29. Now off to throw my net really quick, for some shrimp (my wife will be an hour), then to the beach for the full moon.
 
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george47

Banned
Aug 14, 2015
194
0
North Gulf of Mexico
The city brought 80,000 pounds of soil here this morning. You can put your name on a list for when they have some they do not want - mostly when they are digging some ditch for drainage - and they will deliver it - but with no warning, they just show up and if you are not home take it elsewhere. 4 dump truck loads. I had one dumped on my banana grove at the cottage, two where I will have to move them with a shovel and wheelbarrow, but are central and somewhere the trucks can back into. Over the years I have has 10 loads from them, a great thing; a 10 ton truck load of soil here is $160 delivered. Sand or fill dirt is $100. But these are free. Now I have to think of things to do with it. I have a hernia operation next Wednesday - all of us old tradesmen end up getting one, so 80,000 pounds of soil to move by shovel will have to wait a good bit. (in my work I have moved many truck loads by shovel and wheelbarrow.)

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Here is one being brought in winter when the grass is brown - now everything is lush green.

And the eggs in the incubator hatched and are placed under the small broody hen - 17 of them! And the hen is a big Banti, it is really comical to see them under her, tiny heads sticking out from every place - chicks jam under hen wings, she holds then slightly open as a cover, and burrow under her in a mass. White, brown, black, and mixes of that. A totally mixed batch of Orphington, Game cock banti, Southern yard chicken, Rhode Island Red, some pure black breed I have forgotten, Amaracana, for sure, more likely.
 
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george47

Banned
Aug 14, 2015
194
0
North Gulf of Mexico
No, I actually live in a town - but in 20 acres of extremely low land which floods a lot, so very little building - so in those 20 acres are - us, a vacation home used about 6 times a year, a house at the very end of the 1/4 mile road for sale for ever. Then some rich people have the 60 acres beyond and that is the peninsula of land I am on, I own 1 acre but have the run of all the 20 acres - so I am in a very natural and wild place, but in a urban setting once you leave my gravel road and go back into the real world. So no tractors.

I can get a guy with a bobcat for $100 to spread it, but I have moved so many trucks of soil by hand I will just save the money and use it as a workout - and get my head right when doing it, and actually kind of enjoy it. I tie a rope to the front of the wheelbarrow and my wife pulls it wile I push and it goes easy.

Flooding, low, land is good at minimizing neighbors.

I have to work inside today - but found a packet of seeds I bought for two cents at the Dollar Store closeout - of rainbow radish. I will pop out and plant a row of them today.

What I am glad is over is the annual composting, last week we finished the last piles of bags. We do at least 10 truck loads, each bag weight 20 - 50 pounds depending if the contents have been partly composted/wet/sandy. That is real work because most of them are dry and would never compost. So each bag is opened and sprayed wile being raked back and forth on the pile to wet it fully. Otherwise they act like a thatched roof and the inside just mummifies and does no composting - I think 5-6 thousand pounds of them a year. That is a job that no matter what I can never enjoy.

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