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Gardening 2024 - Ninurta - 03-28-2024
Another year, another gardening thread for the back yard gardeners among us.
I'm already slacking this year. I staked out and broke up the perimeter of a larger garden spot, incorporating both of last year's gardens within it, plus about that much ground again, but I reckon I bit off more than I can chew by hand, Preparation is way behind, and may not get accomplished at all this year. I really ought to invest in a rotor-tiller.
I got a bit disheartened by last year's piss poor results. For instance, out of all my corn, what I got doesn't even fill a ziplock baggie, cobs and all... and none of the ears were full. Some ended up looking more like teosinte than corn. Instead of husks on those ears as we would expect, each individual kernel has it's own husk, and the ears were only 2 or 3 inches long in total. Not a very promising result.
Last year's beans in total amounted to a condiment cup full of dried beans, not even enough for a single serving.
I got a grand total of 18 cayenne peppers, but they were plenty hot. Life is full of trade-offs, i reckon. I got a total of TWO green peppers, both only about the size of a golf ball. Plenty of tomatoes, but again all of them were only about the size of a golf ball.
So.
I'm a bit disappointed, and not very motivated to break up the ground if that's all I get out of it. Especially not to go to all the trouble of breaking it up by hand with a Garden Weasel gadget.
I never got hold of any of the corn I was planning for this year - Hickory King corn. I had decided on that because it makes good hominy, and is better for making grits, corn meal, and masa flour. But, never having managed to get my furry mitts on any seed for it, it's not likely to be in the offing. I've also not gotten any seed for pole beans, which i had figured on planting in with the corn. I DID get some butternut squash seed, though.
All I've started so far is tobacco (Midewiwin Rustica variety from around the Great Lakes), basil, thyme, and some local catnip. I gathered the catnip seed from plants still growing where I grew up. My intent was to hybridize the catnip that has acclimated to the local climate for generations with some fresh outsider catnip that I got started last year. last year's catnip survived the winter and is sprouting out again.
I sewed those herbs on Saturday night/ Sunday morning (23/24 March) right around midnight, in tiny little greenhouse starters that Grace got for me last year. About mid-day on Tuesday the 26th, I noticed the tobacco and basil already sprouting, just a couple days after planting it. No progress yet on the catnip or thyme, but I recall from last year that the thyme took almost a month to start sprouting, and I'm using the same seed that I used last year to start it.
The tobacco seed was starting to get old. It's from a 2020 crop, but it's the only pure-bred seed I have of that variety, so it's what I had to use. I figured since it was getting on in years, I'd double-up on the amount of seed used to insure enough sprouts. that might have been a mistake - the planters for the tobacco have a full green carpet in them today, sprouting pretty thickly. Still, I reckon that will give me enough to plant out, even after I cull the weaker plants.
Coming back from last year's plantings are the catnip previously mentioned, as well as a couple of sage plants. Some onions, although the tops are pretty puny still compared to what they were. The rosemary bush died over the winter apparently, so I'll have to start fresh again this year it appears. All of the peppermint died over the winter, but that's no big loss, considering that it was looking pretty weird for peppermint anyhow.
I had two plants "volunteer" in some of the soil I had, which looked a lot like blueberry plants. I planted them out on either side of my walkway last fall. I'm not sure if they survived the winter or not. All of the leaves turned red, and finally fell off in late January or early February, and the plants are still naked. I don't know if they'll come back or not. I checked the stems yesterday, and they're still tough and pliable, not brittle like I would expect if they were dead, so we'll see.
Last year's thyme barely survived the fall, much less the winter. That's why I started a fresh batch this year. Two sage plants survived the winter, and I'm debating whether to add a couple more this year or not. If those two take off this year, then no more will be needed - we had an ancient sage plant where i grew up that produced for 30 years that I know of, all from one bush. I have no idea how much older than that it was, because no one could recall who planted it, or when. it was already an established bush when we moved in there.
I got some cucumber seeds and some seeds from a giant sort of alleged jalapeno pepper last fall that one of my cousins grew, and I might give them a go this year. Maybe some tiny "cherry" tomatoes I got seed for last fall, too. As small as the "full sized" tomatoes I grew last year were, I'm almost scared to try the cherry tomatoes before I get a magnifying glass so I can tell when they're ripe...
In regard to the alleged jalapeno peppers, I say "alleged" because that's what I was told they were, but I've never seen actual jalapenos that big, nor have I ever eaten any that hot. So, I dunno what they really are, and am just using the name as it was given to me.
I also planted some ginseng berries that I got out of the woods on the hill above my house. I planted those last fall, in the shade of the giant beech tree in my front yard. Since I planted them last fall, it will be next spring before they sprout, if they DO sprout. it takes 18 months for ginseng to sprout from seed. If any of it sprouts, I can watch it from my front porch, meaning anyone trying to poach it is in for a ass-full of lead that I can deliver from the comfort of my rocking chair on the front porch. It's all about the convenience some times.
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RE: Gardening 2024 - VioletDove - 03-28-2024
Must be something in the air. I haven’t been very motivated either. My husband ended up planting the greens this year. I just couldn’t get myself out there to do it.
I usually start a lot of tomato and pepper plants in January but I only started a few this year. I intended to get the rest of them started but I just couldn’t find the energy. I decided to just buy some this time.
My sage, peppermint, lemon balm and catnip have come back and look really good.
My mulberry tree has leafed out. I have a pomegranate and a peach tree to plant. I have a fig tree too. I think it’ll do ok here, but I’m not sure. I lost some blueberry bushes but the ones that are growing look ok.
Hopefully once it warms up I’ll be more excited about it.
RE: Gardening 2024 - Ninurta - 03-28-2024
Lemon balm you say? I may have once found some of that growing wild.
It was probably 40 years ago or so, and I was out thrashing around up on River Mountain in Russell County, VA. There is a mountain meadow about half way up the mountain, a clearing where no trees grow. As I was walking through it, I noticed a plant that looked familiar, but weird. It looked just like a catnip plant, but it was a lighter green. Maybe a yellow-ish green. I got curious and stopped, picking off a couple leaves and shredding them as I do when I'm trying to identify a plant by smell. I knew what catnip smelled like, and was checking to see if it was just some kind of mutant catnip plant.
Imagine my surprise when that "catnip" smelled just like a lemon! The leaves were dead-ringers for catnip, except for the lighter hue - same size, shape, and texture - but they smelled like lemons.
Was that lemon balm?
I use catnip for nerves and my stomach. But, since I found out that the reason cats roll in it is because it repels mites, I'm thinking that a tea of it might not be a bad idea for folks with mite allergies, which I happen to have... so I'm gonna use myself as a guinea pig to find out if it works. I got the cat here some cat treats that are flavored with catnip, and gave them to her to see if it works internally as well as with an external application, and it seems to have helped her a bit - she apparently has mite allergies too, some times to the point of appearing mangy. The catnip treats seem to have helped her...
... or else she's just rolling around in my catnip outside when I'm not watching her.
Or maybe both.
The thing about the catnip treats is that she seems to be addicted to them. She gets downright rowdy if I hold back on them, and after eating them, she's crazy as a shithouse rat for about 15 minutes, then she suddenly runs out of gas and passes out.
ETA: regarding the fig tree, I saw one growing on a college campus in Greensboro, NC, but I don't think I've seen them any farther north than that. You might check the USDA "growing zones" map to see if your zone is that warm, or warmer, and if it is, then it ought to do fine. I have a hunch that if magnolias will grow there, then figs ought to, too... but that's just a hunch.
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RE: Gardening 2024 - VioletDove - 03-28-2024
That sounds like lemon balm. I make a tea with mine. It’s a good antioxidant and supposedly helps with anxiety and other things.
I did a quick search about my fig tree. One site said if they grow in Oklahoma they are usually stunted and don’t produce fruit. Another one said they will grow here fine so I guess I’ll just plant it and see what happens.
RE: Gardening 2024 - Ninurta - 03-30-2024
It appears that two of my thyme seeds have sprouted about mid-day yesterday, the 29th - 5 1/2 days after sewing them. It's either just two early bloomers (likely), or else the rest of the seed is dead and that's all I'll see. Time will tell.
Dead seed can be a problem. I've sewn several thousand poppy seeds, and out of that several thousand, only two ever sprouted. Neither of those two lived long enough to flower. I'm told poppy seed can only live for a year, and am prone to believe it.
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RE: Gardening 2024 - Ninurta - 03-30-2024
I went out to The Big City With The Bright Lights today, and while out I picked up 100 peat pots for seed starting, and some sunflower seeds and some rosemary seeds. The sunflower seeds are because, since i failed to acquire the right sort of corn seed for this year, I thought I might experiment with crops from the earlier Indian Eastern Agricultural Complex ("EAC" - sunflower, goosefoot, sumpweed, little barley, maygrass and erect knotweed) instead of the Three Sisters planting.
The rosemary seed is because every year, I pick up a couple of rosemary plants, and every winter they fail to survive the winter. Starting them from seed is cheaper than laying out cash for already growing plants that are just gonna die anyhow.
I MAY have some goosefoot seed from a couple years ago, but I'm gonna have to shake down some dried flowers to find out if they've set seed or not. Goosefoot is the North American answer to South American Quinoa. Same genus (chenopodium), but different varieties.
Goosefoot (also called "pitseed goosefoot" to distinguish it from European goosefoot, because the seed coat has bunches of tiny pits in it) was raised because it provided greens in the spring and grain in the fall. There are also reports from the earliest explorers and colonists of the Indians using it for seasoning. Apparently they'd burn it to ash, and then use the ash as salt. That works because it's a sort of weed that pulls up whatever is in the soil, including salts. There have been experiments regarding using it for soil reclamation of contaminated soils because it is so efficient at removing impurities from soils.
A few decades ago, there was an archaeological dig at a cave about 3 miles from where I was raised called Daugherty's Cave. Occupation layers going back 11,000 years were present in it, and among those occupation layers was found goosefoot seeds. The seeds found there are generally reported as chenopodium jonesianum, a now extinct domesticated variety, but in reality they were chenopodium berlanderi, plain old wild North American goosefoot. The only real difference between the two were the thickness of the testa, or seed coat.. Over generations of selective breeding by Indians, the jonesianum variety had a reduced seed coat thickness, less than 30 micrometers, whereas the wild variety has a thicker seed coat of over 30 micrometers.
So, I know that it was used by Indians going back 11,000 years or more right here in this area. The seed I collected - if there is any seed there, that is - was collected from my old homestead about 3 miles from that archeological dig, and so is likely to be direct descendants of the plants whose seeds were found in Daugherty's Cave.
The quinoa I've tried to grow (from grocery store seed) has all failed to even sprout, but I know for certain that the North American variety will grow here, because it grows wild.
Just one more tenuous link to a past that is no more, but may someday have to be again.
Squash were also developed by the Indians, from cucurbita pepo. However, the wild variety is bitter, nasty, and slightly poisonous. The Indians bred those qualities out of it over generations to give us the squashes we have today.
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RE: Gardening 2024 - Snarl - 03-31-2024
Wife wanted to plant flowers in one of the fields last year. Turns out the work I put into the soil contributed to a good grow.
We seeded an English Lavender across all of the fields ... with my intent being to plow it under in time to plant corn. It's doing better than I could have ever imagined. Might not even consider another planting effort. My only concern right now is how to get so much of this stuff sold.
RE: Gardening 2024 - Ninurta - 03-31-2024
I was out poking around i the herb bed this afternoon, ridding it of troublesome wildflowers and such trying to take it over, and stumbled across a couple of spear mint plants coming back. That's odd - I didn't start any spear mint, don't even have any seed for it, and don't recall setting any out, but there it is all the same.
RE: Gardening 2024 - Ninurta - 04-14-2024
I checked the supposed blueberry plants this afternoon, and noticed a couple of leaf buds starting to form on them, so I reckon they didn't die after all. BUT - while the leaves are shaped like blueberry leaves, they are much larger when they grow out than the leaves on some blueberry bushes I looked at at the Walmart garden Center a week or so ago. Since I know nothing about blueberry bushes, I don't know if there are varieties with leaves that big or not. Hence, I still can't be sure they actually ARE blueberry bushes. I may not know until they start bearing whatever fruits they are going to bear,
Sprouting is going dismally this year, all except for the tobacco sprouts, which are rolling out like gangbusters. The new catnip sprouts are slow - there are only 8 or so of them so far, out of a couple hundred seeds sewn. Worse for the thyme - 3 sprouts so far out of a couple hundred seeds sewn. Basil is sprouting ok, but nothing to write home about. The rosemary has not shown a single sprout in 13 days, but I'll give it a couple more weeks before I throw in the towel and pick up some pre-sprouted plants.
Last year's catnip is coming back, and is starting to put up stems out of the rosettes that survived the winter. The volunteer spearmint is doing pretty good.
Wild ferns around my deck are putting out fiddleheads now.
I got some mammoth sunflower seeds and some pole beans, but it'll be a couple of weeks still before I can put them in the ground. I figure I'll let the beans vine up the sunflower stalks, and not bother even planting any corn this year, given last year's dismal showing, and the fact that I've still not got any seed for the kind of corn I want to grow anyhow.
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