Gardening 2024

[Ninurta]

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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[VioletDove]

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.

[Ninurta]

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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[VioletDove]

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.

[Ninurta]

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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[Ninurta]

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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[Snarl]

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.

[Ninurta]

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.

[Ninurta]

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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[Ninurta]

I've been slack. very, very, slack.

I've just now, the day before yesterday, gotten half of my tobacco (17 plants) into actual dirt, and 14 of my tomato plants into actual dirt. It's the first part of July, and I'm just now getting them into the earth. That's pretty damned slack, in my book.

The tomato seeds came from a grocery store "sample", 6 bitty little cherry tomatoes in a sealed plastic bag that I was given as a sample at the grocery store. I ate a couple, and they tasted pretty good, so I saved seed out of a couple to see what they'd do. Just about every seed I planted sprouted. I ended up with 16 of them surviving to a size that I could plant outside, and so I did that day before yesterday. 14 in the earth, 2 more in planters that I can move around on the deck, for easy access.

We've had heavy rains yesterday and today, and it's supposed to continue for the next week. That's what prompted me to get the stuff out into the dirt - let Mother Nature water them in, and allow the overcast skies to let them get established before the sun starts blazing them up.

I've got two kinds of catnip. One is from a seed pack that God only knows where they originated, and the other is from seed I collected in the Corner Settlement of Glad Hollow, at the foot of River Mountain in 2022, I think. Oddly, the local catnip is a little different from the "foreign" catnip. The local catnip has bigger, greener leaves - in some cases a LOT bigger and a LOT greener - and the teeth on the leaf edges are a little more rounded, a little less pointed. That catnip has been growing around here for a couple hundred years I reckon, so it's acclimated to the area, and is showing some morphological changes to the leaves. All of the "foreign" catnip is blooming, and the bees are working the hell out of it. The local catnip isn't blooming yet, but it got a late start, and it may be that acclimatization to the local climate and area has changed it's blooming schedule.

I've also got two different strains of tobacco, neither of which is actual smoking tobacco. Both are different variants of nicotiana rustica, sacred tobacco or native tobacco. It's the kind the Indians grew here before John Rolfe introduced "Orinoco" (nicotiana tabacum) seed at the Jamestowne Colony, which was Carribean seed filched from the Spaniards in 1612. Almost all of the commercial, smoking tobacco sold today is descended from that Orinoco strain that Rolfe imported. What I have is older, the original tobacco of North America.

I alternate years between the two strains to prevent cross-breeding and to keep the strains pure, "Thousand Year Old Tobacco" one year, "Midewiwin Tobacco" the next. The 1000 year old strain is alleged to have originated from seed found in a clay pot at an archaeological dig, and dated to 1000 years ago before any white folks had invaded America and started changing things up, but I'm still in serious doubt about that story. I've still not found any confirmation of it in any archaeological papers, so I think it's probably a made-up selling story... and the origin of that tobacco remains shrouded in mystery. It has wider, shorter leaves than the Midewiwin, and looks an awful lot like the tobacco the Cherokees still grow.

The Midewiwin Tobacco is sourced from seed grown by the Great lakes tribes, north of here. It takes it's name from the Midewiwin Medicine Society of those tribes. It's what is still grown by tribes like the Anishinaabe. It's probably what was grown by the Sauk, Fox, Miami, Shawnee, etc. back in the day. This year, it's the Midewiwn's turn. Last year, it was the 1000 Year Old Tobacco. I've got hundreds of thousands of seeds from both that I've collected from what I've grown over time. What I planted this year is 5 year old seed, and ALL of it still sprouted, didn't show any decline in seed vitality at all.

I planted 4 hills of squash. I got that seed again from the grocery store, out of a butternut squash I bought. Out of the 4 hills, 3 came up. A few days ago, I noticed that something had uprooted one of them, just pulled it out roots and all, and it was just laying there all forlorn, wilted, and dead looking. I picked it up and popped it back into the dirt, watered it in a little bit, and left it to it's own devices without much hope that it would revive. I checked on it about an hour ago, and surprise, surprise, it's thriving again. That's probably due to the rain we've got over the past couple days combined with the overcast sky which has allowed it to recover.

I planted 9 hills of sunflowers outside, directly into the ground, and not a single plant came up. I started 18 more seeds in a flat indoors, and 3 of those came up. Only one has survived, and it's looking pretty rough right now. it may not survive at all.

I planted 9 hills of pole beans right along with the sunflowers. My idea was to allow the pole beans to twine up the sunflowers for support, but since the sunflowers didn't sprout, that wasn't gonna happen. 3 hills of the beans came up, and two of those have survived. I set a tomato cage around them to let them twine up it, which they took to pretty well. One of them stopped growing upward about a week ago,and today I noticed that one has a couple blooms on it.

Last year's sage all survived, but it's growing pretty slow. I don't know if that's normal or not. I don't expect it to bloom this year, either. I don't know how many years it takes to bloom, assuming it survives.

None of last year's basil survived. I've started about 6 pots of it over again this spring, and expect to overwinter it indoors to try to get it established.

None of last year's thyme survived, either, and neither has any of the thyme I tried to start this spring.

None of last year's rosemary survived, and only two plants that I started this spring. Like the basil, I plan to overwinter it indoors to try to give it a head start. It's growing REALLY slowly.

Oddly, I have a couple of spearmint plants that I don't even recall planting that came back this spring. It's growing pretty slow, too, but it got a rough start this spring when some kind of black rust or mold damn near killed it off altogether.

Last year's peppermint all died, and good riddance! It wasn't very peppermint-like, despite the label on the seed pack. I need to gather some seed from the River Mountain peppermint plants, if I can still find any. That was some real, live peppermint, not the hybrid trash that folks are trying to pass off as "peppermint, the ONLY kind of peppermint" these days. I don't know how that story got started, or by whom, but peppermint seed you can buy now is nearly all bullshit peppermint... and they seem to have come up with a bullshit cover story to try to cover that up. Real peppermint is a species of it's own (mentha piperita), and decidedly NOT the "hybrid" that Wikipedia claims it is. I know - I've seen both kinds, and there is a world of difference between them. Real peppermint has long, smooth, dark leaves, and the leaves and stem are tinged with purple. That crap seed they sold me as "peppermint" was nothing of the kind, nor did it have any peppermint smell or taste.

Last year's "blueberries" - if that's what they really are - came back and are doing very well. They probably won't start blooming for another year, and it won't be until then whether I know if they are really blueberries or not.

Wild stuff that I never planted, but is doing fine:

I have a bumper crop of "jewelweed", also known as wild "touch me nots" for their habit of throwing seeds up to 15 or 20 feet away from the plant when you touch a ripe seed pod. I notice a single solitary bloom just starting on one of them this evening, so they are about to bloom out. Jewelweed is an old Indian remedy for skin problems like rashes, hives, poison ivy and the like that the settlers took over using it for after the Indians were moved on. The sap from it has been shown to have soothing, antifungal, and antimicrobial properties.

The blackberries threw a giant crop, but the birds ate them all before I got to gather any,

I've got several plants of what I believe is wild lettuce, of the Canadian variety, growing around. You can make "lettuce opium" from that, good for pain relief. The Canadian variety is not the strongest pain killer among the wild lettuces, but one works with what he has to work with, eh?

I found a stand of "Silver Dollar Plants" (Lunaria Annua) growing wild in the brush on a bank below my house, between the house and the creek, this spring. It's a fairly large patch, and must have gotten out from a flower bed my aunt grew here 50 years ago. Been growing there that whole time, and no one knew.

Last fall, I copped a berry head off of a ginseng plant that  was growing in the woods just the other side of my yard fence, and moved the berries about 30 yards down hill into the lower edge of my yard, and planted them in the shade there. Nothing has sprouted yet, but that's to be expected. It takes ginseng 18 months to sprout from planted seed, so maybe next spring it'll get a start there. I did that to protect it from the poachers. Ginseng poaching is a perennial problem here, and you have to constantly throw some lead into the woods to keep them at bay. I've got probably close to 40,000 dollars worth of ginseng growing on my land, which I never harvest unless I need some for something - never to sell - (that's how you preserve a ginseng patch! If you dig it all, you've got no more!) and so it's a big ol' patch of poacher bait. Ginseng poachers will come onto your place, and rape the entire patch, not leaving you anything at all, if they think they can get away with it.

I caught a fella eyeballing my ginseng patch last fall, and had to inform him he'd best leave it be, on account of that patch was right in the middle of my shooting range, and unfortunate accidents happen... I believe in giving folks a fair warning, if they'll take it, and if you get a chance to before they go to doing untoward things unannounced.

Big crop of black walnut last year, so there probably won't be many this year - they tend to produce bumper crops every other year. Black walnuts are good for a lot of things. You can eat them of course, and they're good added in to other foods, like cookies and fudge. The Indians used to pound them into meal, and use that to thicken soups and stews, or to extract oil from. You throw a bunch of that meal into a pot of water, boil it for a couple of hours, then skim the oil off the top. Then you boil that down until all the water is boiled out, and all you have left is the oil. You can make a dye out of the outer hulls, and we used to also soak steel traps in a solution of black walnut hulls and water to camouflage the traps, makes them harder to see and smell. It leaves a black coat on the outer surface that masks the steel.

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