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.
.
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.
.