On 3/22/2015 12:47 PM, Derald wrote:
George Shirley wrote:

Mine got bad enough that I bought a back brace online. Works great to
keep an old rickety back from going out again. Wife worked in garden all
day wearing the brace herself and is feeling okay.

Pulled the scallions and garlic chives today, washed, topped, planted a
couple of each back in the ground. Rest are being chopped and dehydrated
for later use and for the descendants to use also.
I have onions blooming. They have the full attention of
swallowtail and longwing butterflies, as well as of native "wild" bees
and wasps. We've had just enough rain and fog to induce the spiderwort
to bloom and I notice that it diverted the honeybees from the onions.
Spiderwort blossoms don't last very long, though. I'm pretty easy on
the honeybees this time of year. They're mostly strays from the
blueberry operations down the road and are pretty easy to control. I
don't dehydrate much anymore; I just pay the electricity co-op to keep
the freezer running. I do, however, intend to try dehydrating a little
home grown ginger within the next few days.

Had to take more buds off one of the blueberry plants today, thing is
persistent about making berries.
The only blueberries here are "improved" highbush cultivars with
cute names such as, "Misty" and "Gulf Coast". They all tend to
overproduce and have to be thinned fairly ruthlessly, early on. No
native highbush, to the best of my knowledge, and the rabbiteyes are
only for the truly dedicated. Their range pretty much ends about ninety
miles north of me. Picking commercial berries should start in early
April; the season lasts two or three weeks and then the commercial
market dies by the end of April when the berries further northward come
in on a much larger scale. Afterward, a few of the farmers shift over
to pick-your-own.
The blueberries we planted all have fancy names too, all are southern
high bush cultivars and seem to be doing well in the new raised bed. I'm
grateful for the builders putting five feet of Houston gumbo clay in
here before building the homes. If they hadn't we would all have been
flooded by now.

I sometimes miss the massive gardens of
old and then I think about our backs and age and am then thankful for an
eighth of those gardens.
I grew up in a gardening household but we never dealt with anything
more than small kitchen gardens. Within my family, the generation
immediately preceding mine got over that farming stuff and began
converting their "truck" acreage to citrus. Of course, now many of the
orange groves are becoming house groves....
My Dad grew up in a sharecropper family in Central Louisiana and taught
me all about gardening and farming. Mom was half breed Cherokee and grew
up doing stoop labor and being someone's maid or housekeeper. They did
pretty good for themselves as adults and yet they never lost the urge to
plant and preserve their own food. Wife's folks were college educated in
the twenties, one an artist, the other an architect, but gardened to
survive when young and during the Great Depression. My wife is the only
one of five kids that is still gardening seriously. I guess it's a
disease that is passed on to children. Both our kids have, at least, a
salad garden. But only one grandchild gardens.

Raining again after a beautiful day in the low eighties with lots of
sunshine. Saving money on the water bill right now. Got to get out there
tomorrow and test the soaker hoses and set up the watering system for
summer, shouldn't take long.
I wish we had some of that rain you're getting. Spring is one of
our two "dry" seasons but this March has been exceptional. Are you
using those black soaker hose things made from shredded tires? Man, my
experience with those was terrible! Finally replaced them all with 1
gal/hr/ft dripline, which cost less (online) and, so far, is holding up
much better.

I will be looking at drip lining later on. First set of soakers I bought
lasted ten years but I also know how to repair them when they do leak so
they keep lasting. Now if SWMBO doesn't prong one with a shovel or hoe
maybe the new ones will last. She's dangerous around tools of any kind.
I try to keep her busy painting watercolors and playing with flowers.

We're getting intermittent showers mixed with lovely sunshine and about
a two knot north wind. Still to wet to plow in farmer language.