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Old 02-10-2017, 01:17 AM posted to rec.gardens.edible
George Shirley[_3_] George Shirley[_3_] is offline
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First recorded activity by GardenBanter: May 2014
Posts: 851
Default october already!

On 10/1/2017 5:32 PM, songbird wrote:
George Shirley wrote:
On 10/1/2017 8:43 AM, songbird wrote:
i'm not sure where September went. too quickly
by for sure...


Everything gets faster when you're aging. September was a good month for
us, I turned 78, wife got the fall garden, such as it is, in, the
kumquats are still getting bigger, the ten or eleven pears on the tree
are getting larger, my back still hurts. G


my back doesn't hurt as much as it used to.
chiropractor and massage therapy have helped
a great deal. i'm no longer having to take
any pain meds and can sleep. considering i
was contemplating surgery it's been well worth
it.


garden news, still working on the first strawberry
patch. we had hot enough weather that i didn't
accomplish much last week. finally we catch a few
days of cooler weather with some rains. not that
it helped make the subsoil i'm removing any easier
to break up. stuff is like concrete. no surprise
the strawberries in there didn't do that great, but
the subsoil is a foot and a half down, the top layer
wasn't too bad.


Hot weather, move to this part of Texas,we had several days at 100F or a
little more. Not all together but maybe once or twice a week. We're used
to it and we have air conditioning that is wonderful.


i hate AC, but we have it here too, i would use it
a lot less, but Mom has to have it on for the hot and
humid days. when i lived in TN i had a small fan which
worked well enough for me.


and i can move the tulips out of there that i've
already dug up several times, but always miss a few.
i suspect i may still miss a few anyways... and some
deep rooted weeds that are best removed carefully by
hand so as to not break up chunks of the root which
can regrow (sow-thistle, one of the worst garden
weeds for clay).


Wife loves tulips, alas, they don't grow well here, probably due to heat
and underground critters.


i love 'em too, but they don't do well here in
most places. with the animals eating them, poor
soil, diseases, fogs... only the sturdy ones
survive. i used to have about 70 varieties. i'm
not sure what is left now - maybe half that.


yesterday i finally filled in the center part i'd
dug out and it is already replanted. filled it in
with a mix of sand, stuff that needs to rot eventually
(bean shells and squash vines/leaves), and stuff that
is already mostly rotted (wood chips/pine needles)
along with some of the existing clay (about 1/4).


You must really like gardening for all the work you do. I'm glad I'm to
old for that stuff anymore. G


it is my preferred form of exercise and no
shortage of things to do here. this year is
actually sort of strange in that i've finally
been able to get to some projects i've wanted to
do for several years. so we've caught up and
i've been able to get ahead a little for a
change.

there's always something to do though and
often one project starts a whole pile of other
ones.


now i won't need a pickaxe to weed it and if i've
missed any of the sow-thistle root pieces it won't
be so hard to get the rest out of there.

mainly though, i get to redo the edge of the patch
so i don't need to crawl over or around rocks to get
in there to pick or weed. there's way too many ankle
breaking/twisting rock edges as it is. i'm gonna
flatten this puppy out and give me spaces to go through
and figure out something else to do with the rocks...
the stepping stones i already have are flat enough.


We have stones too, the last couple to own this house left a big pile of
river run rocks from somewhere. They're sitting in a big tub in the
garage (actually a storage garage as no cars get to go in it) until she
can figure out how to use them. Hopefully not thrown at me.


we have rocks from all over the USoA that have
been collected over the years. some of them were
used to try to break in one time and another time
one was thrown through the front kitchen window.
so i always recommend bigger rocks which are much
harder to throw.

...
We have lots of dirt in a bag, called "Black Cow." I think she thinks it
is fertilizer, probably from helping me clean out the milking stall when
we had a cow. She still smiles a lot when she can get cow crap for her
garden.


composted cow crap, trace nutrients in all three
of the majors, but still better than the higher
powered fake stuff.

i used a few bags of it when i was redoing the
tulip patches. partially/mostly decayed wood
chips are a much nicer form of humus if you can
get them for free or nearly free. most of what
we've gotten has come via tree service people who
are often happy to have a close place to dump
them instead of having to go a ways.


today a little painting too, the garage sill i
put in this past spring is holding up and sticking
well, a few very tiny cracks are showing from the
differences in cement batches i did when i was
putting it down (hand mixing in small amounts i
couldn't get it all mixed and placed at once). it
needs to be protected before the winter gets here
and we start dripping muddy/salty water on it...
hopefully three coats will do it (or until the
quart of paint runs out).


We're repainting rooms that have colors that make my artist wife flinch
at times. One room at a time and very slowly. The artist really comes
out when we're painting rooms. I just brush it on and move on, she takes
great detail.


i'm very picky too. nothing complicated with the
colors here, the house was meant to be an artists
studio/gallery besides being a summer place. so all
the walls are eggshell white. the trim is red cedar.
i painted the whole thing twice and this room three
times.

...beans...
We mostly grow green beans as we like those a lot and, normally, we can
get a fall crop too.


if i have the space set aside for it i can keep
planting all season to keep fresh beans going. i
usually don't set aside space.

...
We still have two pepper plants that are producing fruit but the fruit
doesn't get very big. She just can't stand pulling up and composting
anything that might have a leaf or a fruit. G I buy my peppers at the
market, great, big, red peppers that are crunchy.


i know that feeling, i don't want to bury any
bean plants until they've completely died back.
once in a while one will flower again and try to
put on some pods.

i've not counted the red peppers but over a
hundred for sure this year. i can eat three to
five a meal. roasted is by far my favorite way
to use them. they go well on about everything.


songbird

The ones I eat are grown in water in a glass house, about the size of a
big man's fist or a small baby's head. There is so much variety in the
weather here from day to day nothing grows like we had in Louisiana. Of
course there we gardened on REAL dirt, detritus from several millennia
of plants dying after the sea fled from the land and became the Gulf of
Mexico and then modern trees dropping leaves for more years. I miss that
soil, throw a seed in the ground and jump back. We had fruit trees,
berries along the fence, etc. etc. The folks that bought that property
were smiling a lot as they wandered the 14000 square feet property and
the big house with the garage in back. Plus a few majestic oak trees
fifty feet tall with a trunk that was large, one was twelve feet in
diameter, lots of leaves for composting. Here, a little sand on gumbo
clay and a 6500 square foot lot with a 1960 square foot house and
garage. Luckily the prices here are sky rocketing since Harvey, we have
the high ground, another five miles north of us flooded almost as bad as
Houston. What makes people build large homes on a creek where you can
look up and see the highway going by thirty feet up from the creek. It's
a wonder a bunch of wealthy people didn't drown. Drove over the bridge
there the other day and most of those creek side houses were torn up
badly. I feel sorry for a lot of these people but who the hell wants to
build a fancy home on low land in this part of Texas where it gets so
much rain. Sheesh! I may be a dumb old country boy but I know where
water wants to go, used to work in rice fields, that teaches you how
water runs. I still have good insurance but no flood insurance as we are
above the flood plain. If the water gets deep enough to flood us I'm
building an ark and gathering critters. G

George