Derald wrote:
songbird wrote:
Derald wrote:
...
Warning: I'm listening to very old shitkicker music performed by George
Jones and drinking whisky.

not something i would ever choose to mix.
i'll leave that to the pros...

Shoot; the two were made for each other. The relationship is symbiotic.

heh, i'll still leave it to others,
i need every brain cell i have left.


snip

glad to hear things are going well.
have you done the mustard greens under
them before?

Yes; my planting pattern for the peas is not terribly space-efficient, so I
always plant something else in the beds with them. Caveats are to wait for the
peas to get tall enough as not to be shaded out by faster growing and to avoid
plants that might require supplemental nitrogen before the peas are done. Also,
it helps if the understorey is a crop that can continue after the peas are done.

i made the mistake in my first planting of
not letting the peas grow another week or two
before putting in the lettuce seeds. they
rapidly took over. i did get a crop from the
peas, but not nearly as much as what i'm seeing
now with the peas growing alone.


snip

haha, well i hope you slept well after all
that?

Who remembers? LOL! Today's the day for second planting of peas. The bed's
ready, save for placing the dripline. Also will plant collards but in a separate
bed. Need to install the dripline there, too. This spring, as beds became
available, I began converting to dripline irrigation from those dreadful soaker
hoses that I once thought so wonderful.

i'm keeping things simple here -- going
back to trench and flood irrigation for a
few gardens next year. we are lucky that
water is not a limiting factor for us.


Temperatures down here have begun to moderate somewhat. Lows in the 60's
are predicted for the next few days but that's only temporary. By midweek, I
expect we'll be back to normal lows in the mid-70's. No danger yet to the
chill-sensitive garden denizens. The end of tropical storm season also is the
end of our rainy "season". Although not unheard of, I don't expect any
significant rainfall before mid-December or, maybe, Christmas.

The cooling temps have triggered a flush of blossoms on the cowpeas -- or,
maybe, they overheard me speaking of pulling them up -- ("Southern peas",
"blackeye peas") which is a mixed blessing:

i'd never even tried growing blackeye peas
until this season. as i put them in late i
didn't really expect a crop. it looked like
i just squeaked by and the pods are drying out
now. they probably could have used another
month. being flooded out four times probably
didn't help either. too much rain the past
few days for dry bean harvesting.

i really enjoyed how they grew being so
different than many of the other beans. with
the pods sticking out like antennae. i didn't
have them growing up a fence or trellis, that
probably would have helped them a lot too.


Although, I'm grateful for the
unexpected produce for the freezer those two beds soon will be needed for garlic
or onions and need preparation well in advance. I have a couple of yards of
chicken manure that came from a covered chicken house on a now-defunct egg
operation. Dry, it smells of ammonina and wet, believe me, it reverts to its raw
state or, at least, certainly seems to do. At any rate, after adding (some of)
it to the beds, I want to allow some "resting" time before planting onion sets
or garlic. Do not accept any further gardening advice from someone who tells you
that "fresh", "green", "raw" chicken manure does not need composting before use
as a soil amendment and will not damage plants!

go light with that stuff for the garlic and
onion patches. too much nitrogen means more
green up top and more bug troubles below.


i finished the first pick through of the
one pinto bean patch just in time before
this round of rains returned. shelled them
out as a nice break from staining. measured
them on the scale at about 10lbs. not bad
for a cover crop on a spot i'd normally have
left bare.

Staining wood, leather, lab specimens, or....??

staining the house. it's mostly red cedar slab
siding. a lot of edges that show. i still have
the eves to do (which means painting upside down
and carefully around the 70someodd vents). the
recent rains and a pulled tendon has given me a
time-out -- the foot feels better, this weekend will
have me back to it, i'd like to get this done so i
can get the gardens finished up i'd like to redo.


What do you do with the
bean vines? Do you turn them under, put them in a composting area? I don't grow
any kind of shelly beans except "baby" lima beans and we eat or freeze those
ffresh and somewhat immature. I don't grow anything specifically as a cover
crop. The garden is deliberately small and is planned around our nearly
continuous growing season. I do, however, track nutrient needs when succession
planting. Everything from the garden, including "weeds" goes to compost.

for the perennial bulb gardens i'll cut those beans
off at ground level so that the roots and nitrogen
fixing nodules will be left behind to rot and feed the
bulbs through the winter and spring. this will be the
first year of trying this approach so we'll see how it
goes.

all the pods will get used one way or another.
last year i put all the soybean pods through the worm
bins. made good worm poo eventually. this season i'll
have a lot more pods. a few bags i'll keep for the
winter worm bins, the rest will get buried or used as
mulch.

i am filling in three strawberry patches (about 2000sqft
total space) and each of those can use plenty of mulch on
top along with organic materials worked into the soil.
the compost pile doesn't get much other than stubborn
weed root clumps or seedy weeds.

for people with limited space it's not really worth
planting dry beans for that alone as they are cheap
enough in bulk. i like messing around and have various
empty spaces or patches in transition to play with.
i'll keep planting them now that i know what each is
like i can plant more suitably. knowing me i'll keep
collecting varieties as i come across them.


songbird