You do have to take precautions, I will look up some references later.turbo-1 said:
Of course, how bad could it be if peppermint took over your lawn? Wouldn't it be lovely to have everything smelling fresh and minty when you walked across the yard? Friends of mine had a bench out in the middle of a plot of thyme which was wonderful...you'd get the fresh thyme smell as you walked to the bench, and were just surrounded by it. Absolutely heavenly.turbo-1 said:
Of course, in their case, it was an island in the center of a circular driveway, so it couldn't escape very far.Wow! how many aromatic perennials could I get to "fight it out" over on the side lawn? I could jump in there and roll around like like a cat in a patch of catnip!Moonbear said:Of course, how bad could it be if peppermint took over your lawn? Wouldn't it be lovely to have everything smelling fresh and minty when you walked across the yard? Friends of mine had a bench out in the middle of a plot of thyme which was wonderful...you'd get the fresh thyme smell as you walked to the bench, and were just surrounded by it. Absolutely heavenly.
Just out of curiosity, how much does it cost you to grow a tomato?Astronuc said:
Right now, I buy a plant for less probably $0.50-0.60/plant, add a few cents of fertilizer, and get several $'s of tomatos per plant. We have been using our own compost for years and that is where the cost savings come originate.BobG said:
A couple of bucks buys a lot of seeds. Start the seeds in peat pots with potting soil (OK, you're out a couple more bucks, now), and when the risk of frost is low, transplant your seedlings to the garden. I paid about $100 for 400# of composted cow manure and 100# of organic fertilizer to beef up the soil in my 1500 ft2 garden, and the tomato plants will take up probably 5% of that, so we're still not quite up to a $10 investment for all the tomato plants. We will probably transplant the best 20 or so plants and give the remainder to friends. Assuming that each plant yields 50 tomatoes, the harvest would be 1000 tomatoes with a cash outlay of a penny each. Of course, you have to weed the garden, water the plants, tie up the vines as they bear fruit, etc, but that's gardening. Fresh vine-ripened tomatoes are nothing like the stuff you find in the produce section. Even if they can get the tomatoes from farm to store very quickly, they generally concentrate on varieties that have a long shelf-life, resist bruising, etc, NOT the varieties that taste the best or produce the best flesh for making sauces.BobG said:
No kidding! I can't believe what they sell in local stores.
I think the absolute worst ones are a variety called "high-pack" - the square-sided tomatoes with cardboard flesh and watery juice. Those are the tasteless tomatoes that you find in plastic trays wrapped in cellophane. Even the pricey vine-ripened "cluster" tomatoes in the stores are crap compared to what our garden produces. We will still have a danger of frost until about the last week of May, but I am tempted to put in a couple of rows of peas, just in case we dodge that bullet. They tolerate cold pretty well, absent a hard frost.Astronuc said:
Oregon is the leading blackberry production region in the world! from North American Bramble Growers Association.Integral said:
Did you get a picture of the bear!? That is so cool! We have bears nearby, but to get to my place, they have to go through several subdivisions, so they would like be spotted and either captured or killed.turbo-1 said:
I have not seen the bear yet, but from his/her tracks, I would estimate it's about 250-300#. I haven't seen any small tracks accompanying the big ones, so I assume it's a "he". We have a ton of wildlife here. Quite a few times last summer a doe would bring her twins to sleep on our front lawn. I would go out to get the paper and see a large kidney-shaped depression in the lawn with no dew in it, and two little ones next to the big one. We have apple trees on the lawn, and despite the potential problems with insect pests, I leave the drops for the deer. I got a couple of sprinklers with motion detectors to scare the deer away from the garden, so they deserve some apples. They got my best habanero plant last year before the scarecrows arrived, though. That was a big bush that my sister-in-law started indoors, and it was loaded with blossoms. They also trimmed all the parsley and some other herbs. There was a fair-sized set of tracks in the garden and some smaller ones, so it's a pretty good bet that it was Mom and the twins.Astronuc said:
Our pileateds are at least as large as crows, and the crows in this region tend to be large. We have downies, hairies, northern three-toed, black-back three-toed, flickers, sapsuckers, red-headed, and red-bellied here. When you hear the tap-tap sound, youve got to get the binoculars on them pretty quick, unless you already know their sound. We had a really bad ice storm 8 years ago that killed or damaged countless millions of trees - the bugs moved in and the woodpeckers are making a huge comeback. We must never again allow timber companies to appy insecticides to combat short-term insect infestations. If we allow nature to take its course, the birds will pull us through.Astronuc said:
Neat!Astronuc said:
I ride a motorcycle and I have to be really careful on our road. It doesn't matter how heavy and stable your bike is (Softail in my case) - catching a 20+# bird in the face will clean you off the bike and may kill you.Astronuc said:
I was the only person in my family that loved blackberries, so finding that there are abundant canes on this land was a real bonus when we bought it. There are clumps with hundreds of canes of raspberries and blackberries and I am thinking of logging the trees shading them for firewood, and for increased berry production. My dad has some nice raspberry bushes on his property, but they cannot begin to compare with the intense flavor of the wild berries on our woodlot. The berries are not as sweet as his, but the flavors are so intense that just a few crumbled berries added to a tossed salad completely transforms it. I'm thinking about making up a raspberry vinegarette salad dressing and canning it for use during the next garden season, when the lettuces, chards, radishes, etc have come in but we don't yet have cucumbers, tomatoes, etc.Astronuc said:I found another new blackberry can, so that makes 5 at least. I might double the yield this year.
I like mixed berries (blueberry, raspberry and blackberry) with heavy cream or vanilla ice cream. I also like berry cobler.turbo-1 said:
Cool! Do you have Ostrich Fern Fiddleheadturbo-1 said:
They are the Ostrich Ferns, I think. We tend to lump them together as a group, but the ferns with the the black or reddish hairs on them are avoided at all costs, and for some reason are called "brakes". They are bitter and inedible. The time to pick fiddleheads is just a little after the skunk cabbage comes out and before the Stinking Benjamins (trilliums) flower, although fidleheads can be harvested earlier or later than these rough guidelines depending on which side of the river they grow, how high the spring run-off has gotten, etc. When I was a kid, my dad and I would pick several pecks an evening for weeks, take them home and clean them, and mom would blanche and freeze them, ready for the next night's harvest. We ate a LOT of fiddleheads over the winter. There is nothing like pan-fried potatoes and steamed fiddleheads to accompany venison or brook trout.Astronuc said:
Somehow, that comment makes your signature seem very disturbing.Evo said:Yeah, you could pass for an ice weasel. I like ice weasels.
)You've got to take 'em where you find 'em. If you're going to be all high and mighty and not take advantage of the ones that are trapped and helpless, you're missing a big demographic.BobG said:
Go, ice weasels!Here is something you can try. We freeze wild blueberries, raspberries, and blackberries throughout the seasons. My wife makes granola, and many mornings she takes a small dish of granola to work, and fills a small dish with a mix of the frozen berries. By noon-time the berries have thawed, but are still cool, and she mixes them with the granola for a nice lunch.Astronuc said:
Neat! I'd like to see those.Astronuc said: