This is a website of the Curriculum Director WSU (Washington) Master Gardener Program. Good info for those interested the more advanced/Master Gardening aspects, especially her Myth papers:
g.
Thanks Gunner, this is a very informative site.
What sort of links are you after? Presumably edible, but do you have climate preferences or edible preference or......
Zone 8a WA State, between Sound Puget sound area and the foothills of Mt. Rainier. lots of good water, little sun, tall trees, offsite imported soils, 9x12 Green house and several beds, raised and yes, creosote and green lumbers. No detectable arsenic leeching!
Lots of containers to move around and manage. Pretty fair hand at cooking. Looking at more exotics to cook up. Presently have over 50-60 going. Want to double that collection by next year. Controlled Environment Agriculture and Hydroponics/Aquaponics are great interests, as well as ancient methods, especially the Amerindian and MesoAmerica, Asian and Persian. Ancient Shaman and herbal healing medicine lore, so the Desert SW is also a logical interest. Plant propagation/seed collection is another interest that I am just startin, . having problems with galangal taking root right now. Lemon grass... got all 12 stick to root. Lemon trees are growing well, can't find a Kariff lime tree up here. My have to order some stock as well as the Seville Orange. Peppers are another great interest, want to collect & grow more varieties of these, yet these are tough to do up here.
Oh yea...Sagan's Fine Art of Boloney Detection is sage advice I like to follow. I follow Dr. Lynette Morgan of Growing Edge Mag, Dr. Linda Chalker-Scott is pretty good read. Also, follow the Aztlan on
As I said, looking for some sage writers from some of the State's Ag colleges, good mag writers, perhpas some of the State's Master Gardener mags/periodicals.
You, what do you like?
Have you moved? Did you used to post as Gunner A....? If you are, then last time I read you regularly (in an ng where Offbr.... posts regularly, I was then posting as Fran H....) I thought you used to live in California in a pretty dry place???
I know that ginger is often treated with an antisprouting agent and as galangal is part of the same family then perhaps yours could have been treated too.
Lemon
heard of and probably couldnt' grow or even get my hands on. thanks - lots of meat to read up on.
plus some cooking blogs. Damn good
I find this site useful as you can search using ingredients which you have on hand and as I'm the sort of cook who cooks from the basic ingredients, it works well for me.
Lord, that's a question and a half!
If you are who I think you are, I have some similar interests to you. I have a particular interest in social history so that leads me to want to know about how people survived and often thrived in an age when there was far less technology than we have access to today and which in these days of peak oil etc may yet come round again.
I have an interest in all the domestic arts (except dusting and vacuuming which TMWOT thinking are just drudgery) so that means sewing (hand and machine) spinning (both wheel and spindle), weaving, knitting, cooking and preserving, gardening for food for humans and animals, gardening for medicine's of a folk origin, gardening for physic health (flowers), domestic animal keeping (which in reality at this stage just means chooks (and the farm's beef cattle) but I am seriously tempted to add both ducks and rabbits [for both fibre and food]. I even have a spot picked out for the duck pen but as I started building a fruit cage and needed help from Himself, I haven't yet broached the subject of the duck pen.
I tend to grow organically as I find in my situation (rural Australia - hot in summer, frosty in winter, increasingly dry due to changes in weather patterns) it works for me as it suits me 'social history' interest and it also uses raw materials that are readily available from our farm, neighbour's farms or from our fires, compost heaps, chooks, cows etc.
I am also a seed saver but a bit sloppy about it and grow only open pollinated heritage varieties of the more basic crops such as tomatoes. I'm not so fussy for things like rockmelons (cantaloups) and water melons, but they are neither a basic crop nor even one that can reach maturity easily in my climate anyway.
I also grow fruit and am interested in grafting and found this to be easy to do and not at all a mystery.
Anyway, here are some sites which may or may not interest you. Some of them are Australian sites but I find that I learn a lot from sites that are 'foreign' because they make me see things in a different light and to think about other options.
Let it just sit in the pot and be patient. It can take much longer to produce shoots than ginger, in my experience. In fact I just went through the same things with two large chunks of galangal that I picked up at a Thai grocery. The market had them wrapped in plastic and refrigerated.
I just kept the pot in indirect light with regular watering. It took at least 2 months for shoots to appear. In fact, I was about to dig it up and toss it when I saw the eyes developing and re-buried it.
Turmeric can take a long, long time, too, even longer than galangal.
Boron
Your welcome, Billy. I read most all your links, some very good ones there. I like to share info also and challenge my beleifs. Sometimes it is good to recognize we tend to cherry pick our infomation according to our beleifs and to challenge those very beleifs forces one to view the world thru a different prisim. I try not to see the world as black and white, but rather more greyscale. It that amatuer anthropologist in me. I sometimes think Americans tend to do everything to excess; eat, drink....... even proselytize. I mentioned to FARMI that I am a fan of Carl Sagan's The fine art of Boloney Detection, which many dismiss just becasue he had atheist views, completely missing his categories of stripping away the petty BS/myths that we tend to use in debate/argument. " Tools for skeptical thinking. ...What skeptical thinking boils down to is the means to construct, and to understand, a reasoned argument and -- especially important -- to recognize a fallacious or fraudulent argument. The question is not whether we like the conclusion that emerges out of a train of reasoning, but whether the conclusion follows from the premise or starting point and whether that premise is true."
here is the wiki version of his points:
BTW, 100lbs of 10-10-10 will yield 10 lbs of N, ~4.4 lbs of P and ~8.3 lbs of K. P and K are not elemental in fert labeling, you need to use the atomic weights.
I have an amateur anthropologist view also. we had a old series her in the US called the Foxfire books that I enjoyed. old stories of the hill folks, bee keeping, chicken raising, gun making, bear hunting, even "shine" stories. lots of old "getting by" stories from back in the day.
No, that is not me. we left Europe in 87 and moved here, retired in 92, did a few contractor jobs and now just keeping busy with "things". Trying my hand at Breads and Sourdough, would like to have some ducks and chicken but we live in a development on the edge of some green belts, I do have a neighbor with 8 acres behind me that raises chicken and pheasant. Been thinking of Beekeeping. Definately have to learn canning. Tomatoes are doing very well this year and expect to have a new hydro system this week and another next month to test run for greens and lettuces in the late summer early fall.
I am looking at all your links this week
Again, thanks. hope to read lots from ya.
Good to know, I checked em, no rot but no signs of roots or sprouts as yet, been a while, but the ginger took just last week-10 days, planted same time .
Would love to find some turmeric, just going through all the Indian and Asian spices to see what I may be able to maintain here. Dr. Morgan has a list of Hydro spices/herbs that I am reading up on now. May be able to heat them that way to get a longer season but still fighting the idea of lighting the green house, the nursery is bad enough.
character said in that horrible movie, Angels and Demons,"I don't have the gift of faith".
I don't think anyone here has ever recommended 23% organic matter. The range (IIRC) has been 5% to 10% but it is an important note that degraded OM can pollute in the same way as chemferts.
Considering the atmosphere is about 78% N2, and elemental phosphorus and potassium can be exciting stuff, I wasn't trying to be analytical here. As I'm sure you are aware that agricultural nitrogen comes in the salt forms of NH3 and NO3 but the percentage on the container is only for the elemental nitrogen, not that of the compound, but strangely enough the next two numbers are for the compounds and not the elements. To follow along you must know that the atomic weight (at.wt.) of phosphorus is approximately 31, and oxygen is 16. Phosphorus comes as P2O5 ([31 X
2]+[16 X 5]= at. wt. 142 for the compound, but the percentage of phosphorus is P/P2O5 = 62/142 =.44) and the actual percentage of elemental phosphorus is 44% of the percentage listed. Potassium comes as K2O and the percentage of elemental potassium is 83% of the percentage listed, or K = 39 (atomic weight) and O = 16, so K2O = 94, and %K = K/K2O = 78/94 = .83 ---> 83%.Bottom line is that in a 100 lb. bag of 10 - 10 - 10, 10 lbs will be N (as NH3 or NO3), 10 lb. of P2O5 = 4.4 lb. P, and 10 lb. of K2O = 8.3 lb. of K.
Anybody still awake?
And that's why I said it the way I did.
See:
I know the series well. I got the first of the Foxfire books sometime in the early?? '70s. I don't have the full set as some have obviously been 'lent' over the years and never came home again. I was going to throw the remaining ones out to make more bookshelf space a few years ago and couldn't bring myself to let them go.
Amazing how once one retires there are so few hours in the day. I',m amazed now that I ever found time to go to work.
Trying my
I used to make bread all the time. For some reason, I've not been doing so recently - must get back to it now our kitchen range is on for the duration of the winter. There is less of a need now as we now have a superb bread shop semi-locally. He does Beer Baguettes made form his own home brewed beer and they last about 5 minutes from the time they get to our kitchen to the time they disappear into our gobs.
would like to have some ducks and chicken but
Bottled (you'd say canned) tomatoes are a good place to start if you get some surplus. It's not rocket science and there is enormous satisfaction in seeing shelves of home bottled goods lined up waiting for the winter.
There is a ng called rec.food.preserving which might be worth looking at.
I notice that American style jars are now available here and thought I might buy a few of the smaller ones to try a different technique.
That description is in fact itself a myth, or at the very best, it is a gross generalisation of the views held by organic gardeners.
I don't know anyone who gardens organically who would say that they are storing fertilisers to prevent them from washing into streams.
She's clearly writing about "excess" use of fertiliser and that is why I have soooo much trouble with her para outlining the 'myth'.
It is far too easy to use chemical fertilisers to excess but for home gardeners who use manures, they would have to use a tractor to apply excessive amounts of fertiliser given the limited percentages of nutrients there is in animal manures.
FarmI, she was talking about landscape gardeners (I think we call them cloth heads.) who load up the soil with organic material (OM) because they read on a website that it was the thing to do. She was talking in quantities up to 33% of the soil as OM. For vegetable gardeners of any size that would require a skip loader, if you amended down 6 inches. Which is the other thing that she hammered on was amending below the root zone, especially near water. Not only would the land sink as the OM returned to CO2 and H2O but the nutrients would run-off in the manner that we condemn chemferts for.
She did four article on soil amendments (three of which I found) and I don't think you would find her exasperation so grating, if you read the first two, first, just to keep it in context.
Glad to hear you have a good baker near by. We just got one in our little town. (The town is small but there are lots of little properties around because this used to be a summer home area for people from San Francisco back in the 30s.) I particularly like baguettes, but most bakers in the area just took to calling their standard loaf a baguette. Some of them have a tough crust and a chewy interior (anything but French bread). Others put a plastic bag over them to keep them from drying out (Oy:o(. Our new baker is pretty good, but still not quite there yet with the interior of the bread.
I'm starting to fiddle with baking, just because white flour is so devoid of nutrients. Anyway, enjoy the rain. It's our turn for some warm sunshine now ;O)
Of course she is! And THAT ideed is central to my point about her first para!
She was talking in
Yes. That is why I made the point about having to use a tractor to overload a garden with organic nutrients.
No, she would still have grated. Any piece of work of that is presented as that one is in terms of the Myth and the Reality, and can be read as a stand alone piece SHOULD make clear in the first para what the hell is going to be discussed. In neither the title or the Myth section does she make clear which group of soil amenders she is talking about that only comes to mind as one wades through the guts of the doco. Loose and sloppy stuff without that precision.
Mind you, she's not on her own there. It seems that more and more people with an academic background have limited literacy skills and cannot tell the difference between a gerund and a split infinitive.
It's freezing here today and I've got a rug on my knee as I type. I should get out and do some digging or humping and toting just to get the blood circulating.
Good day to you both.
And a pleasant day to you Sir.
Gunner wrote: BTW, 100lbs of 10-10-10 will yield 10 lbs of N, ~4.4 lbs of P and ~8.3 lbs
Billy tapdanced with: "Considering the atmosphere is about 78% N2, and elemental phosphorus and
Are you confused as to what you actually said? Here is your cut and pasteed comment to Florabloom:
"If you buy a HUNDRED POUND BAG of 10 - 10 - 10 chemical fertilizer, it will contain 10 lbs of nitrogen (ammonia or nitrate), 10 lbs of phosphorous, and 10 lbs of potassium. A similar bag of 1-1-1, would yield a pound of each/bag."
Changing stories again? Not quite accurate is it nor what you now say. the same for your comment on "chemferts kill micro organisms the inferences causing nitrates in water harming babies. You BS ........alot and as we saw with Florabloom you attack when you lose.
They've all been answered. If you can't read, you should complain to your school board.
You seem to snip alot of your BS out when you get caught up in a lie Billy.
So did you say ;
"If you buy a HUNDRED POUND BAG of 10 - 10 - 10 chemical fertilizer, it will contain 10 lbs of nitrogen (ammonia or nitrate), 10 lbs of phosphorous, and 10 lbs of potassium. A similar bag of 1-1-1, would yield a pound of each/bag."
and then change it to say
"Bottom line is that in a 100 lb. bag of 10 - 10 - 10, 10 lbs will be N (as NH3 or NO3), 10 lb. of P2O5 = 4.4 lb. P, and 10 lb. of K2O = 8.3 lb. of K.
Anybody still awake?
And that's why I said it the way I did."
True or not Billy boy?
Excellent, gunnie, you followed my explanation very well.
Now to test YOUR chemistry abilities, when a weighed piece of metal is heated with excess sulfur, a chemical reaction occurs between the metal and the sulfur. The excess sulfur is then driven off, leaving only the compound, consisting of combined metal and sulfur. From the weight of M and the weight of the compound, the weight of the ulfur i the compound can be deduced. Weight of the metal = 2.435 g Weight of the compound = 3.397 g Weight of sulfur = 0.962 g
What is the simplest formula for the compound, if the atomic weight of the metal is 121.76, hmmm?
Show that you know your ass from a hole in the ground and we will continue seaman.
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