it has been a while and not much new to report when it comes down to garden items.
at least until the weather warms up and spring gets closer...
however, before then i have to test out a few things yet, one of them, is a post to here to see who's still around. :)
in the meantime i'm discovering a lot of new varieties of beans i'd like to have, but most of them are climbers, so i don't have nearly enough fence space to grow them all. :(
hope everyone is well and avoiding the flu?
songbird
Wavs... I'm doing Spring Semester, now, but the hubby is starting seeds in a makeshift set of shelves with lighting.
Doing okay. Nature has been watering the garden.
I got grass sprouts everywhere but haven't had time to go vinegar them.
Cold and windy lately.
I'm building a new plant starting shelf rig and looking at my seed collection to see what needs to be tested and/or grown out. Cooked some "Good Mother Stallard" soup beans the other day; really good, and SWMBO approved! (They're pole beans; very productive).
Have, so far, avoided the flu; we got vaccinated, but the current strain seems different from the vaccine.
Cheers!
Just got a call that my mower is ready for pickup. I took it in last week to get ready for next spring. It's snowing but I don't think I will need to cut grass for a little while ;)
Looking through the seed catalogs and thinking about when to pull the plant lights and seed starting stuff down from the attic and get it set up.
My big problem that I'm pondering is what to do about the deer this planting season. I'd never had more than a nibble or two in previous years, so it wasn't much of a problem. But last year, they wiped out my garden.
I had planted 10 tomato plants, and all were nibbled down to nubs. Never got a tomato off of any of 'em. Same thing for two rows of green beans. I managed to get six cukes out of a row of burpless cucumbers before they chowed down on the vines and wiped those out.
I don't have to tell you all how much frustration there is to working the vegetable beds after starting seeds, raising transplants, and doing all the other stuff only to get pretty much nothing out of eight beds.
Any ideas on how to prevent a repeat this season? If I can't come up with something affordable and practical, I may have to go back to just a pot farm....only grow stuff that can be done in pots on the deck, which means no full size tomatoes, green beans, peas, and the rest of the good stuff.
I've considered hoop frames with netting, but that's a PITA to weed and harvest. Ditto individual netting or chicken wire around each bed. Spraying eight beds all spring and summer with a milk/water mixture isn't too viable either over a long period.
Help!
Nyssa, who after two whole days of gloom and rain now is getting snow showers instead
yep
Still gardening. Picking English peas, turnips & mustard greens. Watcing spinach and carrots grow. Time to transplant onions. Probably put'em in with the existing spinach. Chilly weather knocked the blossoms off of the strawberries and killed all of the eggplants. I covered that bed but did not provide heat. Noticed a few blossoms coming back on the 'berries. Fall-planted mustard greens are in full bloom. I leave them as long as possible because the bugs don't have much else this time of year. Have a bed prepped for more carrots along with spinach or turnips; haven't decided which. Time to prep a bed for Spring peas, to be planted next month.
Spending some time rehabbing a middle-aged very German automobile.
Simplest thing would be to put stakes around garden and hang netting. Deer can jump a 6 foot fence but they do not have to be that high. Deer just nose around like world is their salad bar and bumping into netting will deter them. They are not particularly interested in things like tomato plants or beans but nip at anything green. Their fondness is for things like nuts and apples and they will seek them out.
Deer and shade drove me to the deck but it was a lot of work. I got a new deck last year and hauling big pots of dirt off old deck ,10 ft. high, was not worth the work of putting them back.
I haven't started any seeds for this year yet , but I did recently pot a bunch of starts of house plants (variegated ivy and some spider plants)for sale later this spring . I'll need to build a shelf to hang in the window for my seedlings , but won't need it for another month or so .
The wife and I have bad colds this week but seem to be improving. I hurt my leg a bit by hopping off the backhoe too energetically; that's down to a m inor limp at the moment but has impacted my activity for the last few week s. Not that there was a lot to do anyway. I hope to be back to normal soon so that I can cut some firewood trees in February.
I did manage to bring in a few buckets from the compost pile to the greenho use, where my wife has been repotting the citrus trees and starting some se ed trays.
Paul
Nyssa wrote: ...
a fence is only thing reliable enough. 8ft high. if you do the bottom part right you can also cut down on rabbit and groundhog issues too.
never keep eveything out (birds, chipmunks, squirrels, cats, raccoons, ...) but a good fence does cut down on how much traffic you get and that increases the odds in your favor.
raccoons pretty much ignore our fenced garden because we do not grow sweet corn.
whatever we grow outside the fence is considered possible deer, etc. food. some years they don't bother things, other years they do a lot of feeding.
some years go well, just have to be sure to take into account that this is not a controlled situation, between weather and animals. learning to accept and be humble is a good exercise for the character.
planting in different places, and decoy crops can help. but then they may not too. last year i tried to decoy chipmunks with sunflower seeds they still got almost all of my edamame soybean plants as soon as they sprouted. li'l buggers...
songbird
Don't check this group very often at this time of year since there's not much doing in the garden department around here. Weather has been on a real roller coaster ride for a couple of months. Minus 2ºF early this morning and up to a balmy 24ºF right now. Had some errands to run in town yesterday but had to get the snow blower out and clear the lane before we could leave. Haven't had the flu for at least the last 40 years and have avoided it again this year so far. Maybe that's because I've not had a flu shot for at least the last 40 years as well. Anyone heard from George Shirley? We used to email back and forth a bit over the years but the last one I sent a while ago came back as undeliverable.
Ross. Southern Ontario, Canada
Yes, 'bird and I have contacted George privately. He is out of communication with usenet, uunet, NNTP, newsgroups, but the email addey he used in this ng is valid. Along with computer-related tech difficulties, he seems to be experiencing a resurgence of past health issues.
I miss his posts too. We're about the same age and I see these problems popping up more often with folks our age. I hope he is OK and recovers and comes back here.
Frank wrote: ...
i asked him if he needed help and pointed him to a free service, but he said he wasn't going to mess with it, so i doubt we'll see him again here unless he gets really bored with things and needs to stir up trouble or something. :)
songbird
I hope he runs out of library books. Maybe that will get him motivated to get one of his decendants to help him get a news feed set up again.
I miss his wit and wisdom, and he might just miss sharing his time with us here and in the preserving newsgroup... I hope.
Nyssa, who knows that Usenet needs all the help it can get with regular posters and even lurkers these days
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