The seed catalogues have been coming for some time now. The gardening column in our paper said it is time to start onions, leeks, broccoli, etc. inside. I bought fresh onion seed and need to get the planting trays out and cleaned up.
My garlic is still standing up despite 20° F weather. If it gets warm enough one afternoon soon I will get out and prune off all of the dead branches on the herbs. Maybe I will keep some of the leaves. Should be the same as drying them.
I have a program that tracks my seeds and keeps records like where did I buy them, when did I start them (in the greenhouse or in the garden), when did I set them out and when did they start producing. My biggest problem is that the company went out of business a few years ago and every time I change computers I have to go through and fix a bunch of stuff. Seems to be working now. Fortunately it is not an installed program. Too bad Win 7 wants to do too much for you and it is not always what you want.
Here the day time temps are in the high 60s F to low 70s F. Night time temps running around 27 to 31 F. We have had 2" of rain to date. Last year it was 22". Presently, there is no rain in sight.
Looking like it will be near impossible to grow a garden this year, if we don't get some rain soon.
i'm always interested in what you are planting, methods, etc. especially when it comes to onions. this past season i harvested several hundred onion seeds and so have them on hand for planting, but my results so far for onions have been mixed. mostly i think because the weather last year was poor during prime bulbing time, but also because the starts were not very good, the soil is gradually improving, but perhaps not enough.
garlic here is under 1ft of snow/ice. the bunnies are running around making tracks in the snow. i have yet to see any sign that the owls/hawks are doing the honors for me so i may have to hunt them come spring.
it depends upon the herb, but some will not have nearly the same flavor when left on the plant and out in the elements as compared to harvested and dried.
i took a look on the web for open source seed saving software of any kind. found a few, but nothing that made me think it would be fitting for what you seem to be indicating. the name of the old program would be helpful so i can see if i can find a description of it and what it does.
Thank goodness, I received only one catalog this year and that from a particularly hard-headed vendor. I have no interest in them and the coated stock on which many are printed isn't even good for starting a fire! Did receive what should be my only seed order for the spring season last week. Still looking for a suitable "French" filet bean to replace the Delinel variety that I grew for so many years, so this year's package includes two "new-to-me" varieties. Down here, bulbing onions generally are transplanted in December. Those grown for their tops only may be planted in all but the hottest months because, even under the best conditions, they'll never make bulbs down here?not even "global warming" is going to change day length. This past fall, I direct seeded the cooking onions in one bed and they are doing as well as the transplants so that's what I'll do next fall. The onions seem to be getting along with the garlic, carrots, lettuce, cauliflower, broccoli raab and bok choy with which they're sharing beds and (most of) which will be long gone by the time the onions are ready.
Serious questions:
What does that mean?
What would it otherwise do and?assuming a relationship to temperature?at what temperature range would you expect the garlic to do it?
I'm inferring the absence of snow cover; if cold weather usually kills the tops h ow cold does it have to get and for how long?
My garlic (a warm climate "Creole" variety) spent two months in the 'fridge at ±33° before planting and is growing apace: The first planting is now approximately 28" tall (measured it this morning) and the second, set out two weeks later, is not far behind. Down here, temps in the low 30's are occasional (and of short duration?hours); those in the 20's, unusual. I cover the garlic when expected overnight lows would harm the mustard and the turnip greens (near freezing). Can I assume the garlic in full flush to be hardy to those temps? If so, I'll stop wasting my time, then. I don't have enough planted this year to "test" but next year I'll set some in a container that will remain exposed.
Lemme know how that works out. I'm pessimistic. Freezing ruptures cell walls (not necessarily a "bad" thing) and does not destroy the chlorophyll. Proper low-temperature drying reduces moisture, concentrates flavor, mellows volatile aromatics (chew a fresh bay leaf to see what I mean), leaves cell walls intact (not necessarily a "good" thing) and destroys chlorophyll, which is harsh and bitter.
Wow. Now, I feel absolutely primitive. I still use a spiral-bound notebook to track that info, with the addition of harvest dates and yields plus the date each vegetable is removed from the garden. Seed sources are not an issue because I buy from only two sources. I use a fairly sophisticated computer graphics program to record and reference my garden. The base layer (virtual overlay) holds a to-scale outline drawing of the entire garden. Each major planting ("season") gets a layer of its own on which I can enter (text), planting date, number planted, emergence, first harvest, removal in the respective beds or containers. I also record whether I had to fill-in or replant. My gardening "year" starts with February "spring" planting. Each year is an individual file that contains the complete history to date. Sounds complex but isn't and really makes it easy to keep up with rotation. At least I am not (yet) obsessive enough to import actual photos of plants but I can see where doing so would save some typing.
Fix the same stuff each time? Shoot, fix it and write the whole ball of wax?or, at least, the fixes?to a CD, maybe?
Onions are notoriously promiscuous so suggest you purchase fresh seed of a variety suitable to your tastes and to your latitude (probably "long day")?IME, local vendors rarely know either. Start fresh in "rich" soil with a boost of phosphate; a fungal inoculate wouldn't hurt, too. . I often save seeds from the generic "green" onions that we grow only for their tops but always buy fresh seed for the Red Creole "cooking" onions grown for their bulbs.
The permaculture books I've read says that at some point the predators will become aware of the easy pickin's you got, and balance will return to Happy Valley. ;O)
I buy seed for Granex and Red Burgundy onions. I managed to get 144 seeds planted in the plastic trays in the greenhouse yesterday. I also got the dead material off of the herbs. it is going into one of the compost boxes. Yesterday it was almost 60°F so I did what really needed to be done. Cold today and they are predictions 12°F tomorrow morning and maybe some snow tonight.
The program is Seed Planner. If it looks interesting, email me. This is a workable address.
As far as I remember, the cold here has never killed the garlic. It's just that 20°F is miserably cold. The garlic was planted in last October and is about 6" tall. I buy garlic from Costco and use the largest cloves for planting. After this year I will start again to save the largest cloves for planting. I had been doing that for several years but last year was such a flop that I started over.
I just dumped them into a container that will go to the compost box.
Win 7 is not as easy to deal with as Win XP was. Once I remembered that backed up files were read only, I changed them and things started working correctly.
i thought that things were getting better this year, but it looks like most of the rains/flooding and heavy snows have been in the Rockies. indirectly this benefits where you are at via the Colorado River feed to California. not as dire as it could be, but i do think it a very responsible move for the govenor to declare the water emergency.
i've not seen any actual updates on the affects of the floods yet on the resevoirs. i do recall a bit ago asking my sister (who is out in NM and southern CO) if things were ok for water this year with their resevoirs and she said they were doing ok as compared to last year. when she visited this past fall for a bit we did talk about water out there and she said that there were ponds/lakes in places that she had never seen before because of that big storm they had that caused those floods. a help to recharge the ground water/aquifers. she's been out there a long time (30yrs at least).
i'm hoping it will start happening soon as the management is agitating to get me to shoot them every time she sees one (and we have at least four of them around, probably more than six or eight).
the general problem with our site is that it is too busy (obstacles) for flying predators to get an easy strike and the only other predators than the hawks/owls/eagles is likely to be the semi- feral cats from the neighbors place. far enough away from there that the cats do not make regular appearances (but they do come through once in a while during the warmer weather as i see them and their tracks and sometimes i even see them hunting chipmunks or ...). there are tracks out there now in the snow from cat too, but nothing that looks like they actually made rabbit dinner.
i was really hoping the red tail hawk that visited last summer would become a regular. since then i've only seen a bird that might have been it once in the north hedge/treeline.
there are coyotes that run along the river but i've never seen them here. also there are red fox about, but i've never seen them here. the surrounding farm fields isolate us somewhat from the woods down the road and the road itself takes a toll on many wild life critters (free fertilizer if i notice them before the turkey vultures or crows get them).
Ah, but there exists that "meantime" before the "some point" is reached. Consider, too, that equilibrium may not include a useful quantity of the desired veggies. Bunnies and deer are (so far) not a serious hazard to my garden but grasshoppers, in seemingly infinite variety and number, are pure evil incarnate and are present during all save the coldest periods. Tried "nolo" without significant success and won't use poisoned baits for obvious reasons. Have learned the hard way that "equilibrium", in my garden, does not include baby lima beans (the hoppers eat blossoms off the racemes as if they were corn on-the-cob) or speckled butter beans. Damage to other crops is bearable?I just accept it as a tax for invading the hoppers' space?so I just settle for name-calling.
Thanks. I'll not cover mine unless some of its companions need protection. I did not plant garlic until the end of November, after the weather began to cool a bit. It already is over 2' tall, on average. One bed is interplanted with mustard and turnips and another with a variety of cool weather veggies.
I bought garlic from a Texas grower for a while but his 2012 crop failure caused me to shop around for another vendor as well as for a variety better suited to the warm humid Gulf coast climate. Settled on a grower in Arizona (warm but definitely not humid) and hope to produce starts of my own that might be better suited to this environment. Down here, the sudden onset of unrelenting hot weather in April or May causes garlic heads to divide before they're fully mature but the Creoles came to North Amereica via the Caribbean and Mexico and are, reputedly, better suited to peninsular Florida's warm winters and short cool season. We'll see....
Probably a good move :-). I just grow the frost-tender stuff in containers small enough to move into shelter. I expend more effort protecting sweet marjoram, thyme, oregano and tarragon from the harsh sun and from too much rain than from cold. I'm some distance south of the "official" ranges for those but they do well in open shade with only morning sun so I move them around as the seasons progress.
Good to know. I "upgrade" only when software and/or web sites that I "need" no longer function. I'm still running Win2k on one box and WinXP on another. Will keep an obsolete O/S at least one because the graphics app I mentioned is a ca 1990's port from Mac to 16-bit Window$ and, AFAIK, new "improved" Windows won't run 16-bit programs.
ah, that's too general of a name for me to work with, i'm getting all sorts of stuff. i was hoping something a little less generic that would let me find the company that used to sell it.
looks like there are all sorts of web apps and on-line planners out there, but as of yet i'm only finding a few more specialised programs.
what i'm beginning to think is that a small business inventory control program should have all the functions needed for tracking and expiring seeds and some small business accounting programs even let you schedule, produce and adjust inventories.
still that's much more than most people would want to get into.
Definitely; watering stations, too. We have a pretty stable non-migratory population. One contributing factor is that two near "back fence" neighbors, adjacent to each other, have taken steps over the past thirty-or-so years to greatly increase grasshopper habitat and breeding area while also providing winged adults a virtually unimpeded path to within just a couple of hundred feet of the garden. I'm fairly sure that's why the "nolo" results were not what I'd hoped. Oh, well; I was warned, albeit indirectly, by another NG member that my effort might be futile. There seems little point to trying to control the population locally when adults can just fly in willy-nilly. Adult grasshoppers travel great distances during the hot season and they are prolific. It never stays cold enough for long enough to reduce their number significantly.
Unfortunately, the Colorado River water is partitioned between 8 states. Usually none of it reaches Mexico to quench the thirst of Mexicans, or to flush out the Gulf of California.
About 60% of the water in the lower Colorado (7.5 million acreft/year) water goes to California for agriculture in the Mojave Desert, and for tap water for the inhabitants of Southern California. I'm unaware of any of it finding its way to Northern California, or California's Central Valley.
The Central Valley, and Northern California rely on a melting snow pack to feed our rivers which provide our water. Water diverted from the Eel River for hydro-electric power provides most of the water in the Russian Rivers, which in turn services the coastal counties of Mendocino, Sonoma, and Marin (North Bay). San Francisco receives its water from The Hetch Hetchy Project which transports Tuolumne River water 156 miles from the Central Sierra to San Francisco and peninsula cities (South Bay).
Local cities are taking up the question of water rationing, which was on the to do list at the Healdsburg City council tonight.
At present, there is no rain in our future. February and March are usually our wettest months (but not last year).
The silver-lining is that there should be fewer mosquitos this year.
Global population growth has shot up precipitously in the past 200 years. In 1800, around one billion people lived on the planet. Currently, Earth is populated by seven billion people, with that number expected to rise to nine billion by 2050. All of those people have to be fed, which confronts society with major policy problems. Already, 850 million people worldwide suffer from hunger and two billion are malnourished.
they are good eating. :) we have a steady population of nice sized ones by the end of the summer here. i'm always glad to see the birds wrestling them in the gravel, but to me they are also a back up food source if times get tough. they are big enough it wouldn't take many to make a nice side-dish.
seems like a wise thing to do, along with many other things to reduce water consumption and encourage recycling.
:) never free of them here once the season warms up. i found one inside a few days ago. and yesterday a lady bug which i moved to one of the few houseplants (which hasn't started regrowing again yet for the spring flowering).
today it is windy and blowing snow around. i was surprised to see a squirrel out in the wind picking and eating berries off one of the bushes in the north hedge/treeline. it would sit with it's tail up to the wind using it to protect the rest of it's body from the cold. i'd not seen one do that before here. with these really cold temperatures for this long it must be a challenge even if you hibernate part of the season... no fresh bunny tracks seen yesterday or today, they're hunkered down, like us...
when we get through to where the snow melts back i'll be able to see how well that garlic you sent me held up to the cold.
i'm suspecting that garlic regularly grown in the Carribean may be a bit tender in comparison to the garlic i've grown here for many years.
the hard-neck type has stayed green and kept looking nice at least down to 17F when not snow covered. under snow it seems to be fine no matter what happens upstairs. for damage i think it takes several days of dry freeze 15F or lower. but then it comes back in the spring anyways and does fine. that happened last season as we did not have much snow cover during a severe cold spell. i still had nice heads of garlic. this winter is being much colder in comparison, but plenty of snow cover.
sadly enough, the lady who gave me the garlic passed away last Sunday at a ripe age of 88. peacefully and at home so that was good to hear, but still will miss her as she was quite the character.
HomeOwnersHub website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here.
All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.