International edible gardening

Shiney, let me know if you will be in the NO area, I have a cottage. Thanks Fern. I have paperwork to do today but am possibly going to skip it till tomorrow, I could do a quick plumbing job and sort of justify it.

Then I could re-start the seeds I lost to the rain storm and do a walk around with my weed killer sprayer where some dreadful invasive ground cover plants are suddenly appearing all along my bayou's dirt roads. They grow spiny burrs that hurt the dog paws. I bought a sprayer and glyphosate just for that. And work on some more of my irrigation system - it is shaping up pretty well.

Sounds lots better than paperwork - which I did for 8 hours yesterday and am wrecked from it.

 

More bagged leaves, my wife cannot stop - and I also want to grab them. In about a month the bagged oak leaves will be over. March the tree here, the live oak, the most magnificent of the oak family, drops its leaves as the new ones come out so it is never bare - and its name. (Also has some amazing epiphytes) Then the people rake their yards and grass and bag the leaves and put them out at the street for garbage pickup. The load below is 3 houses worth. I would guess 20 bags at twenty to fifty pounds a bag as they were heavy - some chopped up and collected by a lawnmower (the best kind) some raked from around shrubbery so lots of composting leaves and sand mixed in (excellent) and others just the small, oval, flat, live oak leaves - so they pack in like playing cards to a surprising density.



This is my truck under my house - at least loads 6 this year, maybe 8, but lots of leaves for the compost piles. These are destined for the walkways and paths in my gardens mostly - I have half of a load still bagged I need to add to the compost pile already. (That is my outdoor shower at the left corner, a traditional thing to have here - for when one gets back from swimming.) We take our showers there during the warm months. The water, soap and shampoo make the grass particularly luxuriant.

I will finish my coffee and plant my okra and do some general garden cleaning. On my East pond garden the lilies and iris are all flowering, as well as some roses and weeding is called for. I also need to set up a small rod and reel with a very small lure to catch a couple juvinile bass (Large mouth bas - the top end fresh water predator here) to keep my pond's brim numbers in check. I put 14 warmouth brim in last winter that I caught from a local pond as part of keeping the natural balance.


Brim are a varied group and the most popular fish to catch in USA, they are small (bigger than this, up to 500g, a pound, typically 1/4 to 1/2 a pound) but very tasty. I chose this variety because they are the one which is best at eating minnows - the other kinds are mostly insect eaters. The bottom fish in my pond are the vital mosquito fish - which breed constantly and eat mosquito larva. Several other small fish exist, and so a predator is needed to keep those in check. (otherwise there are such huge numbers of them they swarm you when you are floating in the water - like flies, nibbling at you.) the predators keep the numbers in check, and keep the rest back in the shallows and weed beds where they do not bother you.

Now the brim breed madly so the water will be full of small, two inch long, stunted brim which swarm anything - so you need a top end predator, bass. I also have goldfish so waited on getting the bass till they got 6 inches long (I bought them 4/$1 as tiny things - in a situation that ended up with Jack dog coming home with us and joining the pack)

I try to keep the pond in natural balance because we swim in it almost daily in warm months. In this hot weather a dip is very pleasant - if small fish are not nibbling you. Also one needs all the chains to be balanced for clean, safe, water.

 

I am about to really mess with one of my hens - a big, fat, grey Orphington. In a bit of luck she has gone broody - and I have those 25 eggs in the incubator I am raising for meat birds.

So how about this: I keep her broody with a couple marked eggs till she gets at home with it - then start taking eggs from the incubator and sliding them under her and toss the marked ones! Then when the hatching begins (if it happens, the thermostat is not great on the incubator, but I think it will be fine.) she will care for them - and here is the good part - hens do not mind strange chicks being added to the brood they are hatching - so she will take care of the lot, I will keep slipping more under her.

See that was the problem. chickens will kill chicks and juvenile birds added to the hen house unless a member of the flock defends them and introduces them. (you should see a hen defend her chicks from another hen - they puff up huge, hold their wings sideways to look bigger - and attack!) but this hen will be their nanny - some of the eggs are hers anyway.

The hens, and composting and the flags were from an attempt to keep them from the garden - unsuccessful so they got wing clipped, after losing two crops to their attacks. And salvaged wood I am making things from - I use this spot as my crude woodworking shop.

The grey hen is her, or one of them I have 4


The rough looking brown building in the back, in front of the blue shed, is the hen house - the chickens are in the woods all day getting up to stuff.

 

Apart from the huricanes, which must be scary, it sounds an idyllic lifestyle!

 

Adendoll, it is pretty dull, that's why I am always up to something outdoors. Most of my life I moved around and did things - but now I am settled down, so garden, faute de mieux, as it were.

This area is nice mostly because the weather is easy - bit hot but everything is air conditioned. Hardly any crime and the people are polite. But then it is moving to a town where everyone's grandfather knew everyone else's grandfather. Locals will begin talking to someone they do not know and soon will have it figured out that one's grandfathers brother was married to the other's husband's mother's cousin.

The water and beach are nice - but what I like best is the mild winter, some freezing, but interspaced with mild days. It can be tough to get a decent job. And the innate politeness of the town Southerner is good. Going back to London it seems so very odd to ride the tube next to someone and not talk with them. That would not happen here - if everyone was not in their own cars here though. But then it is not so easy to make friends - although that is probably mostly a function my of age.

but then this is always fun, a huge bonfire of hundreds of Christmas trees on the beach. We go every year after a casual invitation when first moving here. Great big tables of food and tons of drink (here drinking till it showed would be not cool, so it is a good family party with drinking) are set out - (and a big screen tv off in a tent because it falls on an important sport night) Dozens of balloon hot air lanterns are launched over the gulf and then the fire lit and it explodes! Nothing like hundreds of dried Christmas trees. It is a lark. The stars and ocean beautiful - unless raining as it has done - but everyone goes anyway.

 

Ahhh! As I said it sounds idyllic! Looks it too ,

 

LEAFS


yesterday we saw a local cemetery had done its spring cleanup with masses of leaves bagged - (this load has already been partly unloaded) - I am parked in front of the trail that goes to the pond (my road) and put every bag from two totally full loads on the paths and opens back there. We just cannot stop collecting and are now filling a bit of low ground with leaves for no good reason other than we keep passing piles of them, well, and it will form a reserve of compost if ever needed.

So this is the new end of the pond, brown from the massive rains. Planted there are: two kinds of blackberries, 8 blueberries, 3 grapes, 1 blood orange, 2 apples, 1 pear, 3 plums 2 peach, a guava, 2 kinds of water melon, pumpkin, tomatoes, peppers, 2 persimmons, 2 mayhaw, 1 grapefruit, 1 banana, 4 mulberries, asparagus, 3 figs, and a general raised bed veg garden. More than it looks - and lots of flowers. The pier is for swimming and is meant to go into the water - off the end is a ladder for climbing up; sitting on the end one is waist deep, the pond is 12 foot deep a couple foot in front of the back pond edge where the irises are. (can you see the brown and white Chihuahua?)



And the library end of the pond: 4 grapes, 2 blackberry beds with three varieties (kioa, Navaho, Prime Jan) strawberry beds, rhubarb, lemon, 2 fig, 4 plum, 2 apricot, lots of bananas, 1 apple, 1 plucot, 1 crabapple, 1 mulberry, 1 quince, veg bed, asparagus bed, flowers, and my library.



Poor quality camera and it is much greener than it looks - spring is here (tilt screen to get greener)

 

My worm farm. That is the pumpkin that sprouted masses of seeds and I have transplanted a couple to my garden. Does anyone keep a worm farm? I would love to talk about doing it properly if anyone knows how. Basically I made a box, no bottom, on some highish place and half filled it with half composted leaves and then put veg too far gone for the chickens to eat on that and replace the cover.

I bought a small tub of 30 fishing bait red wriggler worms and put them in. We have very few worms naturally because of the salt flooding. They were invisible during the hard winter (when I dumped them in) and now are back - great big with bulging egg cases ringing them; you see a couple when lifting the plywood sheet I use as a cover.

life is a great wheel, we begin, go through our travails and works and positives, and then go back to finish. Nature is, of course, the bigger wheel. As gardeners we live it and when we reflect on nature it is an amazing thing. We grow, eat and compost, and the garden takes the waste of the plants before and grows new ones and so it goes.

I began the worm farm to turn the scraps of veg I grow which are too wilted or, or uneatable, or too rotted for the chickens. It all goes somewhere, what I grow - and the worms will go to the fish in my pond if they become too crowded.

And the water in the barrow in the picture, we get that sort of rains. That was a couple days with heavy rain. This is a very fecund place.

 

I have put in the tomato patch for canning tomatoes. 1 Roma, 4 Rutgers, 4 Celebrity.

here it is, in the small raised bed that had the clump of multiplying onions and purple kohlrabi.



9 little tomatoes, selected for resistance to our diseases. The bed is 6' X 4' if anyone remembers the old system. And those are the leaves we have been dumping everywhere.

So had to pick the onions, Just 2 multiplying onion bulbs and with what was in a pot on the other side - from 3 bulbs, I loaded the dehydrator with 8 pounds of sliced onions. My third dryer full, and so full the trays sit on the onions below till some dehydration has taken place and the trays can sit on each other.

I do all my fish cleaning and garden production outside on my truck tailgate - so easy, just hose it off and the sun and air sterilize it. Also anything that drips or drops is fine to leave. The onions were in flower but the whites were plump and the greens firm and the smell was very good and fresh. I cut the flowers off because they are tough, so they do not go in too; a pity because they are very attractive.



I went to the plant swap today and had a good time. The 80 year woman who teaches my wife's Yoga class is a master gardener who knows most of the native plants, and domestic ones. She sponsored it this year, as always, and 10 people had indicated they were coming - and no one did but me and my wife - so we got lots of plants because the Helen had brought pots of them she had propagated. Basils, lemon balm. mint, a different kind of iris and a flowering bog lily, tarragon, curry plant, camomile, and some things I do not know. A great haul, and Helen came back with us and spent an hour and a half going over our gardens telling us about what was growing. And of how she made money for university by raising chickens during WWII, and how her family grew most of their food and she could not stop doing it herself. I had fun - and so will finish here and go and make a herb bed with some deck boards we found.

 

I planted the ornamental plants from the plant swap but have the herb yet to plant - I cannot decide quite which way to go with them. Use them to fill out fruit beds, make small raised beds, or stick into pots.

the potatoes have their first flower - does that mean harvest is coming soon? this is Jan 20



And yesterday:



Two months growth, not bad. The little tomato in the left pot is looking good too - the raised bed to the right has tomato wilt so I cannot plant them there. The canning tomato bed I started two days ago have more than doubled in size! They went wild when getting into that compost rich sandy soil.

I put my fishing rods out behind my house with no bites last night. There was no bait to net so I used some frozen pogies (a fish you will hear lots about if I keep writing here; they are a big part of my bayou, and things here.) which is not a very good bait, but could work.

The bayou continues virtually fresh from all the rain we have had in the last month. My neighbor lives a 9 hour drive away and only comes here about 8 times a year, mostly for long weekends - and him and his girlfriend are fanatical fisherman. They have a small aluminum boat like mine, and a small electric motor (uses a car battery, can run for a couple hours on one - using mine I can reach the bay in 12 minutes, moves the boat at a fast walking speed - so much easier to use compared to getting out the 75 pound gas motor and then flushing it and cleaning it of salt when getting back. The electric motor you just lean against a piling under the house and it weights 18 pounds. I paid $20 for it from a yard sale.)

Anyway they run along the edges casting a soft rubber body jig right up against the grass; the fish are mostly in water about a foot deep, and near the marsh grass edge. In two mornings and two evenings out they caught 8 redfish between 3 and 9 pounds, 6 spotted trout one to two pounds, and 6 flounder from 1.5 to 2.5 pounds. Not bad, a couple keepers each trip out. (and more too small to keep redfish have to be 18 inches, flounder 12, trout 13 to keep)

We need to get the boat in the water and go out now warm weather is here. Here is my boat at the dock behind my house, notice the battery for the motor, a couple redfish - we eat a lot of fish, redfish being the main one, a small cast net for catching bait (a net you throw, I use a cast net a lot, later I will be using my big one for shrimping) Some crabs in the bucket, and all the gear one ends up taking - then add a couple dogs. But the mouth of the bay is the best place to fish. One will almost always catch a nice dinner if you give it a good try.

 

Now can I do this?

 

trying to post video from flikr



There it is - what a time figuring out how to do this, first ever video made - actually sounds like more than it was, just filmed it, never used video function on camera before.

I will try to make better ones.

 

I have got to say, that I have really enjoyed reading this....and great pictures too. Cant wait to read more.

As for planting, cant do that here until at least May 24th, as that's our last frost date, up until Monday of this week, we still had snow on our lawn...gone now though, thankfully!!!