International edible gardening

Oh, and it is that time of year again and I am sitting here! http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2663936/10-000-free-spirits-nudists-gather-Utah.html

Definitely next year though.

 

Sorry to see it's not going well with your chickens at the moment Colne. It'll probably turn out to be the last chicken you cage that is doing the naughty stuff, that's usually the way it goes! Let's hope you get them sorted soon.

The Ospreys circling around you must have been a wonderful sight, did you manage to get any pictures of them while you were on the roof?

You're doing fine Colne, as we pointed out in earlier posts, members are busy flitting around the rest of the forums here. In Britain, from March to the end of June is probably our busiest time, growing, planting etc., so we are busy helping out with others gardening problems and those members that are new to gardening. Later in the year it will slacken off and we can spend more time looking at other areas of GC. Many of us also have other hobbies and GC has forums for those too.

 

Actually, Sheal, I did take a couple shots - this is almost all of it except the shots from the roof were all trees so I took a few seconds wile down and the ospreys were out. I knew they had had chicks earlier but did not know if they have two batches. And when I saw it I was surprised at how I was tracking them at very high magnification because there is no viewfinder now days but a screen which blanks out in light instead. I have ospreys over my house all the time, and there is a huge nest at the school baseball stadium in one of the light towers. (been there always - the lights are massive for night games, and all the people - but ospreys are not bothered by humans - it is right over where I fish in the school pond to get brim for my pond.)



edit - the flickering in the nest we first thought was a chick but soon realized it was that the nest has lots of plastic bags as part of the building material. And you can hear them squeaking - ospreys are always squeaking. (a bit of bird song too)

 

Well - the problem with using ancient seeds handed out for free has done it again - I picked the first cucumber last evening and it was so bitter I have never had one like it. It must be some kind of pickling cuke and definitely not for slicing on salads. And it is a beautiful plant, lots of small fruits........Wile the straight 8 ones are covered with flowers, 7 foot tall, and zero fruit (from the Dollar Store, 4/$1 seed packets - usually have great luck with them -I know which ones those are) and the Lemon cukes have small fruits so hope yet.

Stem borers have almost completely killed my squash. I made holes (in the base of the stems where you can see the worm has hollowed it out) with my pocket knife (do men carry pocket knives now days? When I was a kid we all began carrying pocket knives at about 10 and then did the rest of our lives. Taking a pocket knife to school was the norm for boys.) and squirted in some Triazicide® out of sheer annoyance. nice, big bushes just dyeing - the problem of being organic, or having been organic. (just on this application, from sheer annoyance)

In a bit I will check the eggs for holes pecked and then release red (who escaped last night, popping open the hatch in the cage roof and flying out! - but stuffed back in at door shutting time at dusk) if any outside are pecked - leave her in if inconclusive.

And, I am thinking of beginning another incubator of eggs - any votes?

 

I thought you might be interested in the following link Colne. It doesn't state whether the Osprey has more than one clutch of eggs/chicks so I had a look elsewhere. Looking at another website the young tend to leave the nest quite late and around July/August the birds start to migrate, that would suggest to me they only rear one clutch a year.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osprey

You have nothing to lose by starting more eggs in your incubator and with the losses you've had one way or the other, it's probably a good idea.

 

The more I am informed about chooks Colne, the more I realise what a pain in the A it is getting them from egg to table. They seem as cantankerous as horses - another beast that seems to spend its life trying to get itself into hot water.
Have you had a browse around any of the other threads on GC? I never seem to see you around - other than on the Harvest thread,
Jenny
ps - our Summer has arrived BIG TIME and the ground is parched. Then we are lugging watering cans around to keep our bits and pieces from dying. I have a micro garden, pots and hanging baskets mostly and I couldn't leave it for more than a day without water as performance would suffer. We have a couple of Tomato threads , including a "heaviest tomato" competition which is good fun. I organised a TOM seedswap and had over 35 varieties in my possession this Winter which I gathered from members, advertised and sent to those who wanted to try different types. We are all trying to give our plants the VIP ( very important plant ) treatment. I think maybe I'm overdoing it - have a forest of green but few flower sets forming. The harvest will be later than I'd hoped for.
I must confess, I spend probably too much time put there faffing about,
Jenny

 

Yes. We may as well. When we can say it with equanimity, IMO we stand in a healthier relation to reality. Minds manufacture meaning and narrative and resolution because we enjoy those things. It's a rare being who finishes his life with his meanings unchanged, and such alterations are honestly come by: we are forced to it by experience's undeniable evidence. I don't believe anyone likes giving up the favourite story, being its protagonist. From this I conclude one can with impunity pick and choose one's own happiest narrative, including no answers at all, and reality will continue to be what it is. Reality can be counted on -- a respectable trait IMO.

In the garden: strawberries are ripening, larger and tastier than I expected, never having grown them before. On the three courgette plants, the first flower to open is a male flower, with many others ready to open. Had sown cornflowers around the courgettes to attract pollinators and now think I needn't have bothered; many bumblebees are about and I think the flowers may be checking the courgettes' growth a bit, so gave the courgettes an extra feed. Runner beans are beginning to flower, low down on the wigwam.

Outdoor coriander in a pot has been chomped, after a vigorous start. Thinking of trying it in the blowaway now. Year One for tomatoes here sees four of seven plants in flower, one truss of fruit set -- on a Sungold, in a container. The other six plants are Alicante (2), Moneymaker, Shirley (2), and Gardener's Delight. This last is the only other one in a container, and from it and the Sungold I anticipate the best results. The others are planted in the ground just so I can see how they go. They sit in the sunniest spot in the veg patch and I'm not sure it's as warm as tomatoes want. So we'll see. Sungold and GD are against a sunny wall. And that's the status of the edibles: time to watch, water, and wait.

I think everyone is into their own narrative, as normal. What sort of response did you have in mind?

 

The equanimity bit is pretty much straight Eastern stuff - blank mind of past and emotion and experience - But I feel Zenning out is nihilism; no answers there except the void. No I am much more inclined to your second sentence, (your answer quoted was about 42). And that this existence is the bird in the great hall (Saxon - I'll look it up)

“Your Majesty, when we compare the present life of man on earth with that time of which we have no knowledge, it seems to me like the swift flight of a single sparrow through the banqueting-hall where you are sitting at dinner on a winter’s day with your thegns and counsellors. In the midst there is a comforting fire to warm the hall; outside the storms of winter rain or snow are raging. This sparrow flies swiftly in through one door of the hall, and out through another. While he is inside, he is safe from the winter storms; but after a moment of comfort, he vanishes from sight into the wintry world from which he came. Even so, man appears on earth for a little while; but of what went before this life or of what follows, we know nothing. Therefore, if this new teaching has brought any more certain knowledge, it seems only right that we should follow it.”

This was a great bit Saxon wisdom, repeated by Hennery VIII even.


Shakespeare:

MACBETH
     She should have died hereafter.
There would have been a time for such a word.
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

We have to notice life, like the sparrow in the great banquet hall, light, sound, smells, warmth, and then - ? So we compose narratives of it. The equanimity one is that we return to the void and become part of it. The Western religion one (ME perhaps mainly) we go out of the beer hall of pleasures of the flesh into pleasures that are non-corpus, and vaster, as is the place outside the hall.

'Reality' is more of a guideline, it tends to breakdown under logic and close scrutiny - Schrodinger's cat, Heisenberg's uncertainty.........Like the fact that you cannot hit a wall by throwing a rock at it because the rock travels half the distance, than half of that, then half of that remaining distance, half of that...............to infinity, and there is still half of the distance remaining.

I guess more Sam Gamgeeesk (the third e is a bit problematic) in the main, but I suppose more of the whyness of gardening; emotion and experience in the narrative. This gardening in today's world is no more use then any hobby such as building model aircraft or golf - except it is life. One is steeped in practical life by growing things and protecting them from living creatures, and nurturing. I guess people may possibly want to wonder about that - and you do.

Must run

 

This is what I am up to:

I have a bit, but the fishing thread is not active, nor the chicken thread - I just sit here on my threads mostly.

Putting line on my light reels - 6#, which is considered ultra light here, and is the lightest one can easily buy here. I normally keep 4# in the one on the right but could not find any locally. My big rod I use 30#, the medium 15#, one 8#, and these two with light line. (I lump fishing in with chickens and gardening as one pastime; nature and gathering and growing.)

It is time for the annual change of line for new - the flaw in the line is why you lose the big one. Normally I would be fishing all the time now but the constant rain (big thunder and lightning yesterday) has kept the local water too low salinity. But it is changing and I need to get fishing - I have friends that I promised fish to, and I like to eat fish 3 days a week.

 

Zen is now popular enough to have achieved pretty total misrepresentation on this side of the planet. So I can't blame you for taking that view. The bird in the great hall: interesting that the bird's time indoors is cast as the time of comfort, when its element is properly outdoors. Might we be out of our element in flesh? During this life, I can't answer this question.

H! V! I, I, I! 'ennery the aigh'ff I yam.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=GisCRxREDkY

Yes. In this your attitude is Zen Buddhist -- especially if you face the idea of the ? with what I am calling equanimity. The ability to face an idea this way is critical to how one will face the actual experience: emotion and memory are still present, what is different is how they affect you. There are potentials in the ? just as there are potentials in the void. I find this idea profoundly refreshing, when I am busy idea-mongering.

Cool. Does personal identity remain stable? if not, do we care? and might physical senses/neurology be analogs of another kind of perceptive frame?

Yes. This is what you can count on. Reality's fluid quality is the origin of hope.

You've almost made my point for me. Popular physics is not unlike popular Zen. The void should indeed frighten us, if we are so easily persuaded that in fact, the rock has never hit the wall. The manner of speaking in which it is true has no application I know of, other than a rhetorical one.

And all this grows in the weird little garden in my skull.

 

Much better

Yoga was some guy going to India to bum around and finding some weirdo sadhu who was into contortions and spun out a good spiel of how yoga was an ancient art of mystic meditation and..........

So he brought it back to USA and in Baltimore or South California, or somewhere, taught it and it spread and was refined to suite Western's 'Eastern' take of mystical spirituality. Then after so many Americans were off to India to find a proper master as a bit of a holiday/finding truth - the local sadhus learned it from the tourists - embellished it and lay on a good 'ancient beliefs' yarn and everyone made an honest buck or got an 'Eastern' spiritual experience.

It was Chicken Tikka Marsala finding its way to India from the Glasgow curry house where it was invented (based on Campbell's canned cream of tomato soup) - and spread around the world.

Zen pretty much from my understanding was the same. But tell us what Zen is other than being everything one cannot actually hit with a hammer as it is a miasma of aimless vagueness. Chekhov writing on Being and Nothingness, no story, no plot, just angst and resignation and then they go off from their Dacha knowing the escapeless nothingness of life's march to death.

But the garden.... It is a tomatogeddon out there - all my little cute forest things have become weresquirrels and werewoodpeckers, and weremice. I am reminded of any 'multi level marketing' system of exponential growth - Ponzi, the tulip speculation, the South Sea Company, unsustainable growth, a feeding frenzy that will end badly.

 

OK Everyone back to normal - I am cool again - but I think a picture of a small alligator and a great egret taken from my porch is right for now: (old photo)



And I have the incubator full of 25 eggs of all varieties from my chickens, here it is from just a bit ago:



I seem to just keep pumping them out - low survival rate - it is a jungle out there.

but it is - I don't know to put it; fun. I like chicks and juvenile chickens; although the juveniles are pretty destructive because they fly like pigeons and cross my fences at will.

 

In one word: Attention.

Glad you're not giving up on the chickens.

 

at the moment, attention to this:

 

Oooh, my favourite brekkie - cornflakes and fresh strawberries...
Jenny