International edible gardening

I grow plants from seed but I buy "those plants" too but not a lot of them. They're not veg plants though - just flowers. I don't look at it as cheating because you've still got to look after them or they won't survive plus I haven't got the facilities at the moment to grow the things I want to - so needs must.

We have a Seed Swap on here and you could still take part even though you're in the US. We have members in Canada and France who take part in it.....it's a good way to get some seeds.

 

I know fern, I buy the nursery plants too - but I should know better - or plan better anyway. I know one day my area will have a plant now - fertilize now - prune now - start seeds now - app and we may as well just give it all up for being nagged rather than actual gardening - and then will really have to feel inadequate when our garden is less than great.

Actually I am such a luddite neither my wife or I have cell phones, much less smart phones. My house phone is free as it is computer based and in 4 years I have never once checked it for messages. But one day inevitably I will have a smart phone.

 

LOTS OF BEANS!

And a huge kitchen. Winter here is jacket weather, but with a couple weeks of below freezing at night, although the day may be OK - rare days stay below freezing. Last night was the first I had the air conditioning on in the bedroom to sleep.

April 1 is the recognized day to plant summer plants in the ground and march 20 when seeds get planted like squash and okra and such into the soil. Summer here is hot, up to 90F, 32C with moderately high humidity. The sun does blast you as well. By early August the tomatoes are done because the heat, late August the next ones should be planted for fall crops.

Greens and lettuce, cabbage, peas and such grow all winter. Citrus do well here but this years freezes froze all the fruit wrecking it - and froze all the leaves off the trees, but they mostly survived it.

I like the heat, nights are 80F, 26C in summer. The frogs and insects make such a song after dark, song that it is like being in a big factory going full blast with the noise. The frogs (we have 6 main kinds) will set up a rhythmic chanting and the others call back their refrain - it can be quite beautiful. The night birds are starting with the whippoorwills beginning their all night calls, fish are always jumping and splashing in the bayou - sometimes very loudly. I walk every night, and sometimes go for a swim in my pond too.

We get over 60 inches of rain a year, two to three times what you get in England, but it comes in storms, never slow rain. Three inches is a common amount in a storm, in 8 hours. in early March one storm dropped 8 inches - 20cm in a day. Then we get hot dry spells. The ground is flat and sandy so surface water is very soon gone. we get hurricane regularly - we are the nations ground zero for hurricanes - this is where hurricane Katrina hit with 30 foot storm surge and 80% of every building in town destroyed - the coast houses just ground to rubble. (27 foot of water at my house, but not moving fast like the houses on the beach got)

During the proper summer we get peppers, okra, yard long beans, okra, some cherry tomatoes in the shaded area, every day - most else has gone dormant or died.

I have mentioned how we start our evening meal with soup every day - in summer here is what I pick, every day, as a soup base - the basis of a gumbo, which is why it is a staple here



I net shrimp and trap crabs





Catch fish (this is under my house)



It is nice here, dull; I could move back to London (to live with my old parents) only recoil at that , they will probably have to move here although they will not like it here - London does have so much buzz and life, but just growing old here peacefully is what I am resigned to.

 

I popped back in to put a shirt on, it is sunny out and I am white from winter - weeding in the beds has given me plenty of sun.

I planted 4 kinds of basil, fennel, coriander (cilantro in USA), dill, and peppers that I grew from free seeds. Seed dealers give expired seed packets to the county parks dept - who next year, give them out during a tree giveaway (they give some native trees). Big bins full of mixed seeds of poor germination - and I use them happily. So next is making another watermelon frame (20 X 20 inches, 6 inches deep from scrap) because another 3 seeds have sprouted and are growing very vigorously. This frame will have 2 of the huge watermelons which I have not had luck with, and one of the miniature which have worked here.

Raised beds are a snap to weed, the soil so soft, a barrier to invasive weeds, and reachable. 3 years ago when I built my raised beds (26 months ago - but my third spring) I put in horse manure, aged but not composted, and the weed seeds from that are amazing. Any time you dig another batch is exposed and grows. The worse is a thorny one that gets deep roots and big thorns quickly so do not wait on it.

Next I have cucumbers to plant, they germinated very well, marketmore and straight 8. I may have to pickle some this year. My chervil failed to sprout again. Three times I have gotten old seed and it did nothing, which is beginning to mean something.

Shiney here are last years yard long beans

 

Wind killed my Yardlong beans stone dead over here

 

Zigs, do yard long beans do ok in England? other than when wind kills them.

We went out and dug up another 5 banana plants and a couple 4'oclocks (do those grow in England), I planted most of it but the soil was getting just too wet as I got close to my pond so I saved the biggest to decide somewhere else to put it.

I also planted another Better Boy tomato in a pot along with my pots of potatoes behind a bit of fence to keep the chickens out - my chickens love tomatoes, and potato and rhubarb leaves!

 

But chickens - you may have noticed how I salvage stuff. My chicken house is almost all salvage, and is a Fort Knox thing; we have some very clever predators here. On my property are raccoons, opossums, bobcats, hawks, falcons, great horned owls, and fox. All of those have killed chickens of mine. So I took a wood picket fence and posts from the side of the road that was put out for trash pickup and doubled it - one level on the next to make it over six foot tall. Some wire fencing I bought to secure it fully, and salvaged some - salvaged the hinges, latch, gutter, water line, bought the used plastic rain barrel for $8, and the metal roofing from a company as off-cuts for $30. The roof collects all the water they need except during really dry spells - but I have a water line to there from my well too. Got a couple sickly grape plants - growing on the sides, and inside furnished all with salvaged wood - I pick up bags of leaves for the pen litter; you can see the ground outside is leaves I collect too.



And the nest boxes inside



Ugly, but strong, and really inexpensive. I made a henhouse inside the pen but they never use it because the shade from the side slats and metal roof , and the wind breaking, make the whole place cozy - so I put up roost poles and they all like to sleep jammed against eachother even though there is room to spread out. I actually like the way it turned out because this is a hot place - and the full shade coupled with the ventilation makes it very cool during the days, and protected in all weathers. It is very strong - has been through one hurricane.

 

Bananas - I am going to start my third grove with one that I did not plant last evening. Below one of my hill gardens I put a grapefruit tree and a mayhaw in a small clearing formed where I felled a dead tree last year, and then another one that was on the hill which died recently.

So salvaging bananas, very simple. Dig them out by punching in a shovel blade all around the trunk, levering it out, knock off the soil, hack the trunk off with a machete if it is dead - but just plant the whole thing otherwise. No need for a rootball, they just grow from the corm which is the lump at the base of the trunk. The easiest transplant in the plant kingdom.

Here some of the new ones were - yesterday. I forgot I also have a banana grove begun in front of my cottage - I put two in from this load before taking the picture. 4 banana groves. With Jack dog.

Then they go into the wheelbarrow to be pushed about 300 foot to the library hill grove, and the pond grove. I also dug 3 - 4'oclocks along with these - a great plant, good size sparse bush that looks dull; but then opens with flowers in evening. Lots of smallish red or white flowers, quite showy. But it is this thin, weedy looking thing till dug, then it has a massive tuber for the root. As big as a potato. (look carefully and they are on the shovel blade) I have several in my shady parts of the hills, and now some more. The garden these are dug from is like a garden one would visit, show quality plants - kept with a part time professional gardener - and one always brings home some unusual plant incidentally when collecting there.



My Chihuahua that is the current ratty king - has gotten 3 this week. He has killed at least 100 rats in his life - he is such a small dog but loves it. Occasionally he has gotten into a big bull rat and they go at it. He will sometimes get bitten enough he will throw it off squealing from the bites, and have blood on his muzzle - and then is in in a eye blink with a grab where the ratty cannot reach him. Ideally they bite the back and shake it so hard they sever the spine - but in the fray of the first grab the dog grabs what ever he can.

 

The last of my post above was cut off - I gave this link to the Daily Mail and ratties http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...e-poison-discovered-feeding-bins-Britain.html

 

pouring rain with lightning and thunder and wind gusts throwing stuff around - and it is a very important full moon - a blood full moon and an eclipse and the drum circle will not happen now. I was going to put out some crab traps in the shallows to catch some more gar today, they are excellent to eat (could show a video of cleaning them - takes an ax, tin snips, and a sharp knife but I have been told not to do that) but when I got home the storm began - any trap gets rushed off to the extent of its rope by currents this rain has brought - so just as well they are not out.

All my poor seedlings are in a pan in trays on the hill and I just thought of them! They will be floating and many wrecked by the rain - I would guess a couple inches in the last two hours. drat, I need to get a light (I never use a light outside at night but may want one for this - I have spent so much of my life in the forests at night I can navigate well in the dark if there is a path.) and go out and get soaked................

 

The seedlings were under water - the tray of starter pots upthread - so we had had over two inches of rain. 2:35a.m. the eclipse should start and now it is 11pm and completely cloud covered.

I am very familiar with the sky at night, and day. As a young man I totaled about five years living out of a backpack, and in my late thirties lived in the remote bush collecting wild gourmet foods for expensive restaurants for 4 years- so always did solar and celestial navigation. I always could have told you what the moon was up to at any day - gibbous, waxing, when it would rise, the main constellations, the sun and compass directions. In total, from figuring it up a few years ago, I have 16 years living in camps of one kind or another.

I am in a maudlin kind of mood tonight, still too wet to sit outside and watch the pond so am in front of the computer - not a TV person much, but will go walking soon.

This picture is the Islands, Hebrides probably, as a young man. I was invited to a clan thing this summer, being part of one, and was thinking of how I could never justify it, the cost of it although lodging would be free - but money is tight. And how every year getting back in the Highlands is becoming more unlikely - somewhere I once knew as much as I have ever known anywhere.

I went broke several times on the road when young - another continent and ocean from my old bed room and every kind of security - and it could seem just too far. So far to get back that it was too much, that I was lost from that and would never make it. I remember that feeling. And tonight had a twinge of it. That all the past and places are just too far off, that I need to resign to not making those journeys again. That the Arctic, North Africa, likely even the Highlands will only be old memories. I am sure I have a couple trips to London left - and then, soon enough - those will be over as my family house there is finally gone.

That is the thing of the sky, I have it as such a figure in all my life, I know it so well, and it is the same one - but not really. I will go off walking with the dogs for a wile now - there is about 1/3 a mile of dirt roads on my bayou and we walk them daily. It is very fresh outside with the road still covered in surface water places where the drainage is blocked - the night birds and frogs calling although I have no hope of the moon showing, but it is warm and pleasant, and I always loved the woods at night.



I just realized my back pack does not even show in the above picture, but it is on and I still have it because one cannot throw those kind of things away - but here it is even earlier

I know this all has nothing to do with gardening, but outdoors things all used to draw me

 

Yes Shiney. I was going to delete last nights post but thought then why, one is allowed to be sentimental for earlier times as one moves on.

It is cool and extremely windy all day today, I will be wearing a sweater as I go out to throw some scraps to the bad chickens. So instead I will put in a picture of my wife at a remote bush work camp (fly in). This is the kitchen, the inevitable white lab in the background.

 

Don't! Your posts are really interesting and you write well. I think you could write a book about your life and travels!