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Post by woodeye on Jul 23, 2022 20:36:26 GMT -6
heavyhitterokra, It wouldn't be as good as a cage, but I remember putting women's stocking hose on cantaloupes to help deter the critters. I don't know if they would be enough to stop a chicken from pecking, we never had chickens loose in the garden.
macmex, I remember growing those Hale's Best Jumbo cantaloupes for our vegetable stand. We kept seeds from cantaloupes of our own, plus we bought cantaloupes along the way when we were on vacation to other states. Never knew the variety for the most part, just knew they tasted good. The least favorite cantaloupes we grew were some slick skinned ones, must have been crossed with a Crenshaw at one time or another, not sure. We never planted seeds from one of them, but for some reason they seemed to just come out of nowhere. We did the same thing on watermelons back in the 60's. Used to go on camping trips to Lake Texoma and we'd stop on the way back home and buy a watermelon to bring home. They cost 2¢ a lb. back then...
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Post by heavyhitterokra on Jul 24, 2022 13:04:59 GMT -6
Woodeye,
Your 2¢ per pound watermelon story reminded me of the 'olden days' when I'd buy sawmill oak lumber for 2¢ per board foot down at the old Peggs Sawmill. I had an old '67 Chevy step-side pickup truck back then. For $100.00 I could buy more green oak lumber than I could haul home in one trip. I had an abandoned school bus on the farm with all of the seats stripped out of it. I'd stack the lumber inside the bus with tomato stake slats between the tiers for drying purposes and let the wood cure in the hot sun for a season, to be used later to build barns or whatever.
(Those were the days!) I sure do miss experiences like those. I currently don't know of a single sawmill still in existence. We spent quite a bit of time and gasoline this last winter, just driving around to the old places where we used to buy our lumber, only to find all the old-timers who ran them had perished. That's a very sad thought. I'm sure glad I had the chance to meet some of them back in the day and even had a chance to run a few hundred board feet of lumber through their blades while trading labor down through the decades.
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Post by hmoosek on Jul 24, 2022 13:51:18 GMT -6
My Childhood Sugar Babies were .25 each, but the fellow would give me mine. As I got older , there’s a little town off I45 going to Houston. He would stack the melons under the shade of an oak tree. Honor System if he wasn’t home. I think the were 2.00 a melon, but that’s been 40 years ago so I might not be right on the price. He grew good watermelons. I have a friend that I went to College with, her Mom and Dad were from the same Community my Mom grew up in and I used to trade them Cantaloupes for Watermelons. Sadly, I don’t currently have a melon suppler, so I’ve been buying 3 to 4 a week from Sam’s. Seedless, but they are good and sweet. Did I mention I love melon? This whole Month I’ve been eating ice cold melon for my evening meal.
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Post by woodeye on Jul 24, 2022 17:13:44 GMT -6
heavyhitterokra, I've had the same perplexing problem, cannot find a sawmill like I used to. In the 90's, I was getting black walnut from a sawyer in Western Arkansas. It was rough sawn, but I have a thickness planer. The price from him was $1.25 bd/ft, but it was high quality lumber. He's gone, his sawmill is not doing business anymore. The prices have skyrocketed so much on lumber that I have to search diligently for 'low' prices on hardwood lumber, and currently I'm buying it from a family owned company in Wisconsin. Black Walnut is $8.85 bd/ft right now, but shipping tacks on another $4 a bd/ft. Oh man, me and my hobbies! But that's okay, I love woodworking, so I'll keep doing it...
hmoosek, I would have to do that trading in reverse. I'd trade watermelons for cantaloupes. I love cantaloupes, but not watermelons. It's strange isn't it, you don't like turnips, but I love 'em. You love watermelons, and I'm not fond of them. But if everything and everybody was all the same, it would make our world a more boring place I suppose. Variety is truly the spice of life...
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Post by hmoosek on Jul 24, 2022 20:46:17 GMT -6
I’m not good at growing watermelon. Cantaloupes grow well here. I don’t know what I do wrong with WM, but they vine out and die. I grew a couple back in 2007, but we went to Branson and while we were gone, some kind of animal ate big holes in both! Looks like it could have left 1 alone, but Noooooo!
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Post by woodeye on Jul 24, 2022 21:03:32 GMT -6
I have the same problem, watermelons are just too tasty looking for critters to leave alone. They eat the pretty ones and leave the bottle neck ones alone. I will take back part of my previous statement, I do like orange meated watermelons fairly well. But it seems like that is always the ones the critters attack first...
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Post by heavyhitterokra on Jul 25, 2022 10:48:38 GMT -6
It helps to hear that I'm not the only one with critter problems, but I do wish they'd leave you guys alone, so some one of us might have some success.
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