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Post by chrysanthemum on Mar 13, 2022 15:11:42 GMT -6
Hurray for pea seedlings! It sounds as though you’re off to a good start, Bon, if the weather will cooperate from here on out.
I’ve never planted English peas, and I haven’t had much success with Sugar Snaps. I do have some that survived our freeze (much less cold than yours), but I’m not sure I’ll get anything out of them before it turns too hot down here. They’re still pretty small.
My kale is looking a little worse for wear after the freeze, and it hadn’t been growing much before it. At least my onions and beets are looking nice.
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Post by macmex on Mar 16, 2022 11:04:04 GMT -6
Pretty soon we'll have weeds for feeding those rabbits! That makes the meat even more economical.
I need to plant our peas today if possible. Besides the fast onslaught of heat the challenge with peas and Oklahoma is that we can have extreme cold snaps which freeze the seedlings. Growing up in NJ I never realized that this could be an issue.
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Post by chrysanthemum on Mar 25, 2022 7:45:47 GMT -6
Sounds like excellent work, Bon, and a great source of nitrogen for your compost. I hope your body is doing okay after all that labor. It’s easy to overdo when focused on a goal, and you don’t feel it till a couple of days later.
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Post by heavyhitterokra on Mar 27, 2022 16:06:22 GMT -6
Thanks, for the encouragement Bon. Keep up the excellent work. The long winter's sleep is almost over. Soon it will be time for all of us to return to our yard work. Your scythe work reminds me of the days when I envied my grandpa working his old-time reel mower. He'd never allow us kids to touch it. All the more reason for us to want to try it out.
Years later, while working for the Department of Corrections, I discovered that those old machines are used nowadays to punish misbehaving inmates. I'd often see someone operating one of those off to one side, while the other 'good' inmates were pushing motorized mowers.
Thinking about how our grandparents had to do yardwork makes me realize why so many had a flock of chickens to scratch their yards down to bare dirt. That posed the problem of needing to sweep away the considerable amount of feathers.
When I was a kid, my mama wouldn't allow a white-feathered chicken on the place; recalling all the times as a kid that she had to sweep away white feathers.
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Post by heavyhitterokra on Apr 2, 2022 17:23:29 GMT -6
Bon,
My soil is the very opposite of yours. My pH is 5.4 and so acidic that I can hardly keep cucumbers and cabbage alive, but pawpaws, blackberries, and blueberries, love it. I've put about a thousand pounds of Lime where I plant my okra over the years and finally raised that portion to a pH of 6.0.
My guess is that you would need to spread Sulfur where you are? It would be hard to say without a soil test.
It might help to look up what plants like sweeter soil and try going that route.
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Post by chrysanthemum on Apr 2, 2022 19:21:59 GMT -6
Our land is so full of limestone, we didn’t really think any amount of sulfur could lower our pH significantly. Our pH is pretty much 8.3. That’s why our blueberries are in pots, and we do our soil building in raised beds. We have had to use sulfur even in the potted blueberries after the water makes the pH rise, and it has worked well for us to get it back down. I also like to work a little sulfur into beds before planting potatoes. I also like cottonseed meal as a soil amendment. You wouldn’t want it if you were tending toward acid soils, but I find it works great for me.
Bon, I noticed today that some of my daikon radishes that I’m growing as a cover crop are sending up flower stalks. I have never harvested seed pods for eating, but I figure this may be a good spring to try some.
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Post by heavyhitterokra on Apr 3, 2022 12:06:52 GMT -6
Hydrangeas provide a decent way to gauge your soil's pH level. It takes a pH of 6.0 to 7.0 to get pink flowers and a pH of 4.0 to 5.0 to get blue flowers. Plus, they are just fun to grow as an experiment. It's possible to play around with amendments and get somewhere in between, such as lavender or a bluish-pink. If I were home schooling, I think I'd include some of those as just a fun way to learn.
Of course, kids can find a way to skew the results of almost anything. I remember when I was a kid, my mom would add coffee grounds to her hydrangeas to try and change their color. I also remember sneaking Mom's food coloring out into her flower bed and adding it to the soil, trying to change the color of her flowers myself. That works to some extent, but you get way better results from cut flowers than with the ones growing in dirt. The roots seem to filter a lot of that out. When Mom found out what I had been doing, she cut some white flowers that were growing at my Uncle's house down the road from where we lived and put them in different vases with different food coloring and we made all kinds of different colors just for fun. She was great with things like that.
Speaking of soil pH and plants; I did some looking around and finally found a list of veggies and their optimal soil pH level. It's not an all-inclusive list, but it's a start. Some plants have a wide range of pH tolerances, but others are very finicky when it comes to pH. Watermelons are one of those 'finicky' plants. I can hardly grow a watermelon here because of the acidic soil. Asparagus is another, my poor asparagus is lucky to get to the diameter of a pencil before it goes woody because it just doesn't enjoy my soil.
I used to have a really good neighbor who was an OSU Extention Agent for about 28 years; he would fill me in on things like that, so I never really had to pick up a book because I could just ask Bob Kennedy and chances were he'd know the answer right off the top of his head. (They don't make 'em like that anymore). Bob was a treasure. I really miss him this time of year.
pH Level Guide by Vegetable
Approximate pH Range:
Artichoke 6.5 – 7.5 Asparagus 6.5 – 7.5 Beans (pod) 6.0 – 7.5 Beets 6.0 – 7.5 Broccoli 6.0 – 7.0 Brussels Sprouts 6.0 – 7.5 Cabbage 5.5 – 7.0 Carrots 5.5 – 7.0 Cauliflower 6.0 – 7.0 Celery 5.8 – 6.5 Chard 6.5 – 7.0 Chinese Cabbage 6.5 – 7.0 Corn 5.5 – 7.0 Cucumber 5.5 – 7.0 Eggplant 6.0 – 7.0 Endive 5.0 – 6.0 Fennel 5.5 – 6.5 Garlic 6.0 – 7.5 Green Beans 6.0 – 7.5 Jerusalem Artichoke 5.8 – 7.0 Kohlrabi 6.5 – 7.5 Leeks 6.0 – 7.0 Lettuce 6.0 – 7.0 Okra 5.5 – 6.5 Onion 6.0 – 7.0 Parsnip 5.5 – 7.5 Peas 6.0 – 7.0 Peppers 5.5 – 7.0 Potato 5.0 – 6.5 Pumpkin 5.5 – 7.5 Radish 6.0 – 7.0 Rutabaga 6.0 – 7.5 Shallot 5.5 – 7.0 Spinach 6.0 – 7.0 Squash 6.0 – 7.0 Sweet Potato 5.5 – 6.0 Tomatillo 6.5 – 7.0 Tomato 5.5 – 7.5 Turnip 6.0 – 7.0 Zucchini 6.0 – 7.0
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Post by heavyhitterokra on Apr 7, 2022 21:58:35 GMT -6
Peppers enjoy a wide range of soil types. They ought to do well for you. A thing I always have to be leery of because of my acidic soil, is the tendency for compost to produce acid. That's good news for you though, your soil is not teetering on the edge of disaster, so you can compost all you want without worrying about whether or not you applied enough Lime to balance it out. How are your Nitrogen Phosphorus, and Potassium levels?
I'll need to have my soil tested again after adding all the tons of cow manure, chicken litter, and rabbit pellets this Winter. Hopefully, the biochar I made will help keep the pH in check.
I can hardly wait for all this crazy, muddy, cold, windy, weather to pass, so I can actually get out there to plant something soon. All I have in the ground right now are cabbage and onions.
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Post by chrysanthemum on Apr 15, 2022 16:50:22 GMT -6
You have had an exciting day, Bon. Some herbs and flowers seem to me to be hard to start from seed as well. For a while I kept failing at mint down here in Texas, and that was just embarrassing because everybody warns about how mint will take over the garden, and here I kept losing it to heat and drought. This year, though, I have some mint coming back in two spots. One is the holes of my cinderblock raised bed in the backyard. The other is in a little square of soil that’s sandwiched by concrete on four sides. It’s right next to our deck stairs, and I planted a bay tree there after we removed some nandina. I keep having to pull nandina sprouts, and I’m hoping that eventually the mint will fill in the whole space underneath the bay. I was pretty excited that it actually did come back this spring.
I have one sage plant that’s growing in the raised bed that’s a new planting. I also have one lavender that lived through winter as well as some oregano. My za’atar ddin’t survive the cold, though, some I have a teensy tiny one that I’m nurturing along inside right now as well as some wild thyme. So far only two of my six starts of that have germinated, though. Another plant I’m trying by seed this year for the first time is lemongrass. I like my plants to do double duty, and I want it to go in a planter that gets lots of southern sun. It can be a heat-tolerant ornamental that we can eat, too. It’s supposed to be tricky to germinate, so I used a bunch of seeds. So far I have one little sprout that’s growing.
We have a lovely nursery about five or six miles from our house. I don’t get much there, but I know their prices have been rising recently. I imagine that rising costs are hitting a lot of businesses hard these days. With the drought we’re having, I can only imagine the water costs that nursery must have as well.
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Post by chrysanthemum on Apr 15, 2022 20:44:03 GMT -6
I still have hopes for growing za’atar. I grew one plant successfully last summer, and it was wonderful. I loved the flavor and the little leaves. I used it in a lot of cooking, even choosing it over Greek oregano because the small leaves were easier to work with. It just kept on growing with all my snipping. I tried to root a few cuttings, but they were probably too old by then, and the winter’s crazy swing from a super-warm December to a 24 degree night at the beginning of January just did it in. Had I thought it would get that cold (it wasn’t forecast so low), I would have protected it, but I really had no idea. (We may have lost our lime tree that same night, too, sadly.) I have one little za’atar seedling that is growing from my seeding indoors this spring. It is getting to be about the size of my fingernail, which gives me hope since it starts out so tiny. I plan to grow it in the same spot, and I have a clear plastic container that will fit nicely over it next winter. I’ll try to be more proactive about protecting it.
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Post by chrysanthemum on Apr 16, 2022 20:06:12 GMT -6
Wow, a mountain valley with an olive orchard! Sounds beautiful! It was a Palestinian friend of mine who introduced me to the seasoning za’atar. She lives in America now but was born in Israel where her parents work as Christian missionaries. They had brought her za’atar seasoning on a visit once, and she introduced it to me. I would love to grow sumac here for that spice.
I checked on my little za’atar plant just now. It’s still growing inside in a peat sponge in my Aerogarden seed starting tray. It has about five leaves and is about the size of my thumbnail, but it looks healthy. The roots still haven’t grown out of their sponge, so I haven’t tried to move it to soil yet. It’s a very different experience from starting a cucumber where I have to move those practically as soon as they sprout, or else the roots get too long.
I have never grown hyssop or even seen it to my knowledge. I’m really only familiar with it from Biblical references to cleansing. What’s it used for?
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Post by chrysanthemum on Apr 17, 2022 13:56:27 GMT -6
Bon, I really wouldn’t know the difference between hyssop and anise hyssop. I did just go read up on Anise Hyssop, though, and seeing that it’s a native to the prairie makes it lodge in my brain as something that we could consider planting down here. We have so much barren land, we’re trying to get some things established that will endure and spread, but we don’t want to introduce exotic invasives. We have quite enough of them already.
I don’t think Staghorn Sumac grows all the way down here. I’m familiar with it from my time back east. I think it suckers easily, so it might work to dig up a plant. This is probably the best time of year to do it when the suckers are just coming up.
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Post by macmex on Apr 18, 2022 7:19:08 GMT -6
I think smooth sumac has a wider range, heading South, than does Staghorn. It's used the same way. Bon, I hope you have success. I haven't tried growing sumac from seed. It's a very useful plant.
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Post by heavyhitterokra on Apr 18, 2022 11:48:04 GMT -6
Staghorn Sumac grows on a long rhizome like bermudagrass. Here where I live, it's very invasive. I work to till it up and try to keep it away from my garden as much as possible. Still, it persists along the borders. It does enjoy disturbed soil and will take over where dozer work has been done. I've never tried to propagate it on purpose. I suppose it spreads by the rhizomes being broken up? This time of year it is just beginning to pop up from the root zone, so this is probably the ideal time to dig it?
What do you guys use it for?
Since it grows on a rhizome it makes good walking stick material. That's mostly what I do with mine.
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Post by chrysanthemum on Apr 18, 2022 20:33:48 GMT -6
The red berried sumacs make a very tangy spice, almost like the flavor of lemon. My Palestinian friend first introduced it to me years ago, and I was just shocked when she told me that it was sumac. (As a person horribly allergic to poison ivy, I was even kind of frightened at first.). Her use of sumac was as an ingredient in a spice blend called za’atar, the primary ingredient of which is a Syrian oregano also called za’atar. (She tells me that it’s a naming tradition in that part of the world to call a preparation after its primary ingredient; hence “hummus” simply means “chickpea.”). It was a combination of Syrian oregano, sumac powder, and toasted sesame seeds, and it was absolutely delicious.
I understand that native North Americans also used sumac berries to create a tart beverage like an unsweetened lemonade.
I wouldn’t want to plant something that would become invasive, but we are interested in establishing trees here that aren’t cedar or oak. (The cedar is considered a native invasive, so it’s possible that sumac could be like that. I’ll have to look into it more.) We have beautiful oaks, but we figure it’s only a matter of time before oak wilt wipes them out. We have put in a few olive trees, and I’d love to have a whole row. I’ll have to work at rooting cuttings again, but the the ones I tried last fall didn’t make it even though a couple had looked promising.
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