Actual Farmer Thread - Also Gathering and similar stuff, just nothing related to hunting

  • 🏰 The Fediverse is up. If you know, you know.
  • Want to keep track of this thread?
    Accounts can bookmark posts, watch threads for updates, and jump back to where you stopped reading.
    Create account
I'm overrun with weeds right now after a ton of rain, so I'll have to take care of all of that before I can really start planting. There's snails hiding everywhere and my opossum friends haven't been coming around to eat them. My berry bushes look like they'll do well this year from the rain, I just need to do some much-needed pruning. There's a huge mass of blackberry bushes on the way to my work, but they've never really given many berries because we've been in a drought for so long. I think it's just overcrowded itself in general. I do hope that I'll be able to forage from it this year.

I've got some peppers started in the greenhouse, plus some peas, green beans, and a few flowers. I need to get some tomatoes started too, but I need my outside tomato area prepped for that. Of course, they seem to like to be just about anywhere. I've got a plant that has survived since last year that randomly popped up in an aloe pot, and there's one that popped up by a path.
 
Think I'm gonna do tomatoes and zucchini again this year. Cutting down on my veggie growing to focus on the main garden in the front
 
Sword Fighter Super said:
Dandelion greens are bitter as fuck, but they’re really good for you.
I’ll harvest the ones in my yard because I don’t use any plant or insecticides.

I like harvesting wild berries too.
Click to expand...
After my pet tortoises ate all the wild dandelions in the yard, I started growing a cultivated strain of French dandelion (just pocketed some seeds last time I was in Paris, where they escaped from 19th c. fresh markets and grow randomly around the city). I recommend actually spending money on these seeds if you have a taste for dandelion! The young leaves are less bitter, the center ribs are more tender, the whole plant is easier to clean, and you can go out and put glass jars over the plants while there's still snow on the ground and start getting fresh greens very early in the season.

When the New York Public Library started digitizing its menu archives, I tried to recreate a few old-fashioned dandelion dishes with wild dandelions for funsies, and they were...not good. Then I tried again once I had the cultivated dandelions, and the results were night and day. I really like these greens, and it's just kinda neat to bring back extinct dishes using forgotten ingredients.

MerriedxReldnahc said:
I'm overrun with weeds right now after a ton of rain, so I'll have to take care of all of that before I can really start planting. There's snails hiding everywhere and my opossum friends haven't been coming around to eat them. My berry bushes look like they'll do well this year from the rain, I just need to do some much-needed pruning. There's a huge mass of blackberry bushes on the way to my work, but they've never really given many berries because we've been in a drought for so long. I think it's just overcrowded itself in general. I do hope that I'll be able to forage from it this year.

I've got some peppers started in the greenhouse, plus some peas, green beans, and a few flowers. I need to get some tomatoes started too, but I need my outside tomato area prepped for that. Of course, they seem to like to be just about anywhere. I've got a plant that has survived since last year that randomly popped up in an aloe pot, and there's one that popped up by a path.
Click to expand...
Man, I am already looking forward to berry season. I just cleaned up the wineberry patch at the edge of my property - clearing out the old canes really does wonders for the yield. It's getting harder and harder to find black raspberries growing wild around here, so I might try to dig out the wineberries and swap in some black raspberry canes, but that's going to be a hell of a job.

Envious of your greenhouse - I've got a light-and-fan seed-starting setup on top of the laundry machines, but it would sure be nice to have more elbow room. What kind of tomatoes are you putting in? I'm always curious what varieties do well in which conditions!
 
Durable Mike Malloy said:
After my pet tortoises ate all the wild dandelions in the yard, I started growing a cultivated strain of French dandelion (just pocketed some seeds last time I was in Paris, where they escaped from 19th c. fresh markets and grow randomly around the city). I recommend actually spending money on these seeds if you have a taste for dandelion! The young leaves are less bitter, the center ribs are more tender, the whole plant is easier to clean, and you can go out and put glass jars over the plants while there's still snow on the ground and start getting fresh greens very early in the season.

When the New York Public Library started digitizing its menu archives, I tried to recreate a few old-fashioned dandelion dishes with wild dandelions for funsies, and they were...not good. Then I tried again once I had the cultivated dandelions, and the results were night and day. I really like these greens, and it's just kinda neat to bring back extinct dishes using forgotten ingredients.


Man, I am already looking forward to berry season. I just cleaned up the wineberry patch at the edge of my property - clearing out the old canes really does wonders for the yield. It's getting harder and harder to find black raspberries growing wild around here, so I might try to dig out the wineberries and swap in some black raspberry canes, but that's going to be a hell of a job.

Envious of your greenhouse - I've got a light-and-fan seed-starting setup on top of the laundry machines, but it would sure be nice to have more elbow room. What kind of tomatoes are you putting in? I'm always curious what varieties do well in which conditions!
Click to expand...
That's actually really interesting about the dandelion thing, I will have to try it out
 
Bugaboo said:
That's actually really interesting about the dandelion thing, I will have to try it out
Click to expand...
One thing I just thought I'd mention: When you're on the hunt for for a cultivated strain of dandelion seeds, make sure you're getting actual dandelion (Taraxacum officinale) and not red dandelion (Cichorium intybus) because that's a kind of Italian chickory . Not every heirloom/specialty seed vendor is super-clear about this.
 
We just threw a backyard garden together, tore out all the weeds in a patch and tilled the earth, kept it wet and threw some cheap seed in the earth, Green peppers, Carrots, Tomatos, bush beans and watermelon, with additional tomatoes, flowering bushes, Rosemary, and White Sage going into our seedling setup tomorrow with an indoor cinnamon tree in the works. We just cleared out this tiny backroom with a giant widowspace that we're going to use for indoor growing, lots of fruiting exotics!
 
Durable Mike Malloy said:
Envious of your greenhouse - I've got a light-and-fan seed-starting setup on top of the laundry machines, but it would sure be nice to have more elbow room. What kind of tomatoes are you putting in? I'm always curious what varieties do well in which conditions!
Click to expand...
I do really well with cherry tomatoes, so I always have at least 5 plants going during the season. I also like growing kind of unusual colored varieties like the Berkley Tie-dye ( I think it's called). I live right on a coastline so the temperature is pretty mild all year, as long as I plant them in a really sunny spot they'll last well into the fall sometimes.
 
MerriedxReldnahc said:
I do really well with cherry tomatoes, so I always have at least 5 plants going during the season. I also like growing kind of unusual colored varieties like the Berkley Tie-dye ( I think it's called). I live right on a coastline so the temperature is pretty mild all year, as long as I plant them in a really sunny spot they'll last well into the fall sometimes.
Click to expand...

Aw, the Berkeley Tie Dyes are such pretty tomatoes - I just haven't had good luck with them. I suspect my backyard conditions are fundamentally out of step with Brad Gates' breeding program, since he's focused on plants robust to his local experience of climate change. With the exception of Solar Flare, I find his introductions struggle with mealiness and late blight.

Here, we've been enjoying salad greens from the cold frames for a while, and I was able to harvest a scant handful of ramps from my slowly-expanding ramps patch to braise in oil and serve over homemade spaghetti. Maybe in a hundred years I'll have enough for ramp butter, or ramp pesto, or just a big mess of stewed ramps over cornbread. One can dream.

This year, I planted sugar snap peas and snow peas a little earlier than usual in an attempt to spread out spring garden tasks, and they've just been sort of hanging around waiting for the soil to warm up. I don't think it saved me any time - because I planted before weeds came up, I had to not only prep the bed but also go back and weed, when usually this is accomplished in one step.

Now that nights are not so cold, rhubarb and fuki are taking off - they're both "spring tonic" vegetables, which is a polite way of saying they'll give you the shits if you eat too many of them, so I've been trying to share them with neighbors who have no idea what they are and don't want them!

A former roommate recently told me that, where her family is from in Japan, Hosta are also considered one of the "mountain vegetables" people look forward to going out and foraging in the springtime. So I picked a bunch of shoots from whatever Hostas around the yard were established enough to withstand harvesting and tried them out. The standout variety was H. montana, which turned out to be a traditional culinary plant that is now mostly used as an ornamental. Sometimes it shows up very cheap in the garden centers at big box stores around here. None of the ones I tried were bad, though. They all taste sort of like a cross between asparagus and a mild onion, with some being more asparagus-forward and vice versa. I liked the furled shoots best picked fresh and cooked right away in a fast pan, like you'd do with skillet asparagus.

In the fall, I'm probably going to split up my H. montana clump and plant a row of Hosta just for eating along the shady side of my vegetable garden. Ever since we moved here, I haven't been able to figure out where to put an asparagus patch. Rather than struggling to make asparagus grow under marginal conditions, I'm so pleased to stumble on an alternative that's beautiful and delicious and also likes it here.
 
Scene report from Casa de Reldnahc. I've got cherry tomatoes, peppers, and basil in a planter bed surrounded by liner to keep my cats from thinking it's a really fancy littlerbox. Unfortunatly they also think it's a really awesome napping spot and that basil is the best thing ever, hence the wood scattered about to make it harder to sit in.
20190531_142248.jpg
There's a few full sized more tomato plants, some barely sprouted ones, (beefsteak, sunrise bumblebee) and greens in another row next to the planter.
20190531_142434.jpg
The rain has been great to the grapes, which were looking pretty sad for a while. Somewhere in there is a kiwi tree which has also been struggling but is coming back nicely.
20190531_142653.jpg
To the left you can kind of see another planter which just has some flowers for now.
Not pictured are the greenhouse stuff (beans, peas, tomatillos, flower sprouts, Catnip), herbs, lavender, a few small fruit trees, and the various berry bushes. Also there's a pair of rose bushes that were planted by my great-grandparents, so they're 40+ years old and look kind of awful. My knowledge of roses is only slightly better than my knowledge of Swahili so these poor girls aren't in the best hands, but after some aggressive pruning of the nasty bits I was rewarded with a few blooms.
20190528_173346.jpg

Note the white powder- that's from the area not being full sun anymore. The house next to us wasn't there when these were planted.
 
Around here, everything's been taking a backseat to this damned drainage project. In the grand scheme of things, it's a pretty small-scale endeavor, but for just me and a shovel in rocky soil, it's more work than I'd planned on. The neighbors' clearing and grading redirected all the melt runoff into my middle backyard, where the soil is only 4-6 inches above bedrock at the uphill property line. So it's utterly inadequate to the task of handling the increase in water volume, and on top of that, it's been a wet spring. A literal creek started running through the middle of my yard into the vegetable patch. Hahahhaa fuck me.

I ended up having to dig a diversion trench that drains almost half the uphill property line into a swale, and from there, the groundwater percolates down into the water table. It's eliminated the standing water in my vegetable garden, along the downhill property line, and even in my downhill neighbor's wet patch. Now the only surface pooling is in my bog garden, where I want it. The Japanese primroses and fuki are very happy there.

The bog garden should persist throughout most of the year as a black leaf pool, but I expect the swale and berm to be in dry shade for most of the summer. I intend to plant the berm with buttonbush, winterberry, arrowwood, highbush blueberry, sedge grass, and marsh fern, as a transition between my ornamental garden and the native woodland. I'm actually pretty pleased with how this is turning out. I'll keep the open trenches until next spring, see if the setup needs any tweaking, and then close it into a French drain.

The vegetable patch will have to coast for a week while I'm otherwise occupied, but after that, I'll have to take down part of the fence to build a permaculture bed. Not looking forward to that, particularly, but I am looking forward to putting in some squash, beans, and melon.
 
My dad's side of the family started a pretty good size hazelnut orchard on my late grandfather's property a few years ago, I work on it off and on when weather permits. At some point in the future I'll be inheriting at least two shares which hopefully should let me live off each year's harvest.

At my own house I have a veggie garden and planted a few dwarf fruit trees but only half of them survived (:_(
 
Welp, I took down the fence to work on the permaculture bed before going away for the week, and rabbits decimated the last of the peas and cool-weather greens. We had just about all the peas we wanted to eat fresh already, but we won't have any for the freezer and I'll have to rely on last year's saved seeds for next year's planting. Oh well. At least the baby bunnies are really cute and fun to watch, if you don't think too hard about their destructive capacities.

I decided to let a buddy use my community allotment this year, as I'm looking at some mobility issues and limited free time as we head into summer. So from here on out, it's all about the raised permaculture bed in the backyard. This week, I'm going to finish prepping and planting for beans, squash, tomatoes, and peppers, and then start pumpkins and gourds in July for a later harvest in the fall.

Right now, the container citrus are coming ready, which is lovely. The Meyer lemons blush up just as the amaryllis begin blooming, which makes the back deck feel like a tropical paradise. On the sunny side of the house, my container fig is fully leafed out, so I'll be making toasted fig leaf gelato over the weekend. Unfortunately, my buddy who keeps backyard goats is moving away, so we won't be doing goat cheese aged in fig leaves this year. But before long, the farmer's market will open and we'll have fish steamed in fig leaves on the grill. The guy who used to run our local seafood shop closed down his storefront when he semi-retired, but he still sells from his refrigerated truck at farmer's markets in the summer - at closing time, he'll swap me fish or clams if I bring him a home-cooked dinner.

Strawberries are ready, which means strawberry-rhubarb everything, and it looks like it will be a good season for the blueberries and raspberries, too. Sadly, the apple fence struggled with wet feet all spring and hardly set any fruit. As long as it survives, I'll count it a win for this year - actually, I'll probably end up removing all the baby apples so the trees don't waste their energy. Local apples are so cheap in season that I only grow a couple of hard-to-find historic varieties for fun and aesthetics, but I sure don't mind having the apples, either.
 
The cherry tomato patch in back of my workplace has been resurrected from seemingly total destruction and death, so this summer I think I will get a good haul. The old patch was growing low at ground level, so it was sometimes a pain to harvest in the heat, but this new patch is growing at chest height, so it's very easy to access. There's about 4 separate sprawling clusters of the tomato plants, each one looking like it will bear anywhere between 20-40 tomatoes at a time, and it looks like I will only need to wait another week before I can start the first harvest.

I just have to hope the animals and hoodlums don't eat them before I do.
 
We have some apple trees and asian pear trees on our property. we didn't get a good haul last year because some bugs got at the fruit, but things are looking up this year. We use the fruit for really nice pies.
One year we filled up like, a dozen five gallon buckets with fruit. It was great. The apples are nice and tart, but not overly so.
We also have juniper trees where I live, Juniperus monosperma specifically. You can chew the cones, or rather the berries, but they have a strong, sweet taste that can get cloying after a while.
 
Past two years I've grown small patches of elephant garlic each year for personal use. Starting the prep soon to plant a 1/10 acre around October to see if we can untangle ourselves from working from the man in another year or two.
 
Like five varieties of tomato, corn, some peppers, parsley and flowers growing, as well as a raspberry bush I planted this year in my mom's garden. She has a biiig pile of compost baking in her yard.

Blackberry bush also came back to life this year and it's growing fast.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom