Gardening

Woman growing strawberries in a covered net box
Food

5 tips on growing strawberries

Are strawberries your favorite fruit?

Want to grow them yourself at home?

Here’s 5 tips on how to grow more strawberries than expected! Practice makes perfect so don’t worry if its your first time gardening.

  1. Make a bed of strawberries. Plant them evenly.
  2. Protect your plants from birds and other critters. Make sure to cover your strawberry bed!
  3. Choose a strawberry cultivar that is known to produce a large berry crop. As most would say, short-day varieties will give you the most strawberries.
  4. Most varieties of strawberries produce runners. These runners will eventually develop their own roots, resulting in a clone plant. Once these adventitious roots establish in the soil, the

    runners begin to dry up and shrivel away. After removing the runners, the plant can absorb more nutrients, which leads to producing more than expected. It’s quite simple to plant strawberry runners. All you have to do is dig around the plant and gently pull it up!

  5. To keep your fruits fresh and healthy, use mulch that decomposes and fertilizes the soil. It will feed your plants and prevent grass and weeds from growing with your strawberry plants.

And there you have it. A bunch of berries! All you have to do now is pick them and enjoy the fresh juicy taste of the red luscious berry. Permaculture experts say that growing asparagus next to your strawberries gives better results.

 

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Community

Never buy grain for your chickens again!

When I picture raising chickens, it’s always free range (of course!), I see a farmer walking through a flock of hungry chooks tossing handfuls of grain onto the ground for feed. It seems that Karl Hammer has figured out how to raise chickens, over 600, without having to purchase even one bag of grain. Watching this video, it’s amazing to see all of these chickens roaming free, scrambling over and digging up tall mounds of compost. Karl is a compost king, he has various (and huge) compost piles set in strategic places to funnel and capture the leachate that drains through and from each pile into the next. This is designed so that none of the nutrients are lost and they don’t end up polluting their potable water source nor the neighboring properties.

These compost piles consist of many different sources of material, from cow and donkey manures, waste food from various restaurants from town and the other things you would find in a compost pile. They are HOT, meaning they are active, in fact, Karl is producing his first batch of black garlic in one of the heated piles. I had never heard of black garlic, but it’s something I am very interested in now, you can learn more about it here.

I started watching this video thinking I was only going to learn about chickens and compost, but Karl has much more up his sleeve than that. He raises and uses American Mammoth Donkeys (Jackstock), seems they were very important in history, in the USA and in other countries, one of his jacks ancestry goes back to an animal that was given to President Washington by the King of Spain, another gift came from the Isle of Malta.  (LINK) These animals not only provide valuable manure, they are working animals, pulling equipment and being guards for the other livestock on the farm.

Watch and enjoy the video, I certainly did.
https://youtu.be/IWChH9MHkHg



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Planting by the moon, hype or help?

I was born in 1965 so I grew up less than one generation removed from those in my family who really farmed and those who went through the Great Depression. We saved everything, we didn’t throw anything into the trash until it was used up, worn out, reused and even then, it would be more likely put aside for parts…

I remember hearing my dad talking about “planting by the moon” as I grew up, one summer he decided it was all nonsense and would just plant whenever, with no regard to what the moon cycle was doing. Well, that year our garden wasn’t as good as it usually was, after that, we went back to planting by the moon.

What does that mean? Well, to simplify it, anything that is harvested from underground (root vegetables, carrots, onions, potatoes) need to be planted by the “dark of the moon”, when the moon is past full going toward the new moon. Anything that is harvested above ground, (corn, tomatoes and the such) should be planted by the “light of the moon”, meaning after the new moon going toward the full moon. If you get an “Old Farmer’s Almanac” it will get even more detailed as to the specific dates when you should plant based on the moon phases.

There is science behind this, it’s not hocus pocus, the moon affects water on earth, just look at what it does to the tides. Here is a video explaining how all of this works.

https://youtu.be/kYtnZPuP4zk

What about you? Do you plant by the moon? Do you believe in it or do you think it’s nonsense? Let me know below!



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Straw bale gardening
Community

Growing in a bale

Surely growing in a straw bale couldn’t possibly be as good as growing in the soil…

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Community

Hugelkultur

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Hugelkultur, pronounced hugle (like bugle but with a “h”) culture, it’s really simple, combining raised beds with lots of organic material under and on top of the mound. You take wood logs and twigs, preferably older ones but fresher ones can be used, cut them to the length of the bed you want to create, lay them in a pile then put dirt on top of them, you will be planting in this dirt. The idea is the wood logs decompose and hold lots of water, meaning you don’t have to water as often. It’s a win win situation. Some even work swales into the hugelkultur beds to help capture water that would otherwise run off too quickly.

I know it’s the end of the summer gardens for most of us, but this is the perfect time to begin planning and building our gardens for next summer. I still want to make a keyhole garden, I might incorporate some of the hugelkultur into a keyhole garden by using decaying wood logs and twigs that we have an abundance of around here, putting it in the base of the keyhole garden. Also working with the rocks and wood when the temps are cooler will be safer (for me) from snakes, scorpions and other creepy crawlies that sting and bite.

Here are a couple of videos about hugelkultur gardening.

https://youtu.be/Sso4UWObxXg

and

https://youtu.be/Lkx2JFO0Dhw



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Community

Strawbale gardening dangerous?

strawbale

I have always loved the idea of using straw or hay, lots of it in my garden as a thick mulch, I follow the Ruth Stout methods of gardening. Then came strawbale gardening, planting directly in the strawbale itself, I witnessed one of these gardens planted by a neighbor who had very rocky soil and couldn’t grow anything before, her tiny strawbale garden exploded with veg, it was very happy there.

Now I discover that with all the pesticides and poisons that are being sprayed, it’s now a problem for those of us who just want to garden using straw or hay. I was under the assumption that if you got something that was used for animal food and bedding that it must be safe, turns out I was making huge and incorrect assumptions.

It seems that it is common practice for the farmers to spray their fields with weed killer and pesticides, it’s apparently not a major issue for the animals eating it, though honestly I can’t see how it can be good for them. But once these contaminated bales hit your soil, they can and do affect how your are able (or not) to grow your food. What you thought was safe and organic is not so safe to use.

What can you do? You must find out the history behind that bale of hay or straw before purchase, find an organic grower and stick with them, yes it may cost you more, but how much is your health worth? You might even be able to get a better price on “old” or spoiled hay or straw from an organic grower.

You can learn more about this here:
https://thegrownetwork.com/hidden-dangers-straw-bale-gardening/




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Community

Keyhole garden

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It’s so nearly spring, I am itching to get out and do some gardening, I’ve been getting seed catalogs, the siren song of the gardener. About a year ago (+/-) I discovered another method of raised bed gardening, it’s called a keyhole garden for obvious reasons, it looks like a keyhole from above.

From what I can see, you make a round raised bed with a notch in it that goes to a central basket that holds compostable materials, kitchen scraps, fruit & veg, egg shells, coffee grounds (including the filter), paper, cardboard, grass clippings and the such. The garden is watered through this middle part, transferring the nutrients from the decomposing material in the middle to the garden that surrounds it.

The notch is important, it allows easy access to the central basket to add more compost and water, you also need to be able to reach every part of the garden area, so don’t make it too large, you can always build more keyhole gardens as needed.

I have seen many materials used for the outside, from bricks, to pavers, rocks, some are cemented in to make a permanent structure, others are just dry stacked so they can be removed later, it can even be made from wood, metal or plastic. I watched many videos on how different people make theirs, some do it very simple, others more elaborate, one I saw this evening looks pretty good, but I saw the builder do something I probably wouldn’t do, after marking out the circle, he used a fork to dig up the soil, the reason I wouldn’t do that is because you aren’t using THAT soil to plant in, you are placing layers of cardboard, paper and mulch type materials in the base, you don’t add soil until the last foot, so disturbing the base layer of soil is not necessary and it seemed to me it would be counter productive.

Here are a few videos you can watch to get a better idea of how this is done, enjoy!




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Community

Air pruning?

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Ever heard of air pruning? Neither have I… I just watched this video and I’m blown away, I think of all the people who do container gardening for many reasons, some don’t have the space, some rent and aren’t allowed to till up the grass/lawn, others have poor or no soil.

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Community

Autumn is coming, what’s in your garden?

garden-07It’s hot, hot hot, those of us with gardens are in full swing… now it’s time to start your fall gardens. Things like greens, spinach, lettuces, garlic… honestly in the past, I haven’t given much thought to fall gardens, I have gardened so hard all summer that I’m pretty worn out for thinking about planing more things. But this is not the mindset of a good homesteader or off-gridder, especially if you are relying on that garden to supplement your food.

So let’s keep that excitement we had during the late winter and spring and get that fall garden started!

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Gardening roundtable

Last Sunday afternoon, I went to a gardening roundtable discussion in my community. I live on a mountain side in the high desert of far west Texas (yes, Texas does have mountains, the Davis Mountains to be exact). It was quite interesting talking to the various gardeners out here. Some were just starting out, some were experienced gardeners but not in this location, and some had gardened out here for many years.

I have been really itching to get out and garden this year, I haven’t gardened much for the last 2 years because of water issues, we didn’t have much of a rainy season those two years. Our rainy season usually starts in July(ish) and ends in September(ish), during those few months we get most of our yearly amount of rainfall. It’s hard to wait for the rainy season to start, typically I would start in spring and hand water.

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Community

Stellar Gardens project

Son of Graham Nash moves from Manhattan to Hawaii

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Seed catalogs

It’s the middle of winter, cold, dreary, but something I start receiving in my mailbox makes me long for the warm days of spring, the seed catalogs. Those shiny, colorful pages full of picture of ripe fruit and veggies and herbs. I have already started buying some things, a week ago, while on one of my rare trips to town (it’s a 3+ hour drive to town), I was in a Sam’s Club store, I was about to start heading for the check out lanes when I spotted something green and leafy sticking out from an odd aisle.

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