Pretty poor year for my garden. Tomatoes haven’t done well this year. Blight and chipmunks have wreaked havoc. Peppers started off the season strong, but kept dropping buds. Got several peppers from the cayenne plant, but then it pretty much died immediately after. The Carolina reaper finally has some buds set, so hopefully I’ll finally get something from it. Same situation with the habanero, kept dropping buds, but now it’s got several peppers set. Scotch bonnet produced about 6/7 peppers which I am drying now.
I just harvested about 25 jalapeños today with lots more starting to come in. I planted my okra pretty late, but they are starting to get tall. Not sure when they will start producing. Hopefully soon. Tomatoes are finally coming in. They are a weird shape but lots of them coming in. The plants are getting out of control. Definitely need better cages and should have done a better job trimming and pruning them. Watermelon and pumpkin plant looking rough. Not sure what is going on there. Blueberry plants look like shit. Planted banana pepper and pepperocinis late and just transitioned them from solo cups to bigger pots today. Hopefully those will start producing in the next 30-45 days. Need to find a good salsa recipe with all of these jalapeños coming in. I’ve never made it before.
This year I planted them in the ground. The past couple years I had them in containers and had better luck. I’ll be using containers next summer since I’ll be moving to the city.
Update on the Carolina Reapers and Scorpion peppers. I made some wing sauce with them (deseeded) and it’s absolutely incredible. It’s hot, but not to the point where it’s painful. I actually sent fsuNizz rv12 and skiedfrillet jars. Here’s how the plants look Started saving the seeds and planting them, since they run about $1 a piece. Might infuse some vodka this weekend or make hot sauce, haven’t decided yet.
Over the last couple weeks we got 2 more ewes from a friend of my wife and 3 goats to eat the weeds in the pasture. The ram is being put out with the ewes this weekend, so he's going to be pretty tired.
Took an observation hive to the local county ag fair this morning for all the elementary kids coming through, including my daughter. They are able to get an up close view of the bees through the glass. Then went back tonight to this sunset.
I can’t believe how big some of this okra is. Two or three times as big as what we would get from the store
Still tender? I can grow some monster ones but mine are inedible if they grow longer than 5 or so inches.
I’ll find out tonight. I’ve never grown it before, so I don’t know when I’m supposed to pick it. Plus, we’ve been out of town since Monday.
Update: they were awful. Thought my wife was going to need to borrow crocodile Dundee’s machete when she was cutting them up. Lesson learned. Pick em early
I got back in town late last night and picked this morning for the first time since Sunday. Some of my crimson okra were damn near a foot long and I'm pretty sure they could be used as weapons. I just tossed them straight in the compost pile
Anyone here done a community garden? I just moved to a townhouse and no longer have any land, so I’m looking at getting a plot for next season. It’s either that or fill my back porch with pots.
Made some homemade salsa tonight with tomatoes and jalapeños from our garden, the rest from the store. Not bad for my first attempt. Definitely used too much cilantro. I’ll probably make some more later this week or next weekend and can it for later.
Hi yes this thread is relevant to my interests. I’ve got an entirely too extravagant yard/garden and am stumbling about trying to learn how to care for it. Put some much-needed trimming on my to-do list for today and decided to make some arrangements with the clippings. Hibiscus: Protea:
Got my new seeds in from Baker Creek this week and starting them in the garage this weekend. In addition to the creole okra, red okra, prosperosa eggplants, cocozella di napoli zucchini, odessa squash and a few varieties of tomatoes I grew last year I got some charentais melon (which I hope taste more like the melons you can get in France and less like the grocery store canteloupe I grew last year) and some thai lavendar frogs egg eggplant, which grow to about the size of a cherry tomato and should lend themselves to all sorts of applications.
Had our first set of new lambs this morning. Both were tiny, 3-4 lbs. Had to bring one it to warm it up on a heating pad before we took it back out to its mom. Have about 20 pregnant ewes, so we have a bunch more coming in the next few months.
Our big ewe had triplets earlier this week. One of the lambs had issues and she ignored it, so we brought it in to try and nurse it back to health. Ended up dying a few days later. Another ewe had been having trouble with prolapsing. We managed to get her through that alive to have twins today.
need some help and recommendations Selling my house that I have had all my garden boxes in the past 5 years, moving into a new one with a larger back yard that already has some nice landscaping. House is on a golf course and from the tracks in the snow, the deer in the area come right up to the back door of the house. I can't put a manmade fence up per HOA My thought was to focus on putting stuff in hanging garden boxes from the elevated wood deck out of their reach like this: or free standing like this for tomatoes and squash: I can build either of these and paint them to match the deck. I just haven't had great results putting tomatoes and squash in any container in the past. Wondering if anyone has anything like this that they've done? How have you dealt with deer?
billdozer What type of sheep did you end up going with? Thinking about getting a couple for meat production as well.
Yes, we give them various vaccines, etc. Plus we had a real bad time with worms last year, so we were treating like crazy. We are working to do both, sell most of them, keep one or two for ourselves.
It'll all just depend on if you run into worms. The only shot we feel is necessary is CDT, but it works out to pennies per sheep (<$10 at TSC). Other than that, it's just if you run into issues. The two recommendations are learn Famacha to check the eye lids for worms and find someone that you can bounce questions off that has the same management style you want to have. We can try and answer other questions you have too.
I’ve tried planting stuff around my tomatoes that deer don’t like, but they still always go after tomatoes.
Meat. These breeds don't have wool. If you've ever eaten lamb it probably had a gamey flavor. That meant it was probably from a wool sheep. The lanolin produced by the wool gives it that flavor. Meat sheep are a milder flavor.
A couple weeks ago, we found our livestock guardian dog, a Pyranees mix, injured in our front pasture. We thought he ran into coyotes since he had a puncture wound on his front leg and an injury to his back leg, like a dog had bit him there. Couldn't put weight on his front leg at all. Took him to the vet and they told us it wasn't broken and gave us antibiotics and pain meds for him. After a few weeks, he still wouldn't put weight on the leg so we took him back to the vet Friday. This time they did x-rays and found a .22 bullet still in the leg and the 2 bones in the leg shattered. So now he's in a cast and will probably have a limp for the rest of his life. He likes to dig out sometimes, but he was in the pasture when we went to bed and when we woke up. Plus, he was in such bad condition on that leg, we don't see how he could pull himself under the fence after he was shot. So it appears he was shot in our pasture. After contacting the police, my wife posted about it on Facebook. It got shared around enough that the local news was calling us about it and came out and filmed a piece. Apparently a few horses and cows have been shot in the local area recently too.
I may do something similar to the first picture on my 6' privacy fence to give it an extra foot or 2 of coverage.
We've had a few more lambs born in the last week. Up to 17, 13 rams, 4 ewes. Still have another 7-9 due to lamb, plus 3 goats due. Our guardian dog refused to stay locked up and was trying to climb out of the barn windows and door, so we've let him out into the chicken yard with the lambs again. Took him back to the vet. She said we'll bring him back in another month and either it will heal, or we will have to amputate.
Did local you or the local PD ever find the prick that set the trap? Hope everything works out positive.
I've got some young trees (plums and peach tree) that I planted last year that already have new growth this year thanks to unusually warm temps this past month. We've got a couple of freezes projected in the next week now. How do I protect the new growth?