Blackberries cleared, teepee trellis is up, and beans are in. I dug up as many blackberry roots as I could find before putting down several layers of cardboard and then the sand. I assume I’ll be spending the rest of the growing season playing whack-a-mole with the blackberries.
Edit: formatting image link
I almost missed fiddlehead season but was able to get out Sunday and collect a few that were still curled up tight.
I’ve heard there are a few edible species but we only harvest the ostrich fern, Matteuccia struthiopteris. I love them lightly battered and fried (after blanching) or pickled to go in bloody marys.
I love that you live in a town where people offer up cuttings rather than let it go to waste.
Our Aerogarden is doing an amazing job growing greens for our pet rabbit. I’ve been succession planting lettuce mix and just put some mint seeds in another open pod.
Hardly any of my green beans have sprouted. Some of the seeds are a few years old so looks like I need to order some new ones. My kid asked for a plant tepee she can play and read in. I need to see if we can find a sunny enough area for one.
I know I’m just a stranger on the internet, but I’m proud of you for putting in the effort to try and get help. That’s hard to keep doing when you keep getting turned away. I hope you keep calling until you find someone who can/will see you.
I find it interesting that they glossed over the simplest solution, which would be switch to buying sustainable, shade-grown coffee thus forcing coffee plantations switch to it from market pressure. But I realize it’s not the main topic of the article and that has its own issues - how to make sure it really is sustainably shade-grown, for one.
But also, maybe this is my cynicism showing, did anyone else think these sustainable coffee-esque options wouldn’t stay sustainable if they became popular? Especially with something like annual crops, once other companies see there’s money to be made they’ll jump on the trend and now land (and forests) is being cleared for these crops.
I love meeting other people who are growing natives! Our first summer the neighbors offered to help us reseed our grass because of our bare patches that hadn’t germinated. They thought our grass had just died. Now they come and collect some of our seeds for their own flower beds!
Our columbine has really struggled which I still can’t figure out because it grows so well naturally in our wood edge along the road. The big-leaved aster and birds-foot violets do well though, as well as some typically more prairie species. And the ostrich ferns only like the south exposure side of our porch, but they’ve taken hold well there. I should consider ginger, I always find some along one of our favorite hiking trails nearby.
Still have at least a month before I’ll be doing any outside gardening. I’m testing some old seeds to see if they’ll still sprout so I know which seeds I need to order for our vegetable garden (and hopefully prevent myself from ordering way too many seeds because there are so many cool varieties).
What is everyone’s favorite seed company? I usually go with Seed Savers, but I recently found Baker Seeds so I’m thinking of ordering from them this time.
I love prairie smoke, they end up looking like tiny truffula trees (from The Lorax).
The seeds may take more than 1 winter to germinate, even coming from prairie moon (love them!), just FYI. Our first fall in our house I seeded an area with some native flowers. It took 2 springs before some of them came up and others didn’t show until the 3rd spring.
It was a work injury so thankfully I didn’t get the bill.
Of course that would be seen as noncompliance, they were choosing to be poor/have crappy insurance. We women need to just stop being so hysterical and pull ourselves up by our boot straps. (So much /s).
They let me walk around for 5 months with a broken vertebra pinching my nerves because they figured it was just tendonitis. They were completely baffled that PT was making things worse. I was finally able to get a referral because my dad came with me to an appointment (I was 28). The new doc ordered an MRI first thing and found the vertebra.
I find that for recipe or how-to stuff, if I have a choice between video or blog post I’ll almost always choose post so I can scroll to the part(s) I’m looking for.
I wonder how much SEO and promoting sponsors/“please like/subscribe” (and monetization of content in general) has increased people using efficiency tools to be able to get to the main content. I know the podcast app I use has a setting where it’ll auto-skip X seconds of the start of podcasts.
If you weave some pieces of ribbon into the netting, it should help make it more visible to the birds so they know to fly around it
It’s more for aesthetic purposes. My daughter’s only garden request this year was a plant-covered hideaway.
Used 6 foot bamboo poles since that’s what the store had, but if it works out I’ll probably try to find taller poles before next spring.
I also will need some individual plant covers - right now I make mini high tunnels to cover my beds (zone 4 so about a 90 day frost-free window). Normally the beans are further along but we had frost warnings even this week so I waited longer than usual to plant them because I don’t yet have a good way to cover them all planted like this.