Well, that last post got such an overwhelming response I thought I'd immediately post another dry-as-cracker juice essay on gardening! Haha! Oh, I'm just joking and being my normal pain in the butt self. Don't worry, I'm not going to turn into one of those dreary, redneck doomers living in woodsy seclusion that hordes 50 cases of Spam and saves my underarm hair to stuff pillows with.
No, I just thought I'd try to do a few more cohesive posts about my planting methods, what we grow etc. I've read several posts lately where the people were talking about how horrible gardening was and Oh!! the misery and disappointment when everything just failed miserably. Year after year even! Well, gardening can be frustrating sometimes, especially if you're trying to really make a dent in the amount of food you buy, but it's not that bad. Most of my crops are fairly successful and I live in humidity/ fungus heaven.
Nothing much bothers okra. I had tried different methods of drying the okra seeds and nothing seemed to work very well though. I had tried cutting off large pods and air drying and then cutting off large pods and heat drying. Every time the seeds would be shrively and puny. Not good. This year I let them grow as big as they would but leave them ON the plant. Just leave them until they dry themselves right there in the field.
Worked great! These seeds are all very robust and healthy. No shrively, black things! Yea!! Now we just wrench open the pods and store the seeds in plastic pouches. You can put them in the freezer but I just store mine all in a box in a cool, dark place.
The garden is doing well and I finally got it all mulched. I made a great discovery on what to use for the walking paths in the garden. I had one roll of silt fence left over from when we built the driveway, so I took that and pulled all the wooden stakes off of it and then split the roll in half longways. This took a while as the rolls are about 100 feet long. Silt fence is just that black plastic looking stuff you see there. It's pretty sturdy but allows water to flow through it easily. They sell a similar material at gardening shops for A LOT. It's basically silt fence. I got Steve to bring me some more off a job so mine was free but I don't think it costs too much if you buy it from a construction supply. Plus, you get some wooden stakes you can pull off to use elsewhere!
Anyway, my strips were about 18" wide, so they fit right between rows and I mulch over the edges. I did make some little pins out of some scrap wire to kinda peg it in place.
We mulch the plants with wheat straw that comes out of the chicken coop, so it's got poop and all built right in! Now, I usually let it set for a week or so to kinda mellow a little, then just distribute around the plants. The rain washes the poopy into the soil and then later it all gets tilled in and the soil gets richer. I hand dug my garlic area the other day to get it ready for planting and man!! there was some big ol' wormies jumping everywhere! I think that was the most earthworms I've ever dug up in this garden. That makes me so happy because that's a sure fire way to tell the soil is improving. It has been raining, thankfully, the past couple of days so that project is on hold but that's great! We really needed the rain.
Well, off to bed because I've got to get a good start on pottery making tomorrow. Got to throw it into mega production mode!
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