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Self sufficient gardening
PaulN/KS:
--- Quote from: sleek on January 25, 2023, 06:21:53 pm ---
--- Quote from: PaulN/KS on January 25, 2023, 05:06:59 pm ---Tomatoes,green beans and hot peppers are my mainstay here. We dry and grind the peppers or roast and freeze them. Tomatoes become salsa,sauce or just frozen in bags.(Gonna use some of that in tonight's jambalaya.) Green beans get frozen as well. Sweet corn we just buy from a farm up the road, that way they have to deal with the coons...
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Tell me more about the ground peppers. What do you do with them, how do you store them, how long do they last, how do you dry and grind them?
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The wife just slices the peppers lengthwise then puts them on baking sheets overnight in the oven on Warm, the lowest setting on our oven. She says she drys them till they are brittle then removes some of the seeds before grinding them in one of those small coffee grinders. We just pour the powder into a mason jar and keep it in the pantry out of the sunlight.
We also found one of those circular food dehydrators at the Goodwill store this Fall and she used that for peppers as well as tomatoes. It worked real well and the dried tomatoes are like those "sun dried" ones at the store.
M2A:
Good luck with the project. Sounds like you your off to a good start with some good experience and ideas. YOu may want to do a soil sample and send it off to the county extension services to get it tested just to have some knowledge of the nutrients you have starting out. And you will want to be able to net those blueberry plants to keep the birds out when they get big enough to start cropping them.
Lots of work , but i'm sure your aware of thet. Hope to have a good growing season.
Mike
Eric Krewson:
Another thing about black plastic, I have used it in my garden for 39 years, now that the weather has warmed, I find it warms the soil too much for some seeds to properly germinate. Green beans don't germinate well through it now, spinach germination is terrible, crops like okra, squash, tomatoes and cucumbers love the heat.
I am branching out this year and putting a 2' strip of landscape fabric down the rows to keep down the weeds but will still let the soil breathe and stay cooler. I will cover the big bare areas between rows with plastic.
The thing about plastic is the price is tied to oil prices, being an old guy, I pay the price so I don't have to do any weeding.
One good thing I found out about my plastic; I only planted half the garden the first few years after my wife died, I let the unplanted side grow up in crabgrass that I kept mowed. With this ground left bare, every winter I would have an invasion of flea beetles that would destroy my turnip patch in a few days. The larva come out of the soil, turn into tiny flying insects and go to work on my greens.
It took 3 or 4 days for the flea beetles to do this to my turnip greens. There is something about rough turnip leaves that they can get a grasp on, they have a harder time holding on to slick leaves like kale and collards but can do significant damage to these crops as well.
When I started covering up my whole garden with plastic again the heat killed all the flea beetle larva, no more pests in my greens.
Pat B:
Plenty of good seafood in that area of NC to supplement your veg supply. Big bears down there too. One good size bear would give you plenty of meat and plenty of fat to get you through too.
GlisGlis:
--- Quote ---I'm going to plant a good sunflower patch for seeds and their roots
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what do you use the roots for?
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