The Old Folks Home

[tnspursfan09]

I was waaay back then.   Hey, I've seen photos of you now, you look great.

Well, I have some EE's hatching.  Two are hatched, and the three left in there are working on it.  I need more color in my nest boxes come summer.

 

[chickadoodles]

If i had four seasons i would grow lots of stone fruits, The best peach I have ever eaten was in North West PA.

We have a vast array of tropical fruit trees that people have never heard of.

I love looking at the tropical nursery sites in USA to discover African and Central American plants that have yet to be commonplace in the Phils. I will try and grow a half a doz new fruit trees from seed.

I did not mention our mulberry tree. Mrs Oz planted it next to the bathroom of Bernie's and its now producing lots of fruit. I bought a little pectin to make jome tropical jams this year. I will start selling them at the end of summer as my bags come back from the phils empty.

I am sure there are, I never heard of most of the ones you mentioned before Christmas.
I have never had mulberry's.
Alot of fruit trees require alot of chill hours. I was looking at some nurseries to see if I could get some tropical fruits to grow here. In Calif. we had kumquats and I loved them.
I would love to grow grapes here, but they only have muscadines. I do not care for their thick skin.

 

[chickadoodles]

I am taking my parents to Yosemite in the morning

Have fun!

I was waaay back then. Hey, I've seen photos of you now, you look great.

Well, I have some EE's hatching. Two are hatched, and the three left in there are working on it. I need more color in my nest boxes come summer.

Good luck on your hatch! I love my EE's.

Not my family. At the end of winter Mom would ask Dad to disk the Garden spot and we would grow a lot of food. We also had 10 Peach trees, Apple, Pear, Plum, Walnut, Almond and Apricot trees. We had Black Berries at the Creek.

We pretty much lived on Yellow Squash and Tomato Sandwiches during the Summer.

Sounds great

we did not eat much meat way back then either.


That is impressive!

That is very impressive Bunnylady! Congrats!

 

[cknnewbie]

Tonight's low temperature is supposed to be about 20o F (which is very cold for here). It's 9:30, and already the temperature has fallen to about 14o. I feel like we're playing a game of thermometer limbo - "how low can it go?!"

Sometimes I feel like Hubby and I are "cheating." We have a greenhouse that he built to grow poinsettias in. When the points are done, we have started taking advantage of the space to grow veg. In the last week, we have eaten spinach, Swiss chard, lettuce, tomatoes, bell peppers, summer squash, and lemons that we grew out there. Not a bad harvest for January!

That's not cheating, that's smartness!

 

[Highcotton]

I'm tired of the cold.

One of my technicians told me this morning she'll be breaking up with her BF and today was trying to come up with a "slogan" for her match.com profile. I couldn't come up with a good one for her (that she approved of) but I immediately thought of one for me. It made all of my technicians giggle (and agree):

I'm hen pecked, and you will be, too.





What would you choose for yourself?

I think we understand but I am afraid the general public would not get it.

 

[scottcaddy]

I am taking my parents to Yosemite in the morning

Here's hoping that the part you want to see didn't burn over last year. Have a good trip.

Scott

 

[Cynthia12]

I have 5 babies this morning, and am done. And, I am pretty sure that I only got one girl out of the bunch..of course. Will see though in a short while for sure.

Now for my other Rhodebars and all 15 BO's to hatch by Mon. I really didn't expect all 15 eggs that I had sent to go into lock down! Man, I'm going to be trying to sell some chicks! They were very easy to determine viability too..wow.

 

[ronott1]

I have 5 babies this morning, and am done. And, I am pretty sure that I only got one girl out of the bunch..of course. Will see though in a short while for sure.

Now for my other Rhodebars and all 15 BO's to hatch by Mon. I really didn't expect all 15 eggs that I had sent to go into lock down! Man, I'm going to be trying to sell some chicks! They were very easy to determine viability too..wow.

That is great news!

 

[ChickenCanoe]

If i had four seasons i would grow lots of stone fruits, The best peach I have ever eaten was in North West PA.

We have a vast array of tropical fruit trees that people have never heard of.

I love looking at the tropical nursery sites in USA to discover African and Central American plants that have yet to be commonplace in the Phils. I will try and grow a half a doz new fruit trees from seed.

I did not mention our mulberry tree. Mrs Oz planted it next to the bathroom of Bernie's and its now producing lots of fruit. I bought a little pectin to make jome tropical jams this year. I will start selling them at the end of summer as my bags come back from the phils empty.

There's a yahoo group for Costa Rican gardeners. They found a nursery in California that specializes in stone fruit and other fruit trees that can produce without a hard freeze. I'll see if I can find it.
I miss a lot of things about CA but the fruits and vegetables are near the top of the list. The variety is really hard for someone from a temperate climate to comprehend. One could be penniless with no support system and still not go hungry. There are some type of fruits ripening year round. There was a huge Manzana de Agua (water apple tree) covering the whole house where I lived. Monkeys would throw them at the tin roof what seemed like all night keeping me awake. It was so productive, we had all we could eat and neighbors would come and collect baskets full and the fruit kept coming.
One of the strangest fruits was 'monkey brains'. I don't know the real name but that's what everyone called it. It looked really gross but was delicious. http://ridgefieldcr3.blogspot.com/2012/04/fruit-of-day-monkey-brains.html
Because of the high elevation, you can get fabulous strawberries year round too.

We have a huge old mulberry that came with the house. Some of the branches almost touch the ground. When they ripen we put sheets under them and shake the branches...any we miss gets eaten by the chickens.

I do the same thing. Put large tarps out under the most productive trees in the evening and collect them at dawn. I have at least 10 mulberry trees. Last year they put out more than I, the chickens and all the wild birds could eat last year. If they're anywhere near as productive this year, I'm going to make wine.
I have a big persimmon tree and the chickens immediately run under it in the morning to eat what fell during the night.
It's the only thing that produces this time of year.

...

But I am off on a tangent. My point was, many people at varying stages of life would really like to know how to start a vegetable garden, how to select plants, which ones need cages, when to fertilize, which plants don't like water on their leaves, etc.

I learn new things every year as much from trial and failure as anything else, but that's partly because where I live isn't a typical growing environment. One year I was having the most success I had ever had in a vegetable garden ... until June 13th, when we had the mother of all hail storms. It lasted 30 minutes. My garden looked like a nuclear wasteland. No one had tomato plants left, but one lady at my favorite little store in town said, "Don't dig them up, just leave them alone, and keep watering them. They might come back, tomatoes can surprise you." She was right. I didn't have the fabulous harvest I had been looking forward to, but I did have a harvest.

One voice of experience is more valuable than all the internet reading, and even book reading, you can do. Even if you don't charge for the instruction you can probably get more than just one helper by offering some learn-by-doing. There's a lady north and east of me who charges $50 to teach people how to process their own chickens - and gets all her chickens processed in a day. Seems like participants get to take home one chicken. People go.

There's a huge old organic farm in the city that charges $750 for a 9 month apprenticeship.
I'm recruiting for mine too but I don't plan on charging the first year. I'll just be happy to get some help. I already have at least one. Theirs doesn't start till May. I'm starting my program March 1 so they can learn how to start seed indoors, prepare the beds, work the compost and do spring bee work.
Last year I had to get my chicken numbers up in a hurry (do to a strange quirk in my ordinances) and I needed them immediately so I bought 50 freedom rangers. Then I though, "how in the world am I going to process 50 chickens by myself. Then I recalled researching other chicken meetups around the country and saw one in Dallas that had a processing meetup. It was so well attended they had to turn people away. A lightbulb went on in my head. I posted on our local meetup that I was conducting processing classes. Since I didn't have room for 50 mature meaties, I held 2 classes where we processed half as Cornish game hens, and let the rest grow out for the second class. I was amazed at how many backyard chicken people wanted to learn how to kill and process a chicken. One of the attendees was one of the people that run the pricey organic apprenticeship.

If you have not eaten mango ice cream, you have not lived. The flavors in pic look like strwberry, mango and coconut

Not my family. At the end of winter Mom would ask Dad to disk the Garden spot and we would grow a lot of food. We also had 10 Peach trees, Apple, Pear, Plum, Walnut, Almond and Apricot trees. We had Black Berries at the Creek.

We pretty much lived on Yellow Squash and Tomato Sandwiches during the Summer.

When I was growing up we lived in the city of St. Louis but we had a hundred acre farm about 100 miles south of here. There we raised cattle, hogs, horses and pheasant. We also did hay, corn and a big garden for sprawling things like melons and pumpkins. In the suburbs of St. Louis in what is now Black Jack, my dad's family also had a 40 acre truck farm that my grandfather, father and uncles operated just a mile up the road from where I live now. That's where we raised all the chickens.
My grandfather stowed away on a boat from Germany and learned about a community of Germans living north of St. Louis, so after jumping ship he made his way here. He worked as a farm hand until he made enough to buy that farm that was being sold for back taxes. That was in the 1880s. The house was a small log cabin built in the 1830s. He added on to the house and it is now a restaurant with the original log cabin still being the core of the building. They let me take people on tours. The restaurant's bar is in what used to be the 'summer kitchen' where they canned produce, processed animals and made sausage. Under the summer kitchen there is a fruit cellar and under the fruit cellar is an ice cellar. The whole community cut their ice for the summer out of my grandfather's pond. My family would fill the ice cellar during the winter and everyday through the rest of the year they would pull a block of ice and put it in the ice box. (yes, that's why some people still call a refrigerator an ice box)
After I got out of the army, I couldn't afford an apartment so I built a loft in the old 'summer kitchen'. I had a wood stove and a tub. The outhouse was just around back.
Every one of my family except my father died in that house. Restaurant workers frequently reported ghostly encounters there. A couple years ago, as the only living person in the area that knew the history, I participated in one of those ghost hunter shows at the house. I remember sitting on the steps leading from the children's bedrooms to the attic of the log cabin where they played. I was holding one of those EMF sensors that ghost hunters use. I started talking to the spirits of my uncles and aunt. The more personal my comments were, the more crazy the monitor got till it was just beeping like mad. I was up all night and I was worried because the next day, I tried out to be on 'Who Wants to be a Millionaire'. I passed all the tests but by the end of the day, when it came time for the personal interview, I was so tired I must have seemed like too much of a dud to be TV material. I was probably a little too weird too. After all, I told them I was up all night as the subject matter expert on a ghost hunter episode. The raw paleo diet thing probably wouldn't have benefited their junk food sponsors either. - Oh, so many reasons not to choose me!

When my dad and uncles were growing up, the boys would work the farm and my grandfather would take the fruits and vegetables by horse drawn wagon to 'Produce Row' in north St. Louis. That's exactly 12 miles one way and he did that every day when there was produce to sell. The horses knew the way home so he would sleep and wake up when the horses stopped in the driveway. They had a greenhouse, eight 5X20 concrete hotbeds, peach, apple and pear orchards, 2,000 tomato plants every year as well as peas, beans, squash, peppers, potatoes, corn, onions and grapes were the primary crops. Oh, and with 100 leghorns, they sold lots of eggs. The chicken houses were in a wedge between the peach orchard and vineyard so would forage the orchards all day. My dad's primary job year round was tomatoes. Even years later when most of the farm was sold for a subdivision we still had a 2 acre garden. About 1/8 acre was in rhubarb and had been growing in the same place for over 100 years. When my wife was pregnant with our daughter (our first child), we were living in the old log cabin part of the house. I decided to put in a huge garden and planted close to an acre of lettuces, tomatoes, peppers, chilies and a few other vegetables to sell. I was working 10 hours a day and knew I wouldn't have time to tend it so I laid newspaper covered by horse manure mixed with a lot of straw. I laid soaker hoses between rows and only had to water once a week since my 'mulch' kept water in. That happened to be one of the hottest, driest summers we had. Several people nearby had big gardens and would sell tomatoes and other vegetables. I was the only one with tomatoes that year. Every morning before it got hot, my wife would go out and pick veggies, put them on the harvest table I would set out before work with a scale, a stack of bags, price labels and a cigar box for money - honor system. She'd then go back inside to sit in the air conditioning (daughter was born in late august so she was always hot). When I'd get home, I'd put everything back in the garage and collect the money. One day there was no money in the box. I shrugged and thought, "it was bound to happen that I'd get ripped off". When I picked everything off the table, all the money was sitting under the cigar box. I guess someone put it under there because there was so much, they thought someone would take it. I never once had a penny or a tomato missing that I'm aware of.

My grandfather was part of the St. Louis Fruit and Produce Association. Produce Row predates the civil war and was primarily to supply grocers, restaurants and confectioners. It started on the Mississippi riverfront where both merchants would bring produce by river or buyers would purchase and take away by river. To this day, Produce Row is a $100,000,000 business. It employs 1200 people and 1500 buyers a day come to the Market from as far North as Iowa, the West to Jefferson City and Columbia, the South to Cape Girardeau and the East to Indianapolis, Indiana.

My grandfather was also the community's leather smith and cobbler making harnesses, saddles, shoes, boots and the like. At his leather shop, which still exists, there were 3 huge black jack oak trees where travelers would rest. Those oaks on his property were how the town got its name- Black Jack, MO.

When I had to fight city hall a couple years ago for the right to keep chickens, among my arguments I reminded city council and the Mayor that Black Jack became a city in 1970 and my family had been raising chickens in Black Jack since 1870 (ok, I stretched the truth by a few years but it made for good courtroom drama to the sold out house)

I am taking my parents to Yosemite in the morning

I've been to California a few times but never made it to Yosemite. That was always the #1 site on my visit wish list but alas. When I was a kid I read that is was one of the most beautiful places in the country.

 

[tnspursfan09]

We have some quinces, too. I've been told that all they are good for is making quince jelly.