What did you do in the garden today?

[Ascholten]

Thank you!

If it was a coon that was eating berries and woodsy stuff, contrary to what people want to say, they ARE good to eat ! If you cook them right they are very tasty. If it's a trash panda now, you'll want to do what you did and bury it.

electric fence - you don't need a massive fence, just a hot wire, and basically put some poles into the ground, put some insulators on it and pull the wire pole to pole giving a wrap around each insulator to hold it in place, run it around ground by windows or doors or where it can possibly get in. it touches wire, is standing on ground and gets zinged. Wiith standard house current / the simplest method of that will only get you 120 volt, which won't do much with a bear. Get a pro shocking unit or up the voltage but DO REMEMBER if you make it lethal to a bear, it's lethal to YOU as well.

egg prices, oh do NOT get me started. I get butter and stuff in mass quantities,like I used to buy it 100 lbs or 48 lbs at a time and get a huge deal on it. I retired last july 2021 from my cough cough.. job, and was selling butter at work for like $1.48 Lb, which is basically what I got it for. I just seen butter in the store today it was over $5 a pound I almost choked. Bacon I was getting for like 48 dollars for a 15 lb case.... now it's like 6 dollars a pound in the store. I was saying to myself, jesus Aaron WTF you going to do with 50 lbs of butter, as I was putting it into the freezer, and shoving it between the 115 lbs of bacon I had stashed in there !! You will have butter for YEARS you stupid hoarding hillbilly !! I shuffled through that freezer today re arranging stuff to make room for the shelves and shelves of stuff I am freeze drying, it's a prep stage and thinking, wow there must be 1000 dollars of food in this thing now and it's nothing special. good lord...

Eggs, I give a LOT away, I get 4 a day, roughly, eat maybe 2 a day so they add up, I give them to the neighbors, to the mailman, my doctor, whomever i interact with, eggs and my coffee I roast. I seen eggs for 4 dollars a dozen, when they used to be 10 cents an egg. yah, and you all laughed when I told ya I give the girls a kiss at night time,.. do the math, that kiss was worth thousands !!!

if I had the room Id get a cow, and would love a goat, for the milk but man oh man, i get mad when the chickens get into stuff.. a goat, Id be burning the neighborhood down chasing after it cursin so NO goats !!


on a more serious note though, I am really thinking now, putting out the money i should have 3 years ago and get a REAL pen / coop built and raise them for meat. just keep maybe 10 or 15 rotating and it'd be a good thing. With half an acre of land, I honestly think they'd do ok for the most part free ranging, it would at least cut down a LOT on the feed bill till I cut them. still doing research on this one.

Aaron

 

[Elyrian1]

So.... we might be buying 10ish acres of desert shortly. Yes that came out of nowhere. Lol.

 

[TJAnonymous]

If it was a coon that was eating berries and woodsy stuff, contrary to what people want to say, they ARE good to eat ! If you cook them right they are very tasty. If it's a trash panda now, you'll want to do what you did and bury it.

electric fence - you don't need a massive fence, just a hot wire, and basically put some poles into the ground, put some insulators on it and pull the wire pole to pole giving a wrap around each insulator to hold it in place, run it around ground by windows or doors or where it can possibly get in. it touches wire, is standing on ground and gets zinged. Wiith standard house current / the simplest method of that will only get you 120 volt, which won't do much with a bear. Get a pro shocking unit or up the voltage but DO REMEMBER if you make it lethal to a bear, it's lethal to YOU as well.

egg prices, oh do NOT get me started. I get butter and stuff in mass quantities,like I used to buy it 100 lbs or 48 lbs at a time and get a huge deal on it. I retired last july 2021 from my cough cough.. job, and was selling butter at work for like $1.48 Lb, which is basically what I got it for. I just seen butter in the store today it was over $5 a pound I almost choked. Bacon I was getting for like 48 dollars for a 15 lb case.... now it's like 6 dollars a pound in the store. I was saying to myself, jesus Aaron WTF you going to do with 50 lbs of butter, as I was putting it into the freezer, and shoving it between the 115 lbs of bacon I had stashed in there !! You will have butter for YEARS you stupid hoarding hillbilly !! I shuffled through that freezer today re arranging stuff to make room for the shelves and shelves of stuff I am freeze drying, it's a prep stage and thinking, wow there must be 1000 dollars of food in this thing now and it's nothing special. good lord...

Eggs, I give a LOT away, I get 4 a day, roughly, eat maybe 2 a day so they add up, I give them to the neighbors, to the mailman, my doctor, whomever i interact with, eggs and my coffee I roast. I seen eggs for 4 dollars a dozen, when they used to be 10 cents an egg. yah, and you all laughed when I told ya I give the girls a kiss at night time,.. do the math, that kiss was worth thousands !!!

if I had the room Id get a cow, and would love a goat, for the milk but man oh man, i get mad when the chickens get into stuff.. a goat, Id be burning the neighborhood down chasing after it cursin so NO goats !!


on a more serious note though, I am really thinking now, putting out the money i should have 3 years ago and get a REAL pen / coop built and raise them for meat. just keep maybe 10 or 15 rotating and it'd be a good thing. With half an acre of land, I honestly think they'd do ok for the most part free ranging, it would at least cut down a LOT on the feed bill till I cut them. still doing research on this one.

Aaron

I gave away about 15 dozen eggs to the food pantry today. I do this every week... I also took some Hamburger Helper boxes up there too because they were almost out when I dropped off eggs last week. Sadly I probably threw away 40 dozen eggs over the early summer before I realized the food pantry needed them.... It's not much but if it can help a few needy families get by then I'm more than happy to do it.

I need to desperately clean some of the junk out of my freezers to make room for things like butter and bacon.

 

[WIchickMama]

Pruning help please----how do I prune my everbearing raspberries. Never had them before, first year canes still have berries on them (turning and green) and we are looking at highs in the 40s and lows in the 30s and 20s for the foreseeable future.

I don't care about amount of harvest at this point, just the best way to do it. Do I leave the first year canes and prune after they bear fruit next summer or do I cut everything down now?

 

[Wee Farmer Sarah]

I have motion sensor lights around my backyard and one near the chicken coop @Sueby. That and the fencing around the chicken yard seems to help deter most predators. All but one is solar and the solar lights won’t come on in the early morning around 6 am if there’s been activity through the night. The security cameras rarely pick up small predators like a raccoon. But taccoons will trigger the lights and that usually scares them away. We get coyotes, bobcats, raccoons and fishers. The neighbors on one side claim they discovered bear tracks in their yard, but no damage other than a low hanging bird feeder. Most likely it was a raccoon as their bird feeder was about 2 feet away from their poorly constructed chicken run. I hope the bear moves onto easier pickings soon.

 

[Sueby]

Motion lights was another thing DEEP recommended - but we have them all over & it didn't phase the bear. In fact one was pointing directly in its face for some of the damage.

 

[jerryse]

I like wildflowers . They take care of themselves . So we have wild aster here . Not as showy as the ones they sell but perennial . A little research and I found the ones they sell in the fall are annual Chinese asters . So there ends the idea of starting the ones they sell .

 

[TJAnonymous]

Pruning help please----how do I prune my everbearing raspberries. Never had them before, first year canes still have berries on them (turning and green) and we are looking at highs in the 40s and lows in the 30s and 20s for the foreseeable future.

I don't care about amount of harvest at this point, just the best way to do it. Do I leave the first year canes and prune after they bear fruit next summer or do I cut everything down now?

Yes, do not prune the first year canes unless they are diseased or look sickly. I only prune after 2nd year canes have fruited. I do my pruning in late winter (Jan-Feb) right before they are about to break out of dormancy.

Just my 2 cents...

 

[NewBoots]

Crap! We had a bear try to get the chickens last night.

Wow that is scary as hell! I'm so glad he didn't make it to your girls. We had a bear in our yard once before we had the front fencing up and it really set the spurs to getting that job done. A bear could still get in but they can't just wander in casually anymore.

Your game warden might be able to offer you advice or possibly even lend a trap / help you trap the bear. Once they start becoming a BIG problem in populated areas, they'll step up a lot more in helping getting rid of bear pests.

Here we have the same deal, the state game commission we trap problem bears and they're pretty quick to do so if a bear hits a trash can in the city.

You also don't need a fence, really, just a hot wire that you can turn on and off. You can message me your set up and I can see if I can plot a wire for you.

I understand laying a piece of bacon on the wire is a great way to be sure they get a zap to a nose or tongue and so learn fast.

if I had the room Id get a cow, and would love a goat, for the milk but man oh man, i get mad when the chickens get into stuff.. a goat, Id be burning the neighborhood down chasing after it cursin so NO goats !!

Goats are so tempting for me too. And yeah, if we had the land we'd have either a cow or more likely a couple of goats.

on a more serious note though, I am really thinking now, putting out the money i should have 3 years ago and get a REAL pen / coop built and raise them for meat. just keep maybe 10 or 15 rotating and it'd be a good thing. With half an acre of land, I honestly think they'd do ok for the most part free ranging, it would at least cut down a LOT on the feed bill till I cut them. still doing research on this one.

Yeah, the feed prices are killing me. I'm afraid I'm going to have to do some culling and it won't be due to neighbor's complaints. Letting them free range more would cut the costs but they do a lot of damage to the garden when they're out.

I have to go scrub the webs and dust off the garage/barn door. We have a neat lady coming to paint the mural on the door tomorrow. In the meantime, I've got the grill set up and ready to fire up for steaks and veg.

 

[TJAnonymous]

I seeded more lettuce and carrots (again.) since it rained ever so briefly...

I REALLY have to figure out how to get rid of this d@m* gopher in the garden. At least I assume it's a gopher based on the size of the holes. Maybe it's a vole. Whatever it is, it's eating my plants and extremely destructive to the garden. Not to mention the number of times I've nearly lost a kneecap from sinking into the ground unexpectedly due to the tunnels caving under my feet.