What did you do in the garden today?

[CNJ]

Eggplant is in the nightshade family and your chickens can get sick, or die, if they eat too many eggplant leaves.

My chickens won't listen to me, they have a mind of their own

 

[Sally PB]

@Sally PB
When I quoted this post this morning I realized I mistakenly gave it a laughing emoji. I was responding on my phone and made a goof. I apologize as sunscald is an aggravating thing and not funny.

No worries.

Well, you'd need to make sure the plants still get sunlight. So a shade cloth would be better, which would allow some sun and allow air flow.

And shade cloth comes in varying levels of shade provided, and different colors. Plus, it won’t hold water like cloth.

Yeah, the white sheet draped over plants was an off the top of my head idea. I'm just wondering how I'd be able to suspend it over the plants. Well, I have a few months to think about it.

 

[Birdsonghill]

I have had such bad luck with cucumbers the last few years that I did not even plant any this year. I am rethinking my whole method of growing cukes. Next year I hope to try again with a different method, probably with an overhead pallet wood trellis support like I built for Dear Wife's bitter melons. I think that will work.

Try growing them under insect netting if you are able. It prevents the insects from bringing them the diseases or eating them. I didn't do that this year but wish I had. The organic insect controls get expensive and that is a must to grow cucumbers these days more for the disease the bugs bring than the actual bug damage. I have used just light weight row cover fabric like AG-19 wt. with good success, but insects did eventually get in late in the season but not as big a problem. The actual AG insect fabric is quite expensive but guards down to the tiniest "no see-ums" and is more durable and reusable more than one season or two. Good luck!

 

[CedarLane]

I have had such bad luck with cucumbers the last few years that I did not even plant any this year. I am rethinking my whole method of growing cukes. Next year I hope to try again with a different method, probably with an overhead pallet wood trellis support like I built for Dear Wife's bitter melons. I think that will work.

Our cucumbers grow up a fence. The fence is used early in the season to trellis the peas. When the peas are finished, one of the peas fences is moved to the cucumber row (hopefully before the cucumbers start spreading!). That said, I think this was the worst year we've ever had with our cucumbers. This has been a bad year for our tomatoes too. We've had a few disappointments with this year's garden.

 

[Birdsonghill]

That is the trials and tribulations of Gardening. Every year some things change. In fact many things are likely to change from the weather patterns to our patience and unforeseen events and calamities that always seem to pop up! I have some flops every year, after gardening most of my life, some I am responsible for and some I will call unavoidable, at least by me! Ain't it fun! I was cursed to dry rough hands and red brown skin from a boy due to my gardening but am so very appreciative for all that I have witnessed and learned, enjoyed and loved. This year the deer got in my corn at prime time after a tornado brushed us with 100 mph winds and brought tree limbs through the deer netting. I was so occupied with storm damage I did not check the garden for a day and that was all it took. Happy deer. It has been a great year for my chiles varieties of all types! The corn, beans and peas loved our early summer monsoon this year and thrived in the heat with plentiful water. Some winners and some losers, just like our real lives as people. I didn't get rich but have so much of everything else. God is good to me and all the glory to him! Growing food and enjoying plants links so well to raising Poultry and kids! If we learn nothing but patience and our tangible reward is just some produce and eggs, we get rich in life. God bless you all and keep on growing gardens and raising chickens for the children to come to see and learn.

 

[jerryse]

About 4 years ago, I bought the SunJoe electric chipper...

View attachment 3623625

My idea was to chips lots of small branches and stuff to make faster compost. I have mixed feelings about that purchase. Although I was really excited at first with this machine, that enthusiasm faded away in a relatively short period of time. Consider this a long term review, mostly negative, and a warning about how much you can expect out of this and other small electric chippers like it.

Bottom line, I would not recommend these machines.

If you want, here is the longer review...

First of all, you can only chip up small branches about 1 inch round, or less. When the blades are new and sharp, they work great. However, after an hour or so of chipping wood, the blades dull and will not pull through the small branches anymore. That means I have to feed and force the branches through the chipper. More work, more time.

You cannot toss much grass like organics into this chipper. It will gum it up and stop working in no time. It really is a wood chipper for small branches, not pulled weeds from the garden. Don't think you will be able to cut up all kinds of compost material. It just does not work for that.

After my blades went dull, and they had been flipped over for the other side, it was getting really tough to feed through the small branches. I tried to order some new blades but they were out of stock for over 6 months - and this was prior to COVID-19 and supply shortages. I never understood how they could sell new chippers when they had no inventory of reusable blades.

I attempted to get the blades sharpened by a service through our local Acme store. I was quoted a price of $2.00 per blade, which was OK to me. When the blades came back from the service, they wanted to charge me something like $15.00 per blade! I refused to pay, of course. I demanded to talk to the manager, showed him that I had agreed to pay $2.00 per blade, that a new blade cost $10.00 to order, but that the sharpening service was now trying to charge me $15.00 per blade.

Long story short, the manager agreed with me that it doesn't make any sense to pay more for a sharpening service then ordering brand new blades, so he gave me the sharpened blades back free, no charge. Although I was thankful for getting my blades sharpened and returned for free, I was really looking for a long-term solution and was hoping their service would fill that ticket. It did not.

Maybe someone knows how to sharpen these small chipper blades at home, but I spent hours on YouTube looking for some help and found nothing. There are many videos on sharpening wood chipper blades for the big machines, but not on these small electric chipper blades.

I do attempt to sharpen my chipper blades at home, but my skills are not that great. Although they are better after I sharpen them, they don't stay nearly sharp as long as a new blade. So, I don't know if I would call that a partial success or mostly a failure?

You can't get much chipping done in the four hours (two hours each side) of the chipper blades useful life. It's really a slow going process, even when the blades are new and sharp, and it slows down considerably after they become dull. Yes, you can force branches down the chute and chip wood, but it's a lot of hard work at that point.

After my last pair of new blades went dull, I basically put the chipper in the shed and there it sits for the past two years. If I ever use it again and it breaks, there is no way I would replace it with a new chipper of the same design or function. It's just not worth it to me. Four hours of life out of a $20 set of blades is not worth it to me. You cannot chip up much wood in four hours with this machine. And I don't like working with dull blades.

But let me end up on a positive note. With the perfect small branches, you can chip up some really nice wood into a quality that I used for the nest boxes for the chickens. The chipped wood from this chipper is much finer than my big gas chipper with the much larger chute. If I were to start all over again with this chipper, I would only use it for that - making nesting bedding for the chickens. Then the blades would last longer, and I think I would have gotten more value out of this electric chipper.

Well that is the chipper I bought. I have a four sided diamond sharpener that might do the sharpening if not Jocko in Longville Mn is my go to up north.

 

[gtaus]

You can watch the video on this sales page. There are 4 settings light, moisture, nutrient and ph. I just did a test and it showed low nutrient and high ph, so I added 1/2 teaspoon of citric acid and master blend to a plastic cup of water and poured it next to the probe in the pot. The ph went down and nutrient and moisture went up, so it's working.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BJCLY3YL?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_product_details

Thanks for the links. I am always looking for one of these that works. I like the concept of the device, just want to be sure it works. Thanks, again.

 

[akroberts1085]

Nothing in the garden today. It started out pretty rainy. Today I turned 72. DD drove me and the “grandkids” to the Clam Box in Ipswich for lunch. This is an annual trip we go on but decided to make it my birthday trip this year. When we got home we ate the yummy chocolate cake the kids baked for me. It has been a very nice birthday. Tomorrow I’ll be getting back to work picking tomatoes and working on the new chicken coop.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY

 

[gtaus]

I got a big gasoline chipper from Sears long ago. It can chip 3-inch branches, but it is too loud, it disturbs my neighbors, and it stresses me out. Its sitting in my storage shed, and I never use it.

Sounds like we have the same gas chipper!

My gas chipper takes up to 3-inch branches as well. It is loud, but I always wear hearing protection, it is Bluetooth capable, and I just listen to a radio program, an audiobook, or some music while working. The noise does not bother me. My neighbors live far enough away that it does not bother them.

I found the greatest value to that gas chipper was using the big chute to shred up leaves in the fall. That was a big deal for me back then. But now I have chickens. I dump all the whole leaves in the chicken run composting system, and the chickens love to rip the leaves to shreds. Good for them, less work for me, better composting in the end.

As for chipping wood, even the gas chipper is pretty slow going compared to me being able to take my trailer out to the county landfill and filling up my trailer in about 20 minutes with free wood chips. That would take me about 8 hours of hard labor chipping wood at home.

Essentially, I don't use my gas chipper anymore. It's sitting outside with a tarp over it. Heck, for the money invested in that gas chipper, I would not recommend getting that one, either.

I hate to sound so negative on home wood chippers, but over the years I have stopped using both my bigger gas and smaller wood chipper. That's money I wish had back. But I now have easy access to mounds of free wood chips at the local county landfill and my chickens will shred up all the leaves I can throw at them. Both those options are much easier and less labor intensive for me.

 

[gtaus]

My chickens won't listen to me, they have a mind of their own

My chickens don't listen to me, either. But I question what goes on in their chicken minds, if anything, at all.

Mostly I think they just look for something good to eat all day. Maybe take a dust bath or sit in the sun. Life is good for my chickens. Maybe they don't have to think very much!