Grow Your Own

Comment by Cal on May 10, 2009 at 1:39pm

A couple of years ago when I lived in a small town up in the mountains where it was misty & rainy a lot of the time I was expecting slugs & snails to decimate my veggy patch & I was dreading taking my mothers steps of going out with a torch at night to catch them & drown them in beer. Slugs are people too .... Anyway - not a slug in sight despite my permaculture mounds and decaying vegetation wherever you looked. What I did find in the garden instead was a golden brown snake about 30 cm long with a red forked tongue. In fact I found a couple of them and then later in the season some babies. I did some research and found that it was called 'the common slugeater' ... now anything but common. They worked like little slug vacuum cleaners. My regret is that I left them there & the next people that took over the garden probably did what all sensible people do to snakes & killed them. I've been keeping my eye out for Duberria lutrix lutrix ever since - even went to the snake park to see if they had any for sale.

Comment by curt on May 10, 2009 at 2:07pm

I like snakes. Not many smakes around here. Strange continent. Anyhoo, I pulled all salad plants out of the ground, planted them in pots and built slightly raised platforms out of stone to keep the buggers away. Not quite ideal, I'd like to have a way of sheltering the plants from heavy rain, wind and hail stones. For the time being, they're as mobile as the upside down tomato and I'm now off to bring them all under the breezeway roofing as the next storm front approaches.

Slugs & Snails, eat your hearts out!

Comment by curt on May 10, 2009 at 2:43pm

Ahoy! A quick flashlite inspection of each plant in its new mini, semi-protective environment revealed one single slug which had miraculously survived the transplant action. Move on, nothing to be seen (or eaten) here!

Me Lady can't quite imagine what I mean with raised beds...in our tiny garden but she is keen on seeing my plan. Pictures say more than words.

I like this one and maybe one in the shape of steps, put up against the house, over on the sunny, storm side. Would have to build a storm shelter for it as well. Yes we can!

Oh, btw, our bats are back! This is the fourth year, I believe. Quite active they are. Our Gypsy is taken aback with the new sounds but knows well what the source is. The first year, the lady bats had huge litters and we had tiny baby bats all over the place. They're sooooo cute. Something tells me it's not a good idea to fell that tree there adjacent to the bat nests.

Comment by hannah j on May 17, 2009 at 4:26pm

http://www.nwf.org/gardenersguide/gardenzone.cfm

Comment by hannah j on May 17, 2009 at 4:27pm

oh, i forgot you can't edit on groups. that link was to a graphic map showing the changes in the grow zones here.......read it and weep

Comment by Mark on May 17, 2009 at 6:09pm

Wow! That really is scary, Hannah. In just 16 years, the coldest zones have almost entirely disappeared and the warmest zones have expanded greatly.

I've been thinking about the concept of growing food. I can grow fingernails and hair, but I can't grow leaves, stems, or roots. A tomato plant can grow tomatoes, a potato plant can grow potatoes, but all I can do is find them a space (since their natural habitat has been destroyed), give them some water, and watch over them as they grow food.

I can help, but they're doing most of the work and doing things that I simply can't do.

Comment by pan on May 17, 2009 at 7:25pm

We were just able to put our vegetables in this week....the map says we have changed from zone 3 to zone 4. Had frost last week, in the 80s this week - but the difference from highs to lows is usually at least 40 degrees (fahrenheit) every day.

Comment by waldopaper on May 17, 2009 at 7:32pm

I am about to go back into the "garden" (such as it is for somebody like me- with a black thumb). The weeds have gone ape-shit. I don't know whether to turn them under or to take the backbreaking hours it takes to pull them out. I have a feeling that by turning them under, they'll just somersault and pop right back up.

We got the tomatoes to go gonzo last year. The sweet-potatoes- so so. It's STILL much much cheaper to buy this shit than it is to grow it... especially on the scale it takes to sustain yourself. With square-foot gardening and other permaculture techniques, you can reduce the 5 acres it takes to sustain a single person to 1/2 acre or less.

This should give you a clue about the billions of acres under industrial cultivation that it takes to keep food cheap and plentiful (for NOW). Throw in Peak Oil, and all bets are off because industrial crops... let alone factory "meat production" are doomed.

We should be paying attention to square-foot-gardening and let the "Obama" Punch-and-Judy Show stick a giant feather up its ass.

Comment by Mark on May 17, 2009 at 8:54pm

I'm an atheist when it comes to religion, but I'm a bet-hedger when it comes to food-growing. Plants take months to grow. Stock markets can collapse, oil markets freeze, or currencies devalue overnight. If I planted and I didn't need to, I get fresh veggies and I haven't lost anything. If I suddenly need to and I haven't, it is too late and I'm on the soup line.

Obama, at least in my opinion, is actually dumber than Bush. Bush only invaded non-nuclear countries, so we survived Bush. Pakistan is a nuclear country, so food or no food, I wouldn't place any bets about surviving Obama.

Even dumber than simply invading Pakistan, Obama is using unmanned drones to bomb them. Any country can buy unmanned drones. Only a nuclear power could arm them with nuclear weapons. And if our air defenses work as well as they did on 9/11, Pakistan could nuke Washington, D.C., New York, Chicago, and San Francisco before his advisors could interrupt Obama's photo-op to tell him what happened. Pakistan KNOWS what we've done to Iraq and Afghanistan, so they can't be fooled into thinking that we have limited goals or can be reasoned with. There are probably two moderates left in Pakistan urging nuclear restraint, and Obama is about to bomb their kids' school and their sisters' weddings.

Comment by curt on May 18, 2009 at 12:30pm

People keep asking me "why a garden?" "Why all the trouble?" And they rightly say "It's cheeper to buy veggies at Lidl, Aldi, Penny, Safeway, Bashas, etc." and they're right. But get this...by gardening now, I'm learning to live off the land. My little garden here won't produce enough for me to live off but I'm still learning. Call it practicing if you like. And my neighbor to the left has been practicing and learning since we moved into this here house...and she still learns something new each season. Another neighbor had the luck to be in the right spot at the right time and is now the proud owner of a small plot in between fields here just outside of town. It's 11 metres wide and over 150 metres long. 15 or so apple trees and all but one are healthy. The grass is so high it has to be cut but if it were my land, I would plant potatoes. Apples are good to have too. The apple trees don't take up much room at all and all you have to do is harvest the apples and keep the trees trimmed - properly. Now, if that were my land and if I planted potatoes there, I WOULD have enough to feed us all year long, at least when it comes to spuds. I think we would have surplus. So another neighbor could do the same and have surplus of something else. We trade, barter. And on and on. Mark my word, once the trucks stop rolling, miles-to-mouth will have to be drastically reduced and people will starve learning how to garden. I guess you could call it a religion. Meanwhile, I couldn't care less what the politicians are saying as long as I have a garden and the freedom to do with it as I please. And oh yes, I know how to booby-trap. Learnt that back in Kansas. As WC said, we will defend our ground, no matter what the cost.

So now I know where another plot is and who the owner is + I know he wants to sell it. Now to get word to him that I might wanna buy it. He knows my better half and she speaks his lingo. I think he'd decline once he sees this pseudobiker. People will never learn, i.e., they still look at a man and pass judgement based on what they see. Dumbfucks.

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