GM nostr!
One of my favorite things about living in a warm climate is having cool little lizards all over the place. The Texas spiny lizards and geckos we have are jumpy and nervous, and run away at every disturbance, but these green anoles are very chill. They'll hang out with you and watch you while you're in the garden, and only run away when they feel seriously threatened. I know a guy who trained one that lived in his woodpile to be hand fed. He'd catch bugs and feed it, until it eventually learned to recognize him and would come out for a treat whenever he walked by. They're cool little dudes.
#lizard #animals #grownostr #texas
Have you ever seen a "militia" group or whatever this is supposed to be that wasn't composed of at least 30% middle-aged fat dudes? They're not even trying to make it remotely believable. This is equivalent to pretending to bust an Islamic terror cell and all the members are Japanese women.
I used to think that stuff like this was attributable to incompetence. Now, I still think that some of it is incompetence. But the really egregious stuff, like this imbecilic "Patriot Front" bullshit, is about humiliation. They do this stuff right in front of our faces to send the message that they can get away with whatever they want to do, no matter how preposterous it is. This is "deep state" bureaucracy rubbing our noses in the fact that they're above the law, and want to make sure we see that. It's intended to demoralize us.
By "old school", I assume you mean something like "competent, intelligent, diligent, and conscientious". My wife is an engineer of this type, and not many of her colleagues seem to be. Certainly not the younger ones. It seems like the engineering schools have finally fallen to the "everybody gets a trophy" mindset that has taken down most other fields, and aren't producing a very high quality product any more.
The scary part is, even if the decline is arrested and reversed, there's already two generations of not-very-good engineers in the pipeline that can cause a lot of damage in their 40+ year careers. There aren't enough old-schoolers to go around, so some of the seats inevitably get filled with people who shouldn't be doing that job.
If you don't have a source locally (sometimes garden centers, especially ones that cater to organic growers, carry them), you can buy online from Uncle Jim's. There's a hydroponics/aquaponics store around here (Brite Ideas) that carries them, so you might check out local options in that arena as well.
As much as it sucks, Facebook and Nextdoor are your best options. I hate using both of them, but we get a lot of traffic from both when we have our plant sales.
Also, start a mailing list (Mailchimp isn't great, but it's free for basic, small-scale stuff) and ask people who buy from you if they want to be on it. Plant people are often repeat customers, especially when you add new varieties to your catalog. As long as you limit yourself to only sending out announcements occasionally and not annoying people, that's a good way to build up a customer base.
Incredibly naive. Those goals could not be *more* incompatible with the goals of government, especially the sort of government embodied by the freakin' CIA.
Don't get me wrong, lettuce has its place. But on a sandwich with fresh tomatoes? It's basil, hands down.. Every. Damn. Time.
That's a great analogy. Twitter and Facebook are the seed oils of the internet. They're unnatural, toxic, and promote inflammation.
Meanwhile, Nostr is bacon grease...
Step 1: Grow "lettuce leaf" basil in your #garden. This basil makes huge, crinkly, crisp, delicious leaves (see photo below).
Step 2: If anyone in your household tries to make a BLT sandwich, smack them gently but firmly with a spatula or similar item, while shouting "NO!", and replace the lettuce on the sandwich with a leaf of this basil instead. Throwing the lettuce on the floor and stomping on it is optional, but does add dramatic flair.
Step 3: Thank me for making your life better. A BBT sandwich is far superior to a BLT.
#gardening #grownostr #food
Chickens are immune to uroshiol, the oil in poison ivy that causes allergic reactions. So they can eat that stuff with no ill effects. They're generally smart and tough enough to avoid getting hurt on thorny plants, so the raspberries are not much of a danger to them.
I'd dig up the raspberries and move them, since they're more far valuable to you than as chicken feed. Brambles transplant very easily, so you can probably expect a good success rate with transplanting them. Find a new location that gets similar sun exposure to where they're at now.
Are the chickens going to stay in this area all the time? The main concern I'd have would be if they are ranging the rest of the property, they'll eat the poison ivy berries and litter the seeds in their droppings all over the place and spread the ivy to new locations. Also, if you're handling the birds, the uroshiol oil can transfer from them to you and give you a rash. You can reduce that by always washing (scrubbing with a washcloth) your hands and arms after handing the chickens to remove the uroshiol before it absorbs into your skin. Over time, the chickens will probably kill out the ivy by eating it all, reducing the need for these precautions in the future.
I've got three donkeys, and even if I were the kind of scumbag asshole who thinks it's OK to abuse animals, they'd be the last ones I'd mess with. Not only can they fuck you up real bad from either end, they have long memories and are very capable of nursing a grudge for a long, long time. If you hurt them, they'll remember it and come back for revenge at a time and place of their choosing.
The lion may be "the king of the jungle", but the donkey is the king of FAFO.
The gardens of the guys who built Stonehenge must have looked like this...
If you have a backpack sprayer, you can use a diluted soap mixture (3-4 Tbs liquid soap per gallon of water) and hose down the entire tree, concentrating on the underside of the leaves. That will help knock down the aphid population and let the ladybugs catch up to them quicker. You can also try just hosing the tree down with a sharp stream from a hose, to try to knock as many of the aphids off the leaves as you can. Be careful with that method, though, because you could knock the fruit off the tree if the stream is too strong.
I wouldn't describe myself as a gardener. I think "gardening-obsessed plant psycho" would be a more fitting description.
The key to onions is getting them in the ground as early as you can and making sure the soil is nutrient rich. The reason is that onions are day-length sensitive. They start bulbing once the days reach the number of hours of daylight that the variety has been bred for. So, the bigger you can get the plant (each green leaf will be a ring in the eventual bulb) before that starts, the bigger your onions can potentially be. Fortunately, onions are pretty cold tolerant plants, so putting them in the ground a month before the rest of the garden is possible in many climates, especially if you use some simple protection measures like a cold frame or just covering them with a sheet at night.
There's a breakdown of the three basic day-length types on this page:
Yeah, they're covered in those tiny little needle-like thorns, so it's best to relocate them somewhere out of the way. That's not too difficult, though, since they're tough as nails. As long as you get a little bit of the root and keep them watered, they transplant very easily.
Jam or syrup. Sometimes if we don't have time to preserve them properly, we'll just freeze them for future use. The best way is to freeze them individually on a baking sheet, then package them up, so they're not frozen together into a big block.
#Dewberry season is in full swing here in central #Texas, so we went to check out a small patch I had spotted a few weeks ago. Turns out to have been a bigger gold mine than I originally thought, yielding almost 5 pounds of berries, with probably that much more still left to ripen! This was just a small unkempt area next to the road in an urban area of commercial/office spaces that I happened to walk past on my way to a medical appointment. It pays to keep your eyes open!
#foraging #payattention #grownostr #eatwild
