Hi All,
I have a follow up on wild leeks from comment one on this page. They are finally sending up flower buds. From my reading, I’ve learned that leeks only live for one season and the fallen flowers and thus the seeds are replanted by Mother nature every year! The real message here, don’t pick every leek from a patch or you will lose the patch!!!
I’ll watch this patch and keep you posted on the changes.
David, growing a garden is like growing a family. You get out of it what you put into it. This picture reminds me so much of how our daughter grew up. You have to love that look of determination, great shot! Nice garlic, too.
Pepe
In keeping with my “organic since day one here” theme, I have a growth update of growing fertilizer. I’m planting comfrey on every available sqft of garden and beyond. Just split up root and put it in a hole deep enough to cover all the root. Water if you have to at the start, otherwise I find them carefree and able to out grow most weeds. A tap root mines nutrients from deep in soil, especially potassium. The plant is high in N and P also. I use most of my leaves as mulch, the original feed and weed process has been going on here for decades.
There everywhere! There everywhere!
We use it as a healing herb but never thought to use it as a green fertilizer or bio-mass, mulch. Can it be killed easily that way. Also, does it shade out your weeds? I am not sure if we can grow it down here very well. We had it in Tennessee. Our Amish friends heal broken bones and all sorts of things with it. You don’t happen to know the comparative N value to something like peas or other N fixer do you?
The only thing I could find was about 3:1:5. There’s always some hand weeding, but as a grow it yourself super hardy perennial plant ground cover and weed suppressing mulch, saving my water from evaporating and gently feeding them to boot, it’s number 1 with this home gardener. Once a bed is established the weeds can’t out grow it.
I gave away about 3X this much Romaine last week, I pulled the rest of the Romaine lettuce today, tis bitter now as we are getting warmer nights, lots of ‘green bulk’ for the compost heap…I guess it has Nitrogen, I consider all green weeds that hit the pile, as Nitrogen.
Garlic blooming just now, I planted the seed for this immediately last year when it matured, leave any baby corms in the ground also, late summer. I grow garlic mainly for the stinky juice to put in my varmit spray repellent, the stalks yield lots of varmit juice.
The wild onions bloom at same time as garlic, now these onion tops we like to eat the green stems, cut up in little pieces, I guess they are ‘chive-like’, but these probably aren’t officially ‘chives’…just wild onions! Whenever I’m out weeding or foraging ALL my wild onions get dug up and end up in this spot of good dirt. The white part of the onion never gets any larger than a dime diameter, but those are edible too I guess.—I just cut the tops, I leave a few onion tops to bloom & reseed.
Hi Oliver,
The tops of the 2 wild onion plants on the right seem to be a cluster of new plants (germinated seeds?). When that touches earth it probably roots and becomes a clump of small scallion size onions, just a wag.
Hi Pepe, ohhhhhh so that is how they work, well ya the thing will bend over eventually, I might break some of these ‘hard bumpy pink balls’ up and spread them out a little. Maybe I missed the flowering process earlier??..hahaha, well it sort of looks like a flower! But I often find ‘wild onions’ in distinct ‘clumps’ involving approx. 8 or so onions, probably from these pod things ‘touching the earth’.
You might be surprised what people will buy. We sell all kinds of things. We were cutting the blossoms off of our elephant garlic a few years ago and had several gallons of blossom pods. We decided to put them in vinegar and add some salt and people bought them as a seasoning sauce.
hahahhaa Hi Billy, sounds like that pickled garlic top sauce might be just the thing to make boiled peanuts appetizing! [sorry but I never could get use to boiled peanuts, I’ll have mine roasted & salted, anytime]
Now them’s almost fightin’ words round here…Hahahaha. Not much better than a half gallon of hot boiled peanuts with just the right amount of salt----not Cajun style mind you----just the perfect amount of salinity and astringency…You have to get them from the primer colored vans on the side of the road just at one end of a bridge. You can’t get them from the Indian-owned gas stations or out of a can. Big difference. You can also find good ones at flea markets in Florida or southern Georgia and Alabama. But there’s not much better than a big cup of properly-prepared boiled peanuts. Especially if you also have a cold Crimson Sweet watermelon to go with it.
Other unexpected sale products: squash blossoms, wild mushrooms, kambucha tea scoby’s, rape florettes, onions in red wine, etc…I guess it’s just marketing…My wife made some carrot salsa which sells quite well. It’s just regular salsa with ground up carrots in it. Or spiced crab apples. A little cinnamon and cloves and all of a sudden people are paying for crab apples. Have you ever had a crab apple? You can sell anything if you promote it the right way I guess.
Hi Oliver,
I just ran across this tidbit of info in the 'weed" section. I always thought of onions, wild or otherwise, as a blessing. I eat more raw onions than any other veg. My maternal grandfather told me if I ate an onion a day I’d never get sick.
Pepe
OK Pepe, I guess these in my annotated pix marked as ‘wild onion’ are really wild garlic ‘flowers/bulblets’…the ‘flowering timing’ next to the domestic garlic is probably no coincidence.
All I know is they smell & seem to taste like mild onion, no heat to it, but the green stem is hollow like a straw, for sure, I’ve probably just mis-identified it. Strangely tho, doesn’t domestic onions have hollow round stems? I’ve grown from store bought bulbs something called shallots that had 1/2" round hollow stems…but I couldn’t get it to mature to seed tops. Oh well botanicals always seem to befuddle me one way or another.
Hey billy, no I won’t fight ya for your boiled peanuts, but if I remember right, I did sample those ones I tried at an ‘indian run truck-stop’…LOL. Crab apples, ya long long time ago I ate 'em as a kid, between the thorns and the worm holes & them being hard as rocks, I never went back for more…now don’t let me get in a thicket of wild plums ahead of you—I won’t leave ya many.
Here’s a couple of pics of our cold frame that we use to garden through the winter. We even had some tomatoes survive all winter. It’s not heated -----just the sun. It’s covered with big doors with double layers of greenhouse plastic. We don’t really have any order to thing in there, just all kinds of things packed in together. The back wall has some “shelves” where we can plant smaller plants=lettuce, beets, radishes. I think we got some beans out of there in February. I have hopes of making a small methane digester to use for a flame to heat it through the coldest nights. We usually don’t stay really cold for very long. So if we can keep things alive when the temp dips down low for an occasional night we can usually keep it going.
An update on Kiwi fruit. If you have 2 plants flowering like crazy but still not developing fruit, you have 2 no fruit possible situations. One, you have 2 male plants. Two, you have 2 female plants. Never looked your flowers in the eye, huh. Here’s how to tell their sex.
Hey, I really appreciate the tip on the kiwi. We have had a kiwi at my grandma’s house next door for 20 years with no fruit. The boys dug it up and moved it to our place this year. We knew it was because we needed another but never knew how to determine which we had. Thanks…Really appreciate it.
The leaves are dying back, but the buds haven’t opened yet. Once the leaves are gone it would be hard to see the flower buds if you didn’t know where the patch was.
But my tomatoes are blighting…Haven’t had that problem for ten years…Lots of rain, lost my mulch early spring in a storm. Haven’t fertilized much. Also, it’s the first year I didn’t start my own plants. A friend of mine owed me money so I let him start my plants this year to pay down his bill…Maybe his greenhouse is infected.
