Following up on the strong black tea for caffeine-fiends addicts like me; Marcus’s Grandfather; Goran . . . ??
My Canadian friend sent me a package of a Canadian morning wake-you-up-tea. With brewing instructions.
The sachets held at least 2x what American suppliers package.
Wow got my heart to racing, and blood to flowing, alright.
Of course I used it up. Only by using TWO bags of brands of American commercial could I even come close. Even thier labled stronger “Irish Breakfast”, “English Breakfast” ones.
Closest I can find to it is P&G Tips pyramid tea bags marked Product of England.
Always a black proceesed tea. Brewed a true 3-5 minutes. For me with a just splash of whole cows milk.
Visiting teas aficionados I have to ask for them to take back their tootsie-social-colored hot waters, and rebrew with 2X the makings, and not brew too long making it bitter.
Wasteful they say. Too strong they say. Ruining your taste buds to the fine taste of a delicate green or oolong.
A true caffeine addict needs every 2-3-4 hours their 200-300 ml of caffeine. From rising to going to bed.
Otherwise they get real grumpy and cross, just before their spring winds down, and they crash and stumble around falling asleep.
Coffee is Fine. But a good strong black tea with milk is Devine.
Steve Unruh
A friend of mine back in grade school lived down the road and his grand parents were a mile down the road from him, they had a small dairy farm and a big big garden. Summer time i would pull weeds in the garden for 8$ an hour at 12 years old that was good money for me, but low pay compared to someone in the actual workforce doing real work paying taxes. I didn’t care, because his grandmother (like most grandmothers?) was a WONDERFUL cook. If i was there early, breakfast was at 7, lunch at noon, and dinner at 5. If you are at the house you are eating, no option “no im not hungry” no get your butt to the table She and her husband were born in England though I cant remember where, their accent was thick and took a while for me to understand. She made a hot cream tea that was very dark, and it would wire me up enough to pick weeds for HOURS in the blazing sun. Her husband would occasionally drink coffee but he preferred the tea as well, they were my introduction to tea and i have never had a cup that was as good of tasting as hers or as caffeinated. Best damn eggs benedict i have ever had as well, on home made English muffins. And amazing zucchini bread
What a sweet old couple they were, very fond memory’s of my childhood
Some questions, do you usually remove the side branches of your tomatoes that you have outdoors?
Do any of you fertilize with grass clippings and how do you do it?
Depends on the region l guess. Here, we need to be extremely carefull with tomatoes. I need to pluck all leaves near the ground and all side shoots. Only one mistake and the whole crop gets blight. Spreads like wildfire once just one leaf gets it.
The cover is the important bit to keep the moist in and the weed down. 1-2dm seems about right
We usually cut the lower branches when it feels crowded there to keep air moving around the plants. Towards the end of the season we also cut the tops of the plant to make it put the last energy in to the existing green tomatoes instead of green growth.
And of course snip the suckers off during the season if your variety has those
Well mulched garden rarely needs any fertilising. The critters under the mulch dying and shitting do the fertilisation.
Depth of mulch depends on the condition of soil. If the soil is “hungry”, half a meter of mulch can just vanish before fall. But once the soil gets going, only a dm or so of mulch per year is enaugh to last to fall.
Yes, we have tomatoes outside this year or, well, no plastic over the greenhouse counts as outside, I guess. We haven’t taken the time to put it on yet with all the sunny weather. I don’t know if that is a bad thing. They are getting dry edges on the leaves and it is not from lack of watering or a disease/pests so I am wondering if it is too much sun or uv light without the plastic on. We drove the potato planter through the greenhouse and planted in the bottom of the grooves for easy watering from the ibc tanks as the greenhouse is on a slight slope. This was part of the planning when we put it up but I couldn’t have imagine how good of a choice it was. That is something we will continue with every year from now on. Success.
As for the melons ours have not shown any yet either but they are growing so just keep it up Jan, they will come
Yes, it will be interesting to see with tomatoes outdoors.
But melons, there were no melons last year either, although we have a lot of flowers. don’t know if they get pollinated in the box I made.
I’m a little afraid that the grass will mold around the vegetables, maybe not so dangerous?
I’ve never seen a tomato that didn’t want all the sun it could get. I remove suckers on indeterminate varieties but don’t on determinates. As for fertilizer, a lot depends on how you prepped the soil in the hole you planted them in. If you added bone meal and a slow release granular like a 5-5-5 and a source of calcium you should be pretty well set for the season but a dose of some sort of compost tea every couple of weeks will keep the microbes happier., Even if it’s just grass clippings and powdered wood ash but if you do use wood ash for micro-nutrients add at least a small amount of sulfur to drop the PH back down. Inside or out, it is good to shake the tomatoes plants every now and then for better pollenization. I saw a youtube where the guy goes around with an electric toothbrush and touches it near all the blossoms and says it gives him three times the yield. I don’t know about three times, but I’m going to try it this year.
Melons are always a crap shoot for me. Way more misses than hits.
Here in NW, U.S.of A. now in the last 20-25 years we’ve had to stop using too much true lawn clippings as mulches.
It seems the commercial grasses seeds are inoculated with a symbiotic Mold? Nematode? that was originated out of New Zealand to kill/prevent grasses insect pests in fancy lawns.
A land leaser we had with goats, many goats had a problems with the adjacent house lot owners dumping grass catcher lawn clipping over the fences.
The insect killing factor sent up in the grasses leaf by then would cause them to have perifial circulatory problems. Their nose tips and hoofs would die and rot.
So not be good for humans either.
Goats. Many, many problems depending on goats. Not an easy animal to raise and nurture.
Only older originating grasses would be safe.
Steve Unruh
Our watermelons (we hav only grown them for four years) have always given fruit but they are in a greenhouse with open doors in high summer and we also have our own bees. The first year was a bad year with only two really small melons and we blamed ourselves that we did something wrong plus the fact that we were planting them pretty late but perhaps it was the pollination, we didn’t have bees that year.
As for our tomatoes I talked about, I looked closer today and it seems all the newgrowth is a-ok so it was the leaves that came while being a seedling that looked like that.
You piqued my interest.
But it simply may not be any treatment at all on the grass. If it is fresh it is okay, if it is fully dried it is okay, but that inbetween stage can make animals sick. If you dump it on the neighbors property and the goats don’t eat it right away, it is harmful.
This is the only thing I have found so far from new zealand. https://biostart.co.nz/bioshield-grass-grub-liquid/
which is a bacteria that infects grubs… It says it is animal safe, but it also says feeding to animals is an offence.
I am not sure how that gets in enough numbers into the lawn clippings to affect goats. but it is interesting for lawn grub treatment.
A leaf mold seems more likely. molds usually have toxic poisons and it would in partially fermented grass piles.
Other then that, I would suspect something more traditional like whatever they use to treat lawns for mosquitos is pretty nasty stuff.
Hi SeanO’
Search up articles about Endophyte (a fungus) inoculated lawn grass seeds.
Article PDF is here: https://extension.oregonstate.edu
2016 “Endophyte Toxins inGrass and Other Feed Sources: Risks to Livestock”
Other articles on other State Dept. of Agriculture sites too.
The actual grass seed companies will not discuss or acknowledge this.
S.U.
Thanks I read it. It isn’t quite as clear as what the u-kentucky version is.
Basically for fescue, there are 3 types of seed. Toxic endophytes, which is the original wild type endophyte and has existed for decades. There is endophyte free seed, and there is a Novel endophyte, which is non-toxic and appears to be discovered in New Zealand.
None of it appears to be ‘innoculated’ because most endophytes are in the seed from the infected plants. It is just tested to see whether it contains it or not.
As an aside, apparently Rye ergot which is what LSD was isolated from is also an endophyte. Although probably not the same aklaloid/chemical found in Fescue.
An idea I have only tried, but not really investigated:
Nesting boxes do better with straw, but we have more hay than straw, so I’ve used that. Unlike straw, hay seems to go away in a day or two. Grass clippings in the chicken run also disappear, and much more quickly. I’m guessing grass/hay may be useful for some feed for the chickens.
In our old, larger run the chickens would eat all the low leaves off the volunteer trees and weeds. The more athletic hens would jump almost two feet (half a meter) up to grab a snack. What I’m trying now is, toss the tree trimmings and sprouts into the chickens, let them eat the leaves, then dry for a while before converting to charcoal. The leaves don’t seem to help much for charcoal, but the chickens seem to enjoy them.
Our compost pile is also the final resting place for stock that dies. In a really hot pile, I’ve seen a chicken reduced to a leg and pelvic bone in a week, but I’m an amateur. These guys are professionals:
“Put a lid on it and it will compost poultry in as little as three days to usable compost.”
Or how about a hog to compost in 9-14 days:
A web search for “mortality composter” will probably turn up more and bigger systems.
Kent
