A Busy Day Outside

Yesterday was quite a busy day.


I built two garden beds with the method previously shown (assembling a cut tire border around posts, covering the bottom with paper and cardboard, soaking with water, filling with hay, soaking again with water).


We hoed the grass between the beds, and covered the ground with pine needles. I love to enjoy the fresh smell of the pine needles while working in the garden.


While mowing, my husband found concord grapevines that we thought were long since dead due to fire.


Then he found a couple more behind the house that must have been a gift from a bird some time ago. Our neighbors have some well developed concord vines, so it's likely the bird had been hanging out over there before visiting our yard. All this was exciting enough, but then I was wandering around the yard and found more vines... lots more.


They are a lighter shade of green, so they aren't concords. And they seem to be growing wild, scattered along the woods. I have a feeling they may be whispering "muscadine" to me. We shall see.


You can see the tiny grape clusters forming.

They are located in a tangle of all manner of plants, including blackberries, honeysuckles, young mimosas, passion flower vines, and several others as yet unidentified. It will be a tedious undertaking to clean out this area: exactly the sort of challenge I love. Speaking of things that I love. I love this land that we live on, and it is constantly showing that it loves us too. We decided we wanted pawpaw trees, we found pawpaw trees... in abundance. We decided we wanted grapes, we got grapes... in abundance. This place has been my home for most of my life and I have quite a close bond with it, and growing closer all the time now that I am giving it more attention.

Meanwhile, I have been collecting various mushrooms periodically. I have been finding them everywhere while working on other projects. It's really a pretty nice way to fit mushrooming into my schedule. I can just take a few minutes to photograph and collect and briefly study them as I find them, then lay them out on some paper inside the house to take a spore print. I can then refer back to them later to try and identify. I'll post more information when I am able to acceptably identify my findings.

Today will be another day outside, planting, and perhaps building more beds, we also have errands to run outside of our kingdom/queendom. So I guess it will be another busy day.

Progress in the Garden

I put on sunblock today, not realizing that I would have to stay bundled up if I were to function. I have been spraying our plants with our homemade pawpaw leaf pesticide. I'll report back later with my results. I planted onions and garlic, a bit late, I admit. I planted the rest of the okra. Here are a few pictures of the garden's progress.


Here is some garlic I planted a little earlier.


I planted these yellow onions a couple of weeks ago.


A bloom budding on our purple pepper plant!

Edibles

Here is a collection of some of the edibles we currently have growing on our premises.


Peaches


Plum


Pears


Apple


Figs


Srawberries


Blueberries


Broccoli


Spearmint


Chocolate Mint


Licorice Basil

Organic Pesticide

I've read that all the wonderful Paw Paw trees in our magical little hollow contain a natural and potent pesticide. Of course, the articles are about making extract in a lab with string solvents like industrial grade ethanol and such which, in my opinion, goes beyond what could be considered "organic". I have also read, however, that organic gardeners use the leaves, stems, twigs, and bark to make their own natural and effective pesticides.

What I can't find is any sort of recipe or anything on exactly how the hell they manage this.

The organic pesticide recipes I have found involve mainly capsaicin (the stuff that makes peppers and onions and such hot). In these recipes, you simply cut the ingredients up small, blend them into a paste, steep said paste in water for a bit, strain, add a bit of vegetable oil and a dash of dish soap to break up the surface tension of the water and there you are.

I figure this should work with the paw paw parts as well so that is what I'm trying. I intend to also make a capsaicin based solution as well and testing them against one another. I will post again in the future once I have some conclusive results.

UPDATE:

The first test of the organic pesticide; we found a spotted up leaf on one of our watermelons. Upon further inspection, we found a striped cucumber beetle just going to town on it. We filled a spray bottle with our paw paw leaf solution, gave it a spritz and WOW! the beetle didn't fall over and die or anything, but it DID start running around in circles and then jumped off the leaf, to be seen no more!

Planting Our Garden

Things are starting to come together.

Don't run off now...

I posted on how this place looks like a war zone. I've got my hands into clearing some stuff (and stocking the back of my shop building with firewood for the winter and then some) so posting has slowed to a halt, unfortunately.

However, we started planting our garden yesterday, and we're gonna go get some more plants today. I plan to take the camera up with us this evening and record a new video entry.

This blog is still very much alive. ALIVE I TELL YOU! *maniacal laughter*

Garden Update