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Post by mnjrutherford on Aug 2, 2009 18:17:55 GMT -5
Thanks people! I'll have to check my soil assessment Patrick. Duh moment there, I should have thought of checking it out myself. I'll have to follow your link as well Dan.
Cloudberry's are WONDERFUL! If you have an IKEA store near you Alan, you can get things like jam, syrup, and wine (I think) all made with cloudberries. I sure wouldn't mind having cloudberries in my brambles collection. I'd also like getting some boysenberries!
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Post by stevil on Aug 3, 2009 3:39:32 GMT -5
That's a nice vesca! Once you get it going could I bother you for a sample. The cloudberry is beautiful! Hows the taste? Worth cultivating? -Alan Fragaria: Yes, of course! Remind me if I forget... The cloudberry (molte) is worshipped here in Norway. You often hear that people have been out picking cloudberries for Xmas. In our area, to get any decent amounts one has to go into the mountains and at this time of year, it isn't unusual in a good cloudberry year to see people in the mountains walking with a couple of buckets to collect the cloudberries. This may be a whole day expedition involving a long walk in to the best areas. A lot of effort involved in other words. People will also protect their molte-patch as best they can - they'll mislead you as to where the best areas are, rumours of a poor molte-year shouldn't put one off as it's probably not true and similarly rumours of bears in the best areas is even more reason to go to those areas (there are not many bears left in Norway and the rumours will be spread to protect the berries). In general it is free for all to pick berries independent of who owns the land. However, in the far north of Norway, the berries were an important income source for the local people and there is a special law prohibiting picking the berries on land owned by others. However, one can nevertheless pick berries as long as they are eaten out of hand in the field. Until recently, there was also a special law forbidding the picking of unripe berries. This was introduced in 1970. In areas with a lot of competition there would be a temptation to pick the berries before they are fully ripe so that your neighbour wouldn't get them! However, there were never funds for a molte-police force to roam the woods and the law was removed in 2003 Along with cowberry, Vaccinium vitis-idaea (also very popular here, used to make a kind of cranberry sauce), Cloudberries contain benzoate, a natural preservative. One could therefore preserve them a long time without sugar, freezing or preservatives. The berries would be either stored in water or cooked up with a little water to make a kind of porridge and stored in wooden barrels. The Sami people (lapps) would store the berries in reindeer milk, preserved in a reindeer stomach - the milk would turn into a sour cream. Creamed cloudberries is one of the commonest ways to serve them with loads of sugar - far too sweet for my taste... Raw, they are an acquired taste, difficult to describe the taste, but they're not particularly sweet and have quite large seeds, so crunchy too. Personally, I wouldn¡¦t make a special trip just to pick them and certainly wouldn't buy them from the market (expensive). However, I wasn't brought up with them from an early age... Cultivation: a couple of cultivars have recently come on the market here in Norway: Fjordgull ( Female) Apollen (Male) - it is recommended to have one male to 4 females. (These varieties were developed for coastal climates in Norway)
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Post by plantsnobin on Aug 3, 2009 8:20:14 GMT -5
Thank you for that info stevil. The same thing goes for the morel mushroom here. People go nuts for them, and won't divulge their favorite spot. We have 'sale barns' here where you can take stuff to auction every week, ranging from animals, eggs, junk, just about anything. In the spring you can always find mushrooms there, and people will pay unbelievable prices for a small sack of them. I like to go for a walk in the woods to look for them, but I just don't care that much for them. I always appreciate your posts, it is good to get first hand knowlege of some of these varieties that we may have wasted time growing, only to be disappointed when we were finally able to harvest. I have been doing some taste tests on my perennials this year, based on what it edible according to PFAF. Can't say that I have been impressed with too much yet. I don't like Rose of Sharron bush, and always have a few volunteers springing up and had decided to leave one since it was edible. Tried a leaf a while back, it was like eating a bad piece of meat that you keep chewing and chewing, but it never disappears. Oh well, there are lots of things to keep trying, and none of it has made me sick, yet.
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Post by silverseeds on Aug 3, 2009 11:26:03 GMT -5
Karen lol I have one or two people call me here in new mexico from ohio old friends, asking for my morel spots, but I already gave them to my mom, lol.
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Post by mnjrutherford on Aug 3, 2009 11:39:05 GMT -5
Anyway I could acquire some cloudberry seed Stevil? Or is that not the way to best grow them out?
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Post by PatrickW on Aug 3, 2009 12:02:50 GMT -5
Stephen, those pictures are great!
Jo, I just dug up your soil test, and your ground is loaded with phosphorus. It's probably has super phosphorus dumped on it year after year for decades. A normal reading is 100, and your reading is 144. You shouldn't add anymore. At the same time what Val said about it not being available might be an issue.
There are no easy answers here, you just have to try to build up your soil in the way you're doing and hope the problem goes away eventually. The fact your ground has so much (super) phosphate in it means your plants will have a hard time absorbing other so-called micro nutrients. You should do another soil test in 5-10 years and see if the situation is changing.
For what it's worth, I seem to have a similar problem in my community garden plot...
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Post by grungy on Aug 3, 2009 13:12:11 GMT -5
Jo, what is your magnesium readings?
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Post by canadamike on Aug 3, 2009 21:32:22 GMT -5
If it is the case, Jo, I suggest you compensate with foliar feeding of kelp and compost tea, the micro-nutrients could help compensate for the problem in the root zone.
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Post by stevil on Aug 4, 2009 2:53:02 GMT -5
Anyway I could acquire some cloudberry seed Stevil? Or is that not the way to best grow them out? I've understood that cloudberry cultivation is tricky with very specific growing conditions required. You can read about methods recently developed in Norway here: www.hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/CropFactSheets/cloud_berry.html
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Post by Alan on Aug 4, 2009 10:55:47 GMT -5
Thanks for the information buddy. I would like to try and experiment with them here though from the looks of it I don't think I would have much success. Maybe I can find a vendor around here for the fresh fruit though.
Interesting about the sterility when crossing them with raspberries and other Ribes/Bramble type species.
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Post by PatrickW on Aug 4, 2009 12:56:44 GMT -5
If it is the case, Jo, I suggest you compensate with foliar feeding of kelp and compost tea, the micro-nutrients could help compensate for the problem in the root zone. This may not be a bad idea. Any time you use fertilizer it's a bit like taking vitamins instead of eating a healthy meal, and likewise fertilizer is not a substitute for healthy ground. If you do have a specific problem, and are growing a plant that works well with foliar feeding (not all do), then foliar feeding may be a good way to address that problem. I personally wouldn't suggest it unless you have a specific problem, but if you do have a problem, it's certainly something worth trying.
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Post by canadamike on Aug 4, 2009 19:06:11 GMT -5
I have been foliar feeding for over 20 years, some years less than regularly, like this year, but in ANY year where I have done it OFTEN I had record years. We are talking almost 25 years here. Despite what they say, twice or three times a week, in a small garden ( impossible to do with acreage like now) has brought me record deserving harvests. My garden used to be a few feet from the road, and EVERY day people would stop to ask my trick,
I also used SPRAY-N-GROW, an organic catalyst of plant chemistry. sprayed once with it and 2-3 days later with kelp. My average spanish onion weight was 2.5 pounds, my beat over 3.5.
I have always used foliar feeding since, sure helps get rid of diseases, but for super harvest, forget recommandations, I seriously think they are designed NOT to make people afraid of work.
When it is possible to NOT follow their advice of a twice a month spraying (average), do it twice a week, with organic SPRAY-N-GROW or another catalyst of chemical reactions as an in between,, one spraying of one, then the spraying of the other, and the results will be mind blowing. Impossible to do it anymore on my scale.
In a farm setting, like I have now, success is only measured in plant helth.
But in a home garden...anybody can really beat the production average of a farm easily.
By a HUGE margin. Really, really huge. Like in ''many many times over''. And it is so freakishly easy.
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Post by silverseeds on Aug 4, 2009 19:12:08 GMT -5
can you be more specific about the mechanics of foliar feeding is there a site with info you could direct me too? what oculd I do myself, would compost teas work?or manure tea or something?
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Post by mnjrutherford on Aug 4, 2009 20:01:18 GMT -5
Whoa... OK, I'm not sure about the magnisium Bunkie... I'll have to look it up. I do have a few specific issues... I was talking on another thread about my tomatoes... roots growing from the stems, fruit rotting before ripening, stink bugs and squash bugs by the zillions and this year a new comer, June bugs. Also the hoppers are more numerous and larger.
On the other hand, I'm actually gathering tomatoes that are edible and I have peppers that are really growing and looking rather decent for the first time in my gardening history. Not to mention basil of death doom and destruction!!
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Post by PatrickW on Aug 5, 2009 5:08:59 GMT -5
silverseeds: I want to make clear here that I strongly disagree with Michel here that foliar feeding your plants as a way to generally increase yields is a good thing to do. It's much healthier for your plants, the environment and your pocketbook to just work with what exists in your own garden and it's natural systems than to spray or otherwise add a bunch of stuff to your plants. It doesn't matter if it's called organic, natural or chemical. It's still not any better an idea to add this sort of stuff to your garden without thinking through the reasons, than it is to take a multi-vitamin every day. At best it's a waste of money and time, and there are always risks and consequences anytime you add anything to your garden.
Having said this, foliar feeding is as simple as spraying dilute fertilizer directly on the leaves of the plants. For some plants it works better than others, for example it's commonly done with tomatoes. I also do it occasionally with my garlic, and I imagine it would work well with other onion/allium plants. It's most commonly done with weak natural fertilizers like fish/kelp emulsion, compost, nettle or comfrey teas, etc. You can even do it with chemical fertilizer if you really want, but you better make sure it's very dilute! Some people spray milk on squash related plants to control mildew related diseases, and I've been experimenting with some success with this to control garlic rust, and milk is also a weak foliar feed. Be careful because any foliar feed with 'taste' can introduce this flavor to your plants. No one appreciates fishy tasting tomatoes.
When plants respond well to foliar feeding, they absorb the nutrients directly through their leaves, and results can often be noticed within a few hours.
On the subject of fertilizing tomatoes, Frank (orflo) and I have just been exchanging emails about tomatoes getting late blight, a common and serious disease we get on tomatoes here. We have been testing various varieties for resistance to blight, and we have one tomato variety that is just barely blight resistant. This year Frank grew several plants of this variety side by side, and gave a few of the plants a small spoonful of weak organic fertilizer. Those plants he gave the fertilizer to got blight, but so far the others have not. Tomatoes are particularly susceptible, but any time you give any plant any kind of fertilizer, you can dramatically increase the likelihood of it becoming diseased. I've been discussing the same issue with other garlic growers in Europe, as garlic rust is a big problem here and fertilized plants get the disease much faster than non-fertilized ones.
Like vitamins, if your garden is not short on a particular nutrient, and you don't otherwise have a particular problem or you're not doing an experiment, adding fertilizer is not a good idea and usually won't help anyway. Like giving vitamins to people, if they do end up making you grow big and strong, that's not always a healthy situation. Overeating causes many diseases in people.
Jo: We talked about this before, but the one real thing your soil test showed was you were a little short on magnesium. Yes, you can get magnesium fertilizer, but this is a little expensive. What most people do instead, who need lime anyway, is use 'dolomitic lime'. The cost difference between normal and dolomitic is negligible, and it's often only a matter of asking for it by name when you buy lime. You might remember, I showed you some pictures of plants with a magnesium deficiency, and I suggested you try to watch out for it in your garden.
Magnesium deficiency often goes together with the use of super phosphate, because the super phosphate binds to the magnesium and makes it unavailable to your plants.
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