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Post by blueadzuki on Nov 25, 2013 10:29:10 GMT -5
Good for you though my gut tells me that any sheep big enough to have a 10 pound shoulder has reached an age where lambhood has be left behind and you are well into hogget territory.
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Post by blueadzuki on Nov 24, 2013 20:03:38 GMT -5
Reminds me of a conversation I had back in college
Me "What to you think of anime?" Other person "Don't know. Who's Annie Mae?"
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Post by blueadzuki on Nov 23, 2013 23:10:44 GMT -5
In my case you'd have to replace blackbirds with squirrels/chipmunks/voles, the poppies with pansies, the cornflowers with grasspeas,and the love-in-a-mist with love-in-a-puff. I'll leave the cricket and beer to you.
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Post by blueadzuki on Nov 23, 2013 18:28:08 GMT -5
Sounds a bit like me except in my case it's more like
1.Year one, plant something new and suffer a failure rate of 99-100% 2a. Year two, plant the seed from whatever made it through year one and suffer a 99-100% failure rate again, becuse the conditions that year are the diametric opposite of whatever they were the previos year 2b. Knowing that the condtions are going to be diametrically opposite, skip planting the seed from last year and instead plant the seed from the year before........and suffer 99-100% dailure because the condtions are the same 2c if try and trick it out by planting both last years and the years before (on the grounds that one or the other has to be right) get condtions that are fatal for BOTH of them. 3. Begin to wonder if there is some sort of divine message in this about the futility of trying to garden here. Brood on this and begin to wonder if said futility in fact applies to ALL my endevors of any sort. Become depressed,or stubborn or bitter. 4. If either of the latter two, repeat process.
I wish I could paint a more postive picture, but there it is. By now I practically go into the year with no hope, and have begun to wonder if the few times things actually do work a bit are no so much miracles of sucess as fate setting me up to make the failure down the road all the more painful.
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Post by blueadzuki on Nov 12, 2013 18:27:11 GMT -5
It also doesn't help much that in some parts of India "Val" can also be used to described dried Lima Beans.
Oh before I forget I have to modify something I said earlier. I mentioned that I thought that the bag kind of white lablab was probably a bit shorter season because only one of my lablabs flowers, and the bean shape looked like those from the bag. Well, now that I have harvested some more mature pods and let the seed dry down a little, I'm no longer so sure that that one plant IS from the bag. As it dried the seed got a lot shorter and rounder than it looked fresh (bit like how a lot of soybean elongate when they are imbibed than they are when dry) so that dried it looks more like the stuff I was pulling out of pods from the vegetable section. So, in short I have NO CLUE from what source that seed came, and it is quite possible that the plant I have is a veggie one that randomly had shorter season genes.
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Post by blueadzuki on Nov 12, 2013 13:52:21 GMT -5
Martin, have you been able to get dry seed from those in our climate? Yes,indeed. Not certain where my Indian friend got his seed but he was growing it in 2005 and saves some every year. I'm his backup in case something happens to his in storage. I didn't grow it out this year since I've got a bit less than a pint from 2012. The very first time that I saw him growing it, I said that they should have support. He said not this one as it will not climb and it never has shown any desire to get very tall. You may also find it called Val, Papdi, or Priya. Several years ago, someone sent me a white variety which also was supposed to be a bush. None germinated so I'll never know. Martin Assuming those are the white ones I sent you in exchange for the bush ones, I never said they were bush (in fact, as I got them out of one of those bags, they presumably WEREN'T). As far as I know, your bush ones are the only bush ones I have ever seen. That's isn't to say that they could not be. Most of those commercial bags is pretty uniform. but there is the occasional really variant seed enough to make the sorting a little more complicated than the old "rip the bag, pull out the other volunteer seeds and chuck the rest". Once or twice I have found seeds that are REALLY big (about twice normal size) with the long angular shape that makes me think that what they could be is the white version of the "long" lablab (besides the kind we are most familiar with, with the pods that look like oversized snap peas, there are longer podded lablabs with a pod shape closer to that of a fava bean. The standard version of this is a purple/black seeded ones) Others have hilums so far up that the seed must be almost on end pointed in the pod. One other question. I have seen people advertising lablab seed on ebay as a sow able browse for fattening up deer. Do Deer actually like lablabs that much. They don't seen to ever touch mine (and the touch everything else). In fact NOTHING does, lablabs are the one seed I now toss the leftovers of in the garbage rather than the lawn or mulch pile, The critters won't TOUCH them so the just sit there, and when Lablabs rot the smell is terrible (much as rice beans can rot into something that smells like dog sh**t, if you take enough lablab seed and let it rot, you'll spend the rest of your summer searching under bushes for dead birds.) .
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Post by blueadzuki on Nov 11, 2013 7:30:39 GMT -5
Baby food jars are a bit better for long term bean storage IMO. Tall baby food jars will hold enough seed to plant 200 feet of row for most beans. They seal tight enough to store beans for about 10 years max. Note that beans have a "half-life" in storage of about 7 or 8 years. After 10 years, you may only get a handful of plants, but they will grow well enough to produce seed for another round of storage. Sounds sensible. No longer having babies in the house, I tend to use the basically spherical jars from a brand of honey I like (or liked, the store I bought it from stopped carrying it) less easy to stack side by side, but a lot thicker glass (good for someone like me who drops a lot of jars). For smaller quantities I usually use tissue vials of various sizes (available from medical supply houses or the Container Store if you know where to look).
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Post by blueadzuki on Nov 9, 2013 13:54:22 GMT -5
I'm not so sure about that. According to Google maps you're at about 42.5 degrees South. I'm at 41.5 North. So your only about 1 degree more polar than me and I'm able to get some of the varieties at least most of the way there (what I have outside isn't completely ready, but some of them are probably far enough along that, if I took them and dried them the seed would be reasonably viable) and ALL the way there if what you want are the pods for eating. Plus as I don't know how far you or him are from the coats, that could have a blunting effect on the harshness of winter Assuming your friend isn't too far further south than you, I would imagine he might be able to pull it off. I would suggest he got for the dried kind in the bag as the fresh kind won't work (besides the fact that they are usually sold too immature to be viable, most of the strains used for the vegetable form are SUPER long season; they won't even FLOWER at my latitude. That, maybe starting them indoors and transplanting them (the one out on my patio only went out around June; an earlier start might have given it more time) and maybe covering them up at the very end of the season might be all that's needed to get mature seed back out.
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Post by blueadzuki on Nov 9, 2013 6:34:09 GMT -5
I have one in my yard (pretty much the only thing left out there at this point, as it was too entwined in the patio railing to bring inside. The pods on mine are full sized now, and well swollen but not yellowing or drying down (that's why it's still out there, I'm hoping to pull just enough time off the plants to let the pods mature. The mature seed edibility depends on seed color; colored seed cultivars are poisonous a maturity, white seeded ones are OK (you can find bags of the white seeds sold at many Indian grocery stores under the Hindi name for them "Van" as well as green pods sold to be cooked as vegetables. The tradeoff is that all of the white seeded ones are white flowered and green podded, the purple podded flowered and leaved ones are invariably colored seeded (there are colored seeded green podded ones as well) So what you gain in extended edibility you lose in ornamental value . From what I have seen, the fairly easy to find purple cultivar "Ruby Moon" is unusually short of season, there were mature pods on plants I saw at the local nursery around mid July (though as that nursery sells the plants in pots, I cannot rule out the possibility that the plants had had been subjected to an artificial short day cycle in a greenhouse to induce flowering early and make them more attractive to buyers.)
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Post by blueadzuki on Nov 3, 2013 23:24:27 GMT -5
Hard to say, since most of my plans tend to change up until the last minute but tenitively
1. Re plant the Bantu seed I got from this year; this time, should have enough plants to be able to actually EAT some without dipping dangerously into the reserve seed. Probably less Fort Portal Mixed next year (I did OK, but the bantu ripens so much more evenly and quickly and has show itself better at handling cold temps, which could become important if we have another spring like the last one.
2. More speckled grey, assuming that a better percentage come up (I got about 25-50% germination with 4, so with the 30 or so I have now, I should get 10-15 plants. And hopefully, the fresher seed I get from them will have a better germination rate than the old seed I'm buying.)
3. More Adzuki beans, planted indoors later (so I don't end up losing them all to late frost when they get so big I have to plant them outside.)
4. More Lablabs, planted indoors earlier (in the hope that larger, more mature plants will pull the flowering back 4-6 weeks and mean I can get ripe seed at the other end before the frost shows up (this year I got to full size pods, but they were still totally green).
5. probably less rice beans (as fun as trying to get this short season version is, the fact that 90% of the crop fails along the way and the remaining 10% become a hopeless snarl unless you plant the seeds one by one (which isn't feasible with a crop where you need to put 1000 starter seeds in to get 20-30 producing plants. Plus, unless I find some more bags of the right type of beans in C-town between now and then, I don't have the reserves to plant on the scale I did last year, at least, not if I want to work for the alternate colors.
6. couple giant peanuts already started, though those will probably stay indoors.
7. Might start some Sesbania aculeata indoors around February (seed shows up in packages of senna pretty often, so I have a decent supply) to see if I like the taste of the flowers. Planted some year before this one, and it grew quite well, but didn't start flowering till frost came, so maybe starting indoors might give necessary edge.)
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Post by blueadzuki on Oct 30, 2013 15:06:19 GMT -5
I suppose it is possible, though I doubt that anymore around here is using Ezeer as ground straw (but you never know). The ancient thing makes sense. Rivet wheat (which is where I've seen this polyheaded nature before) is pretty ancient. And Goat grass (the other half of the wheat genome)is also multiheaded.
Holly I may actually do that at some point. After all, I'm only 15 or so minutes away from the Cornell Ag Extension in Valhalla. I'm sure they would be happy to help me (actually, I'm not sure, but as a Cornell Ag Alum, I think they even waive the fees). The big question will be whether they can do it with just a picture, or they'll need the actual heads (with only two of them, I'm sort of loathe to give up half my seed (especially when there may be only 10-20 good ones, see below)just to find out.) There is of, course also the matter of what happens if they ask where I got it (what I see as somewhere between eminent domain and fremantling, they could easily see more along the lines of trespassing/theft.)
Joeseph, I'm probably going to wait a long while before I thresh them (you can see they are still very green and very wet). But I imagine the seed will look pretty ordinary. The twist seems to only go as far as the rachis (rachii, in this case?) The actual glumes seem pretty normal. Puffed out a lot (they always are when the wheat berries are ripe but not dry. I'd guess it's a red wheat since the grain looks orangy brown, though its' been a long time since I saw much white wheat, so my color judgment may be off. Likely hard (most of the wheat here is, especially feral, soft is too pest prone.) Spring presumably, since it is ripening now (actually if the stuff is on it's own, it may be very short season, since it's gone through it's life cycle TWICE since this spring)
The nematode issue is more or less the same as the something in the soil issue, why JUST THAT ONE PLANT? Nematodes usually wouldn't stay that close in; not with other prey plants so close. Though there may in fact have been two. I mentioned that there was a third head from last week that was picked too young to have usable seed. Well, unlike these two, that one had a beard. Probably they are from the same plant and it's simply a head variation (I've seen wheats before where some heads on a plant were bearded, some beardless and some in between (my "beardless" wheat from one of my seed growouts actually isn't fully; the very last glume on the head always has one single "whisker") But I suppose there could be two there.
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Post by blueadzuki on Oct 30, 2013 5:49:49 GMT -5
Given that the garden has been abandoned as far as I can tell, I'd say probably not. Plus if it was you'd think all the what there would look like that. Oh, looks like direct pic is working again
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Post by blueadzuki on Oct 28, 2013 19:52:12 GMT -5
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Post by blueadzuki on Oct 26, 2013 22:18:08 GMT -5
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Post by blueadzuki on Oct 26, 2013 16:57:51 GMT -5
I know what tree you are talking about, but damned if I can remember what it is called. People always told me it was Japanese Lacquer Tree, excet I just looked thaut up and it is a different tree. Little pods that look sort of like three sided lanterns (bit like love in a puff pods, but longer and more angular)If no one else has figured it out by the first of the year I can try and check when I got to Flushing (there is a sculpture of the branches on a wall I pass by, and if I recall the name is written there)
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