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Post by oxbowfarm on Jan 28, 2013 14:28:00 GMT -5
I've had great luck with cowpeas in NY.
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Post by oxbowfarm on Jan 27, 2013 20:46:48 GMT -5
I grew them like I grow ground cherries. Planted them a month or so before last frost and then planted them out after last frost, but I bet you could easily get away with direct seeding them. They still come up wild in Greeley CO in the old Volga German neighborhoods, so they aren't long season.
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Post by oxbowfarm on Jan 27, 2013 17:04:31 GMT -5
Just a brief update to double check that everyone who asked for seed has gotten it? I didn't really keep track and a few people fell through the cracks already. If you haven't rec'd seed that you requested send me a PM.
Tim
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Post by oxbowfarm on Jan 26, 2013 21:43:03 GMT -5
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Post by oxbowfarm on Jan 26, 2013 21:14:41 GMT -5
I prefer not to buy Seminis either, but I also don't like to be without Simpson Elite. Fortunately lettuce is about the easiest seed to save there is and I am now self sufficient in Simpson Elite. I hardly ever buy from Pinetree anymore, but I was aware that they claim to have stopped buying Seminis products but they still carry at least one. Celebrity is a flagship Seminis variety.
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Post by oxbowfarm on Jan 26, 2013 13:38:06 GMT -5
Try Johnny's, they are better at lettuce than just about everyone else. In my experience, the best summer green leaf is Simpson Elite (a Seminis variety if that matters to you).
For summercrisp, Nevada is good, Cherokee is better.
Romaine, Jericho is very good so is Plato II. Only place for Plato II anymore is to save it yourself or Wild Garden Seed.
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Post by oxbowfarm on Jan 25, 2013 23:45:49 GMT -5
Good. I can't wait till this Glass Gem craze is over. Once the seed is ubiquitous we can just use it in breeding projects or whatever and I don't have to see that picture ever again. I'd also like to say that selling Glass Gem seed one did not grow for 100 seeds/$50 is a blatant ripoff (50 cents/seed for a junky popcorn?!!!). It's disgusting. I'm sick of all the stupidity surrounding this corn.
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Post by oxbowfarm on Jan 25, 2013 23:37:11 GMT -5
Can't get the plastic tight enough and wrassle with the wigglewire with gloves on. So I run inside a lot.
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Post by oxbowfarm on Jan 25, 2013 20:40:14 GMT -5
For a while last year this thread was one of the first search results when you Googled "Glass Gem". No longer the case. #1 appears to be some kind of Glass Gem vanity blog associated with NS/S. We must squeeze ever last dollar out of this viral craze before folks start saving their own Glass Gem!
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Post by oxbowfarm on Jan 25, 2013 20:35:49 GMT -5
Joseph, I'm still trying to pry Magic Mama out of Carol. I was actually talking flour corn with Carol a couple weeks ago. She never said she was abandoning flour corn specifically, but she indicated some reasons she was moving away from them in general. For one thing, she felt that parched corn was good food, but that cornbread was better. She makes cornbread out of both flour corn and flint corn, but she said that flour corn cornbread needs added sugar to taste right which is something she would like to avoid in a food staple. She said the only color flour corn that didn't need the sugar was the brown pericarp, but that she'd never had enough of the brown pericarp flour corn. I'm assuming she's talking all Magic Manna here, but we didn't get that specific that I recall. The other point she made was that she doesn't own any land so she has to find good farmers isolated from other corn to grow her corn and only has one good spot to do that right now. Since she prefers the flint corn to the flour, the flint is what gets planted. Some of the above statements are my interpretations of what she was saying, don't take all that as the WORD of St. Carol. She also mentioned that striped pericarp (chinmark?) flour corn like Supai made a flour that tastes good without sugar. She also seemed to think that Painted Mountain was much flintier now than it was when she selected Magic Manna out of it. All in all, I don't think we'll be seeing Magic Manna from Fertile Valley any time soon. Keep in mind that is just my own guess, not something she actually said.
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Post by oxbowfarm on Jan 25, 2013 7:25:53 GMT -5
IMO the size a squash gets is genetically controlled. Theoretically dry farming would improve squash flavor by concentrating the flavor compounds but if the squash plant gets stressed to much by inadequate water the flavor suffers (in my experience). Best thing to do is find the varieties with the size and flavor that meets your requirements and then breed and select your own strain for exactly what you want. That's how to get the best tasting squash, select them to thrive under your conditions.
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Post by oxbowfarm on Jan 25, 2013 7:07:01 GMT -5
We've been slowly plugging along with this project and are getting down to the final stretch. Conditions have been really lousy for working on a metal greenhouse frame with temperatures hovering around 0deg F. The metal sucks the heat right out of your hand almost instantly.
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Post by oxbowfarm on Jan 25, 2013 6:57:10 GMT -5
Finished in the dish. They were very tasty and held together very well as a noodle, although they definitely are a little more brittle or crumbly than a normal wheat egg noodle. But they work completely well in this kind of dish, and I'm going to experiment further to see about eliminating the kneading step. Someone was mentioning nixtamalization in the Glass Gem thread. I have zero interest in exploring nixtamalizing corn. To me the idea of boiling the corn, removing the pericarps by hand, then rinseing, wet processing or drying the nixtamalized corn sounds like a total PITA. And all to gain a bit of niacin? I'd prefer to just drink milk, that's why I got a cow. It does make sense if you are trying to eat a diet of only or primarily corn, or if you really need to make something like tortillas out of corn and need to change the protein structure to make it workable. As far as Paõ de Milho, it is really hard to find a recipe for it that doesn't have wheat flour in it. But there are some Portuguese Youtube videos showing the traditional process, and you can buy corn only Paõ de Milho in Fall River or New Bedford MA in the Portuguese bakeries. Probably in other Portuguese enclaves as well like SF and Hawaii, but I've never been there. Its wicked good, and the only cornbread I've ever had that you could actually use to make a sandwich with, although it is really dense and a bit sticky.
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Post by oxbowfarm on Jan 24, 2013 21:00:12 GMT -5
CL= Country Living
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Post by oxbowfarm on Jan 23, 2013 20:19:28 GMT -5
Are they cold hardy enough for British Columbia?
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