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Post by 12540dumont on Oct 7, 2011 11:36:31 GMT -5
Joseph,
before our apple trees died, we had a lot of apple maggot. An old guy down the road one day told me that I had to clean up all the fallen apples right away and bury them at least a foot deep. This keeps them from overwintering. That reduced the maggot quite a bit. We also did wooden balls, painted red and sprayed with tanglefoot. (5-7 balls per tree). We'd catch quite a few. Of course we only had a few trees so that they were easy to manage.
Our died because the vile voles girded them. They chewed the bark around the trees. I'm planting new ones this fall, and they are each getting a tree shield and of course, we are planting them in baskets. A real pain if you ask me, but only the trees that are planted in wire make it to maturity.
That was a wonderful picture with the tomatoes/apples and the snow in the background.
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Post by Joseph Lofthouse on Oct 7, 2011 11:49:52 GMT -5
The baskets under the snowy mountains are all tomatoes. I didn't take pictures of the apples. I was too cold by then. It's one thing to pick tomatoes in the rain, it's a whole different experience to pick apples. Chickens or pigs in the orchard seem to deal well with apple maggots. But if you doused your apples in toxic chemicals you would have more salable apples and make more money! That's the American way! People tell me a similar thing about tomato cages: If I'd stake or cage my tomatoes, and grow them in poly-tunnels over plastic I'd loose less of them to bugs, and to rotting where they touch soil, and I'd make more money. But if I was after money there's easier ways to get it than by growing vegetables. I'd just as soon not have all the extra labor associated with tomato cages. |
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Post by steev on Oct 7, 2011 20:12:59 GMT -5
I largely agree. While I suppose many people wouldn't understand my relative indifferance to money, I figure the more I take out of my farm, the more I have to bring in to keep from depleting it. The infrastructure (trellises, cages, etc) that interests me is the stuff that frees me to work on other stuff, the stuff that increases my pleasure in what I'm doing, the stuff that lets me indulge my curiosity. I've noticed that what I don't harvest goes back to the soil; I don't need it all to go through a human gut, even if it squeezes out a few bucks on the way. I admit I wish less of it was going through rodent guts, mostly because that happens before I decide to pick it. I think pigs would help with the rodents.
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Post by mnjrutherford on Oct 7, 2011 21:24:59 GMT -5
I have an aversion to money myself. Some people don't quite understand it. It's necessary, certainly. But like pet rocks, it can't last forever. Economies rise and fall like the tides. When the money ceases to exist, the dirt continues and it's ability to feed with it.
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Post by Joseph Lofthouse on Oct 8, 2011 22:39:33 GMT -5
I harvested my pepper landrace this week. Here is what the general bell pepper landrace looked like.  and the yellow pepper race:  There are a few specialty peppers I still need to pick. |
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Post by 12540dumont on Oct 8, 2011 23:05:31 GMT -5
Joseph, do you grow hot peppers as well?
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Post by Joseph Lofthouse on Oct 8, 2011 23:48:44 GMT -5
I grow a few jalapeno and poblano hot peppers, but never manage to save seed from them. I buy plants from the nursery each spring. Capsaicin flavored foods are quite unpopular around here.
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Post by Joseph Lofthouse on Oct 11, 2011 21:46:39 GMT -5
Finally catching my breath after the frost emergency... It ended up being a partial frost. What got froze varied from field to field and row to row: All of the cantaloupe vines are dead, the fruit didn't freeze. All of the summer squash was severely damaged. (I've picked the winter squash so I didn't even look at it.) A few cucumbers survived. Tomatoes in one field froze. In another field 1/2 mile away they were not damaged. Guess it doesn't matter, most of the really nice fruit is in my truck already. The peppers all survived. I'd picked most of the fruits so I'm not expecting more pepper harvest except maybe of jalapeños. The cold weather things like kale, sunroots, swiss chard, strawberries, and turnips are doing fine. The Oaxacan corn didn't freeze yet. Hoping that the seed will mature that was crossed with sugary enhanced sweet corn. I found an interesting cross while harvesting the winter squash. I'm thinking that it is a hybrid between buttercup and a tiny orange maxima that I grow. I found what looks like the reciprocal cross among the orange squash. Expecting to grow them out together again next year.  I harvested a single plant of "Eastern Gammagrass". It looks remarkably like a stalk of corn, except with 2 cobs per leaf node with cobs at most of the leaf nodes. |
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Post by castanea on Oct 11, 2011 23:39:51 GMT -5
Were you expecting more of the gamagrass to mature? If so, what limited it?
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Post by Joseph Lofthouse on Oct 11, 2011 23:50:36 GMT -5
Supposedly Eastern Gamagrass is a perennial, so I harvested the plant to transplant to a different field. It was at the silk/tassel stage and I didn't expect it to mature seed this fall. I want to plow the field soon.
I only had one plant that germinated this summer. I planted around 30 seeds. It was very slow to
get started. It ended up being about 2 feet tall.
I might have had better results if I had presoaked the seed, or nicked it ahead of time. The seeds were woody looking.
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Post by Joseph Lofthouse on Oct 13, 2011 22:44:30 GMT -5
Here's what the eastern gamagrass looked like:  And the little silks:  My CSA baskets this week (October 12th) contained: Green gages, summer squash, cantaloupe, green snap beans, red delicious apples, cucumbers, carrots, green onions, parsnips (kral russian), turnip, and bell peppers. In addition my people took a-la-cart: ripe tomatoes, gourds, decorative corn, corn stalks, butternut squash, banana squash, hubbard squash, and green tomatoes.  |
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Post by Joseph Lofthouse on Oct 13, 2011 23:22:01 GMT -5
My favorite Moschata squash for the year: I haven't tasted them, and I haven't weighed them, but I sure had fun picking them. There were 4 like this. If I'm gritting my teeth for the photo, it's cause it was a huge effort to hold two of those at the same time!!!   |
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Post by steev on Oct 13, 2011 23:41:25 GMT -5
Looking like the proud, though stunned, father of twins.
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Post by Joseph Lofthouse on Oct 13, 2011 23:43:14 GMT -5
My two small colorful peppers that mature early, so I can have some kind of color to go into salsa or other preserving projects. Regular sized bell peppers rarely ripen in my garden due to the short growing season and cool nights:   |
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Post by 12540dumont on Oct 14, 2011 18:02:06 GMT -5
Joseph, That Moschata, Naples Long made the most lovely breakfast. Pumpkin crepes with pumpkin butter and topped with pumpkin whip cream. Tonight it's pumpkin curry chicken... Did I say I loved that squash? I love that squash. Attachments:
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