Epsom Salt on Plants

Are epsom salts good for plants?

There is a bit of uncertainty concerning using epsom salts on your plants.  Research shows little effects, but gardeners have been using epsom salts on their rose bushes, tomatoes & peppers with obvious positive effect.

Use:
The general guideline for application is 1-2 tablespoons diluted in 1 gallon of water.  Applied as much as every other week.

Benefit:
Epsom salts include sulfur and magnesium, both of which are necessary minerals for plants.

Concerns:
Soil salinity - build up of excess salt (of varying types) in growing beds.  More than just epsom salt, many commercial fertizers are mineral based, and often times excess minerals that aren't used by the plants can build up in the soil.  As these excess minerals build up, it make it much harder for the plant to absorb water and nutrients.  Furthermore, salty soil diminishes moisture in the plant by sucking water out of plants in an effort to neutralize salinity.

Read more: Saline Water's Effect on Plant Growth | eHow.com http://www.ehow.com/info_12140281_saline-waters-effect-plant-growth.html#ixzz23j6lqckv

More on epsom salts for plants on youtube.  FriedasGarden

So the short answer is yes, you can use epsom salts on your plants. Just make sure it's not too much or too often. 

The first harvest!

 

Yes I know, it's still February, but I couldn't wait.  So here you have it, the first harvest of the year.  Two beautiful romaine lettuce plants.

Even though these plants could have gotten a little bit larger, I decided to go ahead and harvest them anyway.  I mean what can I say, I was anxious.  Well there's that and the fact that I found a chicken IN MY GREENHOUSE this morning.  She must have snuck in at night, and got stuck there.  Chicken bliss I'd say.  Fortunately the damage was minimal, but because these two plants were pushed over I decided to pull them.

Surprisingly, that wasn't the strangest thing that happened this morning.  You see generally I don't go looking for a missing chicken.  But I found one of the girls on top of the hen house.

 

Besides wondering how in the heck she got up there, I wondered, why?  My next thought was, maybe she got scared up there, and then I started wondering if the chickens got attacked.  This prompted me to do a head count, and sure enough we were short one.   Well after some searching I found her where I said, in my greenhouse, just chillin'.

Open Source Ecology

NPR had a story on a network of farmers, engineers, and supporters that for the last two years has been creating the Global Village Construction Set, an open source, low-cost, high performance technological platform that allows for the easy, DIY fabrication of the 50 different Industrial Machines that it takes to build a sustainable civilization with modern comforts. The GVCS lowers the barriers to entry into farming, building, and manufacturing and can be seen as a life-size lego-like set of modular tools that can create entire economies, whether in rural Missouri, where the project was founded, in urban redevelopment, or in the developing world.

Check out the story here:
http://www.npr.org/2012/02/19/147110017/building-a-village-one-home-brewed-tool-at-a-time

and be sure to check out http://opensourceecology.org/

Giant Egg

I was collecting the eggs the other day and I found what had to be the largest egg we've gotten to date.  I mean as far as eggs go, this sucker was like a bowling ball.  We held it up to the light and it looks like it could have up to 3 yolks inside.  Talk about an omelette maker, this would be the only egg you need.  Now i'm sure that anyone who has chickens isn't so surprised by this as it isn't that rare after all, but for everyone else, I love to share.

I Saw a Bee in January

I was outside cutting wood the other day, and for the past few hours I'd been wondering. Why?  Heck, new years was just a few days ago - I could still taste the cucumber flavored vodka in my mind.  But outside the temperature is over 50 and in a t-shirt I was fine.  I'd never known such a warm stretch of days in the middle of the winter.  But then again, it's not like it hasn't happened before.  At least this time it was to my benefit.  This weather was perfect for chopping wood.

A thing about chopping wood, even though it can be time consuming, it's very much a sort of zen type activity.  The day was so nice, that combined with the chore at task, it was difficult not to slip into thought.  Now what could have easily been a 15 minute task, took double that.  No matter.  I've come to accept and rather enjoy taking my time.  After all, in general the amount of work I have to do never really seems to reduce.

In spite of this I still manage to catch nature at work regularly, this time, on a much smaller scale.  A honey bee catches my attention.  Now what in the world would a honey bee, be doing out this time of year?  I begin to consider the fate of this bee.  Death possibly.  I mean, being realistic, there is nothing for this bee to eat.  Or maybe he will just go back to his hive and hibernate a little more.

Then I look closer at the bee.  So clean and fresh, almost new in a way.  I watch as the bee moves from each end of the freshly cut wood, likely looking for moisture.  Perhaps attracted by the smell.  It didn't matter, this creature had my fascination.  Then the School bell rings.

I realized that my connection with the time and space of that bee had been interrupted.  Automatically I search for the bee and try to focus again, but my mind won't let me.  I have a task at hand, to chop the wood.  No matter, this is not the point anyway.

In fact, there really isn't one.  Except that I saw a bee, in January.

Putting up your Crops Part 1: Peppers, Peppers and More Peppers

It seems that one vegetable we have no trouble growing is peppers.  This year we grew literally hundreds of peppers, and unlike the tomatoes that still had pounds and pounds of fruit on the plants as well, these peppers were all ripe.  That's right, plant after plant of brightly colored, waxy, practically perfect peppers.  We didn't even bother with the less than ideal candidates, they went straight to the worms or chickens - It's no surprise my egg yolks these days are more vibrant than an orange crayon.  Unfortunately a good half of the most ideal candidates didn't make it to the plate.  This isn't really how I wanted to see the culmination of our hard work and the magic of nature end.

This brings me to the question of what to do with all the excess.  Do we really just feed it to the chickens?  If you knew me well enough you'd know that I give everything to my chickens.  Obviously the first thing you'll want to do is eat as much as you can while it's fresh.  But then what?  The society we live in today separates us from our cultural traditions of eating seasonally.  What I'm getting at is if you can't fathom eating 20 winter squash in your lifetime let alone 6 months, then you may have to focus on a few preserving methods that can help you increase your variety.  One easy way to store perishable produce is by freezing.  Now this is a big subject, and I'll leave you to do your own homework on the matters of the process, but each vegetable has a different reaction to freezing (think blackened potatoes) and you have to counter each potential problem with a different process. For most vegetables this process is blanch, cold water bath, and freeze.

To understand how to freeze your food successfully it's important to understand the dynamic that causes it to go bad in the first place, enzymes.  The enzymes in fresh produce are what causes rot.  Even though enzymes are massively beneficial to our health, we don't want them destroying our food before we get to it.  The goal of freezing is to slow this process down, and it works well.  But for longer storage times it's simply not enough.  What you'll need to do is blanch (cook at high heat for a short period of time) your vegetables before you freeze them.  Again, each vegetable is different.  Raspberries, blackberries & strawberries for example are great to just pop in a bag and chuck in the freezer, and spinach is not.  Most times you'll only need to blanch for a few minutes at boiling temperatures.  This kills off a vast majority of the enzymes and greatly slows decay.

Now lets say you're a gardener and a hunter, just hypothetically, and you've just bagged yourself a deer. We can all understand that when the freezer is full of meat, you 'ain't gonna put no stinkin' green beans in there.'  So what then?  There are options.  One of the easiest is to grow what stores well. Vegetables such as winter squash, potatoes and long keeper tomatoes, all of which require no refrigeration, can last anywhere from 3-12 months. Store them in a well ventilated area that maintains a temperature of around 45-65 degrees. For better shelf life you can wrap them in non-glossy newspaper. There's other staples that store great and are begging for a spot in your garden too. How about garlic, oregano or dill? Herbs require minimal work to store, in fact with most, you pretty much hang them in an area with similar climate conditions as above, and let them dry out. Then just stuff them in an airtight jar or paper bag.  Easy peasy. 

There you go, everything that's required to get through the long cold winter.  Well, hopefully.  Not sure?  Ok ok, I've got a few more tricks too.  But you'll have to check back for part two.  I mean, I'm not writing a book here.

Forward: Fighting Monsanto!

Some good news comes out of India.  The fight to maintain their food heritage is about to be brought to court as Monsanto is being sued by the Indian government for violating the Biological Diversity Act (BDA).  Of course this isn't the first battle with GM crops for Indian farmers.  Suicide among farmers in India is not uncommon.  However, recently the rash of deaths has been blamed on money and failed genetically modified crops.


"famine and pestilence are part of India's ancient story.

But the death of this respected farmer has been blamed on something far more modern and sinister: genetically modified crops."

http://wakeup-world.com/2011/10/11/indian-government-files-biopiracy-lawsuit-against-monsanto/