HelpfulGardener.com

SQWIB wrote:I would look into making some bio-char also.
I have had pretty good luck with it so far.

How are you making bio-char?

When I burn small tree limbs they burn up fast they are gone mostly all ash even if I put it out with water.

Large logs are harder to get started they burn slow if I put them out center is still solid wood & charcoal on the outside.

If I let logs burn longer center becomes charcoal most of the outside has become ash.

Charcoal is made industrially by cooking wood in a very large pressure cooker so oxygen can not burn charcoal to ash and gas is given off. The gas that come off wood is about 70% natural gas pipe it to the under side of the pressure cooker then ignite the gas it becomes a self heating cooker. This gets too hot for a kitchen pressure cooker it burns up the rubber gasket. A 55 gallon metal drum with a metal lid works great but you need a wood fire under the metal drum until there is no more gas & smoke then you get a LOT of charcoal even with small sticks. This only works good for me if metal drum is 1/2 full with small wood pieces & lid is held on by gravity so smoke gets out & air can not get in but its more work that I want an my 55 gallon drum finally rusted away.

Some wood does not like to burn it makes charcoal so it works better than other wood. I have been getting mole wood from a furniture factory it makes a big fire like a kerosene about 60% of the charcoal never burns up it makes a very large pile of charcoal. I till large piles of charcoal into the garden few weeks later it is very hard to find any charcoal in the soil. Charcoal must turn to powder easy. Charcoal is about 8ph it continues to be 8ph much longer than calcium or lime products.

I burned lots of tree limbs in the same spot once tilled it into a 6 ft diameter circle nothing grew there for 2 months soil was gray/black color. After it rained several times and I tilled it several times plants started to grow. I can get too much in a small spot but when I scatter it all over my 30'x50' garden I can't tell it is there.

I shovel all the ash & charcoal into 5 gallon buckets save it until spring it works best for me to till it into the rows that need calcium like, tomatoes, peppers, squash, melons. Wood ask makes a large crop of tomatoes plants like the potassium & calcium to prevent BER.

All that wood I burned several wheel barrel loads only made this much ash. The wood was full of termites & carpenter ants, wood was full of holes an light weight & burned up quick. Soft wood like pine makes almost no ash.

Well it turned out to be more wood ash than it looked like 1/2 a 5 gallon bucket full. Never put wood ash in a plastic bucket this is still red hot down inside. In a few days it will be out then I can save it in different containers, empty milk jugs work it is a bit hard to pour ash down that small milk jug hole. Empty coffee cans work too.

I made guacamole dip with garden, tomato, onion, garlic, red jalapeno pepper, salt, pepper & a grocery store avocado. Why is Mexican restaurant guacamole so creamy & green mine never looks like that. I added the jalapeno little at a time finally ended up using about 90% of it that gave dip a nice spicy flavor. The plans was to let dip set for a few hours for all the flavors to blend together & make it taste better. While making a pot of chili I was taking a bit of the dip & chips soon the guacamole dip was gone. LOL. OH well next time I think I will puree the tomato with the onion, garlic, jalapeno then add avocado.

It was 88 degrees yesterday this morning 44 degrees today's high 60 fall has finally arrived .

I have been waiting 3 weeks for this sweet bell pepper to turn completely RED it has been stuck looking like this for a week. I refuse to pick it until it turns RED I hope it does not rot first. Pepper plants are loading up with lots of peppers I have 1 plant held up with a wood board it is heavy with several green bell peppers. I don't think anymore green peppers will turn red unless cold weather has something to do with making them red.

Today I marked my volunteer potato plants so I can find then after frost kills the plants. I have an old fish aquarium I am going to turn it upside down over 1 plants to see what happens. After frost kills plants I am not digging them up until day before the first hard freeze. Markers are all 6" to the north side.

Today is national farmers day. Are we farmers on a smaller scale?

I picked 1 sweet Pimento pepper today this was the only pepper on 4 plants. These were planted May 22 the tag says 78 day crop. It has been 139 days & only got 1 pepper. I pulled up all 4 of these plants today.

The 4 Red Beauty bell peppers have made no peppers.

The Carmen peppers & Big chili peppers planted in the same row at same day are making lots of peppers. I harvested all the peppers from these plants several times now each plant looks like it has about 40 peppers that need to be picked.

Go figure???

Red Beauty is a hybrid variety. Pimento was originally an heirloom/Open pollinated (OP) variety, but a popuplar Open pollinated variety will inevitably be sold as “improved” hybridized variety by one or more seed companies... usually with just enough tweaked name to make it confusing — it’s possible that this was not the OP variety that would stay true to type.

So if you (or the grower) purchased seeds for those two from unreliable unregulated sources, then they could have been post F1 generation saved seeds. And the worst (or best designed you might say) hybrids will not produce from saved seeds due to self annihilating gene combinations or simply due to loss of the first generation F1 hybrid vigor.


...I saved seeds from a known anomaly — Aloha Sunset a.k.a. Enjoya, which are large red and yellow striped bell peppers — from the grocery store. When I searched around, the consensus was that saved seeds will only produce solid yellow fruits. The Speculated reason for this was that the Stripe occurs due to a “sport” mutation, and the growers can only propagate this variety by “cloning” — this was variously explained as from traditional cutting or from meristem culture.

While searching, I came across a few website seed sources that were selling Enjoya seeds with cut-and-paste grocery store descriptions, one website who had taken down the seed price and stopped selling them but added to the description that they found out the seeds were not going to grow true, and some wholesalers selling “guaranteed” plants.

Anyway, I tried growing the seeds anyway just to see, and I got beautiful huge yellow, juicy bells. Worth growing, just not Striped. I will save these seeds again and see what I get next year.

I have always wondered if hybrid seeds & hybrid plants are the problem why plants don't produce well and saved seeds won't grow. I grew a lot more variety in my garden this year that I usually don't grow, now that I am retired I have time for things like that. It is frustrating to spend time growing plants that never produce a crop. Wife likes to have sliced & diced peppers in the freezer to cook with all winter if we could get plants that actually grow a crop of peppers 1 plant would be enough. I have to buy plants that are available local, Farm Supply stopped selling plants too much compilation with low cost plants from Lowe's & Home Depot. The Amish garden store no longer grows plants from seeds they buy plants too. Big Beef tomato plants did great last year but were not so good this year, plants are not reliable these days. When I was younger an full of energy I grew my own plants from seeds but at the new smaller house I have no place for growing seeds and don't want to. I use to start seeds inside temperature 72 degrees late winter & spring. Next year back to basics I'm only planting the big food groups, corn, beans, tomatoes, and potatoes again. We eat a lot of potatoes if I only get 1 potato per plant like this year then I need about 600 plants next year. I will plant potatoes different next year with several variety of potatoes to see what works best.

The sweet bell pepper we have been waiting has finally turned RED it took 5 months for this plant to make 1 pepper. I removed the seeds & vanes then sliced and dices it for cooking this winter. The pepper tastes good a little bit milder flavor than a green pepper. This is a mail pepper, female peppers are suppose to be sweeter than males. Imagine that..

We may have frost and 32 degree weather Saturday so I pulled up all the pepper plants that are not making peppers. I dug up my okra trees several plants were almost 8 ft tall, they were not easy to pull up the shovel made it easier.

I made this wine 2 months ago from 1/2 gallon of grapes. I hand squeezed the grapes then fermented pulp & skins together until hydrometer was 1.020. Then I removed skins and put liquid only in the 1 gallon jug with an air lock. Today I got 4 bottles of wine plus 1 glass of wine. Wine tastes good being only 2 months old. This is not a full body wine it contains about 45% water. Damn I broke my hydrometer I cannot test the finished wine. It tastes about 1.000 it does not need to be back sweetened. I will drink this glass of wine with dinner in about 45 minutes. These 4 bottles will be gone in 2 weeks..

This evening we are testing 1 of our pint jars of garden tomato pizza sauce from the pantry. We made several pizza sauce recipes I'm not sure which jar wife used to make this sauce but wow it sure is good. She started the meat cooking in the crock pot about 12 noon with 1 jar of home made pizza sauce plus chopped onions & chopped garlic. She also started homemade yeast rolls and let them rise in a muffin pan about 4 hours. She chopped about 30 small garlic cloves to put on top of the dinner rolls after pushing dinner roll tops down flat. She mixed chopped garlic with hot butter then spooned it on all the rolls then baked them in the oven. Home made pizza sauce over spaghetti with garlic dinner rolls. Wow this is so good I ate 2 plates of spaghetti and 2 garlic rolls. I ate too much.

I decide I better pick all the garden peppers today weather man claims Saturday morning will be frost an 32 degrees. We have 18 lbs of peppers, 3 kinds of hot peppers plus sweet bell peppers. I started to count them its a waste of time probably 500 peppers here, could be more, red & green. We are leaving early Thursday morning on a vintage trailer camping trip 4 days in the mountains with 40 other campers. We won't be home to harvest peppers Saturday I don't want to loose the 7 sweet bell peppers, I will slice & dice them later today for the freezer. Camper rally has pot luck dinner every night I will put a few peppers on the table maybe someone will eat some. Saturday night all the peppers go in about 3 unmarked boxes to be given away as door prizes. It might be funnier to give away all the peppers in 1 large box. LOL

I pulled up all the pepper plants today there were a lot of peppers hiding inside there I did not see. Looks like I have another lb of peppers. I pulled up all the wooden steaks threw them in the burn barrel. Weather forecast is no rain next week sunny and nice that will be the perfect time to dig up sweep potatoes. Beans are growing extremely slow if garden gets dry enough it needs to be tilled instead of waiting for beans to make seeds.

Wife & I set down at the table an cut up the sweet bell peppers, removed, seeds, stems, vanes. I was prepared to dice them into tiny pieces be she said, they are much easier to cook with in larger pieces I take 1 or 2 or 3 from the bag then cut them up, plus larger pieces don't get freezer burn easy. 2 hour job turned into a 20 minute job.

I had an idea about your hot pepper dilemma. Have you considered making hot pepper lotion/cream with them? I would advise caution and testing for sensitivity before rubbing home made lotion all over the body, but it might be worth a try.

I have to admit, I have been *thinking* about it but haven’t actually tried, so I don’t have a good recipe for you. My very vague recollection is to extract the capsaicin oils by soaking in oil of choice — then straining/filtering and hand blendering/whipping together with melted beeswax. I would probably add vitamin E and maybe rosemary for added stabilizer/preservative, maybe add citrus seeds in soaking process for antifungal.

I did find this article while looking for possible cons —

Advantages and Disadvantages of Homemade Capsaicin Cream
https://www.arthritis-health.com/treatm ... icin-cream

Today I decided to dig up white sweet potatoes while weather is nice 65 degrees. After pulling up all the vines I could see the row of mother plants. Mother plants were easy to dig because their location is easy to see and soil is pushed up giving away their location. Mother potatoes for each slip grow in a 16" diameter circle. I raked the soil surface and found about 20 easy to find satellite potatoes. We have a total of 107 lbs of white sweet potatoes. Potatoes were all in a straight row but vines covered an area 18 ft by 26 ft that will require a lot of work to find & dig up all the satellite potatoes. After 2 more days of 70 degree weather I will run the tiller through the potato the whole garden and maybe find another 20 lbs of potatoes. Some of these potatoes are large enough to make, mash potatoes, fried potatoes or french fries for a group of people the largest potato is slightly less than 3 lbs. Potatoes should have been dug up a month ago but if you keep potatoes cool for a month after they are ready to dig they get sweeter. Sweet potatoes are a 4 month crop they were planted about May 1st and should have been dug up about Sept 1st. Potatoes have had 7 weeks to age an get sweeter. Wife is going to make french fries for dinner tonight. Sweet potatoes are very easy to grow there is nothing to do but plant slips then wait 5 months then dig them up.

I cut about 1 lb of french fries then wife cooked them in the deep fryer using olive oil. WOW these are the best french fries we have ever eaten. We have not eaten any fried food in months this was a real treat. I think these potatoes will keep well inside the house for about 6 months. I need to have 40 slips growing & ready to plant in the garden by May 1st.

I gave my 2 sons potatoes then put the rest in these 2 bags for us. Still about 50 lbs of potatoes per bag.

Why did the potato cross the road?
He saw a fork up ahead.

What do you call a baby potato?
A small fry.

Why do potatoes make good detectives?
Because they have lots of eyes.

Where were the first french fries cooked?
In Greece.

LOL.

Today I pulled up all the flat pod bean plants. For that past several weeks beans just set here not growing any larger. Today I decided it is time to pull the plants up. I set at the patio table an pulled beans off of the plants. Then I sorted the beans, anything that felt like rubber with large beans inside the pod I removed the beans then threw the pods into the garden. This plate full of beans will be soup or chili or something tomorrow on the next day. I will give this bucket of flat pod green beans to my son to eat. I was hoping to save seeds for next year but I don't trust these beans the pods did not dry on the plants so seeds may not be mature enough to grow. I still have 1/2 a bag of seeds from growing this crop it will have to be enough for next years crop.

I sliced and dices several potatoes so wife can make Spanish Steak. We made a double recipe so we have left overs for lunch tomorrow. Wow this is so good especially with garden, potatoes, onions, tomatoes, garlic.

Today I decided the garden is finished. After pulling up the beans I dug up volunteer russet potatoes. Then I tilled the garden. I hate it the tiller chopped up so many nice size potatoes. I saves a lot of large pieces they are hard to get by the time I see them the tiller covers them up again. I saved what I could see on the surface about 5 lbs there are lots of potato pieces still some where in the garden soil. I hope next spring some of the pieces grow potato slips. Now that I have found a potato that grows great in TN watch what a 40 ft row of potato plants do next summer. If an 8 ft long row grows 107 lbs of potatoes a 40 ft row will grow 500 lbs of potatoes. Now if I can find garlic & onions that grow as well as these potatoes that will be very amazing. LOL.

I'm already thinking about next years garden, 11 rows all 40 ft long.

Corn, 6 rows, 80 plants per row, 480 plants total.
Tomatoes, 26 plants, several varieties.
Beans, 240 plants.
Potatoes, 5 different varieties.
White Sweet Potatoes, 40 plants.
Onions, 3 varieties, 350 plants.
Melons, 8 plants.

Best Garden Potato soup ever. Make a potato soup recipe with milk & potatoes then add, kielbasa pork sausage, onions, garlic, green beans, carrots, peas, corn, potatoes, salt, pepper, & cheddar cheese. Wow this is good with home grown garden vegetables.

After being 41 degrees for a high, today was 73 degrees and sunny. I have been outside enjoying the nice weather all day. Clouds appear to be moving through the sky at the same speed as the jet airplanes. 2 more days of warm weather. No frost or freeze yet but it was very close last week.

Today I made garlic ginger paste with our garden garlic. The garlic is in a grapefruit bag I took it outside and shook it for several minutes most of the outer skin falls through the holes and blows away. Ginger was sliced in very thin slices so it grinds up easier with the garlic. Ginger is not pealed & garlic skin is not removed. Put 1/3 garlic, 1/3 ginger, 1/3 white vinegar in the small food processor then grind and put it in an empty jar. Vinegar is a preservative this will last a long time in the panty or refrigerator. I also like to put 2 teaspoons of turmeric powder & 2 paper thin slices of jalapeno pepper in the garlic ginger paste. The hot pepper slices give food a very slight spicy flavor. Sometimes we put 2 or 3 paper thin jalapeno slices in spaghetti sauce or several paper thin slices on home made garden pizza. Wife has crock pot chicken cooking about 4 pm some garlic ginger paste goes into the crock pot & 5 pm we eat it.

After washing the potato pieces the tiller dug up I put them in a basket to dry on a table next to a sunny window. Today wife made mash potatoes she said, why do mash potatoes look green & have a bad flavor. I looked an they do look green, they taste terrible. I can't get that horrible flavor out of my mount. I dumped the mash potatoes in the garden. Don't forget potatoes need to be kept in the dark.

I picked a lot of scarlet runner beans yesterday. Someone mentioned these beans can be eaten, I hope they are not poison, wonder what they taste like, beans are big. They should be dry enough in a few weeks to remove all beans form pods.

Still no frost here, we almost had frost 2 weeks ago 33 degrees but no frost & none in the forecast. 70 degrees here Sun & Mon.

I save all my junk mail envelopes for seed packages. Lick the tab on new envelopes, close it then cut off both ends. Write information on the pack, put in the seeds, glue or tape the open end shut. Sometimes I use paper clips to keep the ends closed. Center piece of the envelope can be used too if you clue both ends shut. Envelopes that I opened can be used also 2 edges need to be taped or glued shut. I have several paper plates with dry seeds that need to be packaged today before they get spilled on the floor.

Today is another dark over cast rainy day, I decided to cook a pot of garden chili. I am glad it only rained twice this year, 97 days the first time and 41 days the second time. Chili turned out very good it has garden, tomatoes, onions, garlic, paprika, oregano, in it. Recipe will be recipe page soon.

Today I made more Guacamole using spicy hot Ro-tel tomatoes this time. I used 1 of our 9 garden ripe tomatoes too. I am surprised how good green tomatoes get after setting in the kitchen several weeks to get ripe. Wife refuses to eat this she says, It looks like something I have seen in a baby diaper. That is good I get the eat the whole bowl myself.

We tried our home made pizza/spaghetti sauce again tonight. One thing I realized tonight is Ragu pizza sauce has onions but we put no onions is our sauce that is why our sauce does not taste the same as Ragu right out of the jar. Wife cooks 1 lb of 96% lean ground been with 1 very large onion in a hot skillet then adds our sauce that gives it a flavor just as good as Ragu. Wife puts meat sauce mix in crock pot and cooks it for 2 hours. She adds Italian seasoning & cheese flavor gets better. Tonight she made something different Spaghetti Pie. Stir cooked spaghetti into the crock pot sauce then spoon it into small 1 serving Pyrex bowls, top with more sauce and 2 or 3 kinds of cheese. Bake in oven to melt cheese its ready to eat. WOW this is good. I ate too much.

We have been keeping some of our garden white sweet potatoes in the kitchen, today I notice some of the large potato eyes are growing. All the potatoes need to be in cold storage in the spare refrigerator out in the garage. There are a total of 40 eyes growing slips on 3 potatoes another month or so slips will be large enough to plant in the garden but Jan 1 is the wrong time to plant. 40 slips in a 40 ft row 1 ft apart will grow about 500 lbs. In the past I got 25 to 35 lbs of orange sweet potatoes from each plant but I worked those plants making sure vines were covered with soil every 18" so they grew lots of roots on every vine and made lots of satellite potatoes around the mother plant. This year I did nothing I just watched and let mother nature do what she does. Today I am taking another 5 lbs of potatoes to each of my 2 sons. We had baked potatoes for dinner 2 nights ago. These white sweet potatoes don't taste anything like the orange sweet potatoes everyone eats for Thanksgiving, I think white sweet potatoes taste like Red Pontiac potatoes. They are good any way they are cooked, baked, french fries, boiled, mashed, potato salad, hash browns, potato chips, sliced & fried with onions, stew, soup, etc.

My refrigerator is loaded with potatoes. I had to make 2 plywood shelves to get all the potatoes in the frig. Bottom shelf is thin plastic almost not strong enough to hold 10 of the 3 lbs potatoes. I need to cover bottom shelf with plywood before 30 lbs of potatoes breaks through the plastic.

Beans seeds are finally dry and ready to go into seed packs. I cut the parsley before frost or freeze killed it and let it dry. I refilled parsley container in the kitchen. Wife made garden beef stew for dinner. Rhubard is not dead yet we finally got a good frost this morning at 33 degrees.

Today I raked some of the tree leaves from the 65 ft tall maple tree then moved them along the south border of the garden. I set lawn mower blade to run fast and put mower in the lowest gear to mulch tree leaves. Mower blew chopped leaves in the garden 6" deep, 4 feet wide, 40 feet long. Leaves are a little deeper on 1 corner where mower blew them in from 2 directions. I mixed Urea & pellet lime then sprinkled it over the leaves. Weather man claims it will rain tonight. Weather man claimed it will be 70 degrees and sunny today but that never happened. I will put more nitrogen on the leaves during the winter to make leaves compost by spring. Next week I plan to get a truck load of 1 year old composted mulch for the garden potato row. Only bad thing about composting like this spring soil will not dry out enough to till unless I rake composted leaves to another dry part of the garden. Look at this dark over cast sky we will have this for the next 6 months. Wish I could spend the winter in Arizona.

Today I planted 9 potato eyes under this fish aquarium. Wait and see what happens. There might be 9 new potatoes in 4 months. Eyes are not planted very deep a long hard freeze will probably kill everything. If we have more 6 degree weather like last year this will be a failure for sure. No matter what happens it will be interesting.

I also put 100 lbs of Calcium Hydroxide CaOH2 Hydrated Lime on the garden it comes in 50 lbs bags $9 each. Information online says, pine tree needles are high acid use Calcium Hydroxide to neutralize the acid 3 months before planting. The man at Farmers Co-op said, it would be a good idea to put hydrated lime on the soil then have it tested about March 1st.

When I was in college I learned Lime will unlock nutrients that is locked in the soil that plants can not use.

Wife made tiny Lasagnas for dinner with our, tomato sauce, garlic, onions, oregano, basil. I made a loaf of home made bread. We make garlic bread with it. We sure do enjoy garden food we have in the pantry.

Gary350 wrote:Waiting for rain. After lunch it rained about 5 minutes but soil does not look very wet. Weather man claims big rain storm tonight just have to wait and see.

I'm guessing it rained big!!! Hope you had great yields!

Wife had 3 red Pontiac potatoes that were growing eyes. She cut off the eyes for me to plant then sliced the potatoes to put in Spanish steak. We were going to have Chili for dinner tonight but she decided we better use up these potatoes first. I went out to plant potatoes eyes in my tiny fish aquarium green house, when I lifted it up there were several little green plants growing from the eyes I plants a few weeks ago. I put 13 more potato eyes in the soil about 2" apart then covered them with 1/2" of soil enough to keep them from freezing. If weather report calls for extreme cold weather I will cover them with more soil. We had 2 nights that were 24 degrees the potatoes that I already planted were doing good. Eyes that I planted this summer grew 1 new potato per eye I don't think 20 eyes inside this fish aquarium will be a problem. If this works good I will probably wish I had 15 more fish aquariums for next year. About 15 yrs ago I planted winter potatoes in 20 foot long hill with no fish aquariums it grew 28 lbs of new potatoes.

See that little green plant growing next to the aquarium, that looks like a volunteer broccoli, I hope so.

This is my second load of 2 years old composted mulch. A drop in the bucket compared to what I would like to have. This load is heavy the truck frame is all the way down on the axle and tires look low. Unloading by hand is hard work I wish I was 40 years younger. I still need to move mulch to the potato row about first part of May when soil it dry enough to till. There might be enough mulch for 2 or 3 rows unless I go get another load then there might be enough for 5 rows. If I could cover the dog house with this mulch it would keep the dog warm all winter mulch feels like its about 110 degrees.

This morning I rented a 6' x 10' electric bump bed trailer $50 for 4 hours. I made 4 trips to the country recycle center to get 4 loads of free 2 year old compost. Each load is about 4000 lbs. It was a bit tricky learning how to make the compost mulch slide out the the dump bed it stuck in place like it was glued there. Push the button after the bed is up I had to back up then slam on the brakes, pull forward then back up and slam on the brakes over and over about a dozen times for each trailer load. I dumped 4 loads next to the garden in 3 hours. I returned the rental trailer about 11:30 am then we went to the Thai Restaurant for lunch. The dump bed trailer is faster and less work than my little pickup truck. I got more compost mulch in 3 hours than I could get in 2 weeks in my little truck.