happy Halloween

have fun everyone !



if I am going to go to lots of work to put up something, it really should be a video and not pictures, but I sure can't do this every day

computer / green house

so I spilled some liquid on my laptop computer, and the keyboard is broken,
the rest of it seems ok, but the keyboard is fairly critical,
and more important, it is the only computer I have that can read the SD card from my camera...
so no more pictures till I figure out something,
I can remove the internal keyboard and use an external one, but don't really have the space to set that sort of thing up, and I have no budget for computer things, so likely no pictures again.

so today I used a tractor to dig part of a green house,
it is a big hole in the ground, and will be covered with a 4 foot by 8foot corrugated plastic sheet,
I am going to lift off the top to get into it, 
pretty simple, but should keep things from frost.
I plan on starting lots of yams in it for next spring,
and will put the peanut plant in it if I get it done in time,
and likely put some peppers in it.
it might even get a few citrus trees if it is deep enough,
so that is the update for now,
I will keep collecting cute pictures on the camera, so if you know me in person, ask to see them all.

almost frost

so it frosted on the metal surfaces that had nothing under them
but not really anywhere else,
thermometer under shelter read 39 in the morning
so not that cold, but sure colder than it has been,
and here is what it did

the sorghum looks fine 

 some of the squash has brown edges on the leaves, it may die in the next few days even though it should be warming up

 the rice seems done with what ever it is going to do, just not sure what that is yet

 this rain gauge is not level, so add 15% or so ? for the last rain storm

 the pepper plant did fairly well

 the one remaining zucchini (out of 5) making seeds seems to have done just fine

 the tomatoes seemed to have dies back the most, with about 60% damage

 the beans seem happy

I forgot to take a cute picture today, sorry. (I will take 2 tomorrow)

rain again !

so everything is wet,
the ground is just saturated

 the last one of these on this plant was 35 pounds, this one is not quite as big yet

so I just stayed inside mostly, (I did have to go outside to do laundry though )
I connected my MP3 player to a battery due to the lightning all around, and I relaxed

another fall day

so it is another fall day,
it might rain again, so I harvested all the squash that I could

 I made another cat very happy, but missed another in the other plot

 I harvested some sorghum early and set it out to dry

and here is my Halloween tree

calories

so survival gardening is all about calories, the goal is to grow more than you use,
if you are growing something that you spend less calories than you get from it, then ask if it is a good idea to grow lots of it.

one way to need to grow less calories is to not use them pointlessly in the first place,
carts and other things keep all that heavy lifting to a small amount,

but last thing I moved with it would likely have not been possible without it, so maybe it is a bad example,
and I am still walking around, so I guess it is better to just grow more calories.

wheat is the most efficient as far as time invested to calories grown,
it should take a regular person (not totally out of shape) about 6 weeks a year to plant, harvest and thresh to feed a typical family of 5. the big drawback is that you need land to do it, it is not dense as far as calories for the area. and a slight drawback is that you do need some hardware to help you do it.

potatoes are another good one, they give you lots of calories for little work and land space, but you will still be needing more work to do it than with wheat.

some trees need almost no work, you just go harvest it, and that surely gets you more calories than you spent getting them.

just keep in mind that survival gardening is all about calories in and calories out, you don't want a negative number, and the idea of "empty calories" is just insane, when eating food you grow, it is almost not possible.

this little guy is about an inch long and still living in the water box

cracked squash

so cracked squash stores badly on or off the vine,
this is after a few weeks and is rotted all the way through

this one was cracked wider and seems to be doing ok, but not many were like this one

so eat or preserve all the cracked ones you can as fast as you can.

mostly I built antennas today

yes it is a disk cone antenna with a lower limit of 144mhz, and it has nothing to do with gardening (just like the kitty pictures)...

fall decorations

fall decorations are fun,
and when living where "events" don't happen unless you make them,
things tend to get decorated for the season (Halloween)
click on the pictures to make them bigger

 the yellow box has tiny tarot cards in it

 and these just pile up on every shelf space possible

I should have taken video of these 2 playing, but they ran out of view before I could start recording

plans

so I had plans to grow nitrogen fixing plants on my garden plots to fix the nitrogen in the soil this winter,
the big issue is that even now the sun is so low in the sky that there is no more sun in at least one garden plot.
so growing things there this winter is likely going to fail.
that leaves me with taking leaves from under the trees and adding that to the soil (yet again)

if I would have looked at this plot from the start and looked for weaknesses, I would have spotted it,
but I was kind of forced into this plot, and there were no better ones here, so I took it, and did not look much further about it.
I guess we will see if I can manage to move enough leaves.

cooking with wood

so there is wood all over here,

and many people that use it for cooking run out of it,
it burns at about 450F, water boils at 212F
the temperature difference is just not that big (238 degrees), so it is not super efficient,
that means you need quite a bit to cook your food

according to Wikipedia charcoal burns up to 4892 degrees Fahrenheit
that means the temp difference is almost 20 times hotter
you end up getting way more heat into what you are cooking,
and this means less fuel needed,
here is how to make it
http://www.nakedwhiz.com/makinglump.htm

there are some neat forced air tricks  that make wood burn hotter, and they are worth using

this is a rocket stove, and it tends to burn hot, fast, efficient, and with usually little smoke (people can see smoke far away)
here is a bit more on how to make one
http://solarcooking.wikia.com/wiki/Rocket_Stove

and the solar cooking is likely the best for having free energy that others can't really see you using.
here is more on solar cooking
http://solarcooking.wikia.com/
it is going to be ideal for cooking in clear weather were someone far away might spot smoke from a fire.

I hope I have given you some ideas on how to not use up all your wood with cooking (or heating)
lets just look at the hurricane blown apart areas,
they have all the fuel (broken buildings that they need to clean up anyway that they payed to have done) and parts to make a rocket stove also from the broken buildings,
so they don't have to be cold or need fuel for cooking, yes watching the news(was that last year ?), it would appear that having all the tools you need is clearly not enough to keep anyone warm.

ice cream

so it seemed to be ice cream day, (I know I don't have any dairy animals)
but the stirrer section on my ice cream maker broke

but the compressor section works just fine.

so I found a stick and carved it to match the stirrer, there is wood everywhere here, so it gets used for all kinds of things

so now I might have to stir it by hand, but at least it works enough to get my ice cream,
and stirring it for 30 min. while I watch TV is not that hard.
maybe I will go fix the broken pivot point on that gear when I get tired of hand stirring
and I am pretty sure this is not the look the designers were looking for when they built it

this cat almost looks like it could be made of orange ice cream

bees and pesticide

so I have seen about the bee die offs in the news lately,
and also the reports that they are doing fine at organic farms,
this is likely due to the nicotine based pesticides that were introduced right before it started happening...
(they are not just using pure nicotine, that is a fairly good organic pesticide)

either way I am reporting that the bees here are doing just fine here where there are no pesticides being used.

I had another picture, but it iss very out of focus...

now the neat thing about the nicotine is that you can grow it in tobacco,
and it does make pesticide that is mostly totally safe to use.
read how to do it here
http://www.ehow.com/how_2227316_use-organic-pesticide-tobacco.html

black eyed pea harvest

so black eyed peas, also known as cowpeas, or southern peas,
but no matter the name, they are great,

I only planted 5 plants, and 3 of them got ate by birds when they were tiny,
so I only had 2 growing this year,
and they are pretty productive in crummy soil with little water and had no issues with the heat or cold.
they are from Africa, so that is why they can take the wide range of conditions

next year I have to grow way way more (I also love to eat them, and they cook fast)
here is the kind I am growing if you are curious
http://www.southernexposure.com/mississippi-silver-southern-pea-cowpea-28-g-p-209.html

wildlife

so the wildlife here is nothing like it is just a few miles away,
I asked at a farmers market what the biggest challenge they had was,
and they said squirrels,
the squirrels use to be everywhere here as well
they filled the trees, but now the trees are empty

the cats are what drives them away by eating the babies...

there is also lots of gophers around here now,
there use to be a way bigger snake population as well,
and they would keep down the gopher populations

for each animal that is changed here, something else will change in response,
so what may not be an issue at all where you are, might be the biggest problem ever just 3 miles away,
and it might be from your cat or dog you have living on your doorstep.

I would love to breed nice snakes and let them go here, but that cats will eat them all now...

for now I am just happy that the birds have not figured out what the sorghum is yet.


more flowers came out when it warmed up

watering grain

you can often save water on your grain crops,
but I have learned years ago,
do not try to save water when they are making seeds !

you can save water at other parts of the season,
but low water when a plant is making seeds can get you way less harvest.
getting half or 1/4 would be common.
so don't skip the water near the end.

here is the new cat,

and it is clearly a pet, it demands to be petted,
someone brought it from a city and left it here,
I am not very happy about it, and neither is the cat.
I hope it works out well.