Mark Reed

Burra Maluca wrote:My plans mostly involve taking a deep breath and concentrating my energies on tried-and-true food plants rather than on experimental ones.

Me too, more of less is my rule from now on. More of the things I know will produce and less of the finicky and experimental things.  

Just posted an update about my sweet potatoes over on OSSI, I'm copying it here

Sweet potato season will be starting soon. I've been thinking about making a video about it and I will I guess pretty soon but I have been a bit lazy about it so for now just a written update.

My two favorite ornamental plants that I have referred to as Miss Bloom and Likes to Climb have done very well over winter. Always before I kept them as potted plants in the unheated room upstairs where they lived but just barely. This winter I just kept them as cuttings in pint jars of water in the south facing windows downstairs and they have done really well. Not nearly as much issue with spider mites overall and the lady bugs helped out with that too.

All through my work, along with selecting for sexual reproduction of superior lines, I've also worked to see just what a plant really needs to live and produce. For over winter storage, all a sweet potato needs at the beginning of the growing season is to not be dead. It doesn't matter how bad it looks when the longer days and warmer temps arrive, if the plant has life, it will soon be growing again. Doesn't matter at all to me what the "best" way to do it might be. I don't know how many plants I have, some died early on because the stems were not long enough and they didn't make it down to the water. I'm guessing I have about ten nice plants each of the two ornamentals and they have started growing nicely so each can easily make three or four new cuttings. Lots more than that actually if I keep letting them regrow after trimming and there is lots of time before they need to go out. They were just in the jars of water and fed once in a while with the stuff I squeeze out of my aquarium filter. This method was lots easier and more productive than keeping them as potted plants.

On the culinary side I'd have to go look to see how many I have, but again I'm getting pretty lazy. I remember I have plants #s 10 and 11. They are both very nice bushy, seedy plants with orange/orange nicely sweet roots that grow in the clump habit that I like. I also have plant # 7 which is similar except it has white/orange roots and is very, very seedy. All together I guess I have eight to ten culinary roots saved to grow this year. One is a 2025 volunteer with white/yellowish roots that I think I might like but need to grow more of it to see for sure. It's roots boarder on what I call clunkers, meaning they get bigger than I like. I prefer clusters of roots around six to eight ounces over a few much larger ones. I grow most of mine in pots, so it isn't an issue to just dump them out but if the really big ones were grown in the ground, it would be hard to harvest without damaging them. Also, if you have a three-pound sweet potato you can cut off a piece to eat and the rest will still keep for later, I would just rather have six 1/2-pound sweet potatoes.

I had mentioned in one of my videos that selecting for the traits I like I might also be selecting for the same boring heart shaped leaf. There is nothing wrong with that, I reckon, I just like a little more variety and the 2025 volunteer I mentioned has a thin finger shaped leaf so I'm going to turn it loose in the culinary patch.

I only have the two ornamentals but last year three or four great ornamentals volunteered but I did not keep them. Now that I know how easy it can really be to keep them, I'm going to save more of them from now on.

I've said before that I might not start any new seeds, but I always do, plus I always find volunteers. Volunteers are decreasing a little though because I'm keeping the garden more heavily mulched most of the time and that seem to prevent them from having a chance. I have the same issue with my marigolds, dill, radishes, mustard and so on but that's a different problem that needs addressed overall.

So, I probably will start some new seeds, but I think I'll open the vault, put in most of the newer seeds and get out some of the much older ones. They have lower probability of having all the preferred traits of course, but they also have a bit more diversity of phenotype and I think it might be fun to explore that more, now that I have little better handle on what I'm doing. Even back in the beginning, more than ten years ago some really nice ones showed up but I didn't keep them more than a year or two for backcrossing. To prevent contaminating the current project I'll keep sprouted from old seeds isolated from the rest. I did keep a small area around last year's patch mostly mulch free so should also have some volunteers.

Waste not. Want not.

My personal opinion is that in the vast majority of cases perhaps all of them there are no advantages to you or me but several disadvantages. The only advantages are to the people who made the app. What they are to me is just another little tendril of data collection for someone else's profit but not just that. They also lock up data storage, hog bandwidth and drain batteries on my devices. I didn't buy these things to host other people's software.

I did enjoy one from Cornel University for a bit that lets you identify birds but ended up uninstalling it too. There are others that I'm sure are useful and I have come across websites and such that I would like to see but that refuse access without installing something or scanning this or that QR. When that happens, I generally just take the loss of not engaging with that site.

All of my garlic came from old long-abandoned homesteads in my area of the Ohio Valley where it had fended for itself for at least a hundred years and in some cases maybe closer to two hundred years. I just found it and brought it home. I don't tend it much except sometimes divide clumps to replant for bigger cloves, but it all makes cloves they are just smaller than most people might expect garlic to be. It grows volunteer all over the place to the point I've almost banned it from the garden itself. I harvest the little cloves and leaves almost all year long. My absolute favorite is in early spring; to dig up those crowded clumps like in your pictures and eat them in every way a person might eat garlic. It is so, so good.

Michael Helmersson wrote:Has anyone tried this? I did this years ago with some slight variations when planting Plum trees but I don't see any noticeably different results. I realize there are some odd features to her method but I can't resist the allure of anything contrarian:

Ellen White Method

That is funny, but I certainly do agree with the odd features part. It is good to carefully separate the roots of a bare root tree, but a hump of dirt or a chunk of rotting wood in the bottom of the hole works fine.  Unless of course a person enjoys digging big holes and hauling rocks.

Martha Stephens wrote:Mark Reed, can you please share your methods of just seed planting for trees please? I have about 90 acres, 50 or so of which were logged heavily before I acquired it. I would like to replant from seed oaks, evergreens, maples, poplars, trees that were logged and try to reduce/eliminate much of the brushy privet that has taken over in place of the Hardwoods that were logged. Thanks!

A long time ago I would start trees in pots or in the ground and transplant the seedlings but that got pretty tiresome and if you do that large scale, just planting and forgetting a lot of them don't make it.  I started planting oak, walnut, pecan and hickory seed using a hand shovel fixed to a piece of pvc pipe. Just basically made a crack in the ground and dropped the seed down the pipe and moved on. That also got a bit tiresome after a while, but I discovered when the squirrels got into my stash that a lot of the nuts they stole ended up growing all over the place a year or two later. Then I just started letting them do most of the work. The little town where I grew up and most of the other little towns near the river have lots of large, old oak and pecan trees. There are so many sometimes that I can collect them from sidewalks and parking lots with push broom and a snow shovel. One of my favorite trees is in a fenced yard with a long shed running by the alley. There is no gutter on the shed, so lots of pecans end up in a long pile, easy to scoop up.

Smaller seeds like poplar, maple, apple, pear and so on don't work as well like that, so I still start and transplant them. I've scattered the nut and oak trees all over the state-owned hunting ground nearby and all over back-forty parts of my and my neighbor's lands.  I'm amazed that it really worked but young trees are everywhere within a mile or so of my house and I'm hopeful they will replace all of our wonderful ash trees that died some years ago.

I love those big, sweet cherries from the store and didn't know if they would grow here, but they do. Our own wild black cherries, pawpaws, plumbs as well as adapted wild peaches and pears are much harder to collect in quantity like I do with the nuts and acorns, so I either start them to transplant or spend a bit of time preparing a spot to plant. I never go back to check them, not that I would remember where they are but years later, I see them here and there, especially when they bloom. Actually, most all of those I start to transplant now, I sell at the flea market or farmer's market for a few dollars apiece.

Evergreen trees except for native Eastern red ceder and American holly are much harder to establish in numbers, so I don't mess much with them except for very close by. Holly is actually pretty hard too and ceder just does its own thing. I clone a lot of grape vines, but they of course have to be panted so my range for them is much smaller. I'm learning to clone Southern Magnolia trees which grow fine here but they will just be for my own land and to sell.

I don't know what brushy privet is, but large acorn and nut trees do pretty well in tall weeds and grubby areas. If you can source the seeds and if you have squirrels, you can just dump them out in piles and a few years later you will notice some of your trees claiming canopy space above the shorter stuff. The squirrels will eat some of course, which is their due and some won't make it to crown out above the shorter stuff but if you plant a thousand and five percent make it that's fifty trees. Fifty oak or pecan trees can go along way on occupying fifty acres. Plant ten thousand and you have a forest. Well, you probably won't but someone or something later on will.

I'm convinced overall that my methods, along with being much easier is far more effective at establishing new trees than shoving little bare root sticks in the ground, especially if you have a large area to work on. I think people mostly believe you will get bigger trees sooner by planting trees and that's great for a front yard tree or an orchard but to plant lots of trees, seeds is where it's at.

*I don't think squirrels range very far especially if there is big pile of food in one spot so dump you seeds in smaller piles well-spaced. More than they can eat at once, so they bury some but not too many so they don't plant them too crowded.

I guess it might depend on the river and what is upstream. I live near the Ohio River which commonly floods the boat ramps and adjacent parking lots and leaves behind thick layers of silt. Those floods over centuries created the deep super fertile bottom land of the flood plain.  It would be easy to collect that silt and add it to the garden but now the sewage and city run-off of thirty million people, not to mention whatever is left from the Fernald uranium processing facility is in that silt. I won't even touch it.

add - Anything dredged up from the bottom I imagine, would be even worse.

A cat showed up at my house, I named him Stanley. I had a dog named Ethel and a dog named Wilbur. I have a fish named Carl and a pair of semi-tame crows named Percey and Lucille. The neighbor's dog answers best to Critter. Past pets include cats, Cleopatra, Geremia and Pete. Dogs include Lad, Thief and Wheezy.  

I sometimes sell black locust bark on eBay. It's useful in various crafts like making natural looking bird houses. It is excellent for growing mounted orchids as the rough surface is perfect for their roots to hold on to, and it lasts or years.  When I cut a big tree I run the saw lengthwise, just through the bark before chunking it up. By time it seasons good, the bark easily removes in a solid piece. Other types of bark just get composted, used in paths or burned.