Mark Reed

I love all things concerning water and growing things in water, but you haven't provided enough information for me to make any suggestions. Some questions I have are how big and deep the pool is, is your climate such that it will freeze in the winter? The only comment I would have right off is that I would not incorporate grey water into the system, but that is just my personal preference and not knowing for sure on how you intend to use it.

Judith, no I haven't started sweet potato seeds. I don't do that until late April to mid-May. That's about when I start slips too. In the first couple of years, I started seeds inside on a heat mat. Then I moved out to unheated cold frames, then to beds in the ground under plastic. They started coming up volunteer, and soon enough to make nice roots, so now I've started direct seeding.

I may not start any seeds this year but instead focus on backcrossing the best of the best clones with each other to produce a more refined generation of seeds.  I'm sure there will be some volunteers too, so I'll keep some of them.

Our winter green things are still under snow. This has been the longest lasting cold spell and longest lasting snow cover we have had in a very long time; the snow has been here since the first of January. It's just the end of February now but I feel way behind. I've grown used to having everything ready to plant by now, and my cold frames and seed starting supplies ready. Last year I had already planted some things by now. Today is supposed to be the first one in weeks well above freezing and tomorrow the first night above freeing but the rest of the week it just gets warmer. Now the period where melting snow on the still frozen ground makes a layer of sloppy mud on top.

Josh Hoffman wrote: Everything I read is geared towards commercial situations and they want 15'-20' between vines. I assume because of all the chemical inputs they use and room for machinery.

Wow, that seems extreme to me. I agree, most of what's advised about anything, is based on maximum production or to accommodate machines and often in a commercial context. My grapes are just stuck along the back fence of the back garden and among the cedar trees just outside the garden and a few others growing on makeshift trellises or in the trees, here and there in the yard.

The road to my house is over 3/4-mile dead end with old fences along each side, for years I cloned and planted vines there too.  All together I have about a mile and a half of grapes.  None of them are in an ideal location or produce as much as they might, but I don't care, some are too high in the trees for me to even get to. All I want is to eat some fresh when I'm working in the garden or going for a walk and enough to make several pints of jelly each year. I'm also fine with it if the critters take a big share, which they do.

What I hope eventually happens is that they cross with our wild grapes and make a new race of larger, sweeter wild type and that the birds will spread them all over the place.

Judith Browning wrote:Mark, We are finding that things that were staples at our other property do not grow as well here although this is the first land we've worked since '73 that has no rocks! Sometimes I kind of miss them.

I've had sweet potatoes bloom but always harvested before seed set...it's been only the purple that I've noticed flowering.
rain, no ice, high 38F

I'm finding that things that used to grow well here, don't grow as well here as they used too. Potatoes especially, used to you stuck them in the ground and a bit later they bloomed, the vines started dying down and you could dig up a bunch of potatoes. Now they don't bloom hardly at all, and you have to keep them watered all the time. That's partly, well largely, why I got so interested in sweet potatoes. Other things too like peas, and even common beans are more difficult to grow now. I've been migrating to some of what I always thought of as more southern crops like cowpeas and peanuts which along with the sweet potatoes seem be doing quite well. I'll keep growing the old things but maybe in a bit a smaller plots because of the extra attention they seem to need now days.

My garden plan for this year is to focus more on staple things and things that don't need processing to store. Dry beans and cowpeas, dry corn, peanuts, sweet potatoes and so on. Along with a lot of stuff for fresh eating during the growing season. Also, lots of herbs for seasoning and greens like mustard and brassica's that I've managed to adapt to being sort of feral. Some of those, if I plant and tend them need constant attention, especially with watering but seem to find their own way, if just left alone to plant themselves whenever they get in the mood.

I have a tread here on Permies  about my sweet potatoes but haven't updated it for a while. Reed's Sweet Potatoes, if you read it keep in mind that some of the older stuff may not be completely accurate. They are genetically complicated critters, and I learn new stuff all the time, sometimes it conflicts with what I thought I knew then. I've talked a lot about them on the OSSI forum too and just posted a little update there. Reeds Sweet Potatoes OSSI Same with it, older stuff may or may not be my current thinking. For the most recent you can just jump to the last post.

And I have a little, occasionally updated YouTube channel with some videos about my sweet potatoes. Reed's Garden Youtube

Another thing that I look for in any crop is that it makes true seeds. With those things traditionally propagated by clones some have largely forgotten how to make seeds, sweet potatoes is one of them but when I discovered one that did make some seeds I started on a quest, (fell in a rabbit hole) of restoring that ability to ones that make nice roots to eat. The original seeds came from a plant that only had stringy worthless roots. It's taken over a decade but, now I have them to where more than half of sprouted seeds make nice plants and a nice harvest in the first year from seed. Unlike potatoes that just make little tubers that you have to keep alive till the next year. Eliminating the necessity of keeping plant material alive over winter is what I see as the biggest advantage. If we have to eat them all or critters break in and ruin them all, or if the heat goes out and they freeze, just get out the seeds and start over.

I was in a meeting yesterday where a veterinarian with our state's Board of Animal Health gave a short talk about the bird flu. She said that small birds carry the flu around some, just by having it on their feet and so on but that there isn't much evidence they are sick with it themselves. It sounded like water birds are the primary victims and spreaders and she reported a big die off of sand hill cranes a few counties west of where I live. Some water birds apparently can have it and carry it but not be all that sick themselves, others die from it. I haven't seen any sick or dead birds myself.

We don't have large bodies of water here, except for the river but water birds have never congregated on the river like they do in lakes and swamps. We do have Canadian geese that live here year-round, and our resident population of Canadian geese is very much less this year. Until this year hundreds of them would land each morning and graze in the field behind my office, this year almost none. The big flocks that fly over, one direction or another, are much smaller too.

Still, I'm seeing lots fewer small birds too. If it isn't flu then it's something else and I think it's something else because they have been declining for longer than just this year. I have a small garden pond with a pump and make sure to keep a spot ice free for the birds. Used to be, if it is very cold as it was for a while this year, we have tons of birds and lots of kinds coming to drink, way more than come to the feeders, but this year almost none. Except for titmouses, there are a lot of them, but chickadees, cardinals, nuthatches, woodpeckers, gold finches, purple finches, are almost completely missing.

I garden on a much smaller scale, and I don't use anything except mulchy stuff that I find around the place, a lot if it is just weeds I pull or chop down in the garden itself and the spent vegetable plants, also leaves raked up from the yard each fall. A lot of time, I just let low growing ground cover weeds like purslane or creeping Charlie do their thing, especially under tall plants like corn or okra.

I might be more sensitive that others, but I think plastic has an unpleasant chemical smell, especially if it's left out in the sun so I don't like it. I do use some plastic pots but that's because I haven't found a better option, yet. I collect them for free and after sitting out for a long while I figure most of the outgassing is done, or at least that's what I tell myself.

I think cardboard is pretty gross too. I did a short stint receiving product, mostly from China into a big distribution warehouse.  My oversensitivity may be in play again but the smell when one of those trucks was opened was unpleasant, at best. Even if the production of cardboard and inks used isn't an issue, which I don't believe, whatever might have been used to protect against infestations certainly is.

I let big-rooted weeds like dandelions, thistles and dock along with things like radishes and turnips do most of my tilling. If more is necessary, I use a shovel or hoe. I don't like the roar and stink of gasoline powered machines and enjoy my gardening lots more since abandoning them. Getting rid of that big tiller was the best thing I ever did as far as making things easier.

I've never been good at record keeping. I've resolved lots of time to do better at it, but I never have so I'm officially abandoning the idea and just go by memory like I always have. The only exception is my sweet potatoes which I breed from true seed. I have a very detailed little book on them with lots of photos and notes.

Overall, I'm scaling my garden down some, not really in area planted, I'm just focusing more on the things I know I can grow and dropping most of the more novel and experimental stuff. I am trying to plan a little better this year so as to maximize production of staple crops.

I don't get into the political stuff much, don't see the point in it. Plus, I don't have any pies and don't really want any as I don't like cooked fruit, but I am real fond coconut cream.

Also, in Hawaii there is a highway called the saddle road.  It runs at high elevation between the Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea volcanoes. Our tour book said the ancient Hawaiians considered the area sacred and taboo. It seems the mountains are entities, not especially fond of one another and it's just prudent not to get between them. The book also said it was a poorly maintained road and infrequently traveled and again best not to go there, so we did. We saw just one other car during the whole ride, as it got dark the night sky was even better than in the Tetons and the silence and solitude were intense.  It is very eerie and wonderful place. Maybe the old Hawaiians were right.

I love that photo of the night sky posted above. It rivals when we camped in a high valley in the Tetons beside a small river. I think it was the Buffalo River, but I don't remember for sure. The valley was fairly narrow at about 9000 feet and the mountains went up another thousand or more on both sides giving a view of a slice of the sky bisected by the galaxy, with so many starts they were individually indistinguishable. One of the coolest things I ever saw, up there with liquid rocks running out of the ground on Kilauea volcano.

I think the coolest ever might have been the blue air over Blackcomb Mountain in Canada. Apparently if it isn't masked and turned gray by the effluents of civilization oxygen and oxygen compounds refract light in the blue range of the spectrum. In any case the mist and thin clouds, were blue. Even the air seemed to sparkle with blue. The shadows on the other side of the mountain were blue. I could hardly believe I got to see it and stood there looking at it for a long time before pointing my skis downhill. I had read about that phenomenon in the Smoky Mountains but that it disappeared soon after WW2, when the recreational V8 engines came roaring through.  

Sorry no photos, I have some, but they predate the digital era, and they have faded.