Mark Reed

I don't know a lot about growing grain, except for corn which is easy to do here. I've never tried to grow wheat because I don't think I could grow enough to matter in my little gardens and I don't know how or have much motivation to learn how to make bread. I love both oats and barley, but they are hard because of birds that eat it and some kind of fungus that infects the seed heads. I don't process them except to remove the husks and am happy if I can pull off harvesting a teacup full of clean grain. Barley in beef broth with onion is a treat for me, oats with honey and cream even more so.

Millet and sorghum are easy to grow here too but I don't have chickens to feed them to, so I don't really know what to do with them.  Job's tears grow easily; they are very productive and volunteer readily. I guess you can eat them, I'm going to look into how to do that and since they are so easy, I'm considering a breeding project to improve them if I can.

I like rice a lot, especially wild rice and although I doubt I could ever grow it in serious quantity, I'd like to give it a try in my little garden pond but not sure where to find seeds.

Most grain is just grass seeds and we have lots of wild grasses, some of which I think are feral barley and maybe also wheat and rye. They seem to get along ok despite the birds and fungus. Another project to consider, find and collect those with bigger seeds and try cultivating them.

Overall, I guess I agree that grain, other than corn isn't worth a lot of effort where I live, except mostly just for fun and curiosity and the occasional treat.

I'm all about the cheap and lazy but by some standards I'm not sure I have a lawn. I have spaces that I keep open so I can walk around and look at stuff or pull my cart and collect stuff. It couldn't be much more organic unless maybe I threw away that stupid roaring stinking mower machine and got a pet donkey, one of those cute little ones, which I have considered. I'd name it Bob or Phyllis.

As far as grass care goes my philosophy is let it get just short of hard to mow then chop it to the ground, so it doesn't come back for a while.  If creeping Charlie tries to smother it, I let it. If I see a dandelion, plantain, white clover, wild daisies, purslane, columbine or my favorite VIOLETS I mow around till they drop their seeds.

Mow two or three times in spring and early summer then maybe again in fall, spend zero money except gas for that stupid roaring stinking mower machine.

In the first twenty seconds I heard an AI generated voice narrating an AI generated cartoon. If something of value showed up later, I missed it because the twenty seconds was all I could tolerate. A lot of Amish live in my neighborhood, they might get a good laugh at it.

I might not plant much of anything other than maybe throwing seeds of local native plants that I like into it. Other than that, just leave it to nature to do what it wants with it. I did that with about twenty-foot strip between our yard and the road. I mow a couple feet along the edge of the road and around the mailbox, so the county doesn't spray it.

I did plant a couple seed grown peach trees and some grape vines, but I don't tend to them. It looked sort of bad for a few years before other things crowded out the grasses but now native ceder, black locust, multiflora rose, Japanese honeysuckle and wild blackberries are dominant, and critters of various descriptions live in it.  Looking that way from the house and yard, you can't tell a road is over there. It's a total of about 20 feet by 400 feet; I didn't spend any money at all on it.

I see you mentioned the "town" might mow it. I'm pretty far from anything resembling a town. I may be able to get by with more of what some might consider sloppy landscaping, but I like it that way.

I've been around Indiana for quite a while and I remember when we lived in town a tree that might have been that big. The pears were fantastic, us kids could climb parts of it, we used rocks, sticks and fishing poles to knock them down. Lots just fell and many rotted, the wasps loved them. A little kid could get quite sleepy sucking the juice out of the partly rotted ones, it was so good! There is a similar tree by and old church not far from me now, but it isn't that big. I don't think I ever knew a name for them.

If you live in a climate that does not freeze which I don't, sweet potatoes might be hard to beat. I still grow a lot of them, and they keep easily until the next season. If you like the greens, they can also pretty easily be grown as house plants. Pecans are probably the most productive perennial thing I have but again are not a harvest in winter crop. Turnips, carrots, winter radishes various wild and feral domestic onions and some other things can sometimes be harvested in winter, it just depends on conditions year to year.

For things that can be winter harvested reliably, garlic is one of the biggest here. It is far more productive, and we enjoy it a lot more than walking onions. Plus, it grows and spreads on its own even in the weeds outside the garden and yard where walking onions have to be tended inside the garden itself. Nothing has ever attracted more voles to my yard than sunchokes. So much so that the patch completely died out and then the voles attacked other things. Our area has an abundance of wild ones, but they are little knobby things.

There is a big range of mostly self-caring things like peaches, pears, blackberries and lots more but of course you have to harvest and store them one way or another instead of harvesting any time. My peach and pear trees are absolutely loaded with little fruits this year, fingers crossed nothing happens to them. Dandelions, dock and some other wild weeds are often available in winter too. I saw someone mentioned dames rocket, we have lots of that, but I didn't know it was edible, going to have to look into that.

I remember a number of interesting experiences like when it took over four hours to get home from work one morning, which normally took about forty minutes driving a 1980 Ford Pinto past snowplows, stuck on the side of the road. One time I guess about twenty years ago I went to bed with about a foot of snow on the ground and remember hearing it rain and blow all night. Next morning the snow looked the same except it wasn't snow anymore; it was a foot of solid ice. Out of boredom I used an ax and shovel to hack my way to drive out to the mailbox, but it was over a week before the county used a bulldozer to open the road.  

77 / 78 though is the most memorable. I hear people call it a blizzard; I don't remember it that way. It was more a series of blizzards with multi-week periods of temps below zero F. When it did warm up to ten or fifteen above it would snow like crazy and then go back down to fifteen below. The Ohio River froze for the first time since the high-rise dams, but it wasn't like in the old pictures and stories of the older folks where you could walk or even drive across it. Instead, the barges acted as ice breakers for a long as they could so when they had to give up with some stuck in pace for weeks the river was full of giant chunks the size of cars and bigger. Almost a hundred barges full of coal and whatever else smashed into the back of the Markland dam and sank.

How we got there and back is a mystery, but we managed to go see it and actually watched many of them sink. They were all smashed up against the back of the dam. Just below there was a couple hundred yards of open water. A little tugboat came out of one of the locks, positioned itself between the concrete piles between the flood gates which themselves were under water and rammed the ice on the other side. The little tug backed up, and a little bit of ice broke up and floated through.  After making some progress the little tug ran up on the corner of a barge on the other side and pushed it under. It sank, the barge attached to it sank, and so on until a string of about a dozen of them disappeared. The ice and a bunch more barges immediately flowed in and fill up the gap. The little tugboat puttered back over and went back into the lock it came out of. It was quite a spectacle.

All through it though, I never felt the aspect of survival it was more of a wonderous adventure, but some friends had a much different experience. When I got there to visit for the first time weeks later ice was still melting off the walls bringing wallpaper and plaster down with it. Their power had been on and off for weeks and fuel oil had turned to jelly in the lines, and the furnace wouldn't re-light during the brief periods when the oil would flow again. They were able to cook by burning whatever they could scrounge in an open fireplace, but it did nothing to heat the house. They put a mattress on the kitchen floor and made a tent of blankets over the table and chairs. That is where they and their two big dogs lived for three or four weeks, heating it with a hair dryer whenever the power did come on. Their cars were still just barely visible in drifts, and we had to park on the blacktop and hike to the house. I don't remember what we took them except for dogfood. It was a while longer before they could get out themselves.

paul wheaton wrote:
And a huge twist of "grow what you ACTUALLY eat!"  Which translates to people growing stuff for supermarket shelf life, or foods they eat because they have a 90% subsidy, therefore they are cheap.

 
I don't understand that translation. Is it that you believe people are trying to grow a duplication of what they can buy in the store? I grow food because it is lots better and lots cheaper than what the store has. We do actually grow a lot of what we actually eat.

paul wheaton wrote:And winter storage!  People are desperately trying to preserve a harvest so that they will have food in the winter.  I would like to see that transformed into preserving a harvest is a nice-to-have rather than a desperate-to-have.   The ability to harvest food all winter solves so much.  

Harvesting food in winter can be a nice little perk of gardening if you know what you are doing but I'd be hard pressed to get through a winter with only that.  I'm more comfortable with a pantry full of canned green beans and tomatoes along with a big bag of dry cowpeas, a bin full of sweet potatoes and few five-gallon buckets full of pecans, anything harvested fresh in January is icing on the cake but just the icing.  

I put a new post about my sweet potatoes over on the OSSI forum and am copying it here.

I put my sweet potatoes in for clones today. I have nine plants in the culinary line and two ornamentals. The culinary are a mix of mostly planted on purpose and volunteers. Three of them #s 7, 10 and 11 are three or more years old, some are just newly sprouted last year. I've changed up how I'm starting them this year with each in its individual pot, so they don't get so tangled together. The ornamentals, Miss Bloom and Likes to Climb are started from clippings kept in the window over winter. They look kind of rough but will perk up soon.

I've been wanting to sell some of my sweet potatoes for a long time and I'm thinking I may offer some on eBay or maybe Permies but I don't think I'll offer seeds, rather clones. I've done a lot with them, but they are still pretty screwy, and I think a buyer might get a better deal with clones of proven seed producing plants than with seeds. Uless someone bought a lot of seeds the chances of failing in the first year are too high for my comfort level, considering how much I will likely ask for them. All nine of the roots I'm cloning make seeds, nice roots and have all or most of my other preferred traits like clump root, bushy habit and so on. I of course still cannot guarantee success but if a person buys a collection of say five or more clones (from different roots) the chances of getting more seeds and roots to eat, on 100 days or less are very high.

I have all the sweet potatoes and sweet potato seeds I will ever need and will keep playing with them myself for the most part I'm considering the culinary side of this project near completion. The culinary line is what I'm considering selling perhaps under OSSI, perhaps not. I need to get in contact with my advisor with OSSI and get their input first.

While I won't stop working with the culinary, maybe introducing a new one now and then, I'm turning my attention to the ornamental line. Lots of ornamental sweet potatoes are already on the market but mine, I believe are superior for a number of reasons, one being they bloom, a lot. Miss Bloom for example is quite unique in that the abundant flowers are held above the foliage rather than buried in it like most strong blooming plants.

My abuse of the ornamental plants, keeping them in water on a cold windowsill, allowing the spider mites to chew on them and they still survive shows that they, with just a bit of attention could be fantastic and edible house plants. Pretty plant, pretty flowers and greens, year-round anywhere with a sunny warm window. So many great ones show up and I just discard them. I think it would be more fun to turn most of my breeding attention to them. I've observed often times that people will often pay more for flowers than food, so perhaps considerably more profitable and less restricted too. If I'm able to get through the OSSI pledge process it will just be for the culinary.

I've never known deer to mess with potatoes; I often grow them outside the fences. As far as off the ground I grow some in large tubs with composted and non-composted stuff in the bottom. I generally prep that in the fall. In spring I barely set the potatoes below the surface and pile lots of a similar only even less composted on top. I add a little more at time along with a little actual compost to simulate "hilling them up". In the ground I do similar, with the potatoes barely buried and heaps of stuff on top. At harvest time I can just dig for them with my fingers. That ease of harvest is a primary reason I grow them like that.