Eino Kenttä

I just now went through the "bargains" section of a Swedish seed company website (always a dangerous place), found three varieties of runner beans, remembered this thread, and felt "okay, let's give it a try." So next year I'll be growing runner beans. It would be just great if they could overwinter. Probably they won't in our climate, but one never knows until one tries, no?

And Ac, please do report the results of your experiment next year! I'm very curious.

My father-in-law (who's Belgian) makes a stew with endives and minced meat. I think there might be some onions in there as well, and it's served with boiled potatoes. I personally find it very tasty, but I can imagine some people might have trouble with the consistency of cooked endives.

Jay Angler wrote:Was there any old curry spice hiding in the same closet?  I would just check before you put a lot of work into drying nettle leaves, although I have read that dried nettle leaves are good for top-dressing plants as a natural pick-me-up. I have done that in the past, and I don't recall a curry smell, but mine weren't in a paper bag.

Nope. No spices in there, and the smell is only coming from those fibres. I checked again just now, and it's specifically from one of the fibre bundles, not from the others. Odd. I wonder if I did anything different with those than with the rest? Maybe they were picked at a very specific stage, or got attacked by some specific strain of bacteria or fungi before they were fully dry, or something... No clue.

Well, I might try to replicate this with nettle leaves anyhow. If they don't turn curry-ish, I like using dried nettles in bread and soups and things anyways. Nothing's lost.

Tried a bit just now, and it's not entirely dissimilar from curry! Of course it doesn't have the pungent/peppery taste, but that I suppose one could get from another ingredient.

I was just tidying a cabinet where I keep a lot of half-finished projects and materials for projects (I imagine some of you probably have a similar piece of furniture, where things just tend to end up?) Anyways, in there is a paper bag of nettle fibres. Not retted, but raw dried bark that I've pounded and combed to get rid of most of the non-fibre material. I think there are fibres in there collected both one and two years ago.

When I took this bag out of the cabinet, I caught a whiff of curry smell, so of course I shoved my nose in the bag. It did smell more or less exactly like curry powder. Since I was wondering if my nose had bugged (it does happen) I asked my brother to smell it. He confirmed that it does indeed smell like curry.

Now, this has me wondering. I don't want to eat nettle fibres obviously, but maybe you can do something similar with the leaves? Grind them into a paste, dry it in cakes, and let them sit in a paper bag for a couple of years maybe? And then grind it into a powder, add salt and something spicy like peppers? Or maybe you could use the non-fibre stuff in the bark, to get a bonus product out of your nettle processing? I find this interesting anyways, I like curry spice. Did anyone else notice this?

We do get a bit colder than you, down to -15 C occasionally I believe (although we still haven't spent winter on our land, so only know what the neighbours told us.) That said, at least one winter we had potatoes survive in the ground, just below the surface, so maybe dahlias will be fine if we mulch heavily?

Ah. I think I might have an answer for you. I assume you girdled the branches for air layering? When girdling, you stop the flow of cytokinin from the roots, thereby reducing the cytokinin/auxin ratio (auxins are produced in buds, cytokinins in root tips). The reduced c/a ratio is actually what induces rooting. By contrast, an increased c/a ratio promotes growth of lateral buds. The point is that cytokinin and auxin have roughly opposite effects, and the relative abundance of the two determines what happens. Now, Wikipedia says this:

Auxin inhibits abscission prior to the formation of the abscission layer, and thus inhibits senescence of leaves.

As far as I can tell, that means that a low c/a ratio (a lot of auxin compared to cytokinin) will inhibit leaf drop, and that's exactly the kind of situation that girdling creates. Hormones are funny.

Okay, now that's interesting! Mix of ginger and carrot sounds lovely. I had sort of automatically assumed that the taste would be similar to sunroots since they're in the same family. Silly me, dandelions are also in the same family, and dandelion roots taste nothing like sunroots...

I might have to try growing dahlias even though our climate probably isn't the best for them. What varieties did you start with? Are there any that are even a bit frost resistant?

I've thrown some random post-composting bones in with the wood when making char trench-style once or twice. Since this wasn't at my own place, I don't really have any experience with actually using the char. It chars okay, though. The surface of each piece turns white, so I suppose anything non-mineral burns off there, but when you break the pieces apart they're nice and black inside. When we did it, it was mainly in order to make the bones easier to crush and incorporate into the soil, but if some of the carbon sticks around, that's a nice bonus.

As for how it helps the biochar, I suppose one thing is that it adds nutrients, mainly calcium and phosphorus but probably some nitrogen as well. Other than that, I don't know.

Where my mother's from (the border between Sweden and Finland), they say that mare's tails are a sign that the wind will pick up in the next 12 hours... I guess a lot of these weather signs depend on where you are.