Jeff Peter

If you can't get a local arborist to dump a load of woodchips on your property, maybe a town nearby has their own forestry guys in the maintenance crews, and have a chip pile free for the taking.

My wild black raspberries do well with thick woodchip mulch. My chips get inoculated by the soil. So I miss out on a crop of edible fungus as well as many varieties of raspberries. However, I am learning to value the varieties that are native to my soil. They are proven survivors in my garden. I re-learned this lesson again this year when the volunteer tomatoes, kale, cilantro, lettuces, peppers, etc thrived in spite of the conditions that made my intentionally started garden struggle.
The volunteers all come from spoiled fruit, and from the plants I couldn't eat fast enough and went to seed.

Free black raspberries (enough in the freezer for a full year), free wood chips, free fungus ~ those all fit my budget.

Hi Bert,
Have you thought about using the manure in the way farmers have been doing since the beginning of agriculture?

Spreading it/just throwing forkfulls?
You'd be emulating the way grazing herds fertilized the prairies. Without chickens to scratch it up, and spread it, I've used a mower to do that.
You also get a good layer of clippings over the manure to help reduce nitrogen loss to the atmosphere.

I did create a very good compost by making a five ft. diameter circle of old 4' fencing. I just layered on a few forkfulls of horse manure for each 8 or 10 inches of woodchips. Downside is it takes a year or more to break down the chips, but it came out rich, black, and crumbly.

And nasturtium, zinnias, and others I’m forgetting.

Vegetables:
Tomato. Besides actually cleaning, drying, labeling, and storing seeds, I have a lot of success just tossing the rotten ones where I want them next spring.

Peppers. Two sweet grilling type, and cayenne and poblano.

Beans. We eat and freeze a ridiculous amount of them as green beans, but I leave an equal amount on the vine for dry beans and next year’s seeds. Except for a yellow wax bush bean that I have been saving and growing for years, all of my others are meant to be harvested after the beans have fully grown inside the pods. That’s where the protein is. So pick as they swell out for green beans, or let dry for dry beans. And seeds for next year.

Carrot. One or two overwintered and allowed to flower makes a LOT of seed.

Amaranth.

Kale and rapini broccoli, turnips, etc. Again, leave a couple to overwinter and flower, and I get more seed out of those long green pods than I’ll ever use. Well, they do like to be seeded heavily and way more crowded than you’d think, so I guess I’ll use them.

Onion. I cut the heads off before they start dropping seeds, and just let them dry in a tub.

Squashes.

Bronze fennel and parsley, and dill. Dammit! I do not need dill and fennel seeds to plant! They volunteer like crazy. Shoot me if I intentionally plant more dill.
Fennel seed is a delicious spice, but hoo boy ~ cleaning and winnowing seems endless.

Cilantro. I keep at least one gallon of seeds on hand because I just keep planting it every couple of weeks so I can usually find some young and tender for eating. Once they bolt, they become breeding stock. Great plant to cram in between pepper and tomato plants.

Garlic. Well, yeah😉 But cloning using the biggest bulbs, not true seed.


Flowers:
Coneflower
Bee Balm
Prairie aster
Hollyhock
Columbine
Phlox
Yarrow
Black eyed susan

Native prairie grasses:

Big Indian Grass
Switchgrass
Side Oats Grama
Canadian Wild Rye
Big and Little Bluestem
And some I have not IDed yet.

Trees:

Black Walnut
Red Oak
Shagbark Hickory
Sugar Maple
Redbud

Saving seeds is addicting. And rewarding. I have been greatly helped by the book about it that my wife got me for Christmas a few years ago. If for nothing more than knowing which need stratification.

Thanks for correcting me. Bulbils, not seeds is what I collected.

I have garlic that’s gone wild from some I planted thirty years ago. Never dig it up, and never cut off the scapes. The most attention it gets is usually not mowing it. It produces seeds, they fall where they will, and it spreads.

I do have a dedicated bed in which I grow white and red chesnuk, both hardneck. These are clones ~ cloves chosen from my biggest bulbs, spaced well to give them the room they need for making big bulbs. When they form scapes, I cut them off so the plants put all their energy into the bulb instead of flowers and seeds.

But ~ I invariably miss some scapes, or they develope later after I’ve gone through and pruned. At harvest time, I grab the seeds that have formed on those missed scapes. Here is what I’ve found out about seeds :

If a clump of them falls, next year I will have a cluster of garlic there, overcrowded and small. That works against my ongoing attempt at growing large bulbs.
I dig those at harvest time because I do not want a million stunted, tiny bulbs in my main bed. But the interesting thing to me, is that those grown from fallen seeds do not divide (at least in year one). They form a single clove bulb about an inch in diameter. I presume if they were grown out with better spacing, they would eventually form cloves and bigger bulbs?

This year I gathered all those seeds before the heads dried and spilled them, ending up with about a pound of seed, which I’ve been sharing with people.

I guess I could try planting some to see if given proper spacing, they’d form full sized bulbs. But I grow too much garlic as it is.

This spring, when I planted out a couple dozen brussels sprouts I’d started in my greenhouse, there was a mess of dill coming up, which I just left. The brussels sprouts that became surrounded by a screen of dill were left alone, while a juvenile rabbit ate the others back. Now they are way behind the protected ones.

I let dill and cilantro re-seed themselves, and just pull the ones that are in my way, leaving as many as I can.

Crowding in nasturtium and marigolds also helps distract pests.

Kathleen Marshall wrote:I also found a very odd one that I can't identify. Can anyone tell me what it is?

An app I found says it’s

Smilax herbacea L.
Carrion-flower

Named because it’s strongly fragrant~ like rotten mear or dead rats.
I aint eatin anything like that.

Kathleen Marshall wrote:I also found a very odd one that I can't identify. Can anyone tell me what it is?

An app I found says it’s

Smilax herbacea L.
Carrion-flower

Named because it’s strongly fragrant~ like rotten mear or dead rats.
I aint eatin anything like that.

For years I was bedeviled by a wickedly needled plant all through everywhere my wild black raspberries are ~ little corner woods, edges,
basically around the edges of the entire place. It’s thorns easily pierce my jeans while picking the black raspberries. I simply didn’t know what they were.
It wasn’t until I spent a year on my friend’s organic market garden and berry farm that I realized the plant I hated was wild gooseberry.

Now, while harvesting my black raspberries (and is a stupendous year for my wild black raspberries!), I keep an eye on the fruiting progress of my wild gooseberries. Right now, they are mostly green, so probably ought to be ready by the time the other berries are done.

They must be a natural companion for the black radpberries, because they grow together everywhere. And seem to dig the woodchip mulch I use around the brambles. The other comments are true for me as well ~ they seem to like the part sun/part shade of the edges best.

If any of you have experience with the wild varieties of gooseberries, maybe you can answer this: do they have male and female plants? Only roughly half of mine bear fruit.

Or is it just the age of the bush?

I hope you all are enjoying this berry bonanza we are.

Far northern Illinois, zone 5 or 6 here.