Thom Bri

Last winter I ate some really good pears and stuck the seeds outdoors in a pot of soil so they could freeze and thaw several times. This spring 4 of them sprouted. My first success sprouting pears. Wish I could remember what variety they were! Not that it matters with seed-grown fruits; they won't be the same. Yesterday I separated them into individual pots.

And cantaloupe. I plant lots and lots of cantaloupe and save seeds from anything good. It's a weird mix of types. Some seeds go right in the ground, others in pots. Both ways seem to work.

Getting ready for transplants. Watermelon.
The watermelon is purchased seed. I had seeds saved year after year descended from Moon and Stars mixed with various other seeds. A few years ago I had complete crop failure, then what few seeds I had left failed last year, so I had to buy seeds. Sad.

Volunteer pumpkin. Halloween pumpkins got tossed out and a mess of them grew, all tangled up together. I eliminated the excess.
Seeing various volunteers already. Beans, a tomato, sunflowers, marigolds.

Maiz Morado, supposedly originated in the high Andes. It sprouts and seems to have good germination rates. Interested to see if it handles the day length here. I tried seeds from Guatemala once and they grew and grew, taller and taller but never set tassels or ears.

Pic shows sunflower, lettuce, arugula etc. All broadcast or volunteer. There are a bunch of other things growing here and there. Tomatoes, mint, horseradish. Goal is 100% coverage. Only trick is finding places to put my feet.

Big book sale for 5 days. A gang of writers collaborating to advertise their books, all either free or 99 cents for 5 days.
If you don't have a Kindle you can download the Kindle app for your computer.

Here is one about homesteading:
https://www.amazon.com/Escape-City-How-Homesteading-Guide-ebook/dp/B093F177F5?&language=en_US&ref_=as_li_ss_tl

And of course my books:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GWWD6N2V
and
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00C8E9692

Alex Howell wrote:Hey, as a fellow permie in Japan I was wondering how your garden has been coming along since your last post?

Me too! Very curious. I gardened in Japan (Kanagawa Prefecture) from 1996 through 2005. People were very curious about the white guy gardening next to a busy road.

My 'cover crops' are my vegetables. One easy suggestion is to buy a bag of beans in the supermarket and plant them all. Let them completely cover and smother the entire surface. So you get the benefits of nitrogen fixing but you also get useful food. No lost space. No lost time with beds out of production.

I sometimes use lettuce as a very early spring cover crop. In the fall I clip the dry stalks and save them in paper bags. In very early spring, February this year, I scatter the seeds thickly all over the garden. Once the hard freezes are gone the lettuce quickly sprouts and buries the garden in thousands of lettuce plants, a complete dense mat of lettuce that smothers most weeds. Very easy to remove if you decide later to plant something, and it makes excellent mulch. We are now eating the lettuce I sowed in February.

Squash also makes a great cover crop, though later in the year. Plant now, May to June and they will bury your garden. The goal is to have a heavy cover crop while not taking the garden out of production.

Anything that can conveniently be planted in beds rather than rows can be a good cover crop. Beets, carrots, turnips, lettuce. Broadcast the seeds rather than planting in rows to completely evenly cover the surface.

Nicola Bludau wrote:
Josh, your corn harvest looks amazing! I grew something white, and it looks way more boring. How about usability and taste? Does the red corn taste more interesting? Corn has a huge advantage: the birds are less likely to get into it, but rats like it, though. This should be a cornerstone of home-grain production.
Has anyone done the nixtamal so far? How much work is it?

My colored corn tasted distinctly different from commercial corn meal.

Birds are the main seed predator in my area, raccoons and deer less a problem, rodents hardly at all. If I leave the corn ears uncovered, birds will destroy at least half. They peck the husks open and eat the grain in the milk to dough stage. Then insects and mold get in and the whole ear is wasted. I either wrap the ears with large leaves, or put plastic drink bottles over them once pollination is done.