Dennis Barrow

My grandfather taught me to take care of all tools.
I am still using many of his tools and tools I have gotten over the years.   Some are over 100 years old.
My biggest procrastination on tools is wooden handles.  I am a few years behind sanding the handles and giving them a coat of lindseed oil.

My wife and I have been fortunate to travel a bit, not much but enough to have gotten the travel bug.
We have tried salsa's in everyplace we have gone to.
St Croix, Antigua, Mexico, Costa Rica and Hawaii.
Each place used a lot of local fruits and veggies in their salsa's.
So here at home when we make it, it consists of:   walking through the supermarket.... Oooo, I bet that would be good in salsa and what ever is available from the garden.

One of my son's has a composting toilet and uses saw dust for that.
A year ago he went to a local sawmill to get a yard of sawdust, (couple years worth for him), They had a large end loader and tried to dump a yard onto his dump trailer, the operator wasn't to careful and dumped 4 to 5 yards.  They only charged him for 1.  
I have been using the sawdust for paths, ground cover around some plants, etc.
We have a lot of wild lupine here and this spring a dozen plants started in the sawdust pile.  I transplanted a couple to other areas and let the rest go to seed on the pile.

Chance Lunceford wrote:

Dennis Barrow wrote:I have 3 raised beds I grow strawberries in.  This year, one of the beds has had a serious decline of plants and no runners from them.  This bed was the most prolific of them all last year.   I am thinking there is some type of virus in it.  The beds are all 20 feet apart.

I was planning on replacing this bed this winter with a new one as it is starting to fall apart.  I am thinking I will not plant strawberries in the new bed as any virus in the soil would probably transfer to new plants.  I guess I will build 2 more beds, one with new soil for new strawberry plants.

This sounds like a job for crop rotation. You could have 5-6 beds and switch 1-2 out every year, then grow annual vegetables in the 2-3 empty beds.

Chance, I do crop rotation on everything BUT strawberries and perennial herbs.  I do agree that it may be time to rotate my strawberries into different beds.

I grew up on a farm in eastern Montana.  My parents and grandparents always provided the majority of our food from the garden.
Sour dough bread was a staple.
I learned from my mom many years later how to bake sour dough bread.
When I started college in the fall of 71 I would get up early, bake a couple loaves, take them to the commons with real butter, slice the bread there, (still warm), and sell a slice for 25 cents.

I remember the guy I share the house with took my bowl of rising dough and set it over the heater vent while I was gone for a few hours.  Came back to it overflowing into the heater vent!!   It was a mess to clean, but the house sure did smell good for a few days.

Welcome, Kate!
Looks like a great book and I am sure you had fun researching for it... all those pancakes and breads, well just all that food you had to try.  lol

In banana years................... we're all bread.

I have 3 raised beds I grow strawberries in.  This year, one of the beds has had a serious decline of plants and no runners from them.  This bed was the most prolific of them all last year.   I am thinking there is some type of virus in it.  The beds are all 20 feet apart.

I was planning on replacing this bed this winter with a new one as it is starting to fall apart.  I am thinking I will not plant strawberries in the new bed as any virus in the soil would probably transfer to new plants.  I guess I will build 2 more beds, one with new soil for new strawberry plants.

My sister gave me this recipe a few decades ago.  Great steak sauce!!

Last year we had a good harvest of plums, onions and some apples.  Fortunately, I canned enough steak sauce for several years for the wife and I.
(Late frost this year so no plums or apples and the onions did poorly.)

My sister called this HP Sauce:

4# apples    cored and chopped
4# plums  pitted and chopped
2 large onions  peeled and chopped
6 cups malt or cider vinegar
2 tsp. ginger
2tsp. nutmeg
2 tsp. allspice
1 tsp.  cayenne pepper
2# sugar

Jay Angler wrote:

Dennis Barrow wrote:This spring I found an apple core in my green house I must have left last fall.  I planted the seeds in some pots and now have 4, 2 foot tall apple trees!!!
Now I need to figure out where I want them.

Well done! I hope you find good homes for them with other people if not on your own land!

One of the things I love about apples is that it's not too hard to spread the harvest based on ripening times. Ripening times can be shifted both by location of the tree, and the variety of apple. I have one that ripens early in late July. The next ripens in Aug, and the third ripens in September. All three trees produce far more than I could possibly use, so I'm working on a couple more trees that should produce late in our season and store better.

If Dennis' 4 trees produce too much all at once, grafting is a great permie skill to practice!

Jay, I have 5 apple trees now, 2 I am training espalier, 2 just out there that have never bloomed (three years in ground and 5 years old). and 1 crab apple.   One of my espalier trees blooms 3 weeks before any of the others, so I bought a crab apple, it didn't bloom this year.  I stopped at a crab apple near town and got a bunch of pollen. Hand pollinated the couple trees that bloomed, (different times).  Then we had a hard frost.  Lost all blooms.  No apples this year.

I have 3 plum trees.  Last year I got a couple bushels of plums.  This year, none.  That dang frost.

As far as to many apples?  No way!  We have 5 children and 14 grandkids.  A few years ago I lived near some friends that had a large orchard.  We canned apple sauce by the casefull.  Still have a couple quarts left.   I don't think I have ever had to much of any produce, well maybe zucchini.  lol  I have freeze dried a lot of zuc's this summer, zuc lasagne, zuc chips, zuc soup. etc.  My wife says NO MORE ZUCCHINI !!!   (till next summer). Wife just said she found a recipe for zuc salsa.