Cécile Stelzer Johnson

Lynn Sue wrote:I love my Centennial Crab! It fulfills the role of cross pollinator and bee attractor, but its prolific crops of beautiful mandarin orange-sized fruits are not only fragrant, crisp and delicious. They make the BEST  apple butter. They also make good apple mead.

The fruit is a perfect size for small children. Two or 3 adult bites.

I am familiar with the Dolgo but not the Centennial. I'll have to try it...

I heard that drupes have a better chance to resemble the parent than pomes. I would love to grow peaches in my zone 4b sandbox in Wisconsin but I'm picky: I don't like "cling" anything.
So I bought some peaches this summer that tasted quite good and were freestone and I will try to germinate them. I'm doing the same with plums and cherries.
I figure, if it's a flop, I didn't spend $60.00 or more on a tree that will die. If it is a success, I will get a peach tree for the price of one fruit.
If not, oh, well. The lessons I will draw from the experiment are still valuable...

When I first started an orchard, I didn't have much money to buy expensive apple trees. Crab apples were really cheap then, and they helped my few apple trees produce impressive crops.
Now, I keep them mostly for juice and jellies, because of the pectin. I do have maybe 50 other apple trees, so my crabs are not as valuable now.
I should try to grow some Granny Smith apples as they are richer than others in pectin, but in zone 4b, it is somewhat iffy because of the late frosts, sometimes.

Zone 4b won't let me raise oranges, unfortunately. We get ours from Florida in the Winter. There are always some folks that come with a truckload and we buy a whole bushel.
Yum!

In Wisconsin, we don't have mule deer, but what we have will jump a 6 ft. fence easily from a dead stop.
I had 6 ft. posts all along, to which I then added 5 solar electric wires. It worked for a while, then the grass touched the electric fence, grounding it, and it didn't take them long to realize that. It sagged in places and they figured that out.
I decided to make use  of the 6 ft. fence to which I added wire fencing 5 ft. high but I elevated it with slanted rebars, one on every metal post and bent so it leans toward the outside. On top of that slanted fence, I added 2 ft. of fencing (2X4, galvanized, just like the fence) and fastened it to the rebars with metal zip ties). I bought 4 ft. fencing and cut it in half lengthwise, to make the 2 ft wide extension.
My big orchard now looks like a correctional facility, and they have not crossed it in 6 months.
I'm taking advantage that their eyes are on the sides of their head, making it difficult for them to appraise the obstacle. Having to clear the height but also the width makes them leery of entanglement and they are making no attempts.
In the garden, I'm using 4ft high cattleguard, with again a half of a roll of 4ft high galvanized above that. So this is only 6 ft. total. The cattleguard is too sturdy for them to attempt to push it, but they are very capable of clearing a 7 ft. fence when pressed. (I just have to remember to close the gates at night!)
But because I plant in beds, and each bed is about 2 ft away from the outside fence, I suspect that they are afraid of breaking a leg when they land, as their depth perception is quite poor.
I hope this helps.

Lina Joana wrote:Om, so… my family has had sunchokes ever since I can remember. We eat them raw in salads, and I like the flavor.
However, any time we cook them, (baked, mashed, or in soup), they taste watery to me, with a “sharp” flavor that I don’t like at all.
What I am wondering is, is this a varietal thing? I have only ever eaten from the family patch. We nearly always dig them after frost, though we did try early to see if that improved cooking texture.
Had anyone had experience with different strains? Some being good cooked and some less so?

So, when raw, they are nice and crispy, good flavor, but when cooked, "sharp" and watery?
The watery part could be that they are cooked a bit too long, because indeed, if you cook them too long, they will eventually fall apart completely.
"sharp", I do not quite understand. Sharp like apple juice left a bit too long in the sun (your tongue tingles a bit), or too salty? It does sound like the cooking method. Does anything else you cook in that water have an off taste or do you soak them too long? or add too much salt?
I love them raw as well, like radishes, but the pink one give me serious gas. Not the white ones, so it could also be the cultivar, although tasting them raw side by side, I don't think I'd be able to taste much of a difference between the varietals.  I wish I could be more useful.

If you bought the seeds, they have a date. If not, hopefully YOU wrote the year. Some seeds can be good for many years, but others are rather perishable.
https://joegardener.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Seed-Longevity-Chart.pdf
Long story short: if you have old seeds, toss them. In your garden, in your compost pile... Anywhere where they could still surprise you and germinate:
You will be better able to organize if you let go of the unusable or nearly unusable.
I save my seeds in favor boxes that I buy from Michaels. (An art & craft store here). Favor boxes are made of thin cardboard, so don't put them where they'll get wet. Little boxes 2" X2" X3" are the perfect size for pumpkins and other cucurbits...
I've re-used boxes for years, just changing the label.
I put those boxes in a few different places. Most are not afraid of the cold. They can be placed way up in the coop, above the chickens: It will be quite cold there, but not below zero.
The insulated garage, with a small heater + thermostat can be kept just above freezing, like refrigerator temperature. To encourage me to be vigilant, I put a lot of my canned goods there, in glass jars.
The rest, I keep here, in the office.
I try (but I'm afraid I have not been always consistent) to make a census of them on a spreadsheet, along with where I stashed them.
When the snow is gone, change of plans: I bring them out by planting date:
Some are cold crops (peas, lettuce, radishes... ) will have to go in the ground first.
Melons, corn and the like, warm crops, will go in later.
Of course, there are also cuttings of bushes, like raspberries, black currants and others. Last year, I thought ahead and made cuttings of black currants late in the fall, after the leaves had fallen. I stashed them outside, in a pail of dirt and dedicated a 2" pipe, 1 ft long to each of them. (I love that system: I cut chunks of PVC, like 1 ft long, stand them up in tall totes with a few small holes about 1" from the bottom, on the sides and fill all the pipes with good soil. This way, I can put 50 cuttings or so in one tote.
They stay outside all winter and when I see them take off in the spring, I pick up each pipe and check for roots at the bottom. when the roots start coming out of the bottom, I know they are good enough to plant.
For chestnuts, I wrap them up in a blue Scott's towel, get it wet then squeeze most of the water out of it. In March, most have started germinating and I put them in pipes just like the currants.
Chestnuts are very touchy: You don't want to mess with the root, which is very fragile, because if you break it, you'll just have to throw it: It would never make a tree.
I wish I had a hothouse or a solarium, but I do not have much room in the house: Only 3 shelves are facing East and South windows, so spots for starting stuff inside are rather limited. I buy a number of plants (herbs in particular), as most are hard to start...
I guessed I went a bit longer than just answering the question. Sorry: It's all gardening, though.
So yeah. It's messy. It's complicated, but I love it!

In a previous house, when I had a wood burning stove down in the basement, we would bring wood downstairs and stack it near the stove (but not too close) As we had plenty of wood, the wood could stay outside for a year before we needed it.
In the fall, we would bring as much of it as we could downstairs and it would finish drying. We did bring in a couple of mice and a number of insects, which wasn't too nice, but I regret my wood stove overall: It gave us a very comfortable heat.
It seems to me that if you kiln it, you have to build a kiln (not free) and are spending energy to dry it, though, which kinda defeats the purpose? or am I misunderstanding something?

Well, I'm in 4B, Central Wisconsin. Spring and Fall, in a Continental climate are the seasons that are quite unpredictable. Like they say, "if you don't like the weather, just wait a day: It will change".
Right now, December 26th, the snow is melting. That's not what you would expect.
After a cool spring, we had a torrid summer. There does seem to be a perturbance in the weather force.

Bj Murrey wrote:For me in north Texas, its been composting everything I can in place, and supplementing as I can with wood chips and manure. I went from straight sand in an oak forest to a foot deep of dark black soil full of life.over 10 years. Not hard work, and totally worth it. I prefer adding soil on top rather than trying to amend it in ground. Just my experience.

I bet its much colder up north!

That's pretty much my experience as well: My garden soil was a sandbox, with barely 1" of top soil when I started. the first thing I did was build beds, usually 4' X 8' and scraped the alleys clean so as to have 1.5" of "top soil".
I have chickens who give me *abundant* manure and their litter is made of wood chips, so when their house/ winter run gets cleaned, it all goes on the garden, or elsewhere, around prized trees.
Around here, town folks have to rake their leaves and bag them so they don't plug the city's sewers.
2 years ago, the weather was perfect (It stayed fairly dry for the entire week that the city was collecting). I got ahead and collected bags of leaves (with permission, of course), selecting the less groomed yards, as they are less likely to have been sprayed!
I collected over 100 big bags of the precious stuff and put my entire garden (and the alleys too) under a blanket of precious leaves. My garden has less weeds, I water less and I get more out of it, with a lot less effort. I now have almost a foot of good workable black soil.

Actually, as far as the weather, we have a pretty freaking mild fall and winter. We did get a "white Christmas", defined as a snow cover of at least 1", but we didn't have much more than that. It is melting now (34F) on the 26th of December.