Mary-Ellen Zands

Cy Cobb wrote:2 years ago I did a sort of mini hugel with potatoes & carrots.  They all did well enough, but that was about the only way I could get some loose soil for root crops to actually grow in the hard soil I had at the time.  The downside, is with so much woodchips, bark chips, & old straw mixed in, it was a haven for insects like pill bugs, centipedes, crickets, etc. I ended up losing a third of my potatoes & all of my carrots to bug damage where they were eaten underground, then rotted as I cured them.  Not sure if this helps or not, but I always have to try something myself to see how my gardening style, pests, & rain patterns affect things in my area.  In this case, the plants were healthy above ground, but I had no idea they looked like Swiss cheese below ground.  Give it a try, you won't know for sure until you do.  Unless you are growing long radishes, they mature very quickly, and stay fairly shallow, so you should be ok there.  Beets go a bit deeper, but might still work fine if picked young.  I bet it can be done, Good luck!

Yes same for me. The varmints didn’t even leave enough to share with me!  This was also grown in my hugel beds.

Ra Kenworth wrote:Has anyone had success in zone 4a with the black plastic mulch technique?

I haven’t tried the black mulch technique but I planted summer 2023 in the ground and the mice and voles loved them. I just got the leftover bits!  I’m just on the border of la belle Province so we have similar growing conditions as you I think at Mont Ste Anne.  This past summer I grew them in a huge metal ancient steamer basket. That take a tractor to move them. They are full of holes. Which was perfect for putting the potato slips into. They grew fantastically!  It was just a trial so I only planted 1basket. The leaves covered the whole basket so you couldn’t even see the basket under them. I harvested a lot of leaves for fresh eating. Yummm
Spring started out very wet which was why they thrived. They didn’t do so well later on when we had a drought. I gave them a bucket of water a day which wasn’t enough. I will have to line the bottom of the basket with plastic this coming summer!  

Lucky you to live in Iqaluit too!  I love it up there!  Was there quite a bit in the ‘80s.

Luke Mitchell wrote:We have just repurposed a trampoline safety net as a cloche/butterfly/bird/shade net for our cabbage transplants.

We can get hold of trampolines quite easily, free for the dismantling and removing, and have been collecting them with a view to make a polytunnel.

The netting is working great for crop protection (hung over bent lengths of hazel, driven into the ground at both sides of the bed).

If only we could find a use for the trampoline mesh.

I use the trampoline mesh that I have dragged home over the years for putting under the mulberry trees to catch the abundant harvest of berries in June!  Works great!

Airy macaroons
About the only thing left, that I can eat!
In this age of food intolerance.

What beautiful dogs we all have!  They enrich our lives so.  This is my heartbeat Boomer, who helps me at everything he can and always has a smile!  Understanding every word I say.  He is definitely smarter than me!

Correction it is spelled Amager Bakke

My brother always said that my mom invented recycling!  Growing up with both parents having gone through the 2nd world war and my father even surviving a concentration camp, everything was reused!  To survive you needed the 4 R’s that was just a fact of life. Everything was bartered or borrowed and things were used till they fell apart. I know this is the extreme, there was nothing to buy. No stores to buy it from and the aim was for these prisoners not to survive. Survival in these camps was based on thinking outside the box and constantly trying to outsmart the guards. Seeing a snake cross the compound and getting the children to safely kill them and harvest the meat to survive another day. One morsel of meat could save someone’s life from Beriberi which people were dying of daily. My father at 7 years old learned to trade with the locals and smuggle meat in his anus. He would pay the locals in whatever he could find.
A scrap piece of metal someone turned into a frying pan which they could cook their ‘found prizes’ in!  I still use that pan to this day!  A found piece of wood, someone whittled clogs for my Oma, which she tied to her feet with rags. Better than burning the soles of your feet when you had to stand at attention in the hot sun for hours on end. I have many such stories.  My father was so hungry he even ate grass to survive. So you can imagine that every button every thing a child could find was a treasure!  Oh yes one last story, my father had a terrible toothache and someone had built a foot drill with sticks and string and an old drill bit. So they cleaned out the infected tooth and filled it with the tar from the road. That fixed the problem till years later when Dad as a teenager went to the dentist who looked in his mouth in surprise!  He couldn’t believe it!  

Look what Denmark did with their mountain of garbage just look up Amagar Bakke mountain of garbage.  We can all learn how to problem solve this differently with different eyes,  make beautiful mountains that everyone can enjoy!  

Hi Craig,

John has managed to drag the ‘small’ tank home.  He says that the larger tank had a pipe to the smaller tank that came into the top with the steam. There was an elbow on the bottom that broke when he moved it. It was all rusted out.  John believes that there is a valve on the bottom to release the water. It’s home now. Just don’t know yet what we’re going to use it for.

I’ve had a moringa tree for the past few years and I think I lost it this winter. Then I’ve been watching the electroverse videos on youtube to wrap my tree in copper wire maybe this will bring it back to life?  Looking at Judith’s post I think it’s worth a try. Since the roots grow back so well!  I’ll keep you updated to see if it works. Of course I bring it for the winter and outside for the summer.