Mark Reed

Without any idea of your needs and purposes my own idea would be to just forget the goofy thing and do my gardening without it. Even if they work you still have to maintain them, haul fuel, listen to the roar, and breath the exhaust. Working in the garden is much nicer just listening to the birds. I realize if you are wanting to raise a big garden to sell at market or something you might need machines but just for a single family I don't they are necessary at all and actually in the long run are counterproductive.

Reposted from my account on OSSI

Well, a little bit of a disaster has struck. When I put my saved roots in the cold frame as in the photo shown in earlier post it was still pretty chilly in the mornings, but they took right off. Then it got warmer and I went ahead and took off a few slips, just from three or four roots and planted one of each thinking it would probably get colder again, and I wanted to see what effect that would have on them. Unsurprisingly it slowed them down but did not hurt even though one morning had light frost on the car windshield it didn't kill or even damage the plants.

Meanwhile in the cold frame the others were doing nicely, and I was planning to set them out in a day or two, but it got a bit warmer and I forgot to open the cold frame one morning. The cold frame had been recently remodeled with new tape to seal the seams and with a foot deep bed of composting material providing a little heat from the bottom, and a fully sunny day with a high of about 85 F, my sweet potatoes and the slips they were making cooked. I held out hope they might make some more slips, but the roots themselves were actually cooked. They were soft and dead.

I was only able to save a couple slips from one root so those I planted earlier and those are the only ones I have. Five of the nine roots in that other photo, five unique examples of ipomoea batatas were lost. Fortunately, one that I had planted earlier is our favorite for cooking and it is doing fine as are the other three. All of them are fine sweet potatoes that all have most of my preferred traits. It's just that I won't have extra slips to maybe sell this year.

I described it a "little bit" of a disaster because that is all it is, maybe no disaster at all really because one of the main objectives of this project is a guarantee that a crop failure, even a total one which this isn't, is recoverable the next season.

Except all along I have selected for fast maturity, seed to harvest in 100 days or less and I have plenty more season this year, no need to wait till next. So, I got into my seeds and planted forty in a row in the ground. These seeds are top line seeds mostly from the very plants that were lost. They just sat there for a while until it finally rained and twenty-seven of them popped up immediately and a few more since then. A little bit of a disaster is that I only have twenty-five pots ready and four of them are already take.  

And then on a whim I planted a couple hundred low grade seeds. These are seeds that after harvesting last year were later picked off the discarded vines. Mostly little brown and wrinkled things, not the nice fully formed black ones. Drying on discarded vines without fully maturing and even after a frost or two I figured I would be lucky to get half a dozen plants but apparently what I thought were bad seeds and usually didn't mess with aren't bad at all. I suppose they are responsible for the volunteers that I find each year.

Germination on the low grade wasn't the two or three percent I expected but more like 25% or more. (See photo below)

Now I guess the disaster is that I have probably wasted a bunch of seeds because all together I have close to a hundred and only space for about twenty. I do have some more pots but not that many but I don't have enough compost and stuff to mix up more soil to fill them and I have a near religious objection to buying dirt. I might do that though, so I don't have to discard them because chances are very high that plants as good or better than those I lost are in there.

Maybe this is more of an opportunity than a disaster. These low-grade seeds also (mostly) came from those same superior plants. If I can pull off keeping them all maybe I can arrive at a measure of probability that any one new plant will have all or most of the desired traits. Another possibility is that if I can study them close enough maybe I can get better at finding observable traits that will indicate early on which ones are likely to make nice big roots and which ones are more just ornamental.

On the ornamental side both "Likes to Climb" and "Ms. Bloom" are doing fine. I had already planted several of them here and there and those in the cold frame died back from the cold frame turned sauna but immediately shot back up from the roots. I had thought of planting some older generation seeds looking for more ornamentals but under the circumstances won't be doing that this year.

Since the original poster thought about dragging the on a tarp, I'm assuming an easy cheap way is what is being looked for. If the work proposed is to be done by hand it might work to just attach a rope to on one end just to lift and pull so as you're dragging it the weight is on just the edge of the other end. Something to reduce friction on the other end might help too.

I'd try something like cutting up some plastic milk jugs or pop bottles and wrapping anything touching the ground with it. Attach it with staples or something. The slick plastic won't scratch up and accumulate dirt, thus slowing you down and it will ride over on obstacles like rocks or branches much easier than the wood.  If they are too big for that, then you might have to replace the plastic with some kind of "easy on easy off" wheels. I've done both of those things to move some good-sized logs around the place.

Being downhill certainly should make it easier but be careful putting anything heavy on wheels and pointing it downhill.

William Bronson wrote:Hey, do you think these bubils are ready to plant?

They are pretty easy plants to grow but those do look a little small. I think it's probably better to just leave them be for a bit, even late summer isn't too long. Actually, they will tell when they are ready by getting bigger and heavier until the stalk falls over. You can dig and divide the old bulbs too if you want.

Thom Bri wrote:
Did you ever get it to produce ears after crossing, and if so, how were they?

Yes, lots of them but mostly small the biggest was maybe seven inches long. Individual kernels also small and quite varied in appearance with a lot of sweet and a lot of more flint looking but all small. I think it has potential especially if crossed to Aunt Mary's again, I just didn't have time and space for it. I sent most of the seed to someone else years ago but never heard how it did or if they went on with it.  I think the seed I might still have could be considered the F3 generation.

Christopher Weeks wrote:That sounds really cool! Maybe I’ll shovel half the soil out and spread it elsewhere.

If this goes well for you, and you want to continue with it next year I might be able to help out. I'm pretty sure I have seed from when I grew and crossed it to Aunt Mary's sweet corn. Aunt Mary's is an old Ohio area heirloom and my absolute favorite sweet corn as far as flavor. I didn't go on with it because it was taking too much space in my little gardens and I fell in a rabbit hole of sweet potatoes instead, but I think it might have great potential for someone who wants to follow it along for several years.  Aunt Mary's is an early SU corn with very robust stalks that gets about seven or eight feet tall and makes two or three nice ears per stalk.

I detasseled and crossed in both directions, so the seed is 1/2 Aunt Mary's and 1/2 teosinte derived with mothers from both sides instead of one just being the father side. I do that because I remember Carol Deppe saying something along the lines that traits that only come from the mother side are lost if one is just used for pollen. If I still have that seed, it is in my buried seed vault which I'm planning to open this fall.

Christopher Weeks wrote:The bag said it was 100. I’ll play it by ear. I have the impression that the plant is quite a bit smaller than modern maize, so we’ll see.

When I grew a similar cross the plants were not smaller. They were not giant in height, probably not more than eight feet or so but they tillered like crazy. I wondered if well-spaced and allowed to do so they might turn into big clumps. They had weak stalks and massive amounts of air roots going feet up the stalk. The plants appeared designed to fall down and root along the stem as a means of spreading and smothering surrounding competition. If they grow like those I had, a four x four spot is only big enough for half a dozen or so plants. They did not set ears and die like modern corn but just kept tillering and blooming until cold weather ended it.

Ear development was all over the place with tassels on ears and ears on tassels and tassels and ears on the tillers. They continued producing more ears all season instead of once and done like modern corn. I wondered if it might be possible to select an indeterminate variety where you could pick the first ears and more came on after.

Burra Maluca wrote:

Josh Warfield wrote:Saying flat out that grains aren't worth it is a little intense, compared to what Mr. Lawton actually said in the video. .

I went to watch the video, and you are absolutely right!

In the blurb under the video, it says this...

Key Takeaways

Grains easily fit in places like the deserts and cold climates where there is dormancy and time to process everything. Outside of these climates, grain is inefficient. There are a lot of easier foods to grow in terms of nutrition for the labor required. Grains are a high-quality food that stores, which was good for military needs and aided in the rise of grains agriculturally speaking.  However, usually, the amount of work necessary for the food gained just isn’t worth it. But, mass agriculture has thrived in the grain game because its production is easily industrialized: machine harvested, processed, stored, and shipped.

So somewhere that there is a dormant period, grains are good because you have the time to process the grain, and food to eat until dormancy is over.

Which isn't quite the same as saying that grain is not worth while.

That sounds sensible to me except I don't know what processing oats and barley means. I suppose it is turning it into flour or smashing it flat like the oats you buy which I do actually like. With my little patches I don't process it at all other than removing the husks. Whatever is involved into turning it into something other than just the seeds, I don't know how or really even care to do.

I grow the so called hulless kinds of oats and barley but find they aren't really hulless just maybe less so than others. When I do manage to get a pretty good harvest, which for me is maybe a quart jar full I rub it between my hands in the wind or in front of a fan. Then I spend an evening or ten in front of the TV picking out individual seeds that really did completely shed the husk. By the time I'm done my quart has been reduced to, if I'm lucky a pint. The clean whole grain is all I want. It seems to me that it is easy cook without pre-soaking or anything but maybe that is because it is so fresh. A pint is enough for my seed the next year and to have it for a treat once or twice. I throw the rest out for the birds and chipmunks.

I don't know what to add about corn. I've grown it all of my life and maybe that experience along with my climate is apparently good for it is why it is easy for me. I grow sweet corn, flint-ish corn and popcorn but not always all in the same year. With my flint-ish corn I make a dry, crumbly, gritty corn bread which I love and am experimenting with something that passes for a corn chip.  I grind it up with an old hand crank grinder. I really like hominy but so far have only tried one time to make it myself. I used ash from my wood stove for the nixtamalization, and it worked surprisingly well. I have a larger than normal patch of my flint-ish corn this year for that purpose.

I don't know a lot about growing grain, except for corn which is easy to do here. I've never tried to grow wheat because I don't think I could grow enough to matter in my little gardens and I don't know how or have much motivation to learn how to make bread. I love both oats and barley, but they are hard because of birds that eat it and some kind of fungus that infects the seed heads. I don't process them except to remove the husks and am happy if I can pull off harvesting a teacup full of clean grain. Barley in beef broth with onion is a treat for me, oats with honey and cream even more so.

Millet and sorghum are easy to grow here too but I don't have chickens to feed them to, so I don't really know what to do with them.  Job's tears grow easily; they are very productive and volunteer readily. I guess you can eat them, I'm going to look into how to do that and since they are so easy, I'm considering a breeding project to improve them if I can.

I like rice a lot, especially wild rice and although I doubt I could ever grow it in serious quantity, I'd like to give it a try in my little garden pond but not sure where to find seeds.

Most grain is just grass seeds and we have lots of wild grasses, some of which I think are feral barley and maybe also wheat and rye. They seem to get along ok despite the birds and fungus. Another project to consider, find and collect those with bigger seeds and try cultivating them.

Overall, I guess I agree that grain, other than corn isn't worth a lot of effort where I live, except mostly just for fun and curiosity and the occasional treat.

I'm all about the cheap and lazy but by some standards I'm not sure I have a lawn. I have spaces that I keep open so I can walk around and look at stuff or pull my cart and collect stuff. It couldn't be much more organic unless maybe I threw away that stupid roaring stinking mower machine and got a pet donkey, one of those cute little ones, which I have considered. I'd name it Bob or Phyllis.

As far as grass care goes my philosophy is let it get just short of hard to mow then chop it to the ground, so it doesn't come back for a while.  If creeping Charlie tries to smother it, I let it. If I see a dandelion, plantain, white clover, wild daisies, purslane, columbine or my favorite VIOLETS I mow around till they drop their seeds.

Mow two or three times in spring and early summer then maybe again in fall, spend zero money except gas for that stupid roaring stinking mower machine.