Coffee

[flowerbug]

I painted on the outside of son's house yesterday. Up and down the ladder with a bucket, I guess I got tired. I slept late, then didn't put the coffee pot under the drip. The grounds basket filled up and spilled coffee out on the counter. Mess to clean up and made me feel like a dummy.

Got some bills to pay, need to do laundry, clean up around here and see what else I can get into.

we are still laughing here about what Mom did last week. she went potty and the phone rang and so she got up to get it. a while later she was wondering why she felt funny and was having a hard time walking. she forgot to pull up her unders. yes, she said i could post this. we like to share the humor.

 

[Gardening with Rabbits]

A banana and Cream of Rice with honey ...

Breakfast was so mild for flavor that after finishing I had some kale chips with my herb tea .

@Gardening with Rabbits, I did something in the backyard garden that I've never done before. I put down cardboard in the corner that will only have sunlight during very early morning during weeks about now. Then I piled some boards and milk crates on them to keep our 45 mph wind gusts from blowing them away. However, the protection it has is one of the reasons for the cardboard instead of growing anything there. I had some extra landscaping bark on them a few years ago but traffic pushed them right into the soil. Traffic also carries lawngrass seeds in and it grows those and weeds, a little. If'n the cardboard proves too movable in the wind, maybe I should build a deck outta boards and have another stealth compost pile beneath - nah, be a good place for mice. Frustrating for a gardener to have ground available with zero chance of growing something on it .

Steve

I hope they did not blow away. lol The wind knocked down some of our neighbors fence.

 

[Gardening with Rabbits]

I am having my coffee. Still cold outside, but I am going to have to water plants inside today. It is really sunny and going to be 45. I think I will take the collards outside to the greenhouse and water them and let them have some sun. I think they will have to keep coming in for a few more days and then be able to stay outside again. I need to transplant some seedlings and no place to put them until the kale and cabbage can stay outside.

 

[digitS']

I've been thinking about garden production of some favorite foods - notably, lentils. I'll get back to that.

First breakfast: Cheerios, Cookie Crisp & Eggos in a bowl of milk with sliced banana, I felt indulgent . Peeled Honeycrisp apple on the side, and a cup of oolong.

I've grown lentils and south of here is some very large farms growing wheat, dry peas, chickpeas, and lentils. Dry farming and, given our arid summers, dependent on winter snowmelt and spring rain for soil moisture. So, this should be an especially good location for growing something like lentils in the garden. Hey, I have irrigation water, too!

The harvest from those dry farms is done after seed matures, about mid/late-summer. Dry seed crops, dry weather until late September usually. Hecks Fire, I could probably cut and move plants under the carport roof to dry.

Nah. Why not!?! Production. Tiny plants. Really, they all are tiny. I've read that garden production of lentils works out to less than a pound per 100 square feet. So, you want to fill half your garden with a crop that will produce 3 or 4 pounds??

Lentils aren't soybeans or corn or rice or potatoes -- with all those millions of calories per acre. I know of not one acre of soybeans grown commercially, here. I once tried growing lima beans but the season wasn't long enough. @Zeedman kindly sent some adzuki and soybean seed. I continue to grow one of the soybean varieties but the adzukis could only grow seed to an immature stage, not viable seed let alone a worthwhile crop. (I had dessert recipes on hand!)

Larger plants, perhaps with an early start but being tolerant of cool nighttime temperatures, able to take advantage of what frost-free season we have, trellising possible, irrigation ...

Steve

 

[flowerbug]

I've been thinking about garden production of some favorite foods - notably, lentils. I'll get back to that.

First breakfast: Cheerios, Cookie Crisp & Eggos in a bowl of milk with sliced banana, I felt indulgent . Peeled Honeycrisp apple on the side, and a cup of oolong.

I've grown lentils and south of here is some very large farms growing wheat, dry peas, chickpeas, and lentils. Dry farming and, given our arid summers, dependent on winter snowmelt and spring rain for soil moisture. So, this should be an especially good location for growing something like lentils in the garden. Hey, I have irrigation water, too!

The harvest from those dry farms is done after seed matures, about mid/late-summer. Dry seed crops, dry weather until late September usually. Hecks Fire, I could probably cut and move plants under the carport roof to dry.

Nah. Why not!?! Production. Tiny plants. Really, they all are tiny. I've read that garden production of lentils works out to less than a pound per 100 square feet. So, you want to fill half your garden with a crop that will produce 3 or 4 pounds??

Lentils aren't soybeans or corn or rice or potatoes -- with all those millions of calories per acre. I know of not one acre of soybeans grown commercially, here. I once tried growing lima beans but the season wasn't long enough. @Zeedman kindly sent some adzuki and soybean seed. I continue to grow one of the soybean varieties but the adzukis could only grow seed to an immature stage, not viable seedlet alone a worthwhile crop. (I had dessert
recipes on hand!)

my first few attempts at Adzuki beans did not go well so i abandoned them for eight years. the past few years i've had good enough luck to continue the efforts. what i've done is gotten seeds called Takara Early Adzuki (from Great Lakes Staple Seeds - but i just checked and this variety is not there any longer) and then i've mixed in some larger commercial ones so that perhaps they might eventually interbreed. if you'd like i could send you a sample? note, they are very small beans compared to the commercial ones they can be anywhere from 1-3mm. i only have the first season intermix results so there is a good chance any sample i send would not have any commercial genes mixed in yet.

if you want a commercial source of similar seeds these might do (but they are different from the variety i have noted above):

True Leaf Market | True Leaf Market Seed Company

Over half a million customers have chosen True Leaf Market seed company for non-GMO, heirloom & organic garden seeds since 1974. Vegetable Gardening, Sp...

kitazawaseed.com

my first attempt at lentils did not produce at all, but that was back in 2010 or 2011...

Larger plants, perhaps with an early start but being tolerant of cool nighttime temperatures, able to take advantage of what frost-free season we have, trellising possible, irrigation ...

Steve

good luck no matter what you try. i think if i were a western dryland farmer it would be very interesting times indeed.

 

[meadow]

I'm growing Wase this year, and also Hokkaido.

Hokkaido description from Adaptive Seeds:

We had almost given up on growing adzuki beans and then entered Hokkaido, which matures earlier than most other varieties. It makes sense because the Japanese island of Hokkaido, where this bean originates, has a cool, short growing season. Short bushy plants produce long slender pods that hold many little red beans. Produces in two flushes. The second round of pods can weather wet Septembers without melting or molding, resulting in beans that are in good shape once harvested and dried in October. Adzuki beans are great cooked and mixed into rice or made into one of the many delicious red bean desserts. Very digestible and very nutritious.

 

[Gardening with Rabbits]

I've been thinking about garden production of some favorite foods - notably, lentils. I'll get back to that.

First breakfast: Cheerios, Cookie Crisp & Eggos in a bowl of milk with sliced banana, I felt indulgent . Peeled Honeycrisp apple on the side, and a cup of oolong.

I've grown lentils and south of here is some very large farms growing wheat, dry peas, chickpeas, and lentils. Dry farming and, given our arid summers, dependent on winter snowmelt and spring rain for soil moisture. So, this should be an especially good location for growing something like lentils in the garden. Hey, I have irrigation water, too!

The harvest from those dry farms is done after seed matures, about mid/late-summer. Dry seed crops, dry weather until late September usually. Hecks Fire, I could probably cut and move plants under the carport roof to dry.

Nah. Why not!?! Production. Tiny plants. Really, they all are tiny. I've read that garden production of lentils works out to less than a pound per 100 square feet. So, you want to fill half your garden with a crop that will produce 3 or 4 pounds??

Lentils aren't soybeans or corn or rice or potatoes -- with all those millions of calories per acre. I know of not one acre of soybeans grown commercially, here. I once tried growing lima beans but the season wasn't long enough. @Zeedman kindly sent some adzuki and soybean seed. I continue to grow one of the soybean varieties but the adzukis could only grow seed to an immature stage, not viable seed let alone a worthwhile crop. (I had dessert recipes on hand!)

Larger plants, perhaps with an early start but being tolerant of cool nighttime temperatures, able to take advantage of what frost-free season we have, trellising possible, irrigation ...

Steve

I am kind of surprised then that lentils are then considered low priced, like eating beans to save money. I think I have eaten lentils maybe twice in my life. One I hated and the other I am trying to remember but I think I liked it and maybe it was the red I did not like and the green that I did?? I am thinking of buying some and I have been looking at recipes to try.

 

[digitS']

Hokkaido description from Adaptive Seeds:

"We had almost given up on growing adzuki beans and then entered Hokkaido"

Well, that would describe me - giving up the idea Meadow & @flowerbug . I doubt if there was one adzuki seed that would have been viable. They looked nothing like what Zeedman sent me. And, it seems like he sent me a "Hokkaido" soybean but I could have been mistaken. (This was some years ago!) Much greater success was achieved over the next few seasons with the soybeans altho, I made the mistake of thinking that "Manitoba" just had to be well adapted to this climate but no ... after about 3 seasons I gave up on that one. "Sapporo" was one that did fairly well but it was Bei soybeans that was consistently productive and yet it had one bad year not that long ago.

@Gardening with Rabbits , we had a mix of beans in a soup. yesterday. There were lots of parsnips and carrots in there with the beans & beef. I commented to DW that I think carrot flavor and lentil flavor go very well together, some how .

Steve

 

[Pulsegleaner]

I gave up on lentils after more or less one try based both on the lousy return and just how darn hard they are to harvest (something with pods as small as lentils is not exactly conducive to picking pods one by one as they are ready. And trying to leave everything alone until the whole plant was done left a lot of the seed to either go moldy in the rain or be plucked off by the birds), And the fact that lentils look a LOT like some of the vetches I grow for one reason or another (which are NOT human food grade) makes growing them a bit risky.

As I have mentioned many times before, I did a LOT of growing out of (mostly not-red) azuki beans back when I was finding a good supply in my hunting. However I'm not sure if I could call any of them much of an actually SUCCESS. A few of them DID wind up giving some seed back, but when one divides the amount of seed retrieved from the amount I initially PLANTED, turnover is not all that good. A lot of plants only made one or two pods before dying (one tiny one made only one SEED). The middle sized blacks and large sized salt and peppers produced OKAY in pots on the patio, but I still think I only got back maybe 1/2 to 1/3 of the seed I actually planted (and that IS factoring in for the fact they were in patio pots; in the actual ground, nearly all would have had all their pods plucked and eaten by the chipmunks and squirrels (or nibbled down to the ground by the deer) LONG before they were ready (in general, in order for me to get seed off of a legume in the ground here, the plant has to both survive the animals consuming of planted seeds and early seedlings, get too tough for the deer to want to browse on it (or be too sparse for them to think it worth their while) and then grow tall enough to put any pods out of the reach of the chipmunks or squirrels if they stand on their hind legs) Those two fail on the last point (the PLANTS get tall enough, but most of the pods are produced pretty low down, in easy reach of little paws).

The only one that can be said to be an actual good performer is the black striped brown one from the first grow out I nicknamed Little Workhorse. THAT produced VERY well (from one plant, I probably got about 80 seeds). But this has to be weighed against the fact that the seeds on that one are fairly small (they're more mung bean sized than azuki bean sized). And, of course, the cooked color would not be all that attractive.

Soybeans are more or less a lost cause for me, we have way too many rabbits to let them get very far usually (basically the only way to keep them alive is to put a cloche over every one, and that doesn't work for any decent number of plants). And even if they DO make it through, I tend to get only one pod with one or two seeds in it per plant (if that) which generally never QUITE ripen (soybeans here tend to quickly swell up to mature size and then stay in that state for MONTHS before beginning to actually mature and dry down).

The wild soybeans did great for me last year, but again, they had their roots on the patio (way above any rabbits) and, of course, you can't actually EAT them (I've heard they are good for either shampoo or hair conditioner, but not much else.)

 

[Gardening with Rabbits]

@Gardening with Rabbits , we had a mix of beans in a soup. yesterday. There were lots of parsnips and carrots in there with the beans & beef. I commented to DW that I think carrot flavor and lentil flavor go very well together, some how .

Steve

I found a recipe and tried to copy the best I could with what I had. There was onions, celery, carrots, potatoes and I was surprised that even my brother liked it. I was in the other room and heard him when he came over and walked over to the stove and said to DS, Is this lentils??? Oh my gosh! LOL But he said he liked it and DS did too. I used chicken stock and green lentils. I think I read somewhere that root crops go well with lentils, but I agree about the carrots.