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    water raised beds efficiently

    Very slick, Steve! I bet that would be just the ticket. Pat
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    New to Composting - Lots of questions

    "Start it all at once" just isn't possible in a lot of situations. If you only get a bit of chicken poo at a time, well, that's just the way it IS (well unless you want to acquire a whole big lot more chickens... LOL) Really the only consequence is that you can't make your pile heat up as hot...
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    How do you wash your loose leaf lettuce?

    It's a whole big lot easier to wash as separate leaves than as heads IME, for any of you who are harvesting the whole head. Washed and dried leaves generally keep well for at least a few days if rolled strudel-style in damp paper towels and kept in a plastic bag in the fridge crisper, so if you...
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    Problems with my black-eye peas and yard long beans.

    If you go read a few other threads and post on them, soon you will be able to post pics :) Not gonna make a guess about your problem yet, could be lotsa things. Do you have any other types of bean plants that are NOT affected, or are these it? How are other plants in that region of the garden...
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    water raised beds efficiently

    I suppose it's too late now, but have you considered not USING raised beds, as that is one of the classic disadvantages of them, that they require significantly more water than ground-level beds? :P I have seen thingies like I think you're looking for in garden magazine articles about fancy...
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    raised beds

    Just 2' away from the burn barrel is almost certainly going to be a problem, unless you don't use the burn barrel til the garden is completely done for the year. A lot of HEAT can come off those things, partway sideways when there's a bit of a breeze. Pat
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    Ignoring Your Calendar

    Pull them up in moderately-damp-soil weather, getting as much root as possible. or Use any of a variety of weeding implements to aid you in doing same. or Use fishtail weeder or bread knife (or etc) to cut the root as deep in the soil as you can reach, and remove. and be real nice to your...
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    raised beds

    Wait, that's not a burn barrel you will be using during the growing season, is it? If so, I'd keep the beds much further away. Roasted tomatoes are good; roasted tomato PLANTS, not so much LOL As far as the two designs, they are basically the same just rotated (although one has points of beds...
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    Ignoring Your Calendar

    We must have really different dandelions than you do, Steve ;) FOr one thing, dandelions here DO NOT require sunshine to open. Not hardly. It is darkly-cloudy here right now and has been all morning, and looking out the window, I see a whoooooole buncha fully-open dandelions. Both on the part...
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    Hoeing.... Madening

    Hoeing is really only for controlling annual weeds. Well-established (or invading-from-adjacent-lawn) perennial weeds, particularly ones that spread from runners or bits of root, are best controlled by hand-pulling the plants with as much roots as possible still attached. (Easy for some things...
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    Covering strawberries and blueberry bushes

    Hoops (best) or a-frame type deal (doesn't work well with wide bushes, works better with raspberries grown along wires etc), made of whatever materials are handy, with netting thrown over them. Good luck, have fun, Pat
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    A question of pruning

    I'm not sure the advice to cut TREES back was ever common/widespread, at least among serious gardeners. For SHRUBS however that was the common expert advice from at *least* maybe the 50s into the 80s or 90s. Shrubs of course are much, much less affected in their growth form by doing this...
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    Flowers next to your veggies? And other Qs?

    There aren't really all THAT many veggies that even NEED pollinators... mostly just tomatoes/peppers/eggplant, plus the squash/melon/cuke tribe, plus while beans don't need pollination they need bees to visit the flowers to get them to self-develop. So any kind of salad greens, herbs, corn, and...
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    looks like mint, smells like lemon?

    Lemon balm, for sure. It shouldn't be hard for you to find, and it does come from seed if you end up having to mailorder (my goodness does it EVER come from seed... freely... all over the garden... LOL. But at least it smells nice weeding it out!) Good luck, have fun, Pat
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    Richter's order

    Yup, they ship to the US quite a lot, no biggie at all :) There is a section on their website for US orders. Good luck, have fun, Pat
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    A question of pruning

    Definitely don't do "kneejerk pruning" of the type your books are referring to, CERTAINLY NOT on trees whose main trunk and overall form you want to preserve. For something you WANT to split out and not have a single main trunk, then yes, you will need to do that and in some cases it's quite...
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    Keeping a Ellwoodii (???) in a pot

    It's definitely meant to be an outdoor plant not a houseplant. You can TRY keeping it as a houseplant for a while longer but I would not count on it to be happy or have a long lifespan. If you're going to keep it potted, I'd suggest you pot it on now but DO NOT FERTILIZE. First because you...
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    Richter's order

    Hey, that's cool about the vietnamese cilantro, I may have to try that, as I am the only person in the family that likes cilantro and it is therefore way too much work to grow a constant succession for just me. I live about ten minutes from Richters' and can just pop down there in person...
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    Bush at my new house

    Are you sure it is *compound* leaves? That would narrow it down quite a lot (to the point of I can't think of anything offhand LOL) If the leaves are opposite but not compound, then if the leaves are greyish/silverish I would suspect it may be Shepherdia spp (buffaloberry or, um, whatever the...
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    When to cover potatoes?

    AFAIK the general idea is to keep at least 4-6" of the plant sticking up. How often you hill is kind of up to you -- if it's more often, you'd do it sooner, if you only want to deal with it a few times during the season then you'd let them get more topgrowth before hilling. Pat, whose potatoes...
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