A Seed Saver's Garden

[heirloomgal]

My amendment list has settled down the last couple years and what you see here goes on everything i grow. Every 3x12 bed gets a 2 gallon bucket and Onions and Potatoes get 2- 2gallon buckets! This year im adding the ground Comfrey and each bed will get a measured 2lbs along with the other stuff. That amount will fluctuate depending on how much the Patch produces each year.
No peppers of any kind anymore.

Sorry to clutter up your stuff, thought you may be interested in some of it. Glad to see the previous info found a good home!

Mike

You have never cluttered up my stuff @Alasgun
I appreciate the amazing depth of knowledge you have about organic amendments. I hope I can level up to that some day!

 

[Alasgun]

Well, here’s the thing. About 10 years ago while Alaska was considering legalizing pot and relaxing restrictions on small growers; our State Fair invited in some guest speakers. I assume these folks task was to sway public sentiment in their direction before the vote. I found myself at a booth where the lady who put all that on was seated and we had some good conversation. She told me “whether you grow pot or not you should study up on some of their methods as a lot of these kids are regular scientist!”
Well; i headed her advice and took what i learned and applied it to my own gardening.
A lot of those growers will go to the outer limit of sanity with various soil mixes and several talk about their “super soil” and variants of these grow mediums. The microbiology aspect was another big learning event for me.
It doesn’t take much adapting to find ways to incorporate these things into “regular gardening”, which is what ive done.

1. Using the elements from the super soil recipes gave me a basis for my amendment schedule that i’ve adapted for my use.
2. Learning the important part the microbes play AND having the ability to modify or enhance they’re populations in all my soils was huge also. As a result of that knowledge; now days i completely ignore anything to do with P.H.
I don't care what it is, never bother to check it and never see any indication something is amiss in my plants, knowing that my little bug buddies “got my back”!

Anyway, another long winded didy but it’s all food for thought!
Mike

 

[heirloomgal]

Dog training class last night had a particularly interesting tidbit.

My experience with the whole orbit is that, generally, the #1 cause of pet dog problems is the owners being too soft. I could write an epistle on the layers of it, but the collision of species tends to impact along that fault line. The dogs misbehave because they've never known a consequence for the bad behavior, or at least not a meaningful one. And the trainer last night had a masterful lesson on that.

One of the exercises in class is for the dogs to be walked in a heel around the facility; the trainers sprinkle on the floor tiny bits of a prized rolled meat treat. The dogs have an opportunity to learn it isn't acceptable to snarf up food (or anything else) from floors. If the dogs make a go for the food, they get a leash correction. After a few rotations the trainers placed freshly baked 'pupcups' on the floor as well, and told the class that these were fundraiser cupcakes for the injured woman (which I posted about above) and if your dog eats one you'd have to pay for it, 2 for $5.00. The dogs were quite interested in those peanut buttery morsels!

After the exercise the trainers revealed that 70% of the meat roll pieces had been eaten during the first part of the exercise. One way or another dogs managed to sneak a face to the floor and take them and/or ignore the correction. But not a single pupcup was taken. Clearly she said, when there was no real consequence to the owner when the dogs got the meat roll bits, they didn't work hard enough to prevent the dogs from getting them. But when they had to walk past the mini cupcakes they made darn sure the dog did not succeed in getting one, because it would cost them money.

And the dog thinks exactly the same way we do about consequences. Such an absolutely perfect lesson in understanding canine motivation from a human perspective. I thought that was so brilliant.

 

[ducks4you]

While I lived in my bedroom for 86 days I fell down the internet rabbit hole of German Shephard Dog owners. It is aMAZING how, "what do I do when my GSD is biting my child?" CONSTANTLY, find a toy and REDIRECT.
Poppycock!!!
I do what I have always done with a puppy, grab their mouth shut and say, NO! Sooner or later the puppy will bite his tongue and stop biting.
When one person asked what to do with their GSD that just killed a kitten bc of food aggression, I suggested that they should feed the dog in his crate from now on.
I was banned from the thread.
I SHOULD have started with, HOW DARE YOU THINK THAT THE KITTEN'S LIFE DOESN'T MATTER!!!
Tegan (7 1/2mo GSD) is dog#7 and the 5th dog broken in to a house with cats. She has the same chasing problem that Eva had, but My favorite cat, Lynx has her cow towed. Tegan gives Lynx a wide berth even though Tegan outweighs Lynx 4 to 1 now.
GSD's are Not wild animals, they.are.dogs.
The only unusual problem that I have is that my puppy only barks when she wants to be out of her crate to potty in the morning, or...in the middle of the night.
She hardly barks at all, and not even today, when a serviceman came to fix my DISH satellite.
I kinda like it...

 

[flowerbug]

...GSD's are Not wild animals, they.are.dogs.

while i love both cats and dogs i still want to always inject a moment of caution because what can happen with any well trained pet is what also happens with humans - sometimes they go nuts.

so to me they (animals as pets and also people in general) should pretty much never be left alone with someone or something precious for just these sorts of insane moments.

the other hand, some of us really do ok being alone and that also means if we're a bit crazy at least we're not going to hurt anyone else of we go off the rails a bit for a tad...