Kale is great. We pealed leaves as need from ours all summer long.
Re: On hobby farming.
27I can only handle it in a smoothie with berries
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,”
Re: On hobby farming.
28That is exactly what we use it for. That said, I've been served an amazing kale salad.
Re: On hobby farming.
29Not quite to the level of "hobby farming," but trying to grow a little bit of food.
In August of 2022, my wife and I sold our house, sold her folks' house, and bought a bigger house for the four of us (her folks are both dealing with age-related memory issues, and my wife works as an EMT doing mostly inter-facility transport, and there is no way in Hell she's putting her folks in the assisted-living/nursing home/funeral home sewer pipe until there is simply no other viable option).
I decided that the new-to-us house presented opportunities to revamp all my emergency preparedness efforts, to include having a more productive garden than we had at the prior house. Because my in-laws want to participate (which is a good thing in many respects), and because the soil here is basically yellow clay fill dirt, and because we're starting from scratch anyway (the house had been vacant for some months prior to us moving in), we decided that raised beds seemed a good route. I saw some YouTube videos touting the use of IBC totes cut in half, and creating a system that would wick water from the bottom half of the resulting shell into the soil. I scored a couple of totes at no charge, cut them apart, made a wicking system that I thought would work based on the YouTube tutorials I watched, and we finally got some plants in the soil in early and mid-May.
I've been underwhelmed with the results so far. I don't know where I fouled up. The wicking system doesn't seem to be doing anywhere near as well as it seems it should, and I'm having to water the beds almost daily (unless it rains).
On the other hand, we've already enjoyed a small handful of tomatoes, and I've nibbled on a few kale leaves recently. The bush beans are putting up a lot of gorgeous leaves, but I'm not seeing beans yet.
Again, I'm starting from scratch, and I certainly am not a master gardener. My thumbs were black from grease as a teen and young adult, not green. If I can figure out why this isn't working as well as I had expected, I want to double the number of beds for next year, but I'm waiting on that until I figure out why I don't have bushels of kale already.
In August of 2022, my wife and I sold our house, sold her folks' house, and bought a bigger house for the four of us (her folks are both dealing with age-related memory issues, and my wife works as an EMT doing mostly inter-facility transport, and there is no way in Hell she's putting her folks in the assisted-living/nursing home/funeral home sewer pipe until there is simply no other viable option).
I decided that the new-to-us house presented opportunities to revamp all my emergency preparedness efforts, to include having a more productive garden than we had at the prior house. Because my in-laws want to participate (which is a good thing in many respects), and because the soil here is basically yellow clay fill dirt, and because we're starting from scratch anyway (the house had been vacant for some months prior to us moving in), we decided that raised beds seemed a good route. I saw some YouTube videos touting the use of IBC totes cut in half, and creating a system that would wick water from the bottom half of the resulting shell into the soil. I scored a couple of totes at no charge, cut them apart, made a wicking system that I thought would work based on the YouTube tutorials I watched, and we finally got some plants in the soil in early and mid-May.
I've been underwhelmed with the results so far. I don't know where I fouled up. The wicking system doesn't seem to be doing anywhere near as well as it seems it should, and I'm having to water the beds almost daily (unless it rains).
On the other hand, we've already enjoyed a small handful of tomatoes, and I've nibbled on a few kale leaves recently. The bush beans are putting up a lot of gorgeous leaves, but I'm not seeing beans yet.
Again, I'm starting from scratch, and I certainly am not a master gardener. My thumbs were black from grease as a teen and young adult, not green. If I can figure out why this isn't working as well as I had expected, I want to double the number of beds for next year, but I'm waiting on that until I figure out why I don't have bushels of kale already.
Eventually I'll figure out this signature thing and decide what I want to put here.
Re: On hobby farming.
30I used standard size concrete blocks (dry stacked) to build my raised beds. Two blocks high makes for a nice seat for weeding and harvesting. Inside dimension is 4' by 8'. After a while I realized that 4' wide was too wide to comfortably weed. So I cut them down to 3' 4" wide. And never fill the interstice of the blocks with soil. makes it messy to sit on.
All religions united with government are more or less inimical to liberty. All, separated from government, are compatible with liberty.-Henry Clay
Both oligarch and tyrant mistrust the people, and therefore deprive them of their arms.—Aristotle
Both oligarch and tyrant mistrust the people, and therefore deprive them of their arms.—Aristotle
