Gardening In Stupid RL

dry ice, man.

My yield was pretty amazing for a first timer. gave a bunch of it away, blanched a froze the rest. learned some lessons. maybe forever queered on stored bought strawberries.

bump cause' I paged.

yeah but am I packing a cardboard box with a bottle, bubble wrap and a chunk of dry ice? Won't it look suspicious to the post office pumping fog out of it's seams?

<thx for bumping>

Go to a tropical fish store and ask them for a Styrofoam shipping box. Cut it down to a reasonable size, wrap the bottle in bubble wrap, you do not want the dry ice touching the bottle, insert dry ice, tape the whole thing shut with duct tape, place in a cardboard box.

In large letters on the outside write "contains dry ice".

You might check with the post office on shipping stuff with dry ice.

P. S. congrats on a successful harvest.

Brewed over the weekend. Here's some pictures.


6 lbs of base malt, with 1 lb of wheat, and .5 pound of various caramel malts. Augmented the grown chinook hops with a few ounces of pelletized chinook with know acid content (used for calculating bitterness).


Here's what it looked like during the mash.


The boil. I bittered with 3/4 oz of chinook pellets and used the 2+ oz of whole hops as a flavor/aroma addition at the very end.


Here's the home grown addition at flame out!

I pitched the yeast this morning it will be about a month before everything is all ready.

I didn't want to crap up mosin's garden thread with a soliloquy on the meaning life / beer...

it's really stupid long and ends with...

And so, each of us must chose our own path to the beer garden of eternal paradise, amen

Crawfish boiler being used for brew. Evidence that the mission doesn't have to be confined to/take up the kitchen.



For that, I thank you, Nausi.

I have a gas stove (as you can see) and I used to do it inside because it was cheaper and warmer in the winter.

Never again, the mess is so much easier to deal with and clean when I brew outside.

Additionally when you become a brewer, you start getting into cookware.

I'm jealous.

Agreed. We have a sizable sink but we still have to use a rubber made bin as a cleaning trough to soak the huge glass container after bottling. Not only that, but some of the items are so massive that they need to be rinsed outside anyway.

Basically, brewing outdoors doesn't effect the sterility in any way that would noticeably effect the batch, right?

We have separate pots exclusively for brewing, specifically so the batch isn't "contaminated" by food and whatnot.

Have you tried your hand at kegging yet?

Before I brewed outside, I cleaned everything at the kitchen sink, EVERYTHING. One time after I did my first all grain batch I was foolish enough to think the garbage disposal could dispose of the mash. Well, 2 days later and about 4 trips back and forth to the depot I finally fixed my plumbing.

Brewing outside doesn't really pose any greater danger than indoors. Same sanitary risk either way. Bacterial infection isn't going to come from brewing location. People still make beer today that is open fermented (just left exposed to the elements) and some of it is pretty damn good. I've often found the threshold for being "clean" is pretty low.

I do keg. I have a Keggerator in my basement that can serve/hold 7 kegs. I've almost pushed it from "hey sweet hobby" to "dude, I think you got a problem". Of course I could never drink as much volume as I brew, but that's what friends, neighbors, and co-workers are for!

Gardeners!

On your marks, get set, GO!

What are we all planning outside this year? I've set up the hops, planted quite a few veggies and buried about 70 flower bulbs so far.

Anyone have experience with those? I get the feeling that 1/2 of what I paid for will not come up.

HEY I HAVE A HOUSE I CAN BE IN THIS CONVERSATION NOW.

Frankly, this year I'm not doing so much "growing" as "tearing out all the ***that the prior owners had planted."

After I've got it all torn up and well-examined I'll go from there. All the aesthetically-displeasing aesthetic plants have to go, though. I'm thinking over there summer I'll work on a bit of a planter in the back yard and see if I can't grow a bit of salsa making veggies in the months and years to come (tomatoes, green onion, jalapeno, etc.)

I also saw raspberry bits being sold at Lowe's and gave serious consideration to that...

The only thing I can say from experience with Raspberries is I hope you REALLY like them when the time to harvest them comes. Seems like every year Alley's parents have their raspberries trickle in... 1... here a couple there.... and then OMG HOLY CRAP PICK THEM ALL NOW AND USE THEM BECAUSE THE GO TO ***SO FAST AND ALL AT ONCE OH GOD

Well, I do really like them.

Are they not similar to blackberries? We used to have (I think?) naturally-occurring blackberry bushes all over the place back home which were also freaking great. They weren't too bad and we would pick those throughout the summer at a good pace?

Experience with bulbs? It depends on what you planted and the gradient of your property/bed (you don't want them in standing water). Bulbs go in in February or March here for irises, daffodils, calla lilies, calladiums, ect. You can get by with gladiolas, though.

I think some of the same stuffs as last year. It snowed here sunday/monday and dicked my plans all up, but I shall soldier on this weekend. Experimenting with some flowers this year too, but no bulbs, just some random ones. I guess we'll have to fail together.

Main changes will be no corn, and 2 raspberry bushes. should be good times again. those mini cantaloupe... dear god.... /drools

Specifically I'm curious as to if the stuff that said "guaranteed to grow", will in fact grow. My arms are still sore from digging all those holes. I will be quite pissed if it was all in vain.

I put them in established beds, I just am rather skeptical there was any life in them at all.

It's a coin toss sometimes, depending on where you get them. They can rot or become diseased (it looks and feels like a type of mossy substance but the color is a little darker than the bulbs themselves). Big retailers like Lowes and Home Depot do a shoddy job of pitching the ones that are unlikely to produce.

EDIT: If you hold them in your hand and they feel light as a feather, they're already dead and will not produce.

There's one small part of my lawn that gets very little sun and always looks like ***, so I'm gonna scrap he whole thing and put in a bunch of phlox and periwinkle as ground cover instead. Some stepping stones too.

I'll take pics of the process and share. The periwinkle is invasive as grows like a sonovabitch. But the area is 95% contained so I couldn't give a ***.

Well that's just great Zah, where was this advice a week ago when I planted them?

Sheesh

The deer prevent me from having a garden. If I had a commercial agriculture operation I could take the ******* deer. But I amn't zoned for commercial agriculture. If I was, being in WA state, I would grow recreational marijuana.

Some experience with tulips, hyacinths, daffodils, crocuses. I plant, they pop, I leave them in the ground.

Let's get you a bow grandma chanti! *** that deer!

Planted 8 honeycrip, 2 granny smith and 2 pink lady apple trees. 4 peach trees. 4 Cherry tress.
8 different Blueberry bushes since they cross pollinate for better yields. 5 different raspberry starts since raspberries are awesome. Strawberry patch is up.

Tilled the 2 acre garden yesterday.

Currently searching for deals on mason jars.. lol

If they are hard and not squishy, good chance they will grow. My wife digs up bulbs every year and puts them in the basement for winter. It is crazy how dead a bulb looks after a year in the basement, but they still grow like mad.

Even if you did get some duds, the great thing about bulbs is, the ones that survive will keep producing bulbs. Give them a couple of years to start going. After the last predictable frost or hard freeze, you can carefully dig up the bulbs, shake lightly/dust off the root system and separate the new bulbs that are connected to the original. Then, you spread as you please through out your bed or yard again.

EDIT:


Oleander, lavender and (as ugly as they are) marigolds. Marigolds supposedly keep mosquitoes away, too.

I dunno about mosquitoes but they do keep a lot of other bugs away. Deer will eat marigolds though, they give no shits lol.

Japanese Beetles are the WORST.

Yeah, I hate marigolds, so I don't know about those from first-hand experience. I've heard from a couple of buds in East Texas that the deer there give zero shits there too. Marigolds ain't no thang to deer out there.

I do know from first-hand experience that the jury is definitely not out on oleander. People yap about it (kids, dogs, cats), but I've never seen any pint-sized people or domesticated animals dumb enough to make a snack of oleander.

its not that they were light, they were just dry as ***. particularly the "lily of the valley" i planted. even though they came in a bag of peat moss, it was pretty devoid of moisture.