The Harvest is a coming in! (I'm tired) By JR (Read 4,883 times)

[JR]

Ha ha ha!! Beat ya John! Picked my first tomato today! Did you get any of the violent wind the other day? Fianlly got rain but man it came in here like a freight train. 50 MPH + winds and it blew down one row of my geen beans as I had the light metal posts instead of the heavy T posts on that row. Straightened them up and put some extra ones on them and all is fine. My corn wasn't high enough to hurt it but it did blow down some of the 12ft sunflowers.

Canned my first green beans and new potatoes today! Man are they pretty. It did rain soke mmore on an off for 3 more days, got to mow the damn yard now but at least I'm not dragging water hoses and it did fill my rain barrels back up. Dang strawberries are blooming again!

Going to have blackberries in a few days and more peaches.

Also MC got the package and I'm putting yours together now and will get it in the mail soon. Man you're going to love the zuchinni...........

Unless something bad happens I'll be canning green beans and tomatoes steady for a spell the rain is making them take off and the cooler night temps is making the blooms set well.

Won't be long untill I have cucumbers and squash too. Beets are looking great and so is my corn.

So far so good.

JR

[madcollie]

JR, your language is deplorable! Use of that "S" word was FORBIDDEN yet you use it freely like you own this forum!

I sent the rain your way to help and if you had been nicer so would have been the winds. ;D

When you say "cooler temps" it's been in the mid to low 60"s here with rain! CRAP!

Gonna have to load the new bike down with mason jars to do a nice little jaunt in 2013. Would make a nice vaca run to see some old/new friends along the way. Might make a decent thread

M/C

CCProf, Glad HE's not the only one with a green thumb around here. Show him that us YANKEES can grow stuff too! Same goes for you John.

[jct842]

I just pick 2 nice big green ones and they are frying as I type! couldn't wait

[JR]

Ha! Fried green maters! No way thos old Yankees know about those John!! Great taste, good for ya and just another one of those find southern treats.

Eat your heart out Blue coats!

JR

[jct842]

Not doin too bad here especially since I was born in Iowa.......and I have plans to never ever go back there. I should have fried more, they were great. Had a bad fence repair today, took about 2 hours to fix it including cutting my way in through the woods, could only get the tractor in half the distance. It took 3 posts including a corner with a tree down on it. 2 trips to carry a 5 pack of posts leaving 2 for next time, the saw, post driver and a lopper. That ice storm we had a few years ago has the woods so cluttered up with dead falls I can't even get through it with my tractor. I pushed over a bunch today that were dead too.



them green beans, most diets say you can eat as many as you want so I figure there must not be any food value in them so I don't generally eat them!

[JR]

them green beans, most diets say you can eat as many as you want so I figure there must not be any food value in them so I don't generally eat them!

Yea But I can mine half and half. The other half being yukon gold new taters! all about 1" size ones, just melt in your mouth!

JR

[yoster]

Man, reading this thread reminds me that at I really must be the youngest guy on the forum LOL. I don't think 29-year old guys would start threads about green beans and taters haha.

Oh if my friends could see me now. It's alright, it's members like me who keep you guys young right?

[madcollie]

Why not yoster? I'm only 28 and I started one about bar-b-que sauce. Best in the US!

Age is just a state of mind.

M/C

[yoster]

Hey hey, men of any age can start a thread about anything related to grillin' lol!

[mauiboy]

haha way to make me feel old! I used to grow lots until I moved countries, just getting started here. Should have papaya soon. Just tipped into my 30's age wise. I think its when you realise you are spending $250 a week to feed 2 adults and 2 kids that you learn to plant and fish lol.

[yoster]

Does it really pay off? I'd imaging you'd need a HUGE garden to help out financially at all. I'd see gardening more as a fun hobby, unless you own like a farm or something. A fruit tree or something is a bit different I guess - I remember our old apricot tree would supply us for a long time. We couldn't eat OR give them away fast enough lol! I do need to plant some fruit trees in my backyard - I've got about 1/8 acre of grass back there - plenty of room for something else to grow. I've got a little girl (16 months) and another on the way - I'm sure they'd have fun eating fruit off a tree.

Fishing, now that's different. Used to eat salmon 5 nights a week during salmon season when I lived in Sacramento (fished the river.) Now I fish semi competitively for Bass.

[JR]

Yoster that's a good question so lets just think about say a couple of vegatables, potatoes and tomatoes. I dug all my potatoes last week and I'll say for sure they will last me until next harvest.

I now have a family of 5 with the grankids to raise and we eat taters in several ways. Mashed, fried, baked, and even the little ones that we call new taters go in soup or are canned to add to other things. My wife just made a huge bowl of home made potato salad with taters from the garden.

So with how my family eats I can tell you especially since I'm the shopper in my family that if I bought potatoes I will go through a 10lb. bag in two weeks. You know what they cost in the grocery store so again I'll NOT buy any, in fact I'll have a few left that come Januaray I will put in a sack and a dark place where they will eye so they can be planted for the next years crop. I didn't even buy seed potatoes this spring, same thing for my sweet potaotes that are growing now, didn't spend a penny to plant them.

Now my tomatoes are getting ready to start coming off and I will do everything from homemade salsa, tomatoe sauce, spaghetti sauce, soup with lots of other veggies in it, and even chopped tomatoes in juice for cooking. If I have a good crop I'll not buy any of those in the store, again you do the math on buying those things. I even make homemade ketchup.

Now some things I vacuum seal and freeze, have 3 large freezers, and a lot of stuff I can in jars. When you are starting out new the cost can go up there but unless you break one you can re-use the same canning jar over and over for years and the screw on rings. You just have to buy new lids, 20 = $1. Every year you re-use a jar the cost goes down on your initial investment. Just store them and use when the time comes.

Now lets take jelly or jam and preserves. My initial investment on my strawberry patch was $75 and the rest is all elbow grease and a little gas to plow the area up. I this year alone sold over 150 gallons of strawberries at $8 a gallon. My freezer is full and they will last fresh for up to 5 years. My wife just made 25 pints and 30 half pints of strawberry jam. Next week MC gets his peach and strawberry jam, you will eat none any better, go look in the store at what Welches strawberry jam costs. My cost on this jam sugar, lids and all was less than $1 a pint.

Now I don't count my time and labor if you did that would certainly run the cost up but I'm retired and love doing it and the main reason I garden is for the taste and better food. No preservatives and crap.

But I can say economically it's a winner too. I was raised by people who survived and was born in the great depression. A time when people did things themselves especially their food. If that ever happens again I'll not starve and go hungry, how many will?

As far as my garden I have two what in Arkansas we call above average gardens. What I learned a long time ago from those depression times people was to be able to utilize space and grow lots in a small area, plant early crops as soon as you can, get them done and replant latter crops in their place. I even plant what we call a fall and winter garden with things like broculli and cabbage. Speaking of I just cut my cabbage today, 18 heads of it, going to make homemade salt sauerkraute and canned cabbage.

Plus I'm going to make a lot of damn cole slaw!

1/8 acre? Get you a good garden tiller and get with it, lots of how to's on the net. You can also go to your county home health extension agent and get all the free info you want on how to raise it and presere it.

Hell I even have dehydrators and preserve my own herbs. Just pulled 4 huge heads of elephant garlic today, will let it dry and use it with cooking.

Now on the fishing? Salmon = Bass OK if they are small and all this hub bub about how hard it is to catch a bass? Bass are the most predictable fish on the planet.

Where I live it's both bass and crappie and even the catfsih people. But it's just plain and simple, the bass fisherman are the ones who don't know how to catch a crappie! Enough said!

JR

[madcollie]

Cost of initial investment on my strawberry patch = $75

Cost of a gallon of fresh strawberries = $8

Cost of new lids, 20 = $1

Next week MC gets his peach and strawberry jam = PRICELESS!!!!!!!!!!!!



Folks, 1 table spoon of his preserves over a dish of gourmet french vanilla ice cream is heaven in a bowl. And that's coming from his arch enemy Yankee friend!

Looking forward to doing my receiving next week. Bought a beautiful 6 lb. T-bone and will use Dino rub on it and enjoy a southern feast next weekend.

Thank you muchly ya Ole Rebel!

M/C

Oh, BTW, fried green tomatoes are defiantly ITALIAN! and I've been eating them since I could chew.

[JR]

Let me add another recent thing I've started. When I was a kid I helped my grandpa with honeybees. He was always finding them out in the forest where he worked as a logger. He made his own hives and we would suit up in old clothes and homemade wire screen bee vails and go cut them out of the tree and tranfer them to a hive box. I remember one time we had to go home and get some big wash tubs because there was so much honey in the tree!

We would let the bees settle down for a few days in the new box and then go at night when they are less active and plug the box off and take them home. Fresh honey year round!

Now if any of you has recently bought any honey I don't have to tell you how expensive it is. Around here a good quality quart of raw unprocessd honey will go for as high as $16!

Last spring I met a guy who has a bee farmer who has about 100 hives and works with the University of Arkansas helping new bee farmers learn the art of bees. He makes and sells hives with the trays and starter comb all ready to go. I bought a hive with a top what we call super on it bees and all for $100. Now supers are just extra boxes with trays you can stack on each other and the more you stack on each other the more honey the bees will make.

But I only put one on purpose. In the spring if the hive is about full of honey the hive which is always hatching out new worker bees will split or what we call swarm. They will hatch out a brood of new queens and a battle royal will take place until one new queen is left along with the mother queen of the hive. She then takes a work force of worker bees and leaves the hive looking for a new place to settle and start a new colony.

Knowing this I bought another complete hive without bees for $70 and I took the top super off of the old hive, put a bottom on it and then put two new supers on the old and new bottom. I made sure there was new to be hatched workers or brood comb in the old top. They then hatched out the queens had the battle and now I have two hives instead of one. I will do this again next spring with two new hive set ups and then will have 4 colonies of bees. This is all I want. If they swarm again I'll put them in a new hive and sell them.

So at this point my investment is $240 and will buy two more complete hives with supers which will add another $140. Eventually I'll add two supers to each hive which I can get with trays and comb starter for $35 each or $140 total. So all together I'll have $520 in this.

One can just cut the honeycomb out of the trays and squeeze the honey out and put in jars but it takes the bees a lot longer to make honey back because they have to build new comb that way so I'm going to buy a honey slinger pot. It's a two tray type and you just put two trays at a time in it and it spins very fast. It slings all the sweet honey out into a nice stainless steel tank with a spout. Just open and fill your jars! But the cool thing is it leaves the comb all perfect and intact! Bees just start filling it back up with honey and a lot quicker.

Cost $175. So I'll have $695 in this al together.

OK when all 4 hives are done and at 3 supers on the average you should get easily 40 quarts a year sometimes more. 40 X $16 = $640.

I'm not excited about selling honey, in fact got lots of family that loves honey, would eat it every day if I had it myself but I can get my investment back and then it's all free!

Biscuits, butter honey! Yum Yum!

JR

[mauiboy]

If you can get access to a community garden, don't mind some hard work, are remotely green fingered and have the time then sure it pays off. You do have to be smart about what you plant (rhubarb is $20 a pound here for instance, even back home in the uk it was expensive, its cheap to grow and yields tonnes). If you wan to grow everything then sure you probably need a few hundred acres once you taken bread, corn, beef, pork etc into account, but if you just want to take a chunk out of your budget then it works nicely. You can store surplus yield at harvest time cheaply, you can sell surplus, its all good You do have to have the time and the climate, and having land is good! Community gardens often let you have up to 1/4th an acre plot which is pretty good, once they know you, they often let you take over trouble plots (always overgrown, neglected soil etc) and you end up with half an acre to an acre in total which is a fair amount. It's also fun. Plus you control all the chemicals involved, so you can be totally organic if you wish. None of it is processed in any way which is awesome. I'm no tree hugger, but I am very happy to cut down on the chemicals in my families diet.
Look at what you eat, pick out the expensive fruit and veg items and see what you can grow. Rhubarb, Asparagus etc. Conservatively, you should be able to yield $2500-$4000 a year worth of organic produce on an average community plot if you are smart about what you plant and have a good climate.
A huge bonus is getting to do all what you merkins would refer to as 'redneck engineering' (meant with respect!). Using scavenged glass doors to make cold frames etc. You'd be amazed what you can make with shipping pallets.
As for fishing, you are so right, ahi (tuna) is through the roof in price these days, mahimahi isn't far behind. Fishing for your protein can save huge bucks. Plus its a chance to sit around, talk story, drink wine and play ukulele with your ohana. Good days!


EditL forgot to refresh before replying, jr etc put it far better than i could !