Yeah I get a lot of seedlings this way. Nearly always accidental. There’s a lot of mucus in worm poop and most kinds of germination needs constant moisture… mucus-y mucus-y moisture.
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@IronEdithKidd Did not meant to be rude or telling two things. I need to be fast and risky early, don’t have a watering system, and not over here during the week. So some plants need to be well established or already harvested and soil covered with flowers or other before it’s going to be dryer.
[quote=“Stynx, post:198, topic:51767”]end May is still doable. Most plants don’t mind later even. But apart from that, I really understand you.This weekend the marrowfat peas and the last broad beans seedlings need to go in the ground. Same with the peas.
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That’s the one. Dug in like a tick in my neighbor’s yard, and from there it creeps over/under a low concrete wall to my campos de verde. In my ongoing removal process, I’ve binned it and let the city handle it as waste (and yes, there’s a brown waste center run by the City but my license isn’t local, among other issues, and they won’t let me in).
Last year I took out ten or twelve large garbage bags filled, completely and to the point of bursting and/or too heavy to lift, of that damned plant. There are still minor insurgencies here and there, and some enemy bases are totally out in the open but protected enough to resist attack, but for now terror ivy is on the run in my yard. `MERICA!!
But, yeah, it’s Ivy, so it definitely deserves to DIAF.
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Ye gods.
It’s… like a 20th century low budget psychotronic sci-fi film.
Invasive exotics like this ivy are the stuff of restoration ecology nightmares, and my own as well. Out here, “Golden Bamboo” (Phyllostachys aurea) is a big problem… a running bamboo that is a great construction material, useful for trellising and staking in gardens once dried and dead, and when dug up live in its first month as a new shoot, really tasty. But boy howdy it just takes over the universe.
(Haw! “damn-boo”! … ugh…)
Sometimes you can change the conditions that favor the undesirable species and use a different plant to outcompete it. Or you can try allelopathy and use an antagonistic plant (walnut trees are a commonly cited example) but sometimes this approach backfires if you want to grow other plants that will die if exposed to the same allelopathic exudates you’re using to combat Hedera. Botanical blowback.
I have a friend who works on some very large projects in Texas infested with poison ivy. He uses glyphosate and triclopyr (synthetic pesticides) extensively. He’s a fine fellow on many respects, up against a truly entrenched dangerous enemy. I told him deer and goats eat poison ivy but he said he didn’t have the luxury of time and besides those animals never climb trees. Spray and pray is his usual method. I don’t know what I would do in his place, but then again, my projects are considerably smaller patches of land in comparison.
I just want to thank you here and now @wrecksdart for not going my friend’s spray-and-pray route, which is far far less labor intensive than digging, cutting, bagging the stuff for the landfill. Your time and energy handling Hedera in your space benefit us all.
ETA: inserted link to even-handed article re bamboo in Texas, because not all bamboo is bad and I wanted to be very clear there are plenty of “good” bamboos that are clumpers and won’t spread aggressively.
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Well, golly…and thank you back for promoting excellent garden skills. Walking through the pesticide area of my local Home Despot is a damned scary thing to do, and it’s made worse by considering the ways people use that stuff. In the past I haven’t fertilized at all b/c I wasn’t sure what was in the stuff or where it was coming from.
Actually, some of the blame comes from hanging out with old M/J gardeners, especially the indoors types. They knew exactly what went into the soil, and how much was good or bad, and how to fix those things. Using some nasty chemical to do what a little elbow grease will do much better and without the chemical death being splashed willy-nilly over where my food is grown.
In fact, I’m curious to see how the opening up of American travel to/from Cuba will inform our local/national gardening scene (if at all) in terms of moving away from chemicals and heavy industrialization.
All that said, I’m still amazed and thrilled that I can eat a green pepper, put the remains in the compost pile, pull them out three+ months later and add them to the pile growing more green peppers, which helps me grow better peppers in the future. The basic soil cycle is fascinating and beautiful to me, and even more so when it feeds me all the way through spring, summer, and fall.
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Here’s hoping they stay strong, and that Dow and Monsanto don’t just streamroller them flat.
A teacher of mine had attended a permaculture world conference in Cuba a few years ago:
+
… and I would love to pick his brain again, though he’s extremely busy. I am hoping for the best for Cuba’s food future, that sanity will prevail, with a focus on whole systems health, with clean food, clean air, clean water, and long-term thinking in favor of sovereignty and sustainability, and not profit and short-term gains.
The Cuban farmers and food producers have a lot to teach us. I’d like to know everything about this story here re their apiculture operations:
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-cuba-farming-honey-idUSKCN0VI172
A visit there is on my short list. I’d tour small hold farms, small scale ag producers, anyone who is successful in closing open production loops–something permaculture is pretty good at, but is extremely site-specific in practice, not in theory. Theory is portable. Practice, AFAICT, is nearly always not.
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Remembering a horrible experience a good friend went through about 20 years ago, I feel the need to point out that if the ivy in question is POISON ivy, DO NOT THROW INTO A FIRE!!!
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What happened, if I may ask?
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The poison, which is oily, is aerosolized (tiny droplets floating in the air) and gets breathed into the lungs. You do NOT want poison ivy in your throat and lungs! Immediate hospitalization is required.
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Burning plant material is commonly said to create urushiol-laden smoke that causes systemic reaction as well as rash inside the throat and on the eyes. Firefighters often get rashes and eye inflammation from smoke-related contact. A high-temperature, fully inflamed bonfire may incinerate the urushiol before it can cause harm, while a smoldering fire could vaporize the volatile oil and spread it as white smoke. However, some sources dispute the danger of burning urushiol-containing plant material.
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Ow, that sounds really bad… 
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Oh, yeah. Really bad!
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Warning: Comedic NSFW Language
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Looks great!
What are these pink/purple ‘rock’ flowers?
That’s beautiful! What goes in (or comes up from) this planter when the tulips/hyacinth die back?
Deer will go after our tulips and hyacinth (and crocus), although a few made it to bloom this year. The only thing it seems they won’t touch at all are daffodils.
We have a deck in back that is safe from the deer, but it doesn’t get enough sun to grow much of anything (OK for hosta, but tulips didn’t really make it – to shady, too damp, or both).
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Thanks! It’s creeping phlox - it’s easy to find in the home stores. I’ve had it in the bed for about 3 years, and this is the first year that it’s gotten that soft feeling I love about it.
@Gyrofrog - Thanks! The tulips will go on throughout spring. New ones will come up as the early ones die off and asters will also pop up.
Next: it all looks gross as the stems need to stay in the bed to gather sunlight so the bulbs will get nurtured for the next year. I pull off the leaves as soon as they will detach from the bulb easily.
After: I know I have some lilies in there, and roses but, I have no idea the names of all the perennials that come up.
Our local grocery store sells boxes of bulbs in a display and this brand tends to do well in my garden. Every time I’m at the store, I’ll grab anything from that display that does not require full sunlight. I have this one that was like “a nice centerpiece for the garden” and it really is a beautiful plant that blooms all summer, but I haven’t the slightest clue what it is.
At this point, almost the whole bed will come up from bulbs, but I’ll fill in bare spots with annuals.
Yep - the deer love it! I plant extra for them 
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Holy fuck Holy fuck Holy fuck
Digging, moving stuff, planting, swearing, laughing, crying, getting stung, drinking beer, cursing Home Despot, drinking more beer, did I compost that, where are the seeds, lugging One More Fucken Bag of Shredded Hardwood Mulch, yes that is a splinter in my leg, garden spade bites the dust, the dust gets into the kitchen, the kitchen is a godamn war zone, well it wouldn’t be a war zone if you didn’t track all this fucken mud in here and what’s with all the empty beer bottles you drunkard, the red zone is for parking only, no the white zone is for parking the red zone is for buses, you want how much for one bag of cowshit, good thing I didn’t spill this cowshit everywhere, godamn it I spilled the cowshit everywhere, oh god the potatoes, where are the poppies, lemon balm, bee balm, borage, and yay!
Ahh. Better. Le Gardin is proceeded according to schedule. Elderly neighbor across the alley can’t do garden work, so I trimmed up his back yard and carted all the branches over to my back yard. Roughed up ~4-5 inches of the garden path soil, incorporated a bunch of mulch and then laid down all the resulting trimmings (95% branches) from my neighbor’s yard, then covered that with a mat weed barrier, then laid down more mulch and stepping stones on that. It’s my first time actually building such a path, rather than just mulching the hell out of an area and pulling weeds when they show up, and it looks (to me) like a million bucks.
I also built my first sheet compost ‘raised’ bed–very exciting, and thanks for that image and info, @j9c–and watered the hell out of it (that will be the Moon & Stars Watermelon bed), as well as building one major and two minor hugelkultures. 50 sq.ft. of potatoes went in (purple, red, yellow and white), as did ~150 onion sets, ~120 carrots, radishes, beets, head lettuce, marigolds, daisies, numerous herbs, leaf lettuce, and spinach, among a few others. My hands are destroyed but damn the garden is looking good!
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Also, wondering if this is a thing: the owner of a diner I visit regularly is now saving coffee grounds/filters, egg shells, and some vegetable waste for me to pick up every now and again–all of that stuff would normally go into the trash. Visited another diner I like in the city, and they told me much the same thing–while there’s one guy who comes in every now and again to ask for their egg shells, everything else goes into the trash.
I know some cities have set up programs that will collect said ‘waste’ material, compost it properly, and then either sell it or give it away (Asheville comes to mind, as does, IIRC, Santa Cruz, CA). I know my city has community gardens as well as at least one local non-profit farm–I wonder how hard it would be to create a program to funnel all that good food waste to community gardens or other local non-profits for use in their gardens? Anyone ever done such a thing on a local scale?
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You’re going to make @Stynx’s head hurt with this kind of thing.
Ann Arbor collects compostable materials. The program was set up decades ago, but curb-side collection started about 10 years ago. It wasn’t cheap. Some of the cost has been offloaded to a contractor for the actual composting. The city gets a cut of compost sales, but a millage pays for the remainder (wrapped into the solid waste millage). It’s not quite the same thing as what you’re asking, though.
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