Friday Five

[learnteach]

1. Pickles are good. Pressure cooker? Good. Fondue? Fabulous. Fresh Farmer's Market Feed? Fantastic! I seem to have slipped into an earlier mode of food. Now, to learn how to can, to work on my sundrying, to learn how to salt meat.

2. The computer can suck my good habits right away. I need to get away from this thing. So what am I doing?...

3. Companion planting, I want to learn more about it. Anybody out there doing much of it? And why did the tulips fail again?

4. Best Gig ever: Substitute teaching...on a martial arts beach campout. No, really!

5. Still haven't had a chance to teach my demo lesson. Might be a fail. Ah well!

6. This California Election? Why are we wasting the money?

Comments

[fighter-chick.livejournal.com]

Canning is fabulous. Get the Ball Blue Book--it's the canning/food preservation safety bible. Also, I'd be happy to teach you/hang out for your first canning go-round.

How did your tulips fail?

I do some companion planting. The second planting of pole beans will go into the first planting of corn--bean vines use the corn stalks as stakes. Another is pumkins and corn--the corn stalks help shade the growing pumpkin fruits. (I can't do that one myself--yard is too small for pumpkins!) Strawberries and borage are classic--the borage sweetens the fruit. My personal favorite: ringing my cucumbers and beans with marigolds as slug & snail bait. Tough on the poor marigolds, but highly effective in keeping the cukes and beans from getting eaten to death before they get a chance to grow big.

I do lots of marigolds;

[learnteach.livejournal.com]

also nasturtiums. Did the corn/pumpkin thing last year, the pumpkins also keep the corn mulched. Beans didn't do well enough. This year also adding basil to the tomato garden, and reprising the corn/beans/pumpkin patch, still using indian corn.

Re: I do lots of marigolds;

[fighter-chick.livejournal.com]

I don't want to do in-ground nasturtiums. My garden is...very fertile, and I've had overgrow issues with nasturtiums before.

All but three of my marigolds were eaten to the ground last year. But the lemon cucumbers survived. I always apologize to the marigolds when I plant them. ;-)