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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 8th, 2023

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  • Solid puns but this is actually a problem. Beehives are quite valuable, like $500 per hive or so to just straight up sell them, or obviously they can also be incorporated into an apiary for long-term production.

    Theft of beehives is really not unheard of. Similar to how people steal cows and shit. Beekeepers will sometimes brand or otherwise mark their hives in an attempt to deter such thievery.

    Personally I keep my beehives in huge steel cages, though that is primarily to protect them from bears.


  • Yeah very much so, it’s quite easy to kill plants by over-nitrogenating them. Compost is a good way to safely feed plants, as not only is there a diversity of nutrients in good compost but they are released more slowly over time and so less-likely to do damage. Not the case with manure. Also some compost has excessive salt so watch out for that.

    Otherwise a good rule of thumb for giving plants fertilizers is “weakly, weekly”. It’s also good to keep in mind that plants get the vast majority of what they need from the sun.






  • My garden is going awesome. Third year gardening, first time managing a pretty sizeable garden myself. I’m currently eating probably 50-60% of my food from the garden. Right now I’m harvesting eggplant, tomatos, beans, carrots, beets, kale, kohlrabi, basil, oregano, dill, cucumber, a variety of peppers, and a preposterous amount of zucchini. The zuchs are finally starting to chill out but I’ve got like 7 huge zucchinis taking up all my kitchen space and I eat like 3 a week. I’ve got a bunch of different types of squash coming in. I’m just finishing eating the last of my summer peas. I need to harvest my potatoes, might do that this weekend. The corn will be ready soon but so far I’ve been real bad at getting the timing right for corn.

    My cauliflower is not looking so hot. Dunno if my climate is good for it or if I just haven’t been giving it enough attention. Aphids are starting to make their prescence known on my kale, but I find especially with dyno-kale that they don’t really detract too much from the food value, just takes some time to wash them off.

    I need to do some work putting down straw mulch around plants and reinforcing the bark mulch pathways I’ve started putting in. Long term I would like to replace or at least supplement the overhead sprinkler irrigation with a drip or even micro-sprinkler system.

    I never pruned my tomatoes and so they are kind of a big mess. Getting lots of fruit from them now and they are so good, I didn’t used to like tomatoes but I’m just eating these bitches salad style. Lots of damage from quail and whatnot on the tomatoes but not to an extent that’s really bugging me since I’m not selling the things.

    Peppers seem to be taking forever but are finally starting to turn colour. Got lots of green bell peppers, lots of what I think are hungarian wax peppers that are just starting to finally turn orange and get flavourful. Got some habaneros finally coming in, and some kind of skinny chillis. I’ve also got some purple ones that I can’t at all tell when to properly pick. A few that I’ve tried have seen premature.

    Got sunflowers all over the place, mostly self-seeded. Garden is also full of self-seeding calendula and dill, which have been filled with pollinators of various types including my own bees.

    I really like my garden. Inherited it from my grandmother in law, but she would be really horrified to see how many “weeds” I allow to persist.









  • Poison is really a shitty way to handle this problem. It’s not just bad for our dogs, it’s bad for wild predators as well, and (speculating) probably not good for the soil microbiome either. Also it’s a pretty nasty way to go for the rodents.

    The proper way to deal with moles is using blackhole traps. They take advantage of the fact that moles will try to block any light entering their tunnel. The trap has a hole at the end, so when inserted into their tunnel, the moles will want to plug it to turn out the light, when they enter the open end of the tube it springs the trap.

    It takes a bit of luck and a bit of skill, sometimes you have to reset the traps multiple times before getting the mole.

    I also wouldn’t recommend ultrasonic repellers because we don’t know what effect that type of shit has on other creatures, either.

    Voles are trickier, though also less problematic. I would say get a cat.