/ck/ - Food & Cooking

>>4474009
>>4474040
>>4474119
>>4474168
>>4475898

Wow, I still remember your pics from last year's harvest, but I had no idea of the total extent of your 'operation'. I know it's all worth it quality-and taste-wise to can my produce and that I'll be very happy I did afterwards, but even then I still dislike the actual canning of the little excess I have. Yet again a hat tip to you good sir.

Feel free to share CSI garden updates throughout the season. /out/ seems to be the place, after this board and /diy/ later on.

>>3938777
I clip my chickens about once a year, and it makes no difference. I think a lot of people would be surprised at how adapt they are at climbing.

>>3936604
I already talked a bit about it here >>3904652
and here >>3908962 . The bought chickenfeed mentioned also contains some antibiotics. In about 14 years I only had two chickens get sick to a point I had to give them a coup de grâce. I never had any chickens off the supplements however, so I have nothing to compare it to. That's something I should try out.

I agree with pretty much everything this helpful anon said >>3936634 . I only let my chickens roam through an enclosed part of the garden visible in the first post about them, with my compostheap & -bins, fruit trees and vegetable patch. Also only when I'm around, never without at least sporadic supervision. This comes down
to most weekends and the summer months.

When you LOCK up your chickens for the night, do so timely, before the sun starts to set. They tend to get really anxious when it's dark. Mine climb up into the trees if I don't. I swear I can hear them laughing at me whilst I try to get them down.

Mine have no grass in their pen though. I tried everything to get or keep it growing in there, but the chickens manage to ravage it every time again. They do get greens every day, without exception.

Check out this site, it's the best I've encountered on the interwebs concerning this topic; it has a wealth of information, more than you'll ever get on here.

http://www.backyardchickens.com/

>>3936249

What he said >>3936254
I just used some leftover wire fence I found in the basement. This type of fence is commonly used over here in Belgium.

These domes are also made from it, and just covered with some plastic afterwards.

>>3935542
That one, yes.

I also planted some bisetti bamboo past spring, for general usage in the garden once it produces large enough stalks. No photo of the plant itself though. I put it in a 2m² concrete rectangle that used to be the foundation of a cold box. Pic related.

>>3934488
I think I remember that .gif.
Were you the gentleman with the CSI-garden pictures in spring; yellow police tape or something like that woven through some wire fence ?

I am enjoying the pictures; keep them coming.
I tip my hat to you yet again good sir, and recognize being easily outclassed as a homegrowman.

>>3930611
I live in the city too, while I'm still studying. My pictures are from the house/garden I grew up in. I don't live there yet even though I already bought it from my parents. It's 2 hours of travelling away, but I go over there about 3 weekends a month and all my vacations. I'm a 'country boy' and simply do not thrive in a city environment.
I also switched studio's after 4 years of living in the first one; I now pay half more for only 2/3's the space I had before, and on top of that I have to share my kitchen where I had my own at first.
However, I now have two south-facing windows and one north-facing. This made it possible for me to stuff my studio with lots of plants (still keeping practicality in mind), bathing in light.

It all was/is a rather big investment of funds and energy, but all worth it in the end. I am a more happy and productive person, and the quality of my academic work has also improved. I'm pretty sure the unending love and patience of my parents was the only thing that kept me from going full bateman/breivik/unabomber/harris&klebold, and it all was being undone by dim city-life whilst knowing a better way of living.

>Fucking move.

My apologies for the off-topic chitchat

>>3930297
I'm always lurking on /ck and /diy, since next to plants I also like the internet more than people. I post in most plant-related threads if I can add anything of value. Not always as a tripfag though.

>>3930300
>I heard magnesium deficiency causes older leaves to yellow up. Iron deficiencies cause younger leaves to yellow up.

In many plants, yes. However, Mg and Fe are micronutrients, with a wider variety of ways and quantities in which it is used by plants. This causes the shortages of these also to present themselves in a wider variety of ways.
Nitrogen is a macronutrient in every plant, with no exceptions I can think of right now, and a key component in chloroplasts. This makes a N-shortage present itself in a more uniform way.

>>3923970
>it has started to gently caress my tomatoes.
>Then I cut it because, hey, leaves off the other plants you lecherous creep!

I laughed.

>>3924850
My experience with them indoor is that they're very whiny and picky. They were never content with just a warm spot behind a window during winter, they also wanted artificial lighting. Fluorescents should do fine for vegetative growth, and even some flowering, but I would suggest some HID's for the lather.

>>3928208
>>3925707

That's just phenomenal! I guess it goes a long way filling your vegetable-needs during winter ?
How many hours do you spend in your garden, on average, during the growing season ? I aspire to achieve a comparable harvest one day.

>>3927834
The chlorosis (yellowing leaves) from which your plant is suffering, is an indication of a shortage of nitrogen being metabolized by it.

This could have a variety of causes. The simplest one being a lack of N in the soil, like this anon >>3928760 assumed. However, don't just add extra fertilizer without being (almost) sure this is the cause, or you could 'burn' the roots if the salinity in the soil gets to high.
Other causes could be, but are not limited to overwatering (>>3928702), cold, insufficient light,.. These could prohibit plants from absorbing enough N from the soil, even if it's in there.

Also, it's a natural process for many plants to drain nutrients from their leaves when they're flowering, to be used for producing as much fruit as possible. After you harvest your peppers, the plant won't just revert to it's green vegetative growth. The plant exhausts itself trying to produce the best seeds possible and is, even in nature, likely to die after the first time. This is also why they, on a commercial scale, are grown as if they are annual plants.

There is, however, a technique called 'revegging' , which comes down to drastically pruning it back and giving it lots of light (18/6) to force it back into a vegetative state. I suggest you google it, and also look into the site below. It has pretty decent info and lots of pretty pictures.

http://www.fatalii.net/growing/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=95&Itemid=105

>>3923609
I think, from experience, the whole heirloom-thing is being massively overhyped. Of course they taste better than hydroponically grown storebought tomatoes, bred for looks and ripened with ethylene gas. But if you compare them to 'modern' strains bred for homegrowing, there is no difference in quality worth mentioning. They will taste different, but not necessarily better or worse.

So imho the credit for better taste should go to 'homegrowing' strains in general, not heirlooms in particular.

>>3917506
Must be a pretty big garden you have. I canned about half of my tomatoes and had only 6 filled jars (with very thick sauce though). I already considered it lots of work. I tip my hat to you good sir.

Pic unrelated; pineapple mint which is hard to find around here.

>>3918488
>A body outside isn't being used as a pillow, it's being assessed for lunch

Sounds like my cats. I guess I look tasty then. I'll take it as a compliment.

>Are they really that fussy? Anything I should do for them before winter sets in, or in the spring?

They'll survive and even produce fruit if just left alone, but with just a bit of decent pruning your harvest should greatly increase in quantity and quality. It should also work well as disease control (fungi), depending on the cultivar. A few have a proclivity for getting botrytis. Not really speaking from experience though, just lots of googling done in the past few days.

>>3916396
Got any pictures for us to get excited about ?

>>3915482
I am content that my 'feels' are being understood.
I too find myself expanding year after year.

>>3911349
There is a south faced wall at the side of my house that has sunlight almost the entire day. The enclosed space is protected from the wind by a dense 2m high hedge of beeches and has a fishpond in it. Additionally the brick wall also has a respectable thermal mass. An ideal micro-climate for lots of plants to grow in, were it not for the poor sandy soil, devoid of nutrients and structure.

Past weekend at the gardening center, whilst I was there to buy flower bulbs for my mom, I spotted some nice blackberry plants. They have deviously organised their infrastructure in a way that you have to pass through their outside plant-section before you can actually enter their indoor store. I'm pretty happy they have an automated door, because most of the time my hands are full before I get to it, juggling around plants. Luckily I forgot my wallet in the car this time, and I only had enough cash on me to buy the one plant besides the bulbs.

Motivated by my purchase I decided to mend the aforementioned soil that afternoon. I managed to throw my back out in the process, to the amusement of my onlooking cats, who used me as a pillow to sit on while I laid there on the lawn, writhing, waiting for the worst pain to pass. Some ibuprofens later I was able to finish the job. If this plant doesn't make it through the winter to produce the best tasting berries in the future, then I'm switching from agnosticism to atheism.

>>3913029
HID's work wonders. I sometimes use a 400w HPS for my tomato seedlings, when the weather in spring warms up slower than I anticipated and I have to keep them inside to a point where fluorescent lighting doesn't suffice anymore.

>>3913104
The gas you are referring to is ethylene gas, which tomatoes also produce themselves, just like bananas and some other fruits. It is industrially used on a large scale to artificially ripen a wide variety of produce, including tomatoes. It's what gives store bought tomatoes their bland taste in combination with hydroponics; and thus is one of the biggest reasons why people grow their own. It's an effective trick, but also a last resort for me. I prefer ripening on the vine, even if there's a risk of losing the last part of my crop to bad weather.

>>3914127
I prepare it about the same way as you OP, but I add some lemon juice. Works great imho.

>>3911087
>Plenty of things to do with the ten or so pounds of green left, but six months of no 'mater sandwiches is a tough thing to face.

I put my green ones in an open cardboard box with some newspaper layered in between and on top. Most of them ripen this way (, sometimes a bit at the cost of texture). Check for molding regularly and remove affected ones immediately. (Molding only happened once, with a damaged tomato.)

>>3910956
Like I said in my first post I lurk /ck a lot and always contribute to the gardening threads on this board. My (rather rare) posts on /diy are seldom /ck-related. Thank you for your appreciation.

>>3910599
I got some strawberry plants from a guy I gave one of my pumpkins. Though I'm not particularly keen on strawberries, his were one of the sweetest I ever tasted. They look a bit sad in the photo because it took me a few days to find the time to plant them, but they have perked up by now. Fingers crossed for some sweet delight next year.

>>3910345
>Some more sauce making
I just realised this probably wasn't the best choice of words, being on 4chan.

Fall is apparent in the garden so I started preparing it for winter. The contrast with 6 weeks ago is quite big. The few tomatoes that remain probably won't ripen on the vine in time. A handfull of springonions are left but will be harvested in the next two weeks.
I left a cauliflower plant in place, but nothing will come of it probably. It was heavily shaded by a new cultivar of zucchini plant I grew, which got bigger than I'm used to.

>>3899517
>>3909586
Please oh please don't pee on your plants directly. They will be 'nutrientburned' to death in hours. Dilute it with water and let it sit for a day. Next to dilution, the presence of water also helps to 'degrade' urea into ammonia, though soil bacteria also do this for you as long you just dilute your pee. An extra added effect is that buckets of pee might be a good conversation starter.

>>3909117
>>3908973
Thanks guys.

>>3908962
Some more sauce making, to keep it a bit /ck-related. I always can tomatoes that I don't eat right away. Freezing them in any form degrades the flavor quickly, making cultivating them not worth all the effort.

>>3905768
Indeed. The cultivar that I grow doesn't get that big in terms of height, but bloom with a massive amount of decent sized flowers, easily twenty per plant. Their stems thicken up to 10cm (4inches) in diameter; an odd sight for annual flowers.

>Yeah, composting the bodies of millions over the course of centuries will do that for ya.
I like to think it's because half of the country consists out of alluvial plains or polders. But I guess that helped too.

> I had no idea they had so much personality before we got some.

I know. Mine look alike so much that I tell them apart by how they behave. Curious and kinda sad at the same time.

>>3906575
Get 2 or 3 instead.. It's not that much more work than just 1. My dad made a pen and bought me my first 3 chickens when I was 9 or 10. (As a job/responsibility/chore, not as a gift although I accepted them as one.) I wasn't all that bright as a kid and took care of them without any problems worth mentioning. Their main diet of kitchen scraps and what they find in the garden gets supplemented with some calcium-rich chickenfeed. Besides that they pretty much take care of themselves, given they have a decent (not necessarily expensive) coop.

>>3905592
August is when the magic starts to happen. Pic related.

>>3905554
> (they talk to me)
I hope in the 'I gain an understanding of their ways by observing them'-kinda way, not the 'They tell me to burn things'-kinda way. My chickens come running at lightspeed when I call out for them, and mangle my lower legs if I did so for my own amusement (It's funny to see them sprint.) without having worms or similar offerings.

>>3905558
They have been in there for a bit less than 5 months, and no real chewing so far. Only a few nibbles; I think they dislike they taste of the woodstain. I placed some split logs in their cage, which they stick to.

>>3904376
>>3904460
>>3904513
>>3904599
>>3904652
>>3905533

Not much happens in the following months. Everything just grows and I harvest some lettuce, spinach and pea's from time to time.