Loss of Interest

[jal_ut]

9:55 AM, Calm, sunny, 40 degrees.

It seems that there is no interest in this forum now that winter is upon us. I guess folks are off trick or treating and getting ready for Christmas?

[webmaster]

Gardening is seasonal.

[SQWIB]

Gardening is seasonal.

Not for me, it's just different.

[digitS']

It's finally a season when I have a some time.

Ya know. During the growing season, I'm a little exhausted by things-gardening when I get to HG. Sometimes, my day in the garden looked like real work. Yeah, I try to get on the forum every day but plenty of times, I am a little too tired to think straight - let alone, write something while attempting to be coherent.

It reminds me of when I was in school, long ago. I worked weekends out of town and would drive about 100 miles on Friday and return 100 miles, Sunday afternoon. I learned -- to keep my mouth shut in class on Monday mornings. Yeah!!!

Soon, the 2019 seed catalogs can be spread all around the lazy boy and I can dream and fantasize about the new season ...

Steve

[HoneyBerry]

Actually, I have been reading people's posts but I haven't had anything garden related to post. I only have Non-Gardening Related Foo Fa.
I'm trying to fix up my bathroom. I watched some YouTube videos and replaced the toilet today all by myself. It wasn't too difficult. I'm so proud of myself. Saved some money. Now I'm going to try to replace the faucet.

[applestar]

Heh, I guess I’m too overwhelmed right now. I think I go through this every year around this time, when the garden is shutting down, so you would *think* I would have more time, but playing guessing games and tag with Jack Frost and trying to bring in the last of the harvest, migrating all of my container plants back inside, where inexplicably, the available space seem to have shrunk, trying to squeeze in the neglected summer projects and trying to initiate fall and winter projects that have been penciled as well as blocked in....

...and with fall school year starting all kinds of new schedule changes need to be factored in...
...and gearing up for the holiday season...

But nothing particularly interesting is actually going on here until I get *something* accomplished.

[imafan26]

I've been checking in. I still have things in the garden like komatsuna and swiss chard. I just had my house painted and I still have to move everything back. The garden is on the back burner now.

My pitaya bloomed, but it did not get pollinated so the two flowers fell off.

Today was arbor day and I had to be in a couple of places today. I met with the rest of the bee hui and we did our bimonthly hive check. We took off the MAQs. One of the hives may have lost a queen. We will have to see if we can find open brood for her in a couple of weeks. MAQ's are hard on queens and brood.

The second thing I did was help at the arbor day plant sale and we sold honey from the October harvest. The advertising was not as wide as it usually is and the crowd was smaller. We had some native plants left at the end of the day, and we still had a lot of plants to put back at the end of the sale. All I brought were pitaya cuttings and I sold about half of them. I will pot up the rest for sales next year. Most of the herbs went except for the parsley, some green onions and some Thai basil.

After the sale, I dropped off a bucket of hazardous waste (mostly ironite and pesticides). The city has household collection schedules every two months. I am already starting another bucket (I found more ironite and varathane).

The weeds are growing like weeds in the herb garden. I spent a couple of hours yesterday pulling them out. My friend wants to try to see if they can be composted. I don't have much faith in them staying dead. It is raining now almost every day so I am trying to clear some of the plots to plant buckwheat and quinoa green manures.

At home, the bindweed is coming up again and I have to wait for a sunny day to hit them with round up again. Then cover them with weedblock. I have to move all the plants back where they belong and drag all the buckets back into the lanai. BTW, got about 2 inches of rain in about an hour and the lanai partially flooded. It is a problem since the lanai is lower than the yard.

I have been busy trying to absorb and get rid of the extra paint cans so I can move stuff back and park my car in the garage again. It may be awhile, it took me 3 weeks to move everything out.

And with all the rain, I have to mow the grass again.

[webmaster]

Wow, replacing the toilet is an accomplishment!
I used to live in a condo where the person upstairs from me tried doing some minor plumbing work, replacing a faucet or something. She caused a leak that went through the floors and into my unit. Costs thousands for the building association to fix, I couldn't use my kitchen for a week.

[HoneyBerry]

That's too bad. Sounds horrible actually.
Replacing a toilet is actually pretty simple. The plumber showed up intoxicated so I decided to do it myself. YouTube has good how-to videos. The hardest part was the weight of the toilet. It was heavy to move.
A friend of mine bought a condo and then found out years later that the vinyl siding had not been installed correctly, so water was leaking into the walls of all the units. A big complex, a hundred units or more. This caused some expensive problems. By the time they noticed the problem, so much time had passed that it was too late to do anything about it in a legal sense.
A different friend also had some problems with his condo. The power bill was huge every month. It turned out that the units were cross-wired so he was paying the neighbor's electrical bill - a family of 4. And all of the parking lot lighting was wired to go through his meter as well.

[jal_ut]

Good Sunday Morning! I took some seed out to the bird feeder. Won't be anything growing here except for ice for the next 4 months. No snow yet.

[Gary350]

We need to find other things to talk about.

Garden season is just starting for people in the south where it is too hot to plant anything in summer.

Some people might have questions about next years garden & trying new things.

I have seeds & herbs drying on paper plates, I just packaged & dated more seeds.

I like to watch gardening YouTube videos it gives me ideas especially how big companies grow 10,000. acres of potatoes or beans or tomatoes and other things.

Turning clocks back 1 hour last night is a problem for my stomach it is hard to eat lunch & dinner an hour late it takes a few weeks to get use to that about 5 minutes per day. We are retired we don't eat by the clock anymore.

[imafan26]

I am glad we are on standard time all year. There is only a problem if we try to call out of state, then we have to pay attention to the time difference. The state did go to daylight saving time when it was first started but it did not make sense and caused more problems for us so the state went back to standard time. There is only a 3 hour difference between our summer and winter day length.

In the garden, it does mean that I can plant more of the cool season crops now since it rains more and the sun is weaker. It is also a good time to move plants out from the shade to train them to be in more sun. December is actually the best time to move orchids out to the sun.

Once the plumeria leaves have dropped it will be easier to prune.

It is not the best time to grow things with fuzzy leaves like the tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, and some beans unless they have decent resistance to powdery and downy mildew and they still will need to sprayed every week with a fungicide.

There are fewer problems with thrips and mites, but now the snails and slugs are coming out all over the place.

[jal_ut]

This morning set all the clocks. I wish they would do away with Daylight Savings Time.

[digitS']

I guess that I still have some effects from a travel bug. Sure, I like to watch the videos of the pretty landscapes and urban landscapes but often I have felt like I was just looking at a picture when I have actually been there, especially if the view was through a window.

Something that interests me is what gardeners are doing in other places with climates similar to my own. How do they live their lives, what are their activities, what do they grow??? Of course, visiting during the growing season would interfere with what I do in my own gardens ..! Hard to make that compromise.

It is also a little awkward but I live in the "Empty Quarter." You know, the "Flyover Country." Well, it's kind of true for other places like this. They are not on many tourists' itineraries. It isn't really true - if you want to get some skiing in this winter, think about Schweitzer Mountain in northern Idaho .

So, here's an idea! The Southern Hemisphere. The hill country of Tasmania might be about right. Or, here's a place and a picture that looks so much like it could be a location around here:


This is Nahuel Huapi Lake in the lake region of northern Patagonia, in Argentina. Nice, huh? Wikipedia often has climate information for many locations, worldwide. Dream a little!

Steve

[PaulF]

I think all gardening sites slow down in late fall to early in the year when thoughts of getting back into the swing begins again. I take part in conversations at the two or three other sites visited daily.

[webmaster]

...water was leaking into the walls of all the units.

Yikes. So many gotchas with homeownership!

A problem with condos, imo, is that they have flat roofs that accumulate water when it rains. Those roofs, I think, based on my experience with a condo, tend to be fussy and cause more issues.

Slanted roofs I think are better because they shed the rain rather than let it accumulate in pools.

[PraticalGardener]

Due to an early snow in higher elevations (such as Spruce Knob, WV) at Oct. 19, some local farmers were hauling cattle out of pastures early; I was helping with handling the cattle. In the meantime, I need to split a lot more firewood.

[HoneyBerry]

webmaster wrote: Yikes. So many gotchas with homeownership!

"A problem with condos, imo, is that they have flat roofs that accumulate water when it rains. Those roofs, I think, based on my experience with a condo, tend to be fussy and cause more issues.

Slanted roofs I think are better because they shed the rain rather than let it accumulate in pools."

I believe you are right about that. However, in the case that I described, the vinyl siding leaks were at the top of the windows. The necessary caps were missing entirely on all of the windows, so water got into the walls. The residents were stressed and angry about what it was going to cost to fix the problem. Can you blame them? There were For Sale signs all over the place. People wouldn't return calls to the HMA committee. So it dragged on and on and costs escalated. It looks like a nice gated community from a distance.

[Ksk]

I am cleaning up my garden and thinking about moving beyond vegetable gardening next year. Pretty successful summer produce but winter lacks those glorious blooms and photos! My winter interest is prepping seeds to plant via cold stratification. I am going to start a small tree and shrub growing nursery and have been collecting all manner of native seeds and had great luck with some cuttings. Sounds easy but I have to ID them all which is challenging but still fun. Trees are a a patient persons game.

[imafan26]

I am glad my garden is productive all year. I depend on it for a lot of my fresh fruit and produce as well as stuff like peppers to trade. I wish I had more time and more energy to spend more time in it. I am glad I don't need to deal with snow and winter though. I enjoy the pictures everyone posts of where they live, but I can truthfully say, while it is beautiful, I don't really like to travel and I don't like being cold or breathing cooked air. Many of the military families here say that they do miss their families especially around the holidays and our isolation is tough on them since it is very expensive to travel. They miss the changing of the seasons and one of my friends actually said she enjoyed shovelling snow. She got a new snow shovel for her birthday from her family every year.

We do have seasons, they are just different, and much more subtle, there is even snow if you want to travel to Mauna Kea when it does snow.

[digitS']

Several years ago, I committed myself to 30 minutes of exercise that achieves a target heart rate, at least 5 days each week. Maybe I should have a treadmill but I don't really like the idea. But, I have not found it difficult to maintain this commitment. Certainly, summer gardening accomplishes the daily goal but what of winter?

A snow shovel isn't the torture machine that I imagine the treadmill. I'm fully aware of the danger of injury but I can prepare myself, stance, speed ... duration. This is not a very snowy area with an 8" snowfall somewhat unusual. There can be more but if I get the front sidewalk cleared for the school kids, no more than 30 minutes of exercise is needed ... at a time. To the front door and down the driveway to the backyard gate - another 30 minutes. Gate to backdoor ... Back to clearing driveway ...Now, of course, I can't stretch this over 4 days!

It would be an unusual snowfall that would have me out shovelling for 2 hours. Maybe once or twice a winter and other days in my retirement, I will have less interesting exercise activities in less pristine environments .

Steve

[jal_ut]

Calisthenics: Do some sit ups, pushups, side straddle hops, squat bends and if you have a bar, some pullups.

You have to make a commitment, then force yourself to do the task. No excuses! Here I sit and watch TV, when the ads come on I jump up and go behind the chair and hang onto the chair back and do squat bends till I get the heart rate up. At my age I ain't likely to do any running, but I can do some squat bends if I got something to hang onto so I don't fall down.

[imafan26]

Exercise is great for everyone. I find that I have more chronic fatigue. I have a hard time even doing 4 hours of heavy work a day. It seems counterintuitive it seems that you do have to expend energy to maintain it.

[jal_ut]

9:40 AM November 7 its 37 degrees and sunny, calm. I took some seed to the bird feeder, now sit here wondering what to do for the rest of the day? Thank you all for your comments.

[digitS']

"My idea of an educated person is one who can converse on one subject for more than two minutes."

Robert Andrews Millikan

What do we think?

Steve

[jal_ut]

Sunday November 11, 39 degrees calm and sunny. I took some seed to the bird feeder, now sit here wondering what to do for the rest of the day?

[jal_ut]

Calm, sunny, 22 degrees this morning. Nothing growing but ice.

[pow wow]

My yard has been ready for winter for several weeks now. We have had several large snowfalls but temps warm up and it melts away.
My seed order for this year arrived about a month ago, I will have to stick to Canadian seed companies in future. Sad because I really have liked Parks Seeds. This year Canada customs decided to charge me $15 on an $80 dollar seed order, never again.
Pelargonium cuttings all rooted in water and are potted and on my plant rack.
Now I have more time to spend taking care of my fish tanks, doing some aquascaping and restocking.
I really messed myself up in a bike accident this spring, broken ribs, smashed wrists and stuff. Ribs still hurt some but hands and wrists finally feel no more pain. Anyways I have had to get back into shoveling snow and it's irritating my ribs, went out and bought a snow blower. I can't hardly wait to use it.
When I flew over the handle bars of my bike my only concern was protecting my bike. Bike is fine so I am back to riding to my bird feeding spots along the Bow River.
That about sums up my life for now, until something worth mentioning happens.

Oh, I grew birdhouse gourds in my greenhouse for the first time. They are now strung up in my basement drying very slowly, not sure if they will be dry enough to make them into chickadee and nuthatch houses in the spring.

[HoneyBerry]

"bike accident this spring, broken ribs, smashed wrists and stuff. Ribs still hurt some but hands and wrists finally feel no more pain."

That doesn't sound like fun. Glad you are doing better.

[pow wow]

Thanks HoneyBerry. Well it was a difficult spring and summer, I still had my little gardening business to run. On a positive note, I did learn to float. Yes, my sisters were over visiting me one Sunday this past spring when the pain in the ribs were the worst. One of them had been watching me from the kitchen window. I still had to move seeding flats out and into my greenhouse every day. When I came in the back door my sister commented to me that I had changed how I moved to ease the pain, it appeared to her that I was more floating along than walking. lol

[HoneyBerry]

Call it The Float Walk, or your own version of The Moon Walk perhaps?
Amazing how the body can adapt.

[applestar]

Oooh. I had wondered where you’ve been @pow wow. So sorry to hear of your injuries — ribs, wrist, and hand? Ouch! And it sounds like you had a tough time of it while trying to get better while pushing yourself at the same time.

“my only concern was protecting my bike” made me chuckle But really glad you are going to be out and about along the river on the “uninjured” bike, feeding those birds again.

[digitS']

Good for you, taking care of yourself, doing the best you could at staying active.

I have a bad leg and often gimp along with a cane. Depends, asphalt parking lots and concrete sidewalks, I use the cane. Soft lawn grass, even garden soil, I usually don't.

You develop a cadence, I'll call it. A rhythm that is a little more important to maintain than what the able-bodied usually employ, getting around. Kinda, not much choice ...

Steve

[pow wow]

Thanks all, a few pic I've taken lately.

[HoneyBerry]

Gasp. Wondering what kind of bird that is, the 2nd bird with the red on the head. I love that they are eating from your hand. I had that experience while cross country skiing. Fluffy round yellow birds called Camp Robbers landed on our fingers and ate pieces of our lunch from our hands. We should have brought some bird seed for them, afterthought. That was a while ago. I am more bird smart now.

[HoneyBerry]

That can't be a woodpecker, but that's the first thing that comes to my mind. I will figure it out and then check back to see if I got it right

[jal_ut]

I am going to call that bird a Downy Woodpecker!

Do a google search for Downy Woodpecker.

[HoneyBerry]

I thought it might be a woodpecker but I have never seen one land on a human like that. I wish my woodpecker friends, who often visit my tree, would light on me like that. Mine are also a downys but are not so friendly.

[pow wow]

That's correct, that's Mr. Downy with the red on the head. I've know this fella and the Mrs. (no red) for a couple years. They get very excited for the suet block when I show up, dive bombing me, perching on my shoulder and head while I'm getting everything out of my pouch. A few days ago I was thrilled when a Hairy woodpecker showed up for suet. The Hairy looks like the Downy but much bigger.

A new female Downy has just started eating from my hand this week, further down the trail in another spot I frequent. Took a few days of her being very shy but she's over that now.

[HoneyBerry]

Ahhhh