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My poor blighted tomato plant has taken on a new life and is producing green shoots with flowers, I may still get something out of it before the frost hits.
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I came of age in the 70's so I already went through my earth mother, back to the land phase of life. Plus my parents were rural depression babies so saving, doing it yourself, reusing and preserving is a familiar part of my heritage.
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Anxietynacy, lovely isn't it when we plan things in life and we have to put things on halt. Maybe at some point you'll start again. If not the those projects, news ones :) Definitely with you on the caregiving and having to change priorities, change course. I'm counting on many paths to nirvana :)
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cwillie & Anxietynacy. Thank you! love your responses. Agreed trading is good as is the storage. I've seen many videos on storage of fresh produce. I love the mason jar in hot water technique, someday I can envisage a ladder full of stuff, hopefully homegrown ;-) but yeah, it seems like a lot of work and all year round.

I think if you can make several batches of various items by doing the canning storage maybe get ahead by a year worth of food, then it might start getting a little downhill from there? because you make a batch, eat a batch, and keep that cycle going. Living off-grid must be the best feeling in the world? ok maybe second best feeling in the world.. :)
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It's all about having prime soil fertility and a large acreage. Plus even the off grid folks will still trade amongst themselves - I've got a bumper crop of potatoes and you have a plum tree, let's make a deal - and shop for things they can't grow themselves.

Of course the things that yield the best and are easiest to grow are usually the things that are dirt cheap to buy in season.
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Never enough yield :-O How do these off-grid folks do it? to have year round food.
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🌻🌻🌻
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🪲🪲🐛🐛
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🌱🌿☘️
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I've been reading about people getting amazing yields for decades but those YouTube farmers/gardeners are not fooling me, most of them are all talk and very little evidence to back it up. I have never had much luck with container grown potatoes of either type, I consider myself successful if I get one or two meals for my efforts.
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send - if you grow 100 lbs of sweet potatoes from your slips , I'll fly down and eat them with you!!! Once having been away for on holiday, I came back to a "jungle" of potato shoots in my corner cupboard, I think I grew a few for house plants.

My gardening these days is confined to the balcony and my indoor plants which are adjusting well. I am growing oat seeds in an old roasting pan to give Rocky some greens. Despite tenting saran wrap over the pan to keep the moisture in, the seeds have not germinated as well as I would like. However I did get some green blades growing and put them down for her and she munched the lot and pulled up a few. But she likes it and goes out for a taste daily except yesterday which was too hot for her.

We also have an elm tree seedling growing in a decorated watering can, With temps here in the 90s I'm watering the oat grass and the elm seedling daily. It will need to get planted out at the lake this fall.
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The reluctant gardener here.....

100 pounds of sweet potatoes from slips of one potato!
That's a lot of pressure.

Videos said to change water every two or three days.
I have already failed.

However, this should be fun, right?
These suckers are growing by themselves.

There are so many so-called slips, I could have a 5 ft. x 5 ft. garden.
Planting in the morning, or very soon into available square planters.

Thanks Cwillie, I will do that!
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Yes plant your slips now Send!
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The sweet potato sat there long enough to grow straight up. It grew about 18 inches tall, but no roots.
Then I put a piece of cut potato in a jar, some water, and it grew roots. Took them outside on the porch.

Two of the jars have leaves, one jar does have roots but it looks also like moldy, and the cloudy water smells.

Should I plant them in dirt now? And throw away the moldy sweet potato?

I feel obligated to continue this growing stuff, but will it end with new potatoes?

I could adopt them out.
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Whine away! Does a body good! Sometimes :-)
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Tillage radishes are a popular cover crop here but peanuts not so much, although I do have some planted by the squirrels occasionally!

I'm just whining because where I grew up all we had to do was till the ground and toss in the seeds or plants and we got very good yields, now I'm planting in areas where the topsoil has been stripped away and no amount of compost and peat moss seems to replenish that, it will take decades.
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CWillie, have you tried planting peanuts or dikon radishes? I live where the soil is rock solid and that's what we use to break it up and soften it.

Or maybe passive composting in that area for a year?

Jjust some thoughts knowing exactly how you feel.
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I don't do TikTok either, but when you start to dig a little for verification or question where some of this stuff comes from it always seems to lead there, or to one of the other click bait sites like X or Instagram.
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It originated with TikTok, right? Every weird bit of news or advice I've come across seems to be something somebody made up and posted there, and no matter how outlandish you'll find hundreds of people who claim it's all perfectly true 🙄
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I dug my garlic today and although the tops looked fantastic I'm disappointed with the size of the bulbs. But then when I was digging I saw how despite my attempts to improve it my soil is still basically hard builder's clay, so it's no wonder I can't get anything to yield well there... sigh, I sometimes wonder why I bother.
But hope springs eternal, I've planted some bush beans where the garlic was in hope of taking advantage of the big rainfall we are supposed to get from the remnants of Beryl.
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So much rain here in MN this year... I decided to try the mosquito lawn spray service since I'm pretty sure we will be at Def Con 1 malaria levels by July 4th. They tout it as being "safe for people, pets and plants". Our kids and dogs are gone so I feel less uneasy about doing it. Plus, my Mom still enjoys gardening but has a lot of brush and woods on her small property. Does anyone have any experience with this? A relative of mine got West Nile virus in AZ. He was in the 1% who had it so bad that he got neurological damage and had to relearn essential ADLs. He's recovered now but...yikes. Arizona + mosquitoes. Go figure.
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I still have hope for my peppers 🫑.
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It's that time of year when all the wonderful flowers of June fade away and the hope for the garden fades with it. Powdery mildew has arrived and I expect Japanese beetles are just around the corner, the hot, dry weather stresses plants, and the $%#@ squirrels finally found one of the two sunflowers they have missed up until now (sigh)
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cw,

They are hanging on by a thread but I am still hoping they will come back.
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Yay! where there's life there's hope NHWM!
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Nacy,

Yeah, it’s stifling here!
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My peppers are still growing but I don’t know if they will flourish or not.
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🙂 What did the alien dandelion say to the Earth dandelion?

Take me to your weeder!
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cw,

They are sitting in the pot looking pathetic, a few peppers and no leaves. I don’t know if they will come back or not. We’ll see.

It is super hot here. My husband stayed with me in the hospital, even though I told him that he could go home.

So, they weren’t watered. I think he thought it was okay because we had a lot of rain previously.
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Did they perhaps get dried out while you weren't able to watch them? Whatever happened don't write them off yet, a little TLC might get them back on track (but don't overdo it)
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