Jarhead,

Do you have oak trees on your property, especially White Oaks?

if they are bitter, they haven't been leeched enough.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J…..%C3%A9rico

sorry about the first acorn fed hog link it was way to convoluted….. this one is more to the point

I am trying to do a more low tech sustainable garden. I have not yet got the spring piped to the garden but rain has been good here this year… the winter did not want to yeild to spring this year so planting was a wee late.

My peas & snow peas and string beans have done great waiting on lima beans now. The tomatoes are still green but there in awesome amount. The store bought seedlings (broccoli cauliflower and cabbage eggplant) is doing ok (I had to lime some for the worms that love these plants)

The vines are doing great but only the cucumbers are fruiting so far the others are just plenty of blossoms so we will see.

the lettuce and spinach were failures.

Red beets are kind of puny. Corn is kind of puny. (uncle let us glean about 26 gallons of sweet corn, in the freezer now). My apples and peaches are kind of puny but I only fertilize them I need to look into some home made sprays.

My root crops look good but I cant say for sure potato turnip rutabaga parsnip carrot all look good from above the peanuts look kind of scraggly and I don't expect much when I pull them.

My tobacco is doing good…. now I will have to learn about curing it.

Crabby, that's quite a variety you have there…what part of the country are you in? Just curious.

My gardening experience can be categorized as a complete disaster but I think it's more of an eye opener. I can't remember the ole saying that starts out talking about the hilltop then ends up with the phrase 'the fertile valleys below'!!! The weather and erosion, no matter how much soil amendments I put in my raised beds, sooner or later packs the soil down and leeches out the organic matter. The beds need to covered when not in use, aerated prior to planting, and then add a constant supply of composting organic matter. All quite a task during normal times when you have a job and can buy gas, rototillers, use a truck to go to the local dairy farm or horse farm for manure or garden centers to buy peat moss, and fertilizer, and treated lumber for raised beds, and deer fence (a tree just knocked out my fence a couple weeks ago)….the experience has been locking my attention to ensure adequate employment if possible after SHTF. If not, and I have to rely on what I produce? LTS is only a buffer: I figure I have 40 more years on this earth and I can't store that much food!!

Pete said:

Crabby, that's quite a variety you have there…what part of the country are you in? Just curious.

My gardening experience can be categorized as a complete disaster but I think it's more of an eye opener. I can't remember the ole saying that starts out talking about the hilltop then ends up with the phrase 'the fertile valleys below'!!! The weather and erosion, no matter how much soil amendments I put in my raised beds, sooner or later packs the soil down and leeches out the organic matter. The beds need to covered when not in use, aerated prior to planting, and then add a constant supply of composting organic matter. All quite a task during normal times when you have a job and can buy gas, rototillers, use a truck to go to the local dairy farm or horse farm for manure or garden centers to buy peat moss, and fertilizer, and treated lumber for raised beds, and deer fence (a tree just knocked out my fence a couple weeks ago)….the experience has been locking my attention to ensure adequate employment if possible after SHTF. If not, and I have to rely on what I produce? LTS is only a buffer: I figure I have 40 more years on this earth and I can't store that much food!!

Pete,

Just stick with it, you will improve your soil every year and learn valuable gardening skills by just getting out there and doing it, and doing diligent research of course. I am in the north east. The dog has been kept in a kennel every night to keep critters out of the garden but if we forget …. the deer nibble off the cucumber vines or pepper plants on their way through….. no need to make jerky just yet the squirrels have had a feast in the blueberry bushes  but I have two teenagers who will be bringing in the berry fed squirrels this fall.

My parents grew a garden when I was growing up in rural America (I got to help weed it ).  We would eat fresh vegetables during the harvest season and my mother would can enough food to last through the rest of the year.  I remember going into the woods with my grandfather to pick currents, raspberries, and blackberries.  My mother would make jelly and jam out of them.

Some years, the weather was funny and the growing season in the northeast U.S. was too short, too wet or dry, or too cold.  The garden and woods did not produce enough food to can for a year's supply.  My mother would buy some the items (peas, squash, corn, string beans, beets, and so forth) when they arrived in season at the grocery stores (she was always monitoring the newspapers for sales).  Some fruits, such as peaches, did not grow well in the climate and had to be bought from the store.  Tomatoes were the 50-50 crop — some years, they were OK; while other years, the growing season just wasn't right for them.

We had one neighbor who would tap his maple trees and make maple syrup (it takes 16 quarts of sap to make one quart of syrup).  My father knew how to do this, but thought it was too labor intensive for what it would cost to buy the stuff from the store.  But sometimes we traded things — our peas for his syrup, so I got to sample it occasionally.  Homemade maple syrup always tasted differently from the stuff we got from the store (and it took me a while to get used to the homemade kind).

My grandmother would turn cabbage into sauerkraut through a winter-long fermentation process.  She would also turn grapes into wine (my father would crush the grapes when he was a kid using the old-fashioned method of jumping on them while barefoot).

Even if one is learning how to grow a garden, we can still learn how to preserve food by buying raw vegetables and fruits from the store and preserving them.  It makes sense to have a stash of food on hand just in case the U.S. economy collapses hard and long in the coming years.

The stated shelf-life on store-bought canned goods tends to vary from a few months to a few years.  But this may be a conservative estimate by the food companies to keep lawsuits at bay (or perhaps the industrial canning process is not as good as it could be).  The actual shelf-life of canned goods (especially homemade goods canned correctly) can be a lot longer than the "official life" on industrial-made goods.

Five Different Shelf Life Studies: Two on Canned Food and Three on Dry Food

Although the food had lost its fresh smell and appearance, the National Food Processors Association (NFPA) chemists detected no microbial growth and determined that the foods were as safe to eat as they had been when canned more than 100 years earlier.

A canned food shelf life study conducted by the U.S. Army revealed that canned meats, vegetables, and jam were in an excellent state of preservation after 46 years.