Earlier this month I spent a day with the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources working on oyster beds with some good people. It was about the furthest thing from my garden I have done all year, and I came home thinking about how much of this comes down to somebody teaching you a thing you did not know you were missing. That was most of my week. I put up a video about chickens and you all taught me more in the comments than I managed to put in the video.
The egg one
The one about what it actually costs to keep a flock fed went further than anything else I posted, about 44,500 views on Instagram. The longer version is on YouTube.
The comments were better than the video. One greenhorn farms mealworms with crushed grain and a slice of potato once a week and called it a low maintenance side quest. Another free ranges all day and only puts feed out in the evening, so the birds wake up ready to forage. Somebody looked at my feed pan and said it looks like those chickens are eating better than a lot of humans. Fair enough.
Three questions I did not get to
Why bake the shells. Two reasons. A low oven dries them out so they crush down to a powder instead of a shard, and it takes care of anything living on the shell. The powder part matters more than people think. Hand a hen a recognizable piece of eggshell and you are showing her what is inside her own eggs, and that is a habit you do not want to start.
From a greenhorn in Portugal, thirty degrees and climbing, lavender looking sad and old, is August still the right time. It is. Take cuttings early in the morning while the plant is full of water, pull from this year's growth that has not flowered, and keep them somewhere bright and shaded the whole time they are rooting. Direct sun is what kills an unrooted cutting.
From New York, east of the city, will rooted cuttings make it through the winter. That first year I would keep them in pots somewhere sheltered and unheated instead of putting them in the ground. A cutting that rooted in August goes into its first hard freeze with very little root on it. Plant them out in spring and they will be a lot tougher by the following winter.
In the app
The garden runs by season now, so you can lay out a fall bed while the summer one is still producing. Closing out a season takes its tasks off the calendar and keeps the whole record in your Garden years, so next August you can look back and see what you planted and when it went in. Recipe cards read cleaner too. A photo that does not scan says so, and shooting the same card twice in one day leaves you with one copy.
More than half the gardeners who joined this week said this is their first year growing anything, and eight of the ten who said what they want to grow named something that goes in cool weather. Fall is the easier season to learn on.
You caught the pine needle thing
A greenhorn wrote in after the pine needle video: as soon as you said pine needles my mind said no, sulfur is what you want, though it is still not a permanent change. That last part is the part people skip. Elemental sulfur will pull a bed acid enough to keep blueberries happy and then it drifts back over time, so plan on doing it again. Here is that one.
One thing this week. Start a fall season in the app and put one cool weather crop in it, even a single row of lettuce. It is the cheapest way I know to keep a garden going after the tomatoes quit.
Also watched a lot this week: blossom end rot and freeze dryer against dehydrator.