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Will Dry Beans Germinate?
One experiment that I did, just before the first frost landed here, was to see if regular dried beans would germinate. I wondered if they were heated to hot during the drying process to prohibit them from sprouting. Turns out that they were not. I cannot say that all will perform like these 11 varieties…
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The Season Changes!
We had a frost roll through here for a few nights. Not really unexpected, but I would have enjoyed a few more weeks without it. There were a few things that were but a week or two away from being able to harvest but it has been a good year. A late planting of beans,…
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How Much To Plant
Well, here we go! Outside of gardening, programming is one of my hobbies. I love numbers and data. If one looks hard enough, they can find all kinds of data related to gardening. While one can find out a suggestion for how many plants to sow per person, fresh and putting by, there exists a…
After some 50 years of either planting too much or too little, I have decided to go about gardening from a different angle. I know about the numbers that say to plant x number of plants per person but it still seems to be a bit vague to me. I suppose that is one way to go about it, but I have a desire for a certain amount – such as, how much do I need to plant in order to have a quart of green beans per week. Or 2 quarts? That is where my mind lies at the moment.
Hopefully I still have a few good years left in me to get this figured out! In the past, I have always planted as much as I could and dealt with what I was able to get out of it. But as I look ahead to the future, I want to trim the garden down to a more manageable size – a garden with a purpose! I tend to live my gardening life through pictures and so this will be one way for me to document the trials while maintaining them for the years that I may not remember – cannot think of the name of it at the moment but there is a disease that makes you forget things as you age 😉 It is not funny but it is a reality that may lay ahead.
Perhaps also, it will be here for our children that have yet to be smitten with the gardening bug. Oh they do tinker with it, but not really to the “putting it by” level – though they surely were brought up that way! Well, that is what this site is to be about – knowing what you want to eat and how to get it into the pantry. How much to plant per person? Well, start with “How much will they eat?” – not a lot of need in growing something that will not be eaten. How often do you eat a can of beets? Figure that out and then plan to grow that. No need to grow enough beets for 4 people if only one eats them! So, that is where I intend to tackle this – grow x number of plants to provide that many pints or quarts to fill our need. At least that is the intention!
There exist a lot of barriers and reasons for a garden to fail to provide this but we will do our best to take them on and fill the pantry up!