T wrote:
songbird wrote:
...mentioned wild small black raspberries...
You got my full attention. Wild means
they have not been hybridized for unnatural
levels of carbohydrates.
I need a botanical name so I can chase
them down at one of the wild plant web sites.
here's a useful link which saves me some
typing. :)
https://www.healthygreensavvy.com/wild-black-raspberries-blackcap-berries/
any time you can grow from seeds that
is certainly usually cheaper than trying to
find and buy starts. i wish i could do more
of it here, but there's just not very much
decent space at all for that. it's a small
house and there's no basement with easy
access, the light is poor for growing things
too. i keep only a few houseplants - as a
kid i used to have shelves and shelves of
them along with other plants scattered
around the house (a different house that was
much larger).
blackberries i won't plant
because they are so hard to control and i
have enough projects already...
No problem for me. I can see for you
because you have a green thumb and
know what you are doing.
i don't plant them as they would be just
another thing coming up in places i don't
want them. i don't have any time to forage
them either which we used to do when we were
kids (and i didn't have all these gardens to
keep after :) ).
Me, on the
other hand with my black thumb, can
kill anything edible I want just by looking
sideways at it. Unfortunately, it does not
work on weeds, who just laugh at me.
the problem you have is pretty difficult
location/climate/soils and with that probably
some very intense sunlight when it also gets
to be hot outside. you also may not be on a
very good water supply in terms of water
quality (i'm guessing based upon your general
location in the dessert SW).
it's hard to do things with hardpan alkaline
soils in an arid climate. you pretty much need
to pull out all the tricks for soil building at
the same time dealing with arid conditions and
if you try to do raised beds the heat and drying
winds make that even tougher. pretty much what
you need is a way to bust trenches down deep
enough to hold any organic matter you can
manage to grow and scrounge up along with some
wind breaks to help hold moisture but then if
your trenches don't drain well enough you can
also get too wet when it does finally rain so
you need a way to soak in the extra moisture
somehow too. not an easy situation. it can
be done, it takes time though.
as time goes along you can learn and adapt
some things and get better. just use your
brain and apply the scientific method as much
as you can, observe what happens, try new
things, etc.
every season you should try to bust those
ground pots up a bit bigger if you can and
scrounge whatever organic materials you can
find to decompose over the winter months when
there is more moisture. the acids from the
decomposing materials will also help bust up
that hard ground (and the roots from any
plants will also help with that). if you can
do a trial sometime of sprinkling the empty
pots with winter wheat or winter rye (the
grain not the grass) and then turning that
over in the early spring it may also help.
i would love to do it here in rotation but
Mom does not like how the chipmunks will
take the seeds and move them around. she's
really picky about how things look and
considers mulches of dead plants to look
too untidy - which is pretty sad to me
because they really help break up the heavy
clay we have - i'd be years further ahead
in soil conditioning here if i could have
grown these in rotation with my other
plantings through the winter, also they
look a lot nicer than bare dirt to me.
such is the breaks. we do what we can and
keep on going. :)
songbird
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