Can you capture them with a rope noose trap, then humanely harvest them with gas(CO2), lethal injection (KCl) or gently steer the neck to a deer-guilotine?
i put a little rice in all of mine because i keep the shakers on the back of the stove.
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I went to school in Syracuse. It is definitely the city that Salt built. That and sodium carbonate. The Solvay process was a pretty big deal at the time.
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I have 2 bags of 13-13-13 sitting in the carport in containers waiting to be used. They were purchased last year on speculation the price would jump. Guess what? The price jumped. Two bags is enough to get me through a year with an acre of garden plus fertilizing about 50 seedling pecan trees. I may get one more bag just to be on the safe side. Regardless of fertilizer price, I have chickens and will shovel out the building to use on trees and some in the garden.
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On the Fertilizer topic-
I have been following a fellow blackberry enthusiast for awhile. He doesnt fertilize at all only uses leaves. He stopped posting on FB because everyone wanted to use ‘real fertilizer’… but i tried his method and so far i like it. On top of the nutrients i am getting leaf mould (mold)…
Here is a statement on tree leaves-
Autumn tree leaves are one of the most efficient organic fertilizers, as they contain virtually every nutritional element your plants need.
Tree leaves are the end source of all of the elements a tree’s roots draw from the ground. Nitrogen, Phosphorous, Potassium, Calcium, Magnesium, Sulfur, Copper, Zinc, Manganese, Copper, Boron and more are found abundantly in leaves
This experiment may fail… but its free and i have plenty of leaves. I have piles of leaves, i have a leaf shredder, and my local city has a free leaf compost pile. I got 10 tons dumped last fall.
I also have access to free chicken and horse manure…which aids in breaking down the carbon.
Yes its more work…but i need the extra exercise and i like the idea of doing it natures way.
Final thought- his reasoning is that blackberries thrive on the edge of woods and forest… the only fertilizer they get is fallen leaves. and that the modern cultivars are just children of the wild ones.
This year i plan on ‘fertilizing’ everything with my leaves. May be a failure…may not.
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What your saying is consistent with my beliefs. We discussed this concept extensively here Tap roots why they are important and why they are missing . There is no question at all oak trees are loaded with calcium so if your tomatoes get blossom end rot which is caused by a lack of calcium the leaves would correct that. All that said trees are all different in nutrient content because of the type of tree they are. Every weed pulls different nutrients to the surface.
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I save all of my eggshells… and put them in a small compost bed that i have…the worms eat all of them or they disappear during fall/ winter… i then top dress my tomatoes with that mix. I screwed up with my tomatoes last year by adding grass clippings. Some of my plants were over 10 feet tall. Too much N i guess.
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You made me go there with weeds but I been avoiding it Reading your trees , bushes, weeds to determine soil needs and type
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If you have any doubt about how the weeds etc are working to ‘fix’ the soil try using a scuffle hoe. I bought one recently and i love it. However i do feel bad about using it. It shaves the weed root layer off like a surgeon… but in that root layer the worms are using the weeds/grasses root system to build soil. I take the shaved weeds/root sytem and put it in a wheelbarrow and haul it to my worm bin… where they finish off the organic matter.
I wanted to do no-till on a row that i am going to grow black rasps…but i do know its full of rocks… so i had to get those out with shovels and mattocks and sledge hammers before i gave the black rasps a forever home.
Since i destroyed the weeds roots and the work they were doing i will add leaves and wood mulch and compost… i cant do the job that the weeds were doing but i am going to do my best.
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A long time ago we used to get leaves hauled in by the truckloads to our peach orchard, from a lawn service company in the city. Plants and trees loved them. Lots of good healthy biolife in their compost. I never burned anything by putting leaves around it.
I quit getting the leaves from the lawn service because there was too much trash in the leaves (cups, plastic, you name it). It was too much of a hassle to pick up all the trash. There was a lot of trash.
I still get leaves at the house from a neighbor who vacuums their one acre yard and dumps them around the fruit trees in my back yard. The only problem I’ve had is that once the neighbor piled finely shredded leaves about 2’ high on a youngish peach tree, and that rotted the trunk and killed it. That’ was because the shredded leaves packed down really dense and rotted the trunk.
When I just had my backyard orchard, and I had to go to the city, I would stop on my way back, in neighborhoods who had finely manicured lawns, and load up their leaves or grass clippings they had set at the curb. I’d completely fill up my pickup. Trees and bushes thrived using that stuff.
Once, a long time ago, I kept putting loads of fresh grass clippings and leaves on some first season peach trees. They grew so much that summer, that the trunks were about 3" in diameter by the end of the season (no exaggeration). The next season (second year) I got something like 75 peaches off those trees. The trees were in freshly built mounds, so the dirt was loose. I’m sure that helped. I’ve never been able to duplicate those results. Fresh grass clippings can burn the trunk of a tree, so one has to be careful of that.
Even with about 700 trees now, when I drive out to the orchard, I still stop in the neighborhood along the way, and pick up bags of leaves and grass that people set at the curb. It’s sort of ridiculous for me to do so and a waste of time, since it really doesn’t make a drop in the bucket for 700 trees, blackberries, tomatoes, etc, but I so much like the effect they have on the soil and plants, that I can’t help myself. If I’m honest, I’m doing it because it makes me feel good.
We do still get loads of wood chips from tree services at the orchard. It’s actually enough material to make a difference.
I buy large round bales to mulch tomatoes. It’s expensive, but I like the water conserving effect it has on the tomato plants (since we don’t irrigate). It also substantially cuts down on the weed pressure around the tomato plants. Lastly it’s also healthy for the soil, adding tilth, carbon, and healthy biolife to the soil. It also prevents erosion, compared to bare soil, and keeps soil from splashing on the tomato plants. Good stuff.
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Its worthwhile to see if there is a town/city nearby that does leaf composting. I live in an area where there isnt many people at all and i have one. I paid a local dump truck guy to haul me 10 tons and it goes a long long way. My local one is run by the city… so its free. They have probably 100000 tons of it on hand.
The university tests my local stuff and the guy running it said it has everything that i could ask for in it except for sodium. They said it was lacking in sodium.
I fear that it wont last forever though. They are trying hard to get people to use it… they post ads for it for free and have compost days… but people want to buy the bags from the box stores.
The more people use it the more funding they get to keep it going… but its not going to work long term. People dont like the idea of leaves…to them its garbage/waste…nuisance.
So can we call leaves ‘Fertilizer’? I know some people call it 'Compost".
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It’s a nice thought. We do have local municipalities around KC, which offer free “lawn debris”. It’s good stuff, but paying to truck it is not cost effective for me. When selling fruit it can be hard to recoup costs for things like that.
I do have to pay for the round bales. But they cost me $35 per bale (delivered) and a bale weighs about a ton. It’s reasonably easy to apply (compared to dump trucks of mulch) and does a better job of controlling weeds on the tomatoes.
I agree that compost is really fertilizer. I look at every truckload of woodchips those trucks drop off, as a truckload of fertilizer.
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i always ask a local arborist to drop me a load in june when the trees are leafed out and actively growing. the leaves chopped up in there really feed your plants/ trees that you mulch around. most these guys will drop a load off if theyre working nearby. 1 time i came home and there were 3 piles in the yard. all my plants had near a foot of mulch put around them that summer. by the following spring most of it was converted to nice black soil full of worms.
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Maybe you can use a stimulus check for gas to get it youself?
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I’m not sure I can handle any more free money. Inflation is terrible now I wish they would stop while we are all behind.
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Yes in 2020 gas was cheap about half the price or less than it is now in my area. Facts are facts it’s just the truth. There have been a lot of bad things happen this year. Inflation and shortages is totally unacceptable. If something doesn’t work stop doing it.
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Might be ‘unacceptable’…but I expect overall more shortages occur and more come to ‘accept’ them.
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i have a hard time not believing this is being done on purpose to achieve a end result. why else would they continue to do the same mistakes over and over? common sense isnt so common anymore.
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Pipelines would not really help that much. The problem currently is not enough oil to pump through them. In the short term, we need to drill for oil.
On a different tangent, I talked to the guy who runs the local co-op. He says they are having problems getting seed with no bulk shipments, rather, they are dribbling in a little at a time. I’d like to suggest that anyone who wants to plant a garden consider purchasing seed now, not later. This type situation is what usually occurs when they run out of things fairly fast.
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In 2020, the overall demand for gas decreased as large economies were scaling down and trying to figure out how to manage covid.
There is a lot of nuance that goes into the price of gas and I think some of the posts are oversimplifying how all of it works. The American oil and gas industry is already heavily subsidized and there are plenty of site permits that aren’t being used. Is the answer to offer more subsidies to these companies? Because outside of doing that, the market isn’t motivating them to expand.
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