My grandad loved his garden. With compost, horse poop, and worm dirt he has soil so fertile all he did was throw down a seen and jump back and watch it grow. He has two large worm beds. They looked like coffins. Anything organic went in there. All the food scraps, meat, veggies, cold grease, whatever. It would vanish in short order and the worms make it into worm droppings. That all went into the garden and he grew enough food to feed most of the neighborhood and all the folks at church.

I just go to a grocery store.

Dad gave me 1/4 of the garden to grow okra. It was a dwarf variety that only grew to 4ft high. Picked a bushel of okra every other day and sold it to the local grocery store. Still don't like okra.

We had a cherry tree we had to cover with a big net with bricks all around the bottom of the net to keep the birds out.

I have two citrus trees, an orange and a lime, that we had installed in the yard when we re-landscaped 2 years ago. The we actually had 8 oranges from the orange tree. Still nothing from the lime tree. Oh well...patience.

Had at least two of every kind of fruit tree except for the cherry. We had Pear, Apples for pie and Apples for eating, Plum, Peach, Apricot.

The apricot were not a good trees for our zone. They were always in full bloom on the last freeze. Even tried bagging the trees and putting those flaming oil heaters under them like you see on RR track switches. Just couldn't keep them warm enough to fruit. Imaging they didn't get visited by too many bees with it so cold either. One year in 20 it was warm enough that we had apricots.

Think Dad really enjoyed the free labor.

Think about putting in a garden for fresh salad stuff, then remember all the work.
Have plans somewhere for a greenhouse i designed. It regulated heat and light to produce summer crops year round. Made schedules for rotating planting so it would produce just enough to eat fresh veggies year round. Was considering whether to put in bees or not and was looking into the ways to manually pollenate. Was real disappointed when I found things like peppers cross pollenated so couldn't grow different varieties in the same greenhouse without a lot of extra work.

Rescued.

Back to Monday morning.

When I lived at my bachelor house I had a patch of asparagus pop up one year. I guess it was planted by a previous owner. That was real east to harvest, but not much quantity. I planted some tomatoes once. The bug and birds loved them. I got to eat 1/2 of one. There really is nothing better than home grown tomatoes. The store bought ones are pitiful in comparison. I gave up on vegies, and changed to roses. I had 18 rose bushes, and had fresh roses all spring to fall. Roses are not easy to keep healthy. Now there is a new virus that is insect and wind borne. It makes the rose bush grow in a funky twisted way, and they stop producing healthy growth. No spray, or powder will stop it. Just dig em up and throw them out. And don't plant a new rose in that place or it will have the disease right away.

The water bath was set to 118* and they were in for 45 minutes. I think it needed a sear on the cast skillet.

Morning all. Its another Monday at the mines.

We have a small garden and we put the grass clippings, that we get after raking in the spring, into one of the two compost piles. My wife uses one and puts the fresh clippings in the other and switches from year to year. We have a bin for the table scraps and veggie trimmings. Egg shells go in that one too.

We have a Rainer cherry tree, a Montmorency cherry tree (makes an awesome syrup and dried cherries), a plum tree, a pear tree, a Fuji apple tree and a State Fair apple tree. We have to net the cherry trees. We also have a grape vine that nets 18-20# of grapes for juicing and using the soda stream to make sparkling grape juice. We are putting a vine in this spring for grapes you can snack on.

We are up to -2* today! The snow yesterday was packed so when I used the snow blower it just pushed big chunks ahead of it rather than augering it in the chute to throw it.

With the bosses wife as a master gardener she decided we need a compost two years ago. She ordered a compost barrel, that I can dump in my grass clippings and banana peels, and orange rinds, and such in the summer. In the winter it does not compost fast enough so it mostly sits. We also have a pile of compost next to the barrel, and a trash can with big holes drilled in it for leaves. It all get mixed in. The compost barrel is on a frame with a big pin in the middle, so it can be mixed up by just rotating the entire barrel. It all get added into the flower beds in the spring.
Our soil is 100% red gumbo clay. Just scoop it up, get the leaves and grass roots out of it, and bake it to make bricks. After all the years of working the soil in the flower beds the top few inches has turned into regular soil.

To dig in very far takes multiple tools. One shovel or post hole digger, then a scraper to scrape the gooey clay off of the shovel, than a scraper to scrape off the scrapper, and a piece of wood to scrape off the scraper's, scraper. If you wait until the heat of summer and if it has not rained for a while a jackhammer can be used to just break up the hardened clay. We have a several sandstone rocks I have pulled from the yard while digging a spot for another tree.

Yeah, there is an actual ACME brick pit a few miles from us.

The property behind our old house where we put in the garden was a ravine when we first moved there. Guy with a cat dug it out real deep, pushed all the trees in and pushed the dirt back. Made all the area several feet below grade. Found they were wanting to dump a bunch of nice black top soil from underneath buildings where they were doing urban renewal and filled it up to grade with that. Didn't improve the property until I was 8. Sure enjoyed playing in the unimproved lots with the big trees until then.

ACME brick had an old pit started in the 1940s several miles away, close to the fairgrounds. It was HUGE, as in 1/4 square mile and hundreds of feet deep. They finally decided to close that location. Someone bought it, and they made it a landfill for yard waste, and construction debris. No garbage, just refuse. It filled up in a few years. I have some old tree limbs I brought in long long ago in the bottom of that pit. I buddy of mine let me use his pickup and trailer and I had a bunch of old bushes and tree limbs from the two pecan trees to haul away. Now days the city does large trash days so I can just but that type of stuff on the front yard and the city picks it up. That city program helps reduce the a-holes litterbugs from just dumping trash in off the side of the road.

There was another one just north of the Kirkpatrick and West of Broadway.

That one is still in use, and active as a brick plant.

We have pretty good black soil here with some clay in places if you dig enough.

Acme? Isn't that where Wiley got all his cool toys that tried to kill him?

Yep that's the place.

ACME on Road Runner cartoon stood for American Company that Makes Everything.

from Wiki: and: I prefer the misconception!

Yeah me too...That's why I keep spreading ACME as an acronym.

Make ACME great again! :)