Yes! Potatoes are lovely, just don't eat any of the green parts. Good for you guys. Growing one's own food has a large spectrum of benefits that are hard to define, including just respecting the true value of food production labor. Highly recommend getting big time on your own compost processes - cuts out a lot of the trash and unknown sources. Probably a wood chipper too, if the bushes and trees at your place grow like I suspect. Deep mulch food forest.
I wonder how long it will be before the mammalian gut biome has evolved to do something beneficial with consumed plastic - that process is definitely well underway already in the oceans. Once it really picks up, it might be a big deal, like when they figured out how to eat lignin and cellulose.
Cronenberg's son and daughter have overtaken his recent work for me. Would you rate "Crimes of the Future" highly? I found it hard to get through. Stopped watching about 30 min. in but not necessarily because I hated the film. Just had other things come up and never got back around to it. "Infinity Pool" and "Possessor" satisfy my desire for new old school Cronenberg.
Welcome to the world of garden-y goodness! And the delight of going out to the garden, doing something useful with your hands & forgetting the human instigated clusterfucks (which online media portrays as terminal & looming over us from all sides, yet somehow has not caused our extinction. Yet. Better check Substack in box right now, maybe it's going to hit us next week???).
We also made the mistake of taking "free compost" from the local yard waste drop off site about 10 years ago. And I'm STILL finding bits & pieces, everything from plastic bag fragments to whole tennis shoe soles, kids sandals & toys, golf balls, spark plugs?!, you name it, if people could lose it in their yards & rake it up with the lawn clippings, leaves and tree pruning debris, we got some of it. 150' X 50' (large!) garden, clay type soil, we accepted FIVE 12 cubic yard dump trucks of the stuff before realizing what un-earth friendly delights it contained & stopped...
Then, a local farmer told us he had a mountain of composted cow manure, we could have truck loads dropped for the price of his fuel to load it & drive over! YAY!!! So we took three 12 cubic yard truck fulls of THAT. And discovered the idiots had let all the ORANGE, NON BIODEGRADABLE, VERY STRONG PLASTIC BALER TWINE from around all those hay bales end up in that damned cowshit trove, where it wound tiller tines into impenetrable yarn balls every hundred feet or so for several years afterwards...
I worked for farmers as a kid, haying, washing cow tits, working tobacco, detasseling seed corn, weeding... My farmers would have fired my ass for letting anything like that which could tangle an implement "get away" into their fields- And the baler twine we used back then WAS biodegradable.
Gah. I'm a' go pick some broccoli now and forget my bitter memories...
Twine was probably left on the bales, ended up on the ground in feeding/loafing area, then scooped up by loader while cleaning up cow pies & bunk feed from the ground. Cows who eat big pieces of twine often get the ball of twine stuck in their stomach. Bales should go on a stand, plastic twine or wire removed & disposed of, especially modern PLASTIC non biodegradable twine. Old fashioned biodegradable sisal twine would decay in gut if swallowed, my farmers STILL made me remove & dispose of, got stuck in manure clean out systems, trip hazard.
Back when bales were made with wire, vets had MAGNETS & made cows swallow them to pass through & clear out any scraps of steel baling wire the cows swallowed. Doesn't work with plastic-
In my experience, somewhat limited in scope and scale, but over many years, compost is nice to have and a good thing to do 'for the environment' with some food waste (also earthworms*) and for medium to large scale home gardens, but not really necessary if you're doing a few beds and raised planters as a hobby. Good skill to learn though. Just decent soil (ours is clay-ish too) and some extra potting soil (without little 'plastic' beads) will work fine for most smaller scale purposes like yours or mine.
Don't know about your part of the country, but I have to use slug bait or they destroy EVERYTHING within a week of each heavy rain. It's just a ferrite (iron) compound and totally safe if used properly, not placed right on the roots of the plants and around rather than in the beds if possible.
If and when you get "serious", you might consider raised ~2ft high metal planter boxes. I doubt stuff rusts as much where you are as here, but who knows. With metal or wood planter boxes, always do as much research as possible on what the composition of the metal is and what the wood is treated with. You should expect non-treated wood ones to disintegrate over about 3-7 years depending on climate, but no worries about chemicals leaching into the soil.
*If you're interested in using earthworms, I learned that a lot if not most of the ones commercially available (and now out in the "wild") are actually invasive species. I don't think they are causing any problems to the native ones, but I could be wrong; been a while since I read about it and I don't use them other than whatever species is already in our soil (which again, could be invasive).
Show us some pics when everything is harvest ready?
Slugs are lushes. They want BEER and will happily drown themselves in a bowl with an inch or so of leftover beer in the bottom left out in the garden, set down into the soil until rim is just above ground level. It's enough to drive a druid out of his tree-
Tried that before I learned about the bait and it didn't work. I had several beer cans cut in half, partially buried, and a few bowls with 2 types of beer (an IPA and some kind of Budweiser) in case some of them were beer snobs. There were just too many of them. Hundreds of all sizes. I ended up just going out back with a flashlight every night and picking them off the leaves or the wall of the garage and squashing them. Once the bait was deployed the problem cleared up quickly, but that could have been aided by the slug murder spree I had already gone on. lol
The "Brevette Pfc. Billy Masterson" screen name is stolen from an obscure SF story by either Kilgore Trout or Kurt Vonnegut AFAICR- Google doesn't admit to knowing.
"Ley lines". Lines of mystical/magical/woo-woo force, allegedly. And turn the page. Or better yet, start the comic at the beginning & learn the odd tale of a wombat mining engineer, shanghaied into an alternate universe.
Same for me with the beer, after a week it hadn't made a dent in the outbreak I had going and things were getting stripped bare at a rate that was giving me real heartburn. The iron bait had the mischief managed in two evenings. It's really dry here and those are a rare pest, it might be a different story somewhere else.
Yeah, they're ravenous. Amazing how just one or two can totally deleaf a pepper plant in two nights. I would probably have had 3-4X the yield if I had taken care of it sooner. Beer was a cute but useless attempt. They're far from rare here on the Gulf Coast. Even without a garden they're all over the place and prior to planting my first crop I left them alone thinking they were normal & harmless and the lizards and frogs would eat them.
"I left them alone thinking they were normal & harmless and the lizards and frogs would eat them." ha, that was my first reaction too - probably the worst regular pest I have is late season aphids, and they don't even come close to the utter destruction those slugs brought. In 16 years of gardening here the slugs are the only garden pest I ever bought and applied a "chemical" pesticide in the garden to get rid of them and I don't regret it.
I have no idea why but aphids are not an issue here. It's this kind of mite that slowly kills the leafs and is hard to notice until it's almost too late. The slugs were a wrecking crew.
If I'm giving the benefit of the doubt to some people, it's that some see what are in fact specific compostable bags containing other food waste etc., and thinking that it's okay to just throw it all in any plastic bag. I am a kindly soul however (and of course the harder plastic material you're coming across is inexcusable). Anyway, best of luck with the crops!
Yes. Compostable bioplastics are a thing, but if you put regular plastic in the compost or compostable bioplastic in the regular recycling bad things happen. So on some level the use of plastics should probably be more regulated (in order to make the product lifecycle less of a disaster). Putting the onus of recycling on individual consumers is the plastics industry’s way of distracting us so we don’t tame them.
"The government here collects yard clippings from residents, composts them in huge mounds, and then grinds them up at a facility near the local sewage treatment plant. "
Same here. Same plastic issue. Guessing it's from leaves collected from the streets, & local parks [SLOBS!!! ] I just fish it out as I find it. In the short term, think of it as built-in aeration. *shrug*
We used to surround the perimeter of our house with bags of leaf and yard waste that a nearby city collects in the fall. The bags added a lot of insulation for the winter and were partially composted by the time we removed them in the late spring. We stopped doing that because there was so much junk in the yard waste. Mostly the unrecognizable plastic bits you are describing but also a few needles and less savory items. Our geese would chew on the plastic, probably not a good thing. In rural Maine plastic might be the least of our problems, illegal pay to dump operations where people pay small amounts to dump in someone's back yard and chop shops that dispose of automotive fluid and auto parts on site are everywhere. Visible or not, trash covers every inch of Maine.
Wish I had a picture. They were large trash bags filled mostly with dry leaves. We pushed them up against the outside walls, not stacked just a line of single bags against the base of the outside wall around the entire house except for the doors. Our house is relatively small, 640 sq. ft./two 40' shipping containers, so this was easy to do. Snow falls on them adding to the insulation. Not an immense difference but noticeable. Ground squirrels sometimes created nests in them but there's always a downside. Gave up on the idea because of the trash.
Yes! Potatoes are lovely, just don't eat any of the green parts. Good for you guys. Growing one's own food has a large spectrum of benefits that are hard to define, including just respecting the true value of food production labor. Highly recommend getting big time on your own compost processes - cuts out a lot of the trash and unknown sources. Probably a wood chipper too, if the bushes and trees at your place grow like I suspect. Deep mulch food forest.
I wonder how long it will be before the mammalian gut biome has evolved to do something beneficial with consumed plastic - that process is definitely well underway already in the oceans. Once it really picks up, it might be a big deal, like when they figured out how to eat lignin and cellulose.
the last cronenberg film was about that — humans evolving to digest plastic. https://yasha.substack.com/p/crimes-of-the-future
Cronenberg's son and daughter have overtaken his recent work for me. Would you rate "Crimes of the Future" highly? I found it hard to get through. Stopped watching about 30 min. in but not necessarily because I hated the film. Just had other things come up and never got back around to it. "Infinity Pool" and "Possessor" satisfy my desire for new old school Cronenberg.
Welcome to the world of garden-y goodness! And the delight of going out to the garden, doing something useful with your hands & forgetting the human instigated clusterfucks (which online media portrays as terminal & looming over us from all sides, yet somehow has not caused our extinction. Yet. Better check Substack in box right now, maybe it's going to hit us next week???).
We also made the mistake of taking "free compost" from the local yard waste drop off site about 10 years ago. And I'm STILL finding bits & pieces, everything from plastic bag fragments to whole tennis shoe soles, kids sandals & toys, golf balls, spark plugs?!, you name it, if people could lose it in their yards & rake it up with the lawn clippings, leaves and tree pruning debris, we got some of it. 150' X 50' (large!) garden, clay type soil, we accepted FIVE 12 cubic yard dump trucks of the stuff before realizing what un-earth friendly delights it contained & stopped...
Then, a local farmer told us he had a mountain of composted cow manure, we could have truck loads dropped for the price of his fuel to load it & drive over! YAY!!! So we took three 12 cubic yard truck fulls of THAT. And discovered the idiots had let all the ORANGE, NON BIODEGRADABLE, VERY STRONG PLASTIC BALER TWINE from around all those hay bales end up in that damned cowshit trove, where it wound tiller tines into impenetrable yarn balls every hundred feet or so for several years afterwards...
I worked for farmers as a kid, haying, washing cow tits, working tobacco, detasseling seed corn, weeding... My farmers would have fired my ass for letting anything like that which could tangle an implement "get away" into their fields- And the baler twine we used back then WAS biodegradable.
Gah. I'm a' go pick some broccoli now and forget my bitter memories...
Wonder if the baler twine was passed through a cow first...
Twine was probably left on the bales, ended up on the ground in feeding/loafing area, then scooped up by loader while cleaning up cow pies & bunk feed from the ground. Cows who eat big pieces of twine often get the ball of twine stuck in their stomach. Bales should go on a stand, plastic twine or wire removed & disposed of, especially modern PLASTIC non biodegradable twine. Old fashioned biodegradable sisal twine would decay in gut if swallowed, my farmers STILL made me remove & dispose of, got stuck in manure clean out systems, trip hazard.
Back when bales were made with wire, vets had MAGNETS & made cows swallow them to pass through & clear out any scraps of steel baling wire the cows swallowed. Doesn't work with plastic-
https://www.firstindustrialsupplies.com/alnico-cow-magnets-2pk-popular-with-veterinarians-and-farmers-07239/
https://www.canadiancattlemen.ca/features/can-twine-kill-a-cow/
yikes, metal wire through the digestive system sounds painful or even dangerous.
@ArtistFormerlyKnownAsHuffy
Being a cow is no picnic.
In my experience, somewhat limited in scope and scale, but over many years, compost is nice to have and a good thing to do 'for the environment' with some food waste (also earthworms*) and for medium to large scale home gardens, but not really necessary if you're doing a few beds and raised planters as a hobby. Good skill to learn though. Just decent soil (ours is clay-ish too) and some extra potting soil (without little 'plastic' beads) will work fine for most smaller scale purposes like yours or mine.
Don't know about your part of the country, but I have to use slug bait or they destroy EVERYTHING within a week of each heavy rain. It's just a ferrite (iron) compound and totally safe if used properly, not placed right on the roots of the plants and around rather than in the beds if possible.
If and when you get "serious", you might consider raised ~2ft high metal planter boxes. I doubt stuff rusts as much where you are as here, but who knows. With metal or wood planter boxes, always do as much research as possible on what the composition of the metal is and what the wood is treated with. You should expect non-treated wood ones to disintegrate over about 3-7 years depending on climate, but no worries about chemicals leaching into the soil.
*If you're interested in using earthworms, I learned that a lot if not most of the ones commercially available (and now out in the "wild") are actually invasive species. I don't think they are causing any problems to the native ones, but I could be wrong; been a while since I read about it and I don't use them other than whatever species is already in our soil (which again, could be invasive).
Show us some pics when everything is harvest ready?
@ArtistFormerlyKnownAsHuffy
Slugs are lushes. They want BEER and will happily drown themselves in a bowl with an inch or so of leftover beer in the bottom left out in the garden, set down into the soil until rim is just above ground level. It's enough to drive a druid out of his tree-
Tried that before I learned about the bait and it didn't work. I had several beer cans cut in half, partially buried, and a few bowls with 2 types of beer (an IPA and some kind of Budweiser) in case some of them were beer snobs. There were just too many of them. Hundreds of all sizes. I ended up just going out back with a flashlight every night and picking them off the leaves or the wall of the garage and squashing them. Once the bait was deployed the problem cleared up quickly, but that could have been aided by the slug murder spree I had already gone on. lol
https://diggercomic.com/blog/2007/05/02/digger-91/
Funny. At the end, what's meant by "Key Lines"? I checked twice thinking it must have been "key limes" but no. Inside joke or something?
P.S. I've often wondered about your handle. What is Pfc. in your chosen context?
Signed - Mass Slug Executioner
@ArtistFormerlyKnownAsHuffy
The "Brevette Pfc. Billy Masterson" screen name is stolen from an obscure SF story by either Kilgore Trout or Kurt Vonnegut AFAICR- Google doesn't admit to knowing.
oh man, ley lines is a fun rabbit hole you might enjoy
"Ley lines". Lines of mystical/magical/woo-woo force, allegedly. And turn the page. Or better yet, start the comic at the beginning & learn the odd tale of a wombat mining engineer, shanghaied into an alternate universe.
Saw that it won a Hugo. I might actually do the whole thing at some point. Thanks.
Same for me with the beer, after a week it hadn't made a dent in the outbreak I had going and things were getting stripped bare at a rate that was giving me real heartburn. The iron bait had the mischief managed in two evenings. It's really dry here and those are a rare pest, it might be a different story somewhere else.
Yeah, they're ravenous. Amazing how just one or two can totally deleaf a pepper plant in two nights. I would probably have had 3-4X the yield if I had taken care of it sooner. Beer was a cute but useless attempt. They're far from rare here on the Gulf Coast. Even without a garden they're all over the place and prior to planting my first crop I left them alone thinking they were normal & harmless and the lizards and frogs would eat them.
"I left them alone thinking they were normal & harmless and the lizards and frogs would eat them." ha, that was my first reaction too - probably the worst regular pest I have is late season aphids, and they don't even come close to the utter destruction those slugs brought. In 16 years of gardening here the slugs are the only garden pest I ever bought and applied a "chemical" pesticide in the garden to get rid of them and I don't regret it.
I have no idea why but aphids are not an issue here. It's this kind of mite that slowly kills the leafs and is hard to notice until it's almost too late. The slugs were a wrecking crew.
If I'm giving the benefit of the doubt to some people, it's that some see what are in fact specific compostable bags containing other food waste etc., and thinking that it's okay to just throw it all in any plastic bag. I am a kindly soul however (and of course the harder plastic material you're coming across is inexcusable). Anyway, best of luck with the crops!
Yes. Compostable bioplastics are a thing, but if you put regular plastic in the compost or compostable bioplastic in the regular recycling bad things happen. So on some level the use of plastics should probably be more regulated (in order to make the product lifecycle less of a disaster). Putting the onus of recycling on individual consumers is the plastics industry’s way of distracting us so we don’t tame them.
plastic recycling feels like mostly just a cruel joke
"...the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: The Earth plus Plastic..." (George Carlin) https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/comedy/george-carlin-saving-planet-transcript/
oh Carlin, did anyone ever rock a skullet better than him?
(it's better in person: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrzeHZthD7s )
"The government here collects yard clippings from residents, composts them in huge mounds, and then grinds them up at a facility near the local sewage treatment plant. "
Same here. Same plastic issue. Guessing it's from leaves collected from the streets, & local parks [SLOBS!!! ] I just fish it out as I find it. In the short term, think of it as built-in aeration. *shrug*
We used to surround the perimeter of our house with bags of leaf and yard waste that a nearby city collects in the fall. The bags added a lot of insulation for the winter and were partially composted by the time we removed them in the late spring. We stopped doing that because there was so much junk in the yard waste. Mostly the unrecognizable plastic bits you are describing but also a few needles and less savory items. Our geese would chew on the plastic, probably not a good thing. In rural Maine plastic might be the least of our problems, illegal pay to dump operations where people pay small amounts to dump in someone's back yard and chop shops that dispose of automotive fluid and auto parts on site are everywhere. Visible or not, trash covers every inch of Maine.
how would you surround your house with it? like stack them?
Wish I had a picture. They were large trash bags filled mostly with dry leaves. We pushed them up against the outside walls, not stacked just a line of single bags against the base of the outside wall around the entire house except for the doors. Our house is relatively small, 640 sq. ft./two 40' shipping containers, so this was easy to do. Snow falls on them adding to the insulation. Not an immense difference but noticeable. Ground squirrels sometimes created nests in them but there's always a downside. Gave up on the idea because of the trash.