GuardNGuy.blogspot.com

  It was a good gardening year. The absence of work travel and the general lack of places to go and things to see, due to Covid, led to more time than usual to get to projects in the vegetable garden and the flower garden. Things were far from perfect, but compared to past years, we actually kept up pretty well. We got a lot of food socked away from the vegetable garden.   Some of it frozen, some canned, some pickled, some dried, and some fermented.   We have very little, compared to some people on Facebook, but there are only two of us, so I think we have just about the right amount for the year. I learned some things.   Swiss chard, which I only knew about because my parents liked it, is a member of the beet family.   And the root is edible – kind of.   Who knew?   For people thinking about next year, chard can be used in salads, when young, and as a cooked green.   Its main defining quality, though, is that it doesn’t bolt in hot weather like spinach does. I re-learned abo

Like many people, we've been mindful of the plight of the monarch butterfly.  Their numbers have declined, and one reason is the diminishing amount of milkweed available to them.  That's the only plant on which they lay their eggs, and the only thing their caterpillars will eat. We live on five and a half acres or so, and four acres of that was pasture for our sheep, which we no longer have.  So, we have been cutting that for hay for our horse.  There has always been some milkweed around -- mostly on the perimeter of our place, since the sheep ate it, and everything else that was green.  Now, though, the pasture has been filling up with milkweed plants.  That's a slight exaggeration, but there really has been a lot of it.  It's not so good for hay that horses eat. My co-conspirator made it her project to pull the milkweed plants.  She spent many, many hours pulling it, and reading about it.  It turns out that milkweed creates a big network of rhizomes under the soil tha