What have you done today in the Garden?

CM...that is some tip..
I can only offer Niger seed; Rats, baby ones they ate the dropped seed and they died where tney ate, no poison had been used previously whatsoever.

No slug pellets due to no plants there in that space. That area is paved where the washing line is where the died but weeds grow there.

I have to say that since I removed the seed tnere are no more Rats.
K

 

Yesterday we cleaned up a bit then harvested the parsnips, weeded and min-tilled the bed then covered it with plant debris.---Say good nigh, Gracie.
We also cleaned out the greenhouse and stored some hay for the strawberries in there to stay dry. The bags that it was stored in had leaked. Mice, I reckon.

Well, when we got home...we decided to process the parsnips and a load of apples that we had been given the following morning.

So then, this morning was spoken for--parsnips and apples.
This is a nice bunch of them. We had some forked ones, so I am guessing that the ground was a bit too rich for them...but never mind. They were a bit more difficult to clean, but not impossible.


another thing was that with all the rain the past few weeks, the water table had risen...so the distal tips of most of the parsnips were a bit spoilt. Too bad. If we had waited very much longer they would not have edible.

So then, we ceaned, peeled and chipped out the bad places...then rinsed them again. You have to keep them under water while you are working with them, or they will turn orange. Our fingers and palms turned quite orange during the process.


Afterwards we blanched and bagged them.


We have ten packs. That is enough. Herer is the list as it now stands, held on the freezer with magnets:


We made more apple sauce after this fun chore. I have a real weakness for apple sauce.
We are waiting for the weather to become nice again now.

 

Sjoerd, I never knew parsnips would turn orange if they weren't kept under water! Of course, I've avoided parsnips all my life, so my ignorance is understandable. I'm glad you had a good harvest.
I weeded the broccoli and green beans, and prepped the carrot bed this morning. As usual, I had help--Sophia, who thinks the cultivator is a toy, and Timi, who just loves to chase the weeds I toss. I considered picking more lettuce, but didn't want to "overwork" the "help" I was receiving!

 

Thanks Jane. You have some very will helpers there.

 

Yesterday I spread more compost on my asparagus patch and on the garlic sets. The clover I spread as a ground cover is coming up nicely. Harvested some baby bok chois and kale. I think I will make more kale chips. We had the bok chois in our tocos last night.

 

We finished cleaning out the greenhouse and empties the water but and stored it in there as well. We did some schoffeling and finished off bedecking the last of the beds with mulch. We also took away all of our pruning twigs to the spot up on the central parking lot to be chipped in a couple of weeks.

 

Ok Sjoerd....I looked up 'schoffeling' on google & came up with this: (bear with the video, it takes about a minute before the guy arrives with the hoe & Schofffels.
So am I to take it that you and your wife do a two-step around your lottie with hoes? That link then took me to an American version, called 'Shuffling'
Is that one more like what you do?

 

Schoffelen = hoeing......with the sort of hoes that we use here. In the vids below, uopi can see some of the schoffel blades that we have, We have a number of different schoffel--all with different blades and one uses them slightly differently.
The bloke in your first vid is indeed using a schoffel...but the footwork--wellm my garden is too small for that. hahaha.

 

Sjoerd, that was great!! I swear I kept thinking those guys were speaking English. I kept doing an inner "what was that"? I'd love to hear if other English native speakers on this site have the same reaction. It reminded me of when my son first began to talk, he had the intonation and the cadence of our language down and maybe one or two words, but the rest was total jibberish to my ears. I don't mean to imply your language is jibberish of course, but I swear there is similarity there & I wonder how related English & ??Frisian? are.

So this shoeffel looks like a useful tool. (Is that the right word for the hoe like thing?)

 

Cayuga, my grandfather and father referred to a broad bladed hoe as a "scuffle hoe." They were not from immigrant stock (my granddad was actually half Cherokee Indian). There is a scuffle hoe on the market now that has a moveable head, but his was just a regular hoe with a larger blade. I don't remember granddad and daddy dancing in the garden . . . .

 

Chuckle, MG...did you listen a bit to the first video? You'll swear at first that they are speaking English....only you can't quite catch what they are saying. Tell me if that is your experience.

 

Some words may sound familiar to you because there are quite a few words of Dutch origin in the English language (and vice-versa BTW)...even in the American variant of English. Dutch and English are after all, Gernanic languages. Look at this link:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Dutch_origin

Another interesting link:

https://linguistics.knoji.com/frisian-the-language-thats-like-english/

The tool is schoffel. I do not really know how to transliterate it for you for the pronunciation, but the "sch" sound is like the "ch" sound in the Scottish word, loch. Ach wel, you don't really have to know how to pronounce it. If you are ever in Holland, You could take one back with you, they are very handy tools to have. The most difficult thing would be to choose which type of blade you would want. We have 4-5 different blades depending on the job at hand. I do not know of one Dutch gardener that does not have a schoffel....if not for use, then to lean on whilst nattering.

 

Huh! So it wasn't just my imagination. Thanks for the article S.

 

Actually I found the second link quite interesting.

 

S- you are right. I just read the second article. Very interesting to see the links between the 2 languages.

I think I have mentioned I am learning Spanish. English also has romance language roots, so a number of the Spanish words can be guessed.