How does your garden grow?

I have received at least two questions on the alternative gardening method that I was going to try this year. Today I will try to answer those questions. This has been a fun year to garden because of this experimentation. Let me start from the beginning. In March, my wife sent me an email that had a link in it to hay bale gardening. Yes, I still have hay fever. :) I don't know if any of you have ever heard of this before but it was an interesting subject to me. I always had a fascination with things that were unconventional and just plain odd. :) I told my wife that we would have to come up with some hay bales which was something that I just don't carry around in my hip pocket. Through a friend of ours who has some horses, we were able to come up with 8 bales of hay. I thought that would be good enough to carry out the experiment. Two of the bales were packed loosely so I ended up with six that I could use. I laid down some black plastic and put my bales over the top of them in a double row. Why did I put down the plastic? The short answer is that my wife told me to. :) She said she read somewhere that it would help hold the moisture in the bales longer. I angled the last two because I wanted too. :)



Now by the book, you are supposed to water the bales (it takes a lot of water) and add ammonium nitrate to them daily. Now of course I didn't do this. I watered them a little and put regular fertilizer on them and watered them down heavy to make it soak in. Ammonium nitrate is the better way to go. It is a regulated chemical and you will have to sign for it if you use it. This is the same stuff that those nut cases used to bomb the Federal building in Oklahoma City a few years back. That is why you have to sign for it. You can find it at a farmer supply type place. You could call around in your area and probably find it without too much trouble. Like I said, it is the better alternative for this type of gardening. You add the fertilizer and water daily for a week. I really think that a week and a half to two weeks would be better. The fertilizer generates heat like you would get in a compost pile. The heat has to dissipate so that you won't kill your plants.



I water these things daily unless it rains. I water them heavily because they have no way to hold on to large amounts of water. After the initial fertilizing, I fertilize with something like Miracle-Gro once a week. Now these are the results down below after a few weeks. I am growing yellow squash, tomatoes, eggplant, and pepper. Next year I think this would make a wonderful way to grow bush beans without having to bend over so far. That will take quite a few bales. I think an herb garden would be wonderful grown this way. You would just want to start the seedlings somewhere else first. This is a test, it is only a test. :) If you would like to know more about this subject from an expert you should check this link. This man lives in the same county I do but I do not know him personally. His videos are the most informative that I have found on the subject. If you want to do this right, it will be worth checking the videos out. My results are just OK. I think that is because I didn't do it exactly like it was supposed to be done. Going against the grain seems to be a weakness of mine. I've already started seedlings for the second wave of plants I will use after these are spent. I plan to do this until first frost. That's pretty much it and I wish you all a happy growing season! :)

Summer hunting season

I am still in the midst of a job search right now.  Not a lot has happened since I last wrote about this.  I have altered some of my techniques though.  I only try to make in person contacts now.  No more of this calling around stuff.  Online applications are not something that I am doing right now.  I find them to be long and tedious.  They are demoralizing to me.  I carry a copy of my resume´ with me and a list of my references.  If a company is not taking applications, I ask will they accept a copy of my resume´.  Most of the time they will but what I want to talk about today is the interview and the parts of the resume´.

As of yet, I haven't had the first call back for an interview.  This is a first for me.  I have been in the workforce since I was 16 years old and it just feels so foreign to me to be out of work so long.  Now I haven't started worrying about this because in my heart of hearts I believe that something will turn up.  It may not be just what I was looking for but it will be something to pay the bills so to speak.  Now the resume´ writing has changed a little since I first learned to write one.  There is this part called the "objective" and that seems a little odd to me.  My objective is to get a job!  Now I can't put that on there can I?  It just doesn't sound professional.  So you have to come up with a sugar coated way to say the same thing.  This to me is stupid.  Now you know why I hate politics.  Things that should be so simple are made to be so complicated.  I think I will omit this.  The work history and education areas are OK I suppose.  I don't give more information than I have to there though because I want to explain more of this in an interview.  I just have where I worked and what I did and the hire dates.  I only go back 10 years unless the information from a past job is pertinent to the job I am applying for.  Employers generally only keep records 7 years or so on you.  Many times if you have been away for longer than that, they won't have a record of your employment.  This does vary from company to company and they may remember you anyway, but don't count on it.  Another part of my resume´ is references.  Work and personal references to be exact.  Now I will only furnish this on a separate sheet upon request.  I appreciate all of the people that said that I could use their personal information to help me to gain employment.  I don't hand that information out to just anyone and certainly not like giving away a free coupon or something.  I have a friend in a nearby city that is a manager of a company.  There is a special paper that you can buy just to print a resume´ on.  It usually is heavy milled and has a watermark on it if you hold it to the light.  My friend will hold the resume´ up to the light and if the watermark is upside down, he throws the thing in the trash!  He won't even look at the content.  I haven't told him, but I think it is stupid to let a potentially good employee slip through your fingers just because of a watermark.  I don't use this special paper anyhow. :)  Call me a maverick.  I may be an unemployed maverick, but a maverick, nonetheless. :)

If I can get to the interview, life will be good.  Interviews don't intimidate me because I can usually talk my way into a job.  The person interviewing is just a person like me and that is how I have always looked at it.  You have to have all of your ducks in a row when you go in there though.  Nothing really in my past that would hinder me so I am confident when I get to this part.  It is just getting to the interview that is driving me nuts right now.  Now I know some of you are going through the same thing and you all have a few different techniques that you use.  Perhaps we could compare notes and give each other a few pointers.  Anything to pass the time. :)  Hopefully, the next time I post about this will be about how I got the job!  I'll definitely post that when it happens! :)

Grandpa's Farm

Here in the South it is common to find family farms.  They are quickly becoming a past way of life.  It is difficult for many of them to make enough money from farming and they are simply going away.  Now and then you will meet someone that is good at it and you can tell that farming is in their blood.  I believe some people were just born to do certain things.  My grandpa was born to be a farmer.  When I was young you could find him out in the fields on his tractor or using a hoe to cultivate crops.  I am not talking about a garden, I am talking about 60 acres.  He worked it for the most part by himself without any help.  Sometimes my dad or my uncles would help.  My Granny would always be working too but that is a story for later.  Grandpa usually liked to do things by himself.  He loved the work he did on the farm.   He would raise watermelons, cantaloupes, and cotton.  Cotton was still a money crop in the late 60's and early 70's in South Carolina.  When I was in the first grade I would come home from school and pick cotton for money.  He paid me 3 cents a pound. :)  Do you have any idea how long it takes for a 7 year old to pick a pound of cotton?  It takes quite a while.  I think my friend and myself were able to get $2.75 to split between us one week.  That was a good week for me. :)  Well, in 1968 it was pretty good. 

Like I said, Grandpa would grow watermelons and cantaloupes as well.  There was this 20 acre field below the highway he would plant in watermelons almost every year.  Planting this type of crop near the road baffled me.  People would drive by and see this and of course some would stop and steal a watermelon.  High school kids were the most common culprit.  It was just a temptation that proved to be too hard to resist at times.  Grandpa knew every watermelon and cantaloupe that grew in his field.  He knew when someone had been there even if they had left no sign.  How he did this I do not know but he was never wrong about it.  One year there were these high school boys that would stop in the dead of night and not only steal but vandalize his stuff.  Grandpa would take a couple of boxes of shotgun shells and fill them with rock salt.  Sometimes he would just leave the bird shot in them.  He camped out in the middle of the field that night and waited.  Sure enough the kids came back and began to steal and vandalize his stuff again.  He could hear them talking about him mocking him and cussing him.  They didn't know that he was out there with them. :)  In our community everyone knew everyone else.  So these fellas were local and were calling him by name unaware that he was right behind them.  He jumped up and began firing.  Now in all honesty, from  the range he was shooting at, he couldn't have done much damage.  He didn't want to kill them.  He just wanted to teach them a lesson.  He did just that!  They jumped up screaming and hollering and got in their car and drove away.  The town doctor in Honea Path said that he picked shot out of their backsides all night long.  Even at that range he was a pretty good shot.  The town police were called and he told them that it was a county matter and for them to get off of his property.  They fussed a little but they did leave.  It was understood in those days that a farmer would protect his livelihood with force if necessary.  Grandpa never had those fellas steal his watermelons anymore.  He told me this story laughing so hard that tears filled his eyes.  My Grandpa was an interesting man to say the least.  He passed away in the mid 1990's at the age of 90.  I think about him often and smile.  One reason I smile is because of a question that I have.  Why did my Grandpa plant those watermelons so close to the road? ;)