Duck's New Ragtag garden, Version 2020

[flowerbug]

Until you get pictures, you can think of beer.

Turning Toilet Water into Beer

Brewing beer uses a lot of water: from the irrigation needed to grow barley and hops to the aqua that ends up in the bottle. American brewers use an average of seven gallons of water to make one gallon of beer. This has pushed craft breweries to think about how they can reduce their water...

modernfarmer.com

there are already a lot of projects where the water has been treated and then it is pumped through a wetland, to a reservoir or pumped back underground and then it is brought back after some distance and treated again and used as tap water. most people do not object to this because it has been "greenwashed". but if you talk of taking toilet to tap directly people freak out. in the arid SW toilet to tap is already happening.

the water is clean, probably a lot cleaner than what comes out of many waste treatment plants and is then used by many people downstream, but of course that also goes through another round of treatment.

i've not been able to find how many times the flow of the Mississippi River is reused before it reaches the Gulf of Mexico... hmm... must be a significant amount though it would be interesting to see it expressed as a percentage or multiple.

 

[ducks4you]

Yesterday my friend cleaned my gutters. The debris looks like pine needle bread.
I burned 1/2 of it in my fire pit.
I paid for a 14.5 cu ft chest freezer back in May. STILL Not here, yet. Pretty tired, but I forced myself to put in 3 hours in the garage. My friend helped me assemble my new scaffolding yesterday and I had it where one truck was, truck parked outside overnight. I moved both trucks, thoroughly swept the garage on the truck side, re parked both trucks, moved the crummy spinet piano that is a piece of garbage bc that is where the freezer is gonna go, thoroughly swept the other side of the garage, threw away garbage, picked up and burned any cardboard boxes in the garage that needed it, place the piano up front, to the far right, and put the scaffolding in front of it.
3 hours later and my 4 car garage is mostly clean.
I figure that they will call tomorrow asking when they can deliver my freezer.
First time I got ahead of Murphy's Law.

 

[ducks4you]

Behind on my pictures, need to download from my old camera, BUT, here are some recent ones. I dug up almost all of the iris from around the flag pole. Found 4 mushy ones, but the rest are worth keeping/moving/giving away.
Here are the 2 beds on the north side of the garage. I have NEVER had impatiens get so big! NOW I see why everybody loves them so much as annuals. I transplanted my amaryllis to this bed to get big. I hope I remember to dig it up early next month. I never got any flowers from it, but DD have 4 gorgeous blooms last winter on the windowsill of her office.
I wrestled 11 Rose of Sharon out of my "herb/oregano Only" bed. It took flooding the bed and lots of muscle.
Left the biggest one, and will be transplanting a few in DD's yard, and give away the rest to a neighbor friend. I had one that I dug up and it lived in plain water for a good month. Learned SO MUCH about various plants this year!

 

[baymule]

Your flowers are pretty!

 

[ducks4you]

"Learn by doing." I have learned that you can throw weeds without seeds onto your lawn and mow them into fertilizer. It is, I admit, a lazy gardener's method of disposal, but DD and I did this when we weeded the north 1/2 of her front yard beds, which have smooth stones and large and heavy stones which allowed for a lot of weeds. She poisoned them with grass/weed killer and I told her to hit them again if anything lives. We pulled up quite a few weeds by the roots. I had suggested that we start her 2020 clean up yard work with a "feel good" project that you can drive by on the way home and admire your handiwork.

 

[flowerbug]

iris can take a lot of abuse and survive. i've had them eaten by borers so bad that they've gone completely through the entire rhyzome and still had that piece able to sprout a new plant.

 

[ducks4you]

WAS going to dig today, but I got a last minute signing, they met my fee, so I didn't. Here is Monday, when Lynx decided to crawl in my lap and take a nap with me.
I woke up and she had collapsed.

 

[Zeedman]

"Learn by doing." I have learned that you can throw weeds without seeds onto your lawn and mow them into fertilizer.

Funny, that is what I do to most weeds with seeds. As long as they don't come up in the garden, no big deal. I've never been much of a grass guru... much to the consternation of my neighbor, who is.

 

[baymule]

I miss having a lawn. I miss San Augustine grass. I miss going barefoot in a lush lawn. I have sand, weeds and a rock driveway. Everything wants to stick my tootsies or step on them. The back yard has some turf type bermuda in it, when it gets too tall, we just turn the sheep in it. We machete chop the tall weeds out in the "yard" or pull them up, the sheep graze everything else down. No pretty lawn here.

 

[ducks4you]

Funny, that is what I do to most weeds with seeds. As long as they don't come up in the garden, no big deal. I've never been much of a grass guru... much to the consternation of my neighbor, who is.

I totally agree! However, some of the noxious weeds, like burdock WILL sprout in my lawn, and then I have to deal with them. Others, like clover, I don't give a hang about. DH and I Love dandelions, btw.