Montana Gardener's Lets Thread - Part Deux

The last thread was getting a tad long so here we be. We came from here http://davesgarden.com/community/forums/t/850041/#new

Thanks dahlia!

Now what the heck were we talking about? The rendez-vous at Sofer's place next June?

Blueberries and beer in the compost.

An Imperial Stout is about 3x as concentrated as a Guiness. It is like a robust red wine that will age for a number of years and improve in flavor. The Guiness and the Nut Brown are both past their expected shelf life.

Congrats on getting _some_ blueberries Picante.

Why thanks, DwiD. Not an easy feat, is it?
I'm almost as addicted to blueberries as I am to dark chocolate.
In Canmore I discovered Coppeneur. Frightfully expensive and fabulous.

Its only $100 a pound. Much less expensive than truffles.

Golly, snort! thanks for calculating that!

This is why one should never get a receipt at the chocolate factory. Also enter these purchases in the budget as a 'motley item' expense.

Speaking of chocolate, we stopped last week at the Russel Stover Factory store in Montrose when we went up to Grand Junction. Such super buys... any remaining valentine candy was 8 boxes for the price of one!!! Last time we were there they had boxes of truffles (which were most excellent) 4 boxes for the price of one!! And the candy is really very good, better than I remember Russel Stover candy being.

Ahem, this was a business trip. Chocolate on a business trip is a business expense, no?

It must be!

I used to have friends in Hershey, Pennsylvania when I lived near Toronto. We would pop down for a visit and the whole town smelled delicious. I loved the cute kiss street lights too.

Just a note the RU is June 18-21st. I do like the nut brown, and of course Guiness. I am going to add molasses to my compost this winter to see if it cranks up earlier this spring. Thanks for the reminder to go to the mill and get the molasses.

You live near a molasses mill, Sofer??

No but molasses is sold by feed stores for cattle and horses. So I used to work in a mill where they had bulk molasses. Probably do here. I shall find out.

Horses eat molasses? I so did not know that. I just checked the UFA website and no bulk molasses there sigh. Yes dear picante chocolate is definitely a business expense in that case.

Chocolate is ALWAYS a business expense as it is vital to the operation of any business run by a chocoholic. I would not use chocolate in a compost heap, though I think that is the only good use for beer, other than drowning slugs. I like wine sometimes, but have always detested beer.

Julie, maybe we could co-op on the molasses if we could find a bulk local source of mil grade. docgripe mentioned he provided his own large plastic container with a bottom spiket and had it filled at a local feed store.

I'm not much of a beer drinker, and any form of alchol gives me an instant headache, but I bought an eight pack for my nephew and wife at thanksgiving. Thought I would just try just a few sips out of one can last night and true to form I have this ache in the back of my head which won't go away. But the reason I mentioned this is I heard something rattling around in the can. After giving my worms a dose of the leftover Guiness, I cut open the top of the can to see what was inside. There was a plastic ball too large to fit through the opening so it had to be placed their by the brewer. Then I read the label on the can which called it a 'widgit' for improved taste! If my head didn.t hurt so bad I would still be laughing at that one.

Well how do you like them applies? http://home.comcast.net/~tabco/widget.htm We must come up with a similar device for our Rocks in the Beer Rocky Mountain beer. I suggest we call it a peeblet and make it look like a pebble. +

That widget in the Guinness is so that when you pour it in a glass, it "builds" the same as one from the beer tap. Guinness is a most beautiful beer, forming layers of chocolate and caramel colors. Not that I know anything about beer...

To add digestable energy to horses and cows during cold weather molasses, for the same reason as composting, encourages fermentation and bacterial growth to provide the needed nutrition of a cow and horse. Both use bacteria to convert fiber into bacteria and therefore food in the fermenting gut.

Cows and horses have internal fermenters? No wonder they are so mellow.

Are you inferring that they might be a tad tipsy?
I know from personal experience that if there is candida overgrowth in the human gut, a person can become tipsy just from eating carbs.

I can get tipsy from drinking carbs... the right kind, anyway!

I've seen people get tipsy from sugar too.

Horses mellow? I used to garden out at the community horse stables and you should see them running around like crazy in the wind in the spring. You would think that had had several kegs!

FYI...If anyone is interested I have been conducting an experiment with the feeding of my four indoor worm compost bins. Instead of direct feeding the peelings which are ground up in a blender with gravel syphoned aquarium water, I have been placing the gound mix into two plastic pails to ferment. I found a small jar of molasses to add to the mix as well. Within just a couple of weeks each of the four bins are packed with new worms. When feeding, I stir the fermented mix, add about about two cups of the ferminted mix to the blender, some egg shells and coffee grounds, and do a quick blend. Two benefits from this process: (1) It is easier on the blender, and (2) worms are going through this mix at a must faster rate then the chunky mix directly from the blender. Can't wait to try out the 'spent worm media' or worm casings in my germination and potting mixes. I also add an entire worm compost bin to the outdoor horse manure compost bin in early spring. This may be the jump start I have been looking for.

It is interesting what you are doing mraider, but I think it may be a bit labor intensive for me. I just pile up the stuff, water it, and let it go from there. I never add any worms. They find it all by themselves. Probably your method causes stuff to decompose more rapidly than mine.

I did read somewhere that molasses is a worm magnet. So I mixed some with water and poured it on the compost one day, but then I moved, so not enough chance to thoroughly test the magnetic properties of the molasses.

I was reading a novel the other day, though, in which a character, a little girl, is extremely interested in historic disasters, and one that is described is the Great Molasses Spill of umpty ump sometown, somestate, in which actually some 21 people died, as in drowned in the stuff? (This could be a candidate for our history feature, you think? It has a similar flavor to the Giant Snowflake, though it is a bit more macabre, perhaps.......)

But back to rocks, I just wanted to interject that one time someone gave me a selection of extremely nice rocks some were crystals some not, I don't really remember what all was there...... but the first night I had them I swear, they kept me up all night chatting and introducing themselves, like.

Course, it was in rock talk which as Mulch implies, is quite slow....... but it did happen. Fortunately these were friendly rocks and none of them had anything disturbing to gossip about.

Really it was quite magical. One of my fave memories.

This message was edited Nov 23, 2009 8:50 PM

I believe you about the rocks keeping you up. I tend to gravitate toward them, although I've never heard them chatting, but then, I'm not terribly auditory. Their presence is undeniable.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treacle
Maybe that molasses episode was a reference to the treacle well in Alice in Wonderland. I don't believe there were any worms in that book, although there was certainly a caterpillar... smoking a hookah.

Well, they didn't actually audibly chat, just sort of inaudibly hummed happily to each other but I knew it was rock chat the minute I didn't hear it.

;-)

And the event in question, to do with Molasses, is this one:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Molasses_Disaster

The Boston Molasses Disaster, also known as the Great Molasses Flood and the Great Boston Molasses Tragedy, occurred on January 15, 1919, in the North End neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts in the United States. A large molasses storage tank burst, and a wave of molasses rushed through the streets at an estimated 35 mph (56 km/h), killing 21 and injuring 150. The event has entered local folklore, and residents claim that on hot summer days, the area still smells of molasses.[1]

Sadly, now that I look further into it, it would be quite a stretch to connect this to either worms or gardening, so as to have it qualify for our history thingie. Except, molasses does come from plants.....

I was glad not to have read too far in the novel in question so that it was actually easy to flip back through to find the reference to the Molasses Event, novels not having indices, usually. Makes it frustrating to find stuff. I like it when something that is ordinarily frustrating turns out, in the event, not to be. A good start to the day.

There was a great bourbon disaster at the Wild Turkey Factory a few years ago. I don't know if anyone was hurt or killed, but apparently it really stunk up the town. Bourbon comes from plants, too. Sadly, fish did die, but the Wild Turkey people paid for restocking the river. Not much comfort to the dead fish, though, I suppose.


http://www.bourbon-central.com/bourbon-reviews/wild-turkey-101-review/

This message was edited Nov 24, 2009 12:12 PM

I liked this part: "Apparently the fish were not accustomed to drinking like a fish."

Poor fishies :( Do fishies drink? I thought they just breathed and blew bubbles with it.

Fishes are awash with water.

If the river had a wild fish population, restocking with hatchery fish would not be as much help as you might think. Hatchery fish can really mess up a wild population as they have no sense of proper protocol. I am not kidding.

I have never asked a fish if it wanted a drink. Somehow, it did not occur to me to wonder until now.

Fish protocol in the wild has got to be different from in the hatchery.
Dog protocol in the wild is very different from domestic dog protocol.
Which brings me to wonder about my rock collection....

Oh dear. I suppose I was mucking up the driveway when I threw a few tumble polished domesticated rocks I found in a closet (without any idea how they go there) out into the aforesaid driveway, which had natural gravel type rocks from the wild.

Dreadful sentence, but I am not editing, let's just keep going.

Fortunately little six year old Mason took a liking to the polished rocks and he collected them all when I said he could keep them if he did. But it might have already upset my driveway. Oh dear.

Except rocks' timeline is very very s-s-s-l-l-l-o-o-o-w-w-w so maybe they had not even had time to notice yet.

What do upset wild rocks do anyway, when they are upset???

I'm not sure upset is part of the rock experience. So many things happen to rocks, but they generally just reform into other rocks.

I suspect that when a rock spends time indoors, it might have to be there a LONG TIME before it even thought, hey, I'm not weathering. Nor being compressed nor being heated.