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I have a blackberry bush in my garden that has been growing a little wild on it’s own. It’s all over the place as you can see in the picture above. Now I would still like to have many blackberries year after year so I’ll have to prune it. A blackberry bears fruit on one year old wood so in the winter you cut away the branches that carried fruit this year. Keep two new strong branches to carry the fruit next year.

Just wanted to show you what the weather conditions are like on average in my area:

Usually we have a wet and windy fall and most of the snow falls in January and February. There’s not that much heat around here, so growing oranges are out of the question and melons are difficult. But we’re not too far north to justify transporting our food from far away on trucks. This is not the north pole. If it was that hard to grow our own food maybe we should consider moving further down south. Who said we should live up here anyway… The oil companies?

I’m starting to take a look at what kinds of vegetables I’ll be growing in 2009. Most of the plants from 2008 I’ll also grow next year, since they all turned out quite well and brought us a lot of food on the table. As inspiration I’ve put together two lists for you to get ideas from.

2008 and 2009:

• Bean
• Beetroot, long
• Beetroot, round
• Carrot
• Leek
• Lettuce
• Parsnip
• Pea
• Potatoes
• Radish
• Red Onion
• Spinach
• Yellow Onion
• Zucchini

2009:

• Artichoke
• Asparagus
• Broccoli
• Cauliflower
• Celery
• Chard
• Clove
• Corn
• Fennel
• Garlic
• Horse Radish
• Pumpkin
• Silver Beet
• Soy Beans
• Spring Onions

I will try to get hold of some fine-meshed net to keep the bugs out. Or maybe two layers of net to keep the cats out too. (How do you keep cats out of your vegetables?)

Will you just look at it?! If this is not a killer slug I don’t know what it is. But – I found information today that explains that what we here in Denmark normally refer to as killer slugs are NOT Arion lusitanicus. So the one in the picture is not Arion lusitanicus. I don’t know the Latin name for it if there is one at all.

Sabine from Aarhus University in Denmark did a study comparing the Red Slug (Arion rufus), Black Slug (Arion ater), Iberian Slug (Arion Lusitanicus) and the species shown in the above picture. I believe her supervisor was Dave Parker.

She found that:

• The Iberian Slug has 24 chromosomes
• The one in the picture, Red Slugs and Black Slugs have 26 chromosomes

She talks about the following studies:

• Quintero et al 2005
• Breugelman et al 2007
• Maristella 2007 (chromosome analysis)

I know three things:

• I don’t know what species the one in the picture is
• I would like to grow food for humans, not slugs. Please.
• The bullet function in Wordpress is great

1. Collect them late in the evening and boil them for a quick death
2. Put out iron phosphate that will make them sick when they eat it
3. Use copper strips to form a keep-out barrier around beds
4. Construct an angled fence around your beds
5. Put out crushed eggshells which they will not cross
6. Cut them in half with a pair of scissors
7. Infect the killer slugs with nematodes
8. Keep a group of frogs to eat the slug eggs
9. Raise ducks to feed on the slugs

Other ideas? Please post them in the comments.

Annie from Edifice Rex posted a tip on controlling killer slugs by using copper. Apparently copper will short circuit their body due to some electrolytic effect, and they will stay away since they will get an electrical shock when they try to cross the copper. I’ve been reading reviews of this method and it seems to be working well. Unfortunately copper is expensive and the commercial strips sold is often too narrow and the slugs will cross anyway. The copper also has to be kept clean in order to work as short circuit, but I think it’s one of the better methods I’ve seen.

A few days ago this bed was planted with corn and peas, as you would see on my garden tour post, but as the bed was prepared late there was not much of a chance that those plants would produce much before harvest. So I gave up on them and cleared the soil in order to sow white mustard. You might as well have something growing all the time, since the plants will extract and store nutrients from the soil that would otherwise be washed away from the soil by rain.

I don’t know the exact word in English for these kind of plants but the group consists of clover, lupin, wheat, oat etc. In the spring you dig the plants down into the soil and let them decompose to enrich the soil.

These are the plants I’ve sowed until now for storing nutrients:

• White mustard
• Lupin (collects nitrogen)
• Crimson clover (collects nitrogen)

Others I’m planning on sowing:

• Buckwheat
• Rye
• Common vetch

Some of these plants also attract bees to your garden and the flowers are nice too.

RSS is the next big thing after raised beds. I think it has something to do with Web 2.0, i.e. the next generation of the Internet.

You have all of these websites, that you visit again and again, because the content is updated periodically. I used to do this and waste a lot of time visiting sites that where not updated since my last visit.

When you use the RSS system you use a program (RSS feed reader), which presents you with a sort of custom “newspaper”, with updated content from your favorite websites only. The number of articles in this newspaper is different from day to day. It depends on how many websites you subscribe to in your RSS feed reader and how often they are updated. I use Google Reader as RSS feed reader, but there are many others. The good thing about Google Reader is that it is online, so I don’t need to be at home on my PC.

Most websites today allow you to fetch their new content with a RSS feed reader. Some provide the full blog post or article, and some only provide the headline and introduction.

Using a feed reader can be quite addictive since the content you’re reading is highly customized for you, and you know you don’t waste time visiting sleeping websites. Soon you’ll be adding websites to your reader like a madman, because the system is good and effective, so just remember to use it with caution, or it will start to consume more of your time than you really want it to.

In order to use Google Reader you need to have a Google account. Go to google.com and in the top choose “more” -> “Reader” -> “Create an account”. With your account you sign in to Google and open the Reader function:

On the left you add new RSS feeds and have an overview and on the right you have the content of the different websites fetched from all over the Internet and presented in your custom “newspaper”.

Here are a some examples of the particular address you put into your RSS reader in order to subscribe to a website:

http://happyfarming.com/feed/
http://urbanhomestead.org/journal/feed/
http://whenicomeupforair.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss

often found behind a RSS logo button like on the front page of happyfarming.com

So the format can be very different. Sometimes websites have buttons for subscribing looking like this:

Then you just press the “Add to Google” button to subscribe.

Please leave questions you may have regarding RSS in the comments and we’ll try to find the answers.

My radish are being attacked by these fellows. I hope I can keep them away next year by using a fine-meshed net but still, if you know what these are, please leave a comment. It would be nice to know who’s eating our vegetables.

After my encounter with the leek moth larva I would like to find out what kind of plants that leeks welcome as their neighbor, also known as companion plants. No, leeks are not supposed to look like the ones in the picture They’re infected by leek moth larva.

I couldn’t find any natural companion plants for leek, which surprises me, but it turns out that leeks help quite a few other plants:

• Apple trees
• Carrots (repel the carrot fly)
• Celery
• Onions

Leeks are not a good idea near:

• Legumes
• Broccoli

So I’ll just stick with a fine-meshed net to keep leek moth away. Another trick is to delay planting of leeks until the second generation of leek moth arrive. This will keep their numbers down.

How I’ll keep the cats out of the net is still a big question though I think we’ll have to build the finest cat playground in the neighborhood to keep them the hell out of the vegetables. They’re driving me nuts sometimes. Tonight one of the cats just throw herself down on a bunch of carrots and broke the stalks right above the ground. But of course, she doesn’t know what she’s doing. They’re so zen. Not a worry in the world. Good teachers.