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Ron
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  • Kingwilliamstown
  • South Africa
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Profile Information

Where do you live and garden?
In town with avery small vegie patch and a small lawn
How long have you been growing food?
10-20 years
Dream garden travel destination:
Dream Garden would be a small holding near the sea.
I love gardening and have had a flair for trying to produce home grown vegies and friuts for a very long time.

I participated in the Food Gardens Unlimited project for a number of years but it folded as we made no progress in encouraging the poor to grow their own vegies. Well, lets say that there were a lot of interested parties untill they realised that we had no cash monies to give!

It was whilst trying to recindle this flame that I stumbled onto this website some time ago but did not join the blogs untill recently. I am pleased that I did this as I now have access to a lot of very handy info and great tips.

One of my main aims will be to seek new or exotic plant seeds from all over the world as, in this area, we are restricted to normal run-of-the-mill vegie seeds.

For example, vine-like vegies are restricted to runner bean seeds only! I would love to try somthing new as I have a 12 meter long netting wire boundary fence that could be put to good use.

I have long looked for the bush-type sweet potatoe but can only find the runner-type. My garden is to small for this and I am compelled to plant small, stand alone vegies.

In the 70's we grew an "upside down potatoe". It was a purple spud that grew on a stragly vine. I could not find one again and I have no idea of where we imported it from.

At the same time we have vegies that may interest other countries and I would be only too pleased to post them on. Most of these seeds are performance tested and even offer "drought" resistant seeds meaning that they do not need constant watering once the plant has established itself.

Interested parties may contact me at this address or by post at:

Ron West
20 Thomas Street
King Williams Town
5601
South Africa

Everyone is welcome.

Ron's Blog

Ron

Change means new ideas.

Having read so manny ideas about container gardening I have all but resolved to move away from conventional gardening!
One look at Ilex's containers and I realised that I have a long way to go and that I can do a great deal more.
The manny other blogs about container and raised bed gardening finally caused me to understand that that type of gardening would yield a constant supply of much needed vegies at marginal maintenance costs. My existing patch needs watering nearly each day because of the… Continue

Posted on November 28, 2008 at 9:07am — 1 Comment

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At 7:56am on May 31, 2009, Anh Collins said…
Wanna chat with me on cam?, come see me here You'll enjoy it. I promise!!!! realamateurwebcams.info
At 9:48am on January 12, 2009, ilex said…
Oh yeah- I forget you're in a semi-arid region. If it's dry, worms dig down very, very deep, where it is still cool and moist. Worms need a lot of moisture.
At 8:07am on January 12, 2009, ilex said…
Ron, I really only know about eisenia fetida, the composting worms I happen to use. The right times to dig for fishing worms are a bit above my pay grade (can I admit to you I've never fished in my life?)

I do know one thing about worms though- they don't like extremes of temperature, hot of cold- and they don't like light. You might have better luck digging for them at night or pre-dawn since it's summer in your parts.
At 4:01am on December 30, 2008, Letti said…
guinea fowls will not nest if they are caged. Go on line and read all you can about them. We had lots of open land the our birds loved that. We had no trouble getting eggs from them. You need to find out more of the culture of these birds.
At 9:06am on December 12, 2008, Letti said…
We kept our guinea fowls outside, they were never in cages. Do you have them cages? After all they are birds and love being out. They always gave us eggs. The trick was to find their nests, cause they never liked building them too close to the house. I can still hear them 'singing' in my head, I can just imaging them carrying on at daybreak.
At 8:02pm on December 9, 2008, Letti said…
This was the first grasshopped that visited my garden, I have seen very few since. I have been interplanting lots of herbs and flowers among my veggies, with the hope that the pests would stay away. I also add some garlic and cayanne pepper to my soapy solution. Thanks for the tobacco solution tip.
I grew up with lots of guinea fowls and had fun look for their nest. They make great watch dogs.
At 8:18am on December 9, 2008, LIsa said…
What is the weather like in Kingwilliamstown? Here in NY, the weather is very strange! We just had twenty degree weather the last few days with brutal wind chills, and today it's going to be almost 60 degrees! We have to wrap our fig trees up for the winter here, which I supposed gets easier the more you do it---I didn't know what I was doing this year, and I hope my tree survives until spring!
At 10:18am on December 8, 2008, LIsa said…
Hi Ron, my figs are mission figs. I am not an avid fig gardener, as this was my first year of planting! The figs were relatively small, but tart-sweet. However, I went to one of our local nurseries run by an elderly Italian man, and he had a huge fig tree on his property filled with green figs, I think they were actually called "white" figs...he gave me one, and it was so sweet and delicious (and it wasn't very big, either)! I sort of wished I planted that variety...but wrapping the one I had was a lot of work, lol...I don't want to do it with two! I hope to eat the figs and perhaps learn how to make fig paste or jam.
At 10:55am on November 28, 2008, Penelope said…
People line wire baskets with moss or a moss-like factory made product available at greenhouses here. I imagine you could line a basket with burlap also, anything "natural" and porous for good drainage that will hold soil will work.

I used to make macrame pot hangers, tying knots in groups of heavy string to surround a pot. You can use any kind of plastic or ceramic pot and hang them up with the macrame hangers.

I only occasionally use hanging baskets/pots here because the summers are hot and the winds dry them out so fast; sometimes i'd have to water them twice a day and if something interrupts that routine, my plants are dead.

Working with one's hands is good for all of us whether we "need" therapy or not; it connects us with the earth from which we are bound when our minds seem to drift off into abstract lala lands. that's why I weave, spin, garden, cook and hug my kids and grandkids every chance I get.

Let me know how the baskets work out. Will you post photos?
At 9:52am on November 28, 2008, Ian said…
Hi Ron,
good news about the picture upload.

Rather than chop bits of the picture away you could reduce the image file size by reducing the quality/density of the image. There are various bits of software around to do this and you may already have something on your computer which will do it for you...maybe in a DTP program if you have a bundle which came with the system...
Otherwise picasa, an image handler from Google is free and has an email image function which will reduce the file size to somethong very manageable...
I think it's at www.picasa.com.
Ian
 
 

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