There was “less stinging nettles” from experimental farm network. So it’s being played with.
Vole- tolerant perennial veggies.
@KadenceLunemann There is a naturally occuring species in very northern parts of Europe (atleast) called urtica dioica ssp. sondenii that is stingless or stings less . Maybe it’s that what they are offering at efn. I have no experience of it as it’s futher north from here, but have heard people refer it as stingless.
Good idea! How about garlic that tastes delicious to humans that gophers don’t want to eat?
I got rid of gophers with horseradish. Maybe it was just our particular population. Each spring it took about a week of pouring the horseradish slurry around their holes and around anything I didn’t want them to eat before they vacated.
Wow, that’s awesome! And then you didn’t need to do anything else to keep them out of your garden for the rest of the season?
Nope. They vacated until the following spring. Doesn’t mean others might not have moved in, if they found the territory vacant, but it never happened in four years.
That’s a fantastic tip, then!
Did you grow the horseradish for driving them away, or did you buy it? If it’s possible to grow it yourself, that seems like a great way to have robust local systems.
Grew it. I ground up the whole plant into a slurry.
Nice! It’s a perennial, isn’t it? I think I heard somewhere it was hard to grow. Did it do well for you in the Salt Lake climate?
It was fine. Did better where there was more water, but growing it in one of the dry areas beside one of the emitters did ok as well. I had no problems getting it established.
Yes, it’s a perennial.
Funny story. I had a piece I was growing in a big pot. After a few years I couldn’t move the pot. Turns out the roots had broken through the bottom of the pot and happily colonized the soil underneath.
That is awesome and I hope it lasts for you. Unfortunately, the horseradish set given to me by my brother, was planted in a raised bed. It grew pretty big and then disappeared over night. Found tunnels in the bed.
I’ve recently had luck with no action from gophers/voles by using equal parts of Jiffy cornbread mix and baking soda by putting into their tunnels. Fingers crossed.
Ha ha, those are some vigorous roots!
@pamlc Man, sounds like horseradish doesn’t deter all gophers, then. Unless it was some other tunneling animal that ate it?
O’ yea, I’d love that too and have actually been working at for a bit. Still not seedless or exactly (bite-into-it) size but much bigger than most and quite good tasting.
When I say working on it, I mean I found some big ones on a bush in the planted area of a shopping mall parking lot and swiped some, well more like a lot, or even more precisely, all of them. Must have been some kind of hybrid because the plants yielded different sizes and wonderful coincidence the big ones tasted good. What I guess might be the F3 generation pants are pretty small and haven’t yielded anything yet.
If you have problems with gophers gopher spurge might do the trick. Gopher Spurge (Euphorbia lathyris) seeds, Organic | Strictly Medicinal Seeds
Sounds delicious! I bought some Rosa canina var. inermis seeds last year, because I want thornless rosebushes that grow tasty hips. I haven’t planted them yet because I don’t have the space I want them in prepared yet, but I look forward to seeing them grow once I do.
I would want to cross the hull-less trait found in several C. Pepo lines into moschata and then into maxima squash. A research group I found was able to do it by breeding female pepo to male moschata with only one major problem…the F1 seeds had to be collected before the seed was fully formed and grown in agar cultures otherwise the seeds were nonviable. The F2 intercrosses were stable, hardy, fertile and a quarter had hull-less seeds as expected via simple Mendel genetics. I bet the group is going to patent it and it will be in the market in a few years if a company will buy it. Other than this group, I’ve never seen someone report getting the hull-less trait passed between squash species. If only I was skilled enough to do this work myself instead of relying on others.
Concerning the rosehips: There is a cross between Rosa dumalis and Rosa pendulina that is awailable in Europe, that was selected for bigger hips and high vitamin c content. It is called Pirosa.
I grew luffa in a greenhouse in the UK, it was quite vigorous!
your going to want to soak out or leach the saponins from any chenopodia sp such as lambs quarters