Why I Oughta...

Last week, I read this post from Lee Reich where Lee compares spreading their hardwood ashes to conjuring the dark arts and had a little laugh.  I also...quickly learned a bunch - including how wood ash is a good source of Potassium (the "P" in N-P-K) and how a garden amendment that I've heard about/read about - Potash - is (obviously) the root word from Potassium, but is made up (mostly) of Ash.  Hence the name.   Lee talks about how the spreading of wood ash isn't a precise project; rather just a thin 'tossing' of the ash on the beds does the job.   Because we burn a lot of fires during the Winter, we end up with a surplus of ash that I collect at a couple of intervals when I clean out the fireplace and ash bucket.  Over the years, I've posted about how I've spread this ash - around trees in 2019 and on top of some snow in the perennial beds in 2022 .   I ended up with a bit more than five gallons of ash from Cherry, Birch, Oak, Hickory and....well

Here's something that's new to me:  making banana water to feed Staghorn Ferns .  If you read up on Staghorn Ferns, you'll soon discover that they like banana peels.  In big, mounted Staghorn Ferns, some folks just toss the peel up *in* the fern.   I didn't do that. But, I did soak a banana peel in a glass of water for a little bit over a day and created a potassium, manganese and phosphorus-laden glass of water that I split between the two mounted ferns. Below is a photo of the water after 24 hours with the banana peel soaking in it. #19 on my 2023 to-do list is: "Staghorns take work" .  Feeding them banana water is part of that solve.