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Posts Tagged ‘homesteading’

Portulaca oleracea

Posted in gardening, tagged , , , , , , , , on July 10, 2026| Leave a Comment »

“IF YOU SEE THIS PLANT IN YOUR GARDEN”

That’s the heading for a popular advertisement for purslane (Portulaca oleracea). It goes on to advise the reader to keep the plant and nurture it’s existence.

I say:

PULL IT.

I see this herbal remedies ad frequently that touts the benefits of purslane, some of which are listed below (per an AI summary on the Interwebs):

“Purslane is rich in omega-3 fatty acids, antioxidants, vitamins A, C, and E, and essential minerals like magnesium and calcium, making it beneficial for heart health, reducing inflammation, and supporting overall well-being. Additionally, it may help manage blood sugar levels and promote digestive health. Health Benefits * Heart Health * Blood Sugar Management * Digestive Health * Anti-Inflammatory Properties * Antioxidant Protection“

Yada Yada Yada. Etc., etc. etc.

There are not enough health benefits to purslane to justify an entire garden buried in this pernicious weed. Purslane is a weed.

I spent three days pulling this sucker (sucker of water) out of the raised beds in our vegetable garden. It takes over in a matter of weeks, or even days, covering every visible speck of open ground the vegetables are not planted in. It is worse than the grass I battle in my flower beds.

No, I take that back: purslane is relatively easy to pull out of the ground whereas the grass grows on runners and comes back if you leave so much as a quarter of an inch of the plant in the soil. Purslane doesn’t do that, but it is just as nasty a weed as grass in every other aspect.

If you want to save some for your salad, go for it. My advice is: pull it, kill it, and don’t allow it to multiply. There are a lot of other herbs out there that provide the same benefits and don’t take over the garden. Grow those.

Just my two-cents’ worth of gardening advice. You’re welcome.

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Jaci’s Garden

Posted in gardening, tagged , , , , , , on January 1, 2025| 1 Comment »

I have decided to turn this blog into a Gardening blog. I find myself drawn outdoor more often now that I am retired, and I am even beginning to delve into the murky waters of maintaining houseplants without killing them. I have a lot of gardening how to and how not to ideas, along with my own journey into landscaping the property we currently live on (and, hopefully, any property we move onto in the future, assuming we don’t end up in some Senior Living facility where I will be forced to garden houseplants).

I did get quite a bit done in the garden in 2024. The biggest item on my to-do list was to build a retaining wall inside the vegetable garden area. I bought a pallet of concrete stones a couple years ago (like, three or four years ago). The pallet has been sitting in our driveway taking up valuable parking space for that amount of time. I had a vision of what I wanted to do but the excuses for not doing it were myriad.

I’m not going to kid you: I am 68 years old and things are a little harder to do now.

But I sucked it up last summer and started hauling rocks from the driveway into the veggie garden area. The idea is not only to stop the neighbor’s gravel from eroding into our yard, but to create a long planting bed along the edge of the fence.

It’s almost complete: I have enough rocks left over to put one more layer around the fence, enough corrugated tin to use as a weed/gravel barrier, and then we need to put good potting soil into the space created. It’s not as straight as it could be, but I did it entirely myself, from the weed removal to the rock hauling (well, I coerced a certain someone to help a little with the rock hauling, but most of it was my back ache). My husband will be elected to cut the tin into smaller pieces but I will tell him that when the weather improves and I finish the planting beds.

Now, we just have to agree what plants are going to be planted in that border bed. I want a large rhubarb somewhere in there. My husband has already planted an espalier pear tree and an artichoke that hasn’t produced fruit, but also hasn’t died. We haven’t had a killing frost yet this winter so it may still die. Then, again, maybe it won’t and 2025 will be the year that we get at least one artichoke from it.

My favorite project of 2024 was a bird bath that I made out of a discarded pedestal to a sink we pulled out of our bathroom during the remodel. I placed it in the center of the lawn south of our new deck and dug out a flower bed around it. I placed native round rocks all around that and planted some annuals (I rarely garden with annuals, but it was late in the season, and they were all I could find at the local nursery). I will replace them with something perennial in 2025.

I have multiple bird baths of different depths and sizes: this is the one the crows love. The only expense was the bowl I used for the basin: $4.99 at a thrift store. E6000 is the glue I used to attach it to the pedestal.

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