Funny coincidence I bought a 1986 nishiki prestige earlier this year, it’s the first road bike I have owned. Can’t tell you if it’s good or not bc I don’t know anything about cycling but it works for me! Been riding on this bike path that goes through my neighborhood next to a creek and some train tracks. Saw a snowy egret, a deer and one of those little tykes cars in the creek on my last ride.
@“yeso”#p142898
My theory of bikes is "get a road bike" but that's because that's what I like to do the most. It's also because people (including kids) spend 95% of their time riding on paved roads which is... what a road bike is good for. If you're not riding on pavement (for literally miles at a stretch) then we can talk about other things.
Nishiki (especially older ones) is a good brand and $250 probably an OK price too. Most people selling older bikes don't price them in the $250 range unless they were taken care of. Do take a look at the chain and how it shifts. A chain wears out and needs to be replaced every say... 2-3K miles. Also, if there's rust on the chain, the bike just won't work the way it should and you won't be happy with it.
The only thing I'd encourage you to think of is that you may or may not have ridden a bike w/ drop handlebars before. That changes your posture and center of mass quite a bit. This means it becomes kind of squirrely to ride a road bike with drops with a backpack. This is why "bike messenger bags" exist. The center of mass on your satchel is down by your butt rather than up at your shoulder blades. If you're commuting more than say 3 miles, consider getting one. I have a 15-y-o Timbuk2 (that they resurfaced free after the waterproof lining cracked and failed).
I don't do groceries much on my bike. I suspect that you'll be completely happy with it if you have paniers/saddle bags for groceries - again keeps the center of mass lower.
Finally, you need to pump up your road bike's tires every day you ride. Run them at 90% of whatever the max pressure on the sidewall says. You'll get less flats and you'll go faster.
@"exodus"#p142899 All threads are bike threads now. This is all just _Earthbound_ cosplay and talk about whatever _Pokemon_ game lets you ride a bike and I guess _BMX XXX_. No, I will not share my _BMX XXX_ cosplay.
@“antillese”#p142967 thanks yes I like those old steel frame road bikes. Was riding an 80s Peugot with drop handlebars the past few years but the rust was a little on the deep side in places so had to part with it for fear of failure. Appreciate the vote of confidence on Nishiki build. Not a manufacturer I‘m familiar with. Seller is a bike co-op so I’m getting it maintained and road worthy shape. Think I'll go for it
Been meaning to take the plunge on a Waterford for years, but never made enough of an effort to save for it and now they're closing down. Shouldn't have bought so many video games !
I didn’t want to make a thread for this it turns out.
I signed up for a garden plot but I won’t have access to it until the spring. All I have for now is a houseplant and here it is
December 8 was la Día Nacional de la Flor de Nochebuena in Mexico (and I forgot to post this yesterday). I’ve kept this cuetlaxōchitl aka poinsettia alive and thriving since last winter. I gradually got very into understanding what this plant’s needs are and just what it can look like once it sheds the manicured compact christmas gift shape of the rows and rows of them you can find at the grocery store every year.
First things first: I don’t give a hoot if it never blooms again as long as it’s alive and happy!!! I suspect I’ll see some bracts appear again this winter and maybe even the start of some flower buds, but I don’t know that I can get it to bloom without giving it its own room, which isn’t going to happen.
This is kind of my first houseplant that’s belonged to me and I’m embarrassed to talk about the little journey I went through to understand that you can’t just just throw the dead leaves into the pot and expect them to decompose and provide the plant with ““nourishment””. It’s just what I would have done to add mulch for an outdoor garden so it made sense until I thought about it and noticed the uptick in springtails and mould. So I cleaned out the debris, removed the christmas wrapping from the dinky plastic pot it came in—very important if you don’t want the plant’s roots to rot—and loosened up the soil with a chopstick.
I also researched the ideal N-P-K ratio and got an appropriate fertilizer: cuetlaxochime need medium low phosphate relative to nitrogen and high potassium relative to nitrogen so I got some 4-3-9 hen manure and portioned it out on a kitchen scale and it ate it up. No burned leaves! Eventually it started to look like it was struggling to maintain its leaves though and get any bigger, and this was in the middle of summer so I knew it wasn’t a matter of cold air getting in. I decided to give it a larger pot and it’s been doing even better. For now I’ve just been feeling its leaves and soil to tell when I should water it and that seems to be working for us. 
I hope it’s ok to talk about indoor gardening itt!
@“hellomrkearns”#p137483
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@“hellomrkearns”#p148765 nice! That stuff is really growing!
@“exodus”#p148770 it's been a warm and sunny summer! Real glad we made the big beds this year.
I love cultivating stuff. Since i’m busier at the moment, i’m not growing any vegetables right now bc they demand extra care.
I might flood this post a little…
But Avocado season just began and i have two fruit bearing trees. The older one produces 100+ avocados per season!
I also grow a lot of stuff… i lost track years ago but i always take photos when i harvest them!
Here’s some:
Purple Banana
Papaya
Peppers
Avocados
Pink Pineaple
Passion fruit
Tangerines
Cherry tomatoes
Other tomatoes i don’t know the species
Acerola
Lime
Mandarim Lime
Purple Lettuce and Watermelon
Cucumber
Chayotes
Eggplant
Jabuticaba
Cassavas
Corn and Okra
Regional Pumpkin
Zucchinni
Final boss: me and a regional giant zucchini
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It’s worth mentioning my “farm” is in a atlantic forest region. It is know for it’s Terra Roxa (purple soil but actually the roxa means Rossa from italian, so the best translation would be Red soil) that grows anything effortlessly. There are a few stuff that i grow that it’s hard to in this soil tho.
eg: Vinagreira, used to harvest the leaves and make a north-eastern brazil risotto “Arroz de cuxá”
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Amazing! Where in the world are you? Looks like amazing conditions to grow all you have! We have some little avocado trees, but I don’t imagine they will ever fruit. I’m in central New Zealand, which is a fairly moderate climate. Most avocado growers here are further north where it’s warmer.
Tomatoes
Carrots
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Sao Paulo, Brazil.
Brazil uses cheat skills for cultivating
PS: the hardest thing for me was passion fruits. They depend a lot on pollination from specific bugs… Many times i’ve tried but only twice i got fruits.
All organic btw
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Nice tomatoes!! i love them.
I like carrots but never tried growing them.
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Awesome to see all the stuff you can grow. We’re trying with avocados but our tree is still pretty small (like 6 ft high). On the bright side there were several other avocado trees in the neighborhood when we brought this one in, and none had ever borne fruit - you need an A type and B type plant to cross-pollinate to get fruit, and the season after our tree arrived one of our neighbors got fruit for the first time. so we may be the missing link! We just have to see if it flowers this year.
very jealous that you can grow all that stuff, but of course I live in a much smaller place than your giant forest you seem to have out back, ha ha. Also a lot of our dirt is terrible and we have to spend a few years simply healing and cultivating the ground. Which we are working on! but it’s a process.
That said, something we can grow is passionfruit. We get about 10 fruits every year. Weirdly our chayote never takes. It has been sitting there like a sad boy at about 4 inches tall for 6 months now. never dying, never thriving. maybe eventually!
some day when I have more time I’ll take pictures of our plants and growing situation. But right now we’re spending time like… digging up all the plastic shreds from the tarps the previous folks left on the ground here, removing roofing tile, nails, fuses, and even a shoe heel from the clay-like earth we’ve got. Basically all the ground outside the house was used as a dumping ground for who knows how many years. it’s gonna take some real care to get it to be happy again.
[P.S. I had no idea cassava grew that way - I thought it was individual roots, not a big starfish!!]
[P.PS. is there another name for that okra strain in brazil? Our okra all looks like this https://www.homenaturalcures.com/wp-content/uploads/Okra-Summer-Beauty.jpg ]
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A bit more sharing from our garden. We are between seasons so have been doing lots of removing and planting.
Peas
Silver Beet (aka chard)
Lemon
Fejoa
Strawberry
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My farm is 64500 sqft but the forest (90% of the space) is a
environmental reserve we cannot (and wouldn’t) touch. Brazillian’s atlantic forest was devastated badly in the past so there’s only 12% left. There’s a river on the back too which makes the forest extra extra extra important.
The oldest avocado tree is about 12~15 meters (39~49ft) high.
This week there were 15 ready for harvesting. After sharing with my family and neighbours, i kept these (ps4 controller for scale)
My family takes really good care with cycling the crops so the soil doesn’t go bad too!
We avoid planting the same stuff, along with some off time and nourishing too. This part in specific i know nothing about.
Oh, i was wrong. Those are not okras, but gherkins! We call them maxixe
About the cassavas, we grow 2 types. One is white and the other is yellow and butterish. i think the one used for making bobba and all the other stuff is the white one. We like to eat them fried like potato chips and french fries, boiled in a stew with meat and other stuff… There’s also a soup dish with it that i like!
Since it’s a root, the whole tree needs to be pulled. It grows anywhere!
Thanks for the passion fruit tips. There’s one giant vine already so i’ll just keep planting others. Passion fruit juice is a favourite of mine and the ones that i grew a few years ago were very strong, i needed to dilute it a lot and everyone that drank it got drowsy and slept like a log lol
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Thanks for sharing all this! I didn’t actually give any passion fruit tips so my actual ones are:
Grow it in a pot for a while first, so it can get established.
Dig a hole much larger than the pot and put well draining soul around
Plant it next to something it can grow onto - I attached mine to a fence right away which it seemed to like.
I also give it nutrients once a week - usually water from cleaning the fish tank, ha ha.
It could stand to be pruned some but here it is on the fence
But I suspect yours is much larger than mine anyway and it’s just a pollenization problem! I’ve heard folks shake the flowers and then spread the pollen across to the others, because it can self pollenate but only if insects make it happen for you. Could try that!
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Didn’t take pictures but since i last posted, my avocado tree is just flooding with avocados. I’m eating it everyday, sharing with neighbours and family and leaving a few to the birds… Avocado season babyyyyyy
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I’ve been trying to get into gardening recently. I bought a little basil mint plant to start and am hoping to try and grow strawberries too. Here’s my lil basil pal in their pot.
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I love basil’s aroma.
It’s hard to grow outdoors in Brazil because it gets really big and attracts lots of Trigona spinipes (harmless but a bit annoying lol)
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