Quick notes on timing, etc

It's April 30th.

• Things are growing FAST now.  I potted-on pumpkin starts on April 23 and they're doubled today.  The potato plants are huge!  
• The pepper starts I sowed from seed on March 8th are the same height as those I sowed on the 20th, and the ones I sowed on the 16th are the same height (taller) as the ones I sowed on the 22nd.  WTF?
• The corn starts are 8", but the corn I sowed outside (same soaked seed) hasn't even sprouted yet.  Are the soil temperatures not warm enough for corn?  Update 5/21/2020: no!
• I put pepper starts outside under poly-tunnels and they aren't happy.  Some are in manure, though, so maybe that's why.  Update 5/21/2020: yes!  Plus no water was getting inside the tunnels.
• There's almost no point in sowing indoors except for the super warm crops, I guess.  Or maybe no point in planting them out until the soil temps are right.  But onions should be ok now, and they haven't grown since I transplanted them over a week ago.  Ditto cabbages and kales.  The beets are finally starting to liven up but they're the same size.  Maybe it's the soil.  Maybe we did a bad job transplanting.  I didn't feed them with bacterial inoculant.  Update 5/21/2020: there IS a point to sowing indoors.
• You allow for better succession, ie, in crops that would normally overlap each other.
• You get the plants strong enough to withstand slug pressure, transplanting stress, etc.
• You control the soil temp for longer.
• If things die outside, you have a stash of refills.
• My stupid melons won't come up (in starts).  The sunflower, corn, and pumpkin went bananas, but nothing from the melons.  Update 5/21/2020: they're still small.
• The comfrey doubled in size since April 20th.
• The rhubarb beside the driveway was healthy on April 24th, and today there was a central stem with a flower head that was 3 feet tall!!!
• The radishes are huge, like big carrot tops!  They're hollow inside, like geodes.  French Dressing radishes.  They grew from seed sown super (perhaps too) early, in March.
  
  
  
  They're near the pole peas which are also doing well.  And the bush beans and bush peas that haven't even sprouted (I found out they need much warmer soil).  Wish I had logged what type of soil layering (compost vs fresh manure vs aged manure) I had done in each section.  I thought I would remember.  Dummy.  Doesn't matter because next year, my soil will have lots of biological life in it.
• The clover seeds I sowed within the last month are sprouting and growing fast right now.  

How can I anticipate this phase next year?  By comparing the weather pattern and soil temps?

Update ?/?/2020:  It's the fracking soil temperature!!  We have a strong wind that keeps the soil cold until round about now.  So, sure, the radishes and snap peas germinated and grew fast, much earlier, and the potatoes recovered from.the cold and are exploding.  But the corn, bush peas/beans, lettuces from seed...those are just sprouting through now.  The carrots haven't even started.

Weather-wise, we've had no frosts in weeks, the daytime temps are in the 60s and the lows are in the 40s.  I haven't had to water in 2 weeks because of regular rain.  Need to get the soil temp.

Update 5/21/2020:  In one of the veg beds, I had 2 rows of corn.  The row closest to the retaining wall wood on the downhill side of the terrace didn't germinate until a couple days ago.  The row at the front of the terrace germinated more than a week ago.  Why?  Because the fracking cold air slid downhill and got caught by the retaining wood, which is higher than the soil level because I got lazy and also ran out of backfill for the terrace bed.  So the soil temp for the back row was colder than the soil them for the front row.  Next year, resolve this!!

Today's shot

Just a photo here.  I wanna put all these together in an animation once some real change starts showing.

Here it is without the future play court and the septic drain field in the foreground.  

Man it's so hard to get a sense of what you're looking at at that angle.  Sorry.

Great, a new paradigm that looks promising: French Intensive Method

I fell in love with Korean Natural Farming, as well as Masanobu Fokuoka's natural farming approach.
Then I fell in love with no-til, and Gabe Brown's work (for farmers) and Charles Dowding's work (for annual veg gardeners).
Then Dr. Elaine Ingham's work, focusing on the population and ratio of soil microbes.
I believe in them all.

And now, while poking around Lillie House Permaculture's blog, I discovered another paradigm, which is possibly useful for both my annual beds and possibly my hedgerows and food forests--French Intensive Method (FIM).  I'll have to do that next year, though, but it'll speed up my learning to compare my current garden to what I read about FIM.

For an overview, see https://transformativeadventures.org/2018/05/15/french-intensive-methods-for-permaculture/.  Mike Hoag (of Lillie House) seems to focus on the intercropping.  I remembered hearing that there was more to it, and I remembered a story of how the manure would be collected from the horses who were pulling the veggies to market, and then used to keep crops warm.  So I looked for another source of info.

I found the PDF, Intensive Culture of Vegetables (French System) by P. Aquatias.  (I'll refer to this as FIM from here on.)

This book was written in 1913.  It's slow going in parts, and for a while, I had no idea what was going on because the word "lights" meant (sort of) "windows", or specifically the 3 window panels that get attached as the top of a coldframe, and I didn't figure that out until my third time through the relevant chapter.  

I love how they use horse manure.  I have a weekly supply.  I might try it.  

They store it in summer, and then in winter, they mix it with fresh manure to get the right temperature, then spread it out under where their coldframes will go.  Then they cover the fresh manure mix with a layer of old composted manure, lay out the coldframes, and finally put a layer of really old manure (now safe soil in which to grow food) into the coldframes.  They put starts in there when the time is right.  Since the top of the coldframe is glass, they can put straw mats on them to provide even more heat at night.  

In 1913, some of these supplies were expensive and some not, and now in 2020, the expensive items changed places with the non-expensive ones.  160 pounds (for frames and "lights) in 1913 would be $21745.89 today, so divide that by 100 frames (3 "lights" each), and that would be $217 per frame.  Yeah, I could make a frame cheaper than that today.  Especially if I got old windows from a construction reclamation center.  The straw mats would be expensive though.  And glass bell-jars (cloches) are an up-marketed item now.  But holy cow, I get free manure from 2 mustangs, and the price of manure in 1913...Wow!  But I digress.

FIM also provides a strict schedule for succession that I might try.  Seems like Charles Dowding has already figured out a more modern plan, though he doesn't intercrop as much as Mike Hoag suggests, though Mike is using FIM in his perennial beds, so maybe that's why.

I wonder if the manure is necessary, though.

"It is this heat which repays the grower by enabling him to produce his crops out of season."  The book says that the manure gives you a gain of 3 degrees F in their zone (presumably zone 8).  And the frames and mats can give you and extra boost of 6 degrees at night.

But listen to this amazing gardener I discovered today--listen at 1:43:

Her method gives her a temperature gain just by planting things super close together.  Though she is sowing on top of fermenting compost.  Hmm.

Need to read more and start experimenting.

Doh! No need to panic

It's infuriating how steep and long the learning curve is.
I potted-on some pumpkin last night that was almost overdue.  Some sunflower is also begging for it, as well as my last pepper starts.  I was panicking until I realized that "the last danger of frost" is almost here.  People in our area who don't like to gamble pick Mother's day for planting, and that's 2 weeks away.  Our average last frost date has already passed.  Before realizing that, I was worried because I don't have enough pots for potting-on, nor enough potting soil.  (All the compost has been moved into beds now.)  But I can just pot-on to the next size up instead of the gallon pots I used yesterday.
I'm excited about weed-whacking down the grass in the food forest and putting all of my leftover seeds into the piles of grass.  I've run out of room in beds for stuff, so that's my only recourse.  It's a trick I learned from Mike Hoag at Lillie House Zoo.  He actually gives two methods in two separate posts.  From https://lilliehouse.blogspot.com/2017/06/no-till-3-sisters-update-germination.html:

(Corn germinating in piles of mulch plopped directly on top of slashed meadow, with no barrier. Most of the mulch material was taken from our nearby hedgerow, which also acts as a fertility belt, mostly slashed comfrey, sorrel, chicory and autumn olive. This was covered with a layer of "brown" plant material like dry jerusalem artichoke stalks. A thin "finish mulch" of compost, cocoa mulch, and coir was used to create a seed bed for germination. )

and from https://www.instagram.com/p/BzYL25bg4m-/:

1st slash, rake the slash into mulch piles and plant SEEDS, not starts, directly into the piles. Second slash is with a kama, before the squash run, around the crop plants. This maybe unnecessary and you can just mulch everything in place at the end of the season. Traditionally, there were 2 cuts....

So I'll probably try both.  Mike has some recent blog posts discussing what he learned and how he has changed his 3 Sisters plantings in slash mulch.  I'll need to read those.

Timely videos from Charles Dowding

Woke up, puttered, and saw these on Instagram. The information could not have been more timely!

I've been agonizing over dreading the labor of growing seeds in flats, then potting on, then transplanting.  Also, small cells piss me off, but Charles says seeds like to be close together.  I notice his seedlings come out easily though.  His cells aren't much longer than their diameter, and maybe that's why.
- Can do 4 or 5 chard per cell if you want small leaves, 2 for large leaves to cook with.
- He sows indoors everything except carrots and parsnips.  I wonder if I could do carrots in slitted water bottles to protect the tap root.
- He favors sowing crowded and pricking out early.
- He pots-on sometimes thrice.
- Once they're big, you don't want to firm in the soil (when potting on) as much as you do in the first-stage modules.  That'll restrict root growth a bit.
https://www.instagram.com/tv/B_R-FLcp6Hr/?igshid=1x0y4q896234

Wow, I'm shocked at how early I can plant outside, how closely you can put things together, and how long I can cover lettuces and beets with.  Man, I'm so behind on lettuces and beets.
- Beets, 4 per cell, sow indoors 2/20, transplanted outdoors under fleece mid-March, and remove fleece in late April.
- He puts them out a foot apart diagonally!
- When decided whether to stagger your sowing (to provide a longer harvest window), you don't really need to do that with multi-sown plants.  You just pick the smallest ones when you want.
https://www.instagram.com/tv/B_UbEo_Ja38/?igshid=19m20dv9qonwg

Thoughts on how to plan before buying seeds

Look at these.  I sowed these a week after the last third below.

These were sown in 3 stages.  There's not a lot of difference.

Here's how they looked on April 8th.  The younger ones sure caught up.

So, I remember the author of Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades (Steve Solomon) saying that if you stagger your sowings, then in the spring, you need a larger time gap than mid-summer.  I guess this is proof that I need a large time gap.  Now I want to prove the other half.

And, gosh, look at this miner's lettuce that I sowed outdoors under fleece.  The leaves are plump.

Indoors, the leaves are not plump at all.  And they're leggy.  Why bother with the trouble of transplanting for these?!?

I mean, really, why bother?

I think I need a list of seeds that really must be sown indoors (nightshades, melons, squashes).  Oh.  I guess that's my list.

Then, I need to record how much I harvest per seed, and how much I use.

Then, I need the seed spacing, but with its best companion.  Gawd, Charles Dowding sows 4 beets per module and spaces those 12" apart diagonally.  Also, he spontaneously pops new seedlings into a place where he knows he'll be removing plants within a week or so.

Anyhoo, I only have limited space, so if I try to fit things in....  Like if I know I want to harvest 10 baby butternuts, and they need 2 feet of space, I'll need 20 feet of a bed.  And what can I companion plant in there?  And what can I succession plant in there?

I guess it's going to take intense planning in the coming years, with copious data collection and trial and error.  

Photo notes 4/20/2020

I think I'll document the state of things, every now and then, so that I can see how far the garden has come.  Also, to note observations or lessons learned.

West side

The thank-you garden is a few days' planted now.  The corn got a little less green so I'd better get the clover in there soon.  I'll seed around the corn first and wait until the carrots sprout before seeding the rest.  Oh!  Wasn't I gonna put peas in there between the corn?  Need to remember to experiment with watering with EM-1 every week and alternating with mycorrhizals.  I'm considering this my pilot project for my pea patch maintenance business I hope to run next year.  I thought a lot about how to prepare a bed.  There's Charles Dowding's method, which I'm using alot in the terraces, with and without cardboard.  This method is just using ground that was covered in wood chips.  I'd rather have more time and be able to leave black plastic or a wool carpet on the ground for a few months.  I'll never solarize again--that was dumb and killed all microbes.  I will definitely put cardboard under wood chips for paths at clients' homes.

The 2 artichoke got munched.  What a plant.  You get maybe a couple heads per plant.  Not like cherry tomatoes where you get tonnes per plant.  This is in an annexed part of the thank-you garden because of the spacing requirements.  The bamboo here didn't sprout.  I think the wood chips are lacking fungi.

North side

Explain to me how this works: I bung some sticks in a last-minute-chosen recepticle (recycling bin), and they take off and sprout.

I carefully follow instructions and get nothing.

I also have a bucket at the front of the house where I have the tree cuttings from.the plant swap that I barely remember and they're all sprouting except the corkscrew willow.  And, the regular willow that I took from Helge's place that's been neglected in a garbage bag in the garage--sprouting!!  

Ditto with this walnut that a squirrel planted.  I found two other walnut sprouts in the spot where the compost pit is now, which I moved here.  But if I try to sprout walnuts, I get nothing.  I hate this hobby sometimes.

Still haven't finished securing the compost bins.  I also need to get the perforated pipe made so that I can get the first pile finished.

East side, next to the house

I'm facing east and photographing from north to south.

There's work to be done here.  I need a final home for the bench and the plants that I want to keep.  There's a mock orange that smells amazing in summer, and some others in here.  But it's all in the path of the future driving path and living pool.

Gotta move the trash and the old burn pile too, to unburden the drain field and keep it healthy.

Gotta clear up the raised beds here to unburden the drain field.  The strawberries are blooming though.  And there's mache (corn salad) that I want to go to seed.  Might need to postpone this job.

Here's the trash on the south side.  Just wood sticks to make a decision about.  This is on the future driving path along the south property line.

Was storing woodchips and poop here.  Now there's a load of forest duff from Cheryl's dog rescue property.  Might mix it all together and let it compost in place, in a location that I want to clear of vegetation, like my future tropical plant collection on the south side of the house by ths chimney!  

South side, terraces

These are the first year's beds, mostly planted.  Next year, I'll polish the retaining wood, get coconut fiber mats to cover them and seed with vetch, and make all beds as wide as possible, with paths that make mini-beds a comfortable width.  I want cardboard and woodchips as the paths, and something pretty growing in front of the wood.

This was a flash of insight.  I wanted a deep bed for carrots, but don't have enough compost to extend it to meet up with the grass, so I buttressed it with wood chips.  I wonder if it'll work.  Oxygen will have no trouble getting into the soil.

The last bed will take the longest to fill, but at least I can drive up to it soon.  Looking north...

Looking south...

East side, low end, food forest and fedge

It looks like nothing.  If only you could see it in my head.  Lots of time and work to do.  I want to clear out the path that splits the mirrored food forest paths first.  Also need to berm the south edge to make it ready for fedge plantings.  And move the drivable path to put in one of the ponds.  

For food forest plantings, I can weed whack down the greenery now and sow seeds.  I'll just keep pickimg up plants when I can.

Looking west...

Looking east...

South side

Dammit.  These are gonna get 8 feet tall again.  I didn't move them in time.  Wonder if I still can.  At least it was there long enough to give me seeds.  Seeds I haven't sown yet.  Bah!

Also need to get these in pots or in the ground.  Wonder which is better for tree cuttings the first year.

Hope the cherry fruits this year.  It skipped last year.  This is another example of accidental planning.  I was spitting seeds out on the day we moved in.

I didn't photograph the future tropical plant area.  It's got grap evergreens, and rhodies and azaleas.  Bleh.

No rush, no adjudicator, no regrets

I've started to realize that I'm not rushed, and I don't have to be perfect.  FFS, there are chopped willow branches in the garage in garbage bags that have been there for more than a month and some rooted, and yet, my efforts to propagate roses this way on purpose failed.  I followed instructions for sprouting walnut nuts to the letter and had no success, but I now have more than FOUR walnut saplings thanks to local squirrels.  I missed out on sowing lettuces indoors and now I've missed out on a month of possible harvests, but I'll never make that mistake again.  Nor will I ever sprinkle water on plants while the sun is out... ever... again!  Poor burnt leaves.  I can grow veg in my terraced beds even though I haven't filled them with soil--I just need to water every 10 days with mycorrhizal fungi or with EM-1 (expensive stuff but now I know how to propagate it).  The longer I wait to implement some plants, the more likely a better idea will occur to me.
So, with that in mind, I'm about to go outside and pot some cuttings and sow some seeds and transplant some leggy starts.  I've made a deal with myself that as soon as I'm bitten by the third mosquito, I can come back inside.  (It's overcast, so even though it's only 4pm, I think the jerks will be zipping around soon.)  If I get tired or if my body hurts, I can come back inside.  I might go out again.  I might not.  Nothing is set in stone.  I love this.

Soaking seeds in EM-1

This was highly recommended on a web site so I'll try it.

Corn and peas.

Cat photobomb.

Planted: A "thank you" bed

My neighbor gave me a really good quality 4-wheel cart with drop-down sides.  Geeze!  

To thank her, and to experiment with the soil that was under a pile of wood chips for over a year, I raked down and planted corn, artichoke, lettuce, onion, and sowed carrot seed. There's room to so a little more tomorrow.  The mosquitos were out tonight so I stopped early.

Good looking soil.  And it smells good.  

Not many mycelium were noticeable in the wood chips (and they'd be saphoridic anyway) so I made sure to put mycorrhizae inoculem in with the roots and seeds.

This bed is on its lonesome on the other side of the house to my market garden terraces because I plan to plant a lot of tomatoes in my market garden and my neighbor is allergic to tomato plants.  I don't want any tomato pollen getting on her food.

Problem: Enough inoculant

I'm enrolled in the Soil Food Web lab and consultant program.  I'm learning a LOT.  For example, one of the highest priority items you need to regenerate soil is ... well, wait, there are 5 priority items, but one makes more difference than the others--adding biology.  Get the microbe populations up.  You need to feed them with organic matter, and once there's enough organic matter, and there are living roots in the soil year-round, their populations remain high, but in the first year or two, you need to apply microbes at least every 10 days.  That means adding an extract made from biologically complete compost (but it takes 6 months to make the compost), or adding purchased microbes like EM-1 and MycoGrow.  You can brew your own from scratch, and you should do that, so that you can have a wide variety of microbes, but I don't trust my brewing skills yet.

Microbes should be applied once per week.  I have a fricking acre.

That would mean, in the case of EM-1, "1 gallon of Activated EM-1 per acre per week".  $75 per week?!?
In the case of MycoGrow, 1 pound treats 1/10th of an acre, so I'd need 10 pounds.  That's $674 for one application.  I wouldn't want to apply the MycoGrow more than once or twice anyway, but seriously?!?
No way.

EM-1

At least you can multiply EM-1 yourself, though.  You can make 20 times the original quantity in 7-10 days.  That quantity needs to be used within 45-60 days, and if the pH rises above 3.8, it's gone bad.
So, what would that mean?  If I need a gallon per week.  1/20th of a gallon is 6.4oz, so I need, let's say, 8 oz per week ahead of time to brew 1 1/4 gallon.  Use 1 gallon, and that leaves 32 oz.
Take 16 oz to split between 2 batches (in case I blow it in one of them).  That leaves 16 oz leftover for adding to the compost pile.  That would work.  So, if I started the season with a purchase of a 16oz bottle, I'd be set, so long as I didn't mess anything up.  I'd also need a tonne of blackstrap molasses, and some airlocks and jugs.  Hmm.

1. Split 16 oz to make 2 gallon batches.  
2. When they're ready:
• Use one gallon in the garden (dilute 1 oz per gallon of water).
• Take 16 oz out of the other gallon to brew 2 new gallon batches.
• Use the leftover 112 oz:
• in the compost pit (dilute 2 tsp per gallon of water)
• as a seed soak (probably an ounce per gallon)
• as a folliar spray indoors and outdoors (2 Tbsp per gallon of water).
• as a yard waste drench to speed up the breakdown of wood.
• to water house plants.
3. Repeat from step 2.  :)

There's only lactic acid bacteria in EM-1, though.  I don't want bacteria-dominated soil.  I want fungal-dominated soil.

MycoGrow

My soil seriously needs mycorrhizal fungi, and this is how I'd get it, guaranteed.  But, wow, it's expensive.  I don't even know how to multiple a batch.
Is it as simple as adding it to wood chips and waiting a year?  You can do that with other fungi (like the winecap mushrooms), but I think mycorrhizal fungi need living plant roots.
Bah!  I guess I'll have to keep doing what I'm doing, buying tiny amounts each time I go to the store, and using them appropriately.  I want them to spread the fungal hyphae fast throughout the yard.  Maybe I should concentrate my efforts to water the grass (and future living mulch plants) with MycoGrow, since the grass is, and will always be, there.  So the living roots will always be there.
Whoa!  I'm not the first person to ask how to make your own.
Holy crap!  The whole process is written up here: https://moldresistantstrains.com/diy-how-to-make-mycorrhizal-fungi-inoculant/#diy.  I could do the same as for EM-1: buy a small amount and propagate.

Brewing from scratch

I have a laundry list of other inoculants, like Jadam Microbial Solution.  None of these have mycorrhizal fungi, though.  I can use them when a batch of EM-1 goes bad, but I really need the fungi.  I guess I need to get my biologically-complete compost going.  Though, what kind of fungi grows in that?  There are fungal hyphae, but... are they the right kind?

Need to ask on the Soil Food Web forums.

My working goal

OK, my goal is to brew a perpetual cycle of EM-1 batches, and also buy different sources of mycorrhizal fungi and propagate those perpetually.  I'll need brewing equipment, space, and ingredients like molasses.  Diversity and volume!  Yes!

You really do have to hoe-lean

Steve Solomon was right.  Standing in the garden and leaning on your hoe is important!!  You (well, I) can't come up with solutions to problems unless you're out there.  Here are 2 things I pondered.

Kiwi placement

I have 2 kiwis in pots.  I can't figure out where to put them.  Darren won't let me frame the front door with them.  I could put the ugly bench with the trellis overhead out there somewhere and use that.  But where?

I was down in the 2 mirrored halves of my food forest area.  There's a walkway in-between.  Of course!!  Why not round a huge long piece of hogwire paneling over it.  The kiwi will grow to shade the walkway!  And there will be room for more!  

And I could do the same with the thornless blackberry I've already planted!  They're in the corners in the forefront of the image above.

Beds unfilled and no time

How big to make my terrace beds.  If they're too wide, I can't reach the middles.  Filling them will take forever.  

This narrow one didn't take long.  It's about 2.5 feet wide, and not even filled all the way.  But then there's a tonne of surface area used only as a path (grass right now). 

This one took forever to fill, and it's my shallowest bed!  :(  4 feet wide.  Can't reach the middle comfortably.

I want to get going right away on growing my veg.  What to do?

Oh!  I don't have to fill the beds before growing crops this year!  I don't even have to put down any material at all if Charlotte Anthony is right.  I just need microbes.

Gradually, I'll work towards this kind of design.  The orange lines frame mini-beds within the major bed, with footpaths between.  Now and then, have a hogwire trellis for peas and squash (the blue lines).

Hmm.  It just occurred to me that I could just have one long row, parallel to the terrace.  Duh.

I only wish I had time and resources to make living willow trellis.  I suppose I can have that in progress underneath!!

It was recalling this image from Pinterest, which helped me find these solutions.  (So I guess you need to mix hoe-leaning with book learning.  I think I've said that before.)

Hmm.  Maybe I don't need expensive hogwire.