Installing drip irrigation: What I'd do next time

What a freaking headache.  Meh, I shouldn't say that.  You learn 3 times as much by failing first than by doing something correctly first.

I have delicate, newly planted bare-root trees all over the acre, and that made it especially hard to unroll the 3/4" irrigation hose and lay it out without whacking and damaging the new plants.  I mean, that 3/4" hose is not at all like a garden hose, so unrolling was a pain.  It kinks easily, and it's hard to fix the kink once established.  The attachments are super hard to get onto the 3/4" hose with my level of strength.  Also, pushing the 1/4" drip lines into holes I punched into the 3/4" hose killed my thumb tips!  They're so sore!  At one point, I had the wrong attachments (see the male to male connection I messed up on).

If I were to do this again with established plantings, I would unroll, in the sun, in an open space to get it stretched out and let the sun warm it up, and fix the kinks.  Then gently move it into place.

If I were to do this again with NO established plants that I cared about, then I would lay it out in one of
these patterns.

Hmm.  It just occurred to me that I might've found info similar to this online before I started.  Oh well.  I was in a hurry.

Also, I figured out (finally!) how to get a strong enough grip to shove attachments onto the 3/4" and the 1/4" drip line.  This potholder, which is actually useless for holding hot pots!  Actually, maybe my sister read the box wrong when she bought it for me, and it's actually one of those jar opener assist things.  Who knows!  I just wish I had thought of it when I spent days wrestling with wet hose and wet fingers.  Gah!

Alright, I've got 2 of the 4 major areas set up.  That took 3-4 days, so I guess I've got a lot of work left to do.  :)  I also want to get timers that will turn the water on automatically.  I often forget to turn the water off.  OMG!  I'm forgetting right now!  

I'm out in the garden now.  Wow, somebody's happy.  The ends of this noble fir were looking brown and dry until after the first watering.

In fact, there's a general sense of ease and joy coming from the acre now.  Like all the plants have breathed a sigh of relief.

Oh!  I forgot.  I'd also weedwhack where the hoses go, and then staple landscape fabric under it (ie, before laying the hose), about a foot or 18" wide.  That way the hose wouldn't disappear under greenery.  At least, not in the first couple years.  Maybe I'd put wood chips over the hoses for winter.

Thoughts on process - Buy sun-loving plants first

I bought 72 bare-root trees and 47 starts at the annual county plant sales.  I'm killing myself getting everything in the ground.

As I was struggling to find shady spots in my bare, open acre, for those plants that wanted shade, it occurred to me yesterday, shit, I should've bought only sun-lovers.  Then in a few years when they were big enough to provide shade, buy the shade-lovers to fill in spots.

Wish I'd thought of that earlier.  I couldn't say no to wild ginger, bunchberry, etc, though.

Update 7/1/2023:  

Nope.  Now that I have had another 2 years to tinker and learn, I would say that first, before buying any plants, that you at least have established cuttings of pioneer plants all over the place to provide shade to whatever new plants you buy and put in the ground.  If you pick pioneer plants that also fix nitrogen in the soil, and/or form relationships with mycorrhizal fungi, then that's even better.  Pioneer plants are free (they're all over the place), and root easily from cuttings (except for alder, which frankly, would be the ideal nurse plant since it meets all of the extra criteria).

Actually, if I were to list ALL of the tasks that I would do in the future, to go from bare land to food forest, I think this is the order I'd go in:

1. Observe how water moves through the ground on your property for 1 whole year.  Mark wet spots on a satellite image of your property.  Mark arrows moving away from the driest spots to the wettest spots, downhill.  Then, mark on the map where you might eventually put swales, ponds, bridges, rainwater collectors, hugel beds, etc, in order to distribute water better and make it percolate into the ground better.  Soil is the best water reservoir.

2. Make a loose plan.  Loose!  Mark where things like septic systems and underground utilities are.  Mark where you want your annual crops, living hedges, orchards and alleyways for any grazing animals, food forests, etc.  You might have to redraw boundary lines later, and that's fine.  You might have to switch areas later if you end up accidentally creating a swampy area, and that's fine--just plant water-loving plants that you can graft other things onto (like crabapple and dogwood).  Or dig down for a pond and bring in pigs temporarily to gley it in the French way.  Or make a stepped pond where, as the water aborbs into the ground, it exposes moist, flat sections of shore that you can plant annuals into.  My point is, don't emotionally invest in your perfect plan, because nature will throw you curveballs.  Also, as you work the land, new ideas will come to you.  I turned my woodchips processing area into 3 level parking spots, and I'm going to plant shade trees around it to shade the cars.  The woodchips will process faster since they'll keep getting agitated by the cars.  There's no way I could've predicted that idea when I made my first loose plan.  Also, everywhere I'm putting in terraces, I'm alternated each planted terrace with a walking path terrace so that I can easily access the planted terrace and knee height.  I couldn't have come up with that before I accidentally created it and went, "hey!"

3. Now that you know where you might want to move water to, and where important stuff is, mark where you want drivable paths, or tractor-wide paths.  Include storage locations for things like wood chips, and make sure it's easy for a truck to dump there.  

4. Before you do anything else, put your driveable paths in!!  I would've saved 90% of the time and effort and damage to my body if I could've driven loads of stuff to various locations around our sloped acre.  :(  You might need to splurge on packed gravel road.  In a pinch, you can build paths over time with successive loads of woodchips from ChipDrop.  I cannot stress how important this step is.  You can redirect water, you can change where you store stuff.  You cannot make up for the lost time caused by having to move tonnes of material manually with a wheel barrow over uneven ground, up and down hill.

5. Dig your swales, from the highest elevation to the lowest, and watch what happens after some of your heaviest rains.  (You might have to tweak a bit after the first, startling rainfall.)

6. Lay down foot paths everywhere.  I can't tell you how annoying it is that I have several plantings that are difficult to reach on foot because there are too many things around them that I don't want to step on.  Put down weed barrier and cover in wood chips or straw.  Whatever you have to do.

7. Now that you have reliable (or at least improved) water management, and paths, you can start putting cuttings in the ground (preferably in spring or fall) of nurse plants.  These are things that grow like weeds, which will provide shade and hopefully nitrogen fixation to the longer-term plants that you care about.  Or, they'll provide mulch that you can chop and drop.  In Syntropic Agriculture, they use cassava stakes, planted at an angle such that the leaves will give shade to something, and the roots won't compete with the roots of that something.  They call the cassava the "placenta".  They plant it around fruit and nut saplings.  You can often find lists of "nurse plants", "mulch plants", and "nitrogen-fixers" in Permaculture books or websites.  Don't pick plants you won't be willing to severely prune.

8. Speaking of fruit and nut trees, you can plant small ones within the protective rings of whatever placenta plants you choose.  This is also a good time to plant actual nuts and fruit seeds.  If you're planting near buildings, I highly recommend using seeds/nuts, because trees that grow from seeds create the deepest tap roots and are far less likely to blow over in a storm.  

9. Cover all bare areas with cardboard, mulch, wood chips, straw, weed barrier, sileage tarp, or whatever you can get your hands on.  Preferably organic matter mulch.  If it's bare soil, broadcast lots of living mulch seeds like clover, buckwheat, etc.  If it's compacted soil, sow diakon radish or turnips.  Cover seeds with plastic that's white on the top side, and leave it for a week or until the seeds have time to germinate and take hold.  That way, birds won't get at your seed.

10. Bonus task: if it's logistically and financially feasible, it would be good to start regular waterings of aerobic compost tea, and/or TeraGanix EM-1, and/or mycorrhizal fungi, and/or spread fungal-inoculated wood chips everywhere, soaked and protected by an extra layer of organic matter.  The faster you increase the population of beneficial microbes, the healthier your plants will be, and the more they will resist disease and pest insects.  They'll also heal faster from insect damage.  Plus, the more microbes, the faster your unsightly mulch will be broken down.  Do these waterings in spring and fall, at least 10 days apart, and as many as you can afford.  Make sure the microbes have a layer of protection on the soil surface.

11. At this point, you have nurse/mulch plants, and they're protecting the trees that will take the longest to come into maturity.  Now you can safely rest for a season or two, and watch the results to see if you have to tweak anything in your design or tweak your plant choices.  If something dies where you put it, then that wasn't the best spot for that plant.  Try a different plant.  Let weeds come up and research them.  Are they useful to you?  I had 15 medicinal plants growing for free, and 20 food plants.  Cleavers made me feel amazing when I put them in green smoothies.  Dandelion made my back feel better because I guess my pain was liver-related.   I ate pickled dandelion roots--yum!!  Prickly lettuce became my favorite painkiller for muscle aches.  Whatever bitter herb I could eat raw I put into smoothies with enough sweetening (fruit or whatever) to overpower their taste.  Others I'd put in salads.  If I had to heat a plant to denature things like oxalic acid, I'd saute it or extract it into a medicine.  I swear, I could eat enough greens for free just from the pioneer species that were growing here naturally.

12. Start filling in your bare spots with shrubs, herbs, etc.  Propagate things like crazy, especially the seeds of what you already have, because they'll be more genetically adapted to your environment.  If you can afford it, buy plants from a nursery and put them in the ground in only spring or fall so that they don't go through transplant shock in the heat of summer or the cold of winter.  

Some of these tasks can only be accomplished over time.  I'm 3 years in and I'm still bringing in organic matter.  That's because for 30 years, the previous owner of the house exported valuable organic matter off the property (ie, they mowed, collected the grass clippings, and let the city take the clippings away).  I still have spots that when dry, the soil becomes hard as rock because it's all clay with no organic matter and thus no biological life.  Eventually, I'll have enough mulch plants that I won't have to bring in any outside organic matter--I'll be able to chop-and-drop my way around the property.  After a while, natural leaf-drop in the fall will provide enough organic matter.  Can't wait for that.

Today's shot July 6th, 2020

I'm in a rush, so here's today's shot.  

 

Things are going to seed, aging, drying up.  But check out this area.  I need to identify the types of plants in each section, but I have noticed that on the left are more weedy types of grass, so like, early successional grasses and annual, true weeds.  On the right are some later successional grasses (wheat, barley), and some stronger weeds like the prickly lettuce and some better flowering "weeds".  Why are the right ones greener?  The left ones are in the divit that usually has more water available in the ground.  And we've recently had a nice rain.  I know the stuff on the left is gone to seed, but so has a lot of stuff on the right.  I'm starting to think that the right is greener because of:

• More diversity of species.
• Later successional plants.
• No big patches with the same species.

I bet I could slash a small patch and grow some veg, and they'd come up well.  Maybe I should do that.  I'll do a slash-mulch in both spots and throw my tomatos and tomatillos in there and see how they fare.

And as a bonus, here's a little guy I found in the kitchen.  iNaturalist says it's a bold jumping spider.  He was SO CUTE!! 

 He had a total little personality, just like this guy.

Most demoralizing day ever

Or should I say, the most demoralizing day yet.  (PROFANITY WARNING)

I've had small setbacks.  I've had things get sick or die where I can't figure out why, and that really triggers me.  But today, I argued with myself all day to get the hell out there and do something.  I finally went and thought, hey, I'll just weed-whack the places where I'm going to slash-mulch.  So I did.  OK.  I was still feeling overwhelmed, so I thought, hey, go see the surprise recovery of the hazelnut!  That success should help cheer you up.  It looked like this 10 days ago (May 18, 2020):

I expected even bigger and more leaves.  Well, the bunnies or something got to it.  Bunnies live in the evergreen stand that this patch is in.  Here's how it looks today.

I got so angry.  I'm so mad still.  Mother fuckers.  OMG, I'm SO not in the right mind.  I should've seen this as a solution brainstorming moment.  But no.  I wanna cook that bunny.

So, I thought, geeze, just keep looking around.  I've had successes.  A few setbacks is normal.  I'm still a beginner.

So I looked at the rest of the garden.  Yay!  One of my Jerusalem artichoke patches survived the endless slug onslaughts. 

But the other patch?  Lost 6 of them to those choosy bastards.  Only 3 small ones are left.  Luckily I got some from a woman on the Homesteading Women's group.  Need to put them in.  They're already growing shoots.

The sunflowers are NOT doing well, though 2 look like they're gaining the upper hand over the raw manure.

My peppers... my babied peppers are hanging in there, but the ones I didn't cover in a polytunnel GOT EATEN!  AAARRGRGGHH!!!  Why the fuck did I bother?!?!?

FYI, I'm on my second overflowing bowl of ice cream.

LOOK!  Look, I have proof that the slugs WILL eat weeds.

BUT THEY DON'T when there's Jerusalem artichoke around or or... or MY BRUSSELS SPROUTS, YOU MOTHER FUCKERS!

The collards and kohlrabi are so far doing ok.  In fact they're finally over their transplant shock and are starting to grow.

Speaking of transplant shock, why is that?!?!  Temperature?  Or, ... they went from growing next to their buddies, touching roots, not lonely, and then BAM!  They're separated by a lot of soil.  I've heard both Charles Dowding and the woman from Dirt Patch Heaven say they like to be near each other.  I always felt it was a waste to over-sow, and then have to thin.  But you could always eat the thinnings, and if over-sowing makes them happier, then that's reason enough to do it.

But I digress.  The slugs seem to be leaving the miner's lettuce alone.  Although I did pull 3 of them off some leaves.

Look at my poor perennial kale!  I pulled 3 slugs off of 2 plants.  They are not happy, and they've been out there longer than most plants show transplant shock.  :(

They looked like this when they were in pots.

Now they're bolting from stress and panic.  :(

Something has removed or eaten or rotted all of the buds off of my strawberries.

Maybe it's this little shithead.

I can't bring myself to torture them.  The best slug repellent is to spear one with a toothpick and leave it writhing in pain near the plants you care about.  Other slugs run!  But I can't do that.  As much as I LOATHE them.  :(

My roses.  Poor things.  Need to look this up.

I finally went to my potatoes.  My pride and joy!  The plants that are doing amazingly well for god knows what reason.  And then I saw this on 3 of them (the same potato--the other potatoes are fine).

I was like, WOW!  How many slaps in the face am I gonna get. 

Oh, I found this article about roses, https://www.thespruce.com/black-spot-on-roses-4125530:

Black spot is a fungal disease (Diplocarpon rosae) that affects roses. The fungus develops as black spots on the leaves, which eventually causes the leaves to turn yellow and drop off. Besides looking unsightly, it can seriously weaken the rose plant. Black spot thrives during hot, humid, or rainy summers and hot days with cool, damp nights.

Hot days, cool damp nights?  Check!  But the spots didn't show up until after I sprayed with my home-propagated EM-1.  I wonder....

Affected leaves often fall off the plants, and if left unchecked, the entire plant can defoliate.

Oh!  That's happened 2 years in a row.  Just not this early.

Black spot is easier to prevent than to cure. Existing spores can remain in the soil and overwinter on leaves and stems, waiting for favorable conditions. The spores make contact with the rose by splashing onto it in drops of water.

Hmm.  We've had a lot of rain.  Or, maybe I spread the spores around by spraying it.

Remove any infected leaves and always do a thorough cleanup each fall. Remove and dispose of any remaining leaves when you do your dormant pruning in late winter/early spring. Spores can remain on leaves and stems and can reinfect whenever conditions are favorable.

Oh.  I'm supposed to prune them?  I didn't know that.  We inherited these roses with the house.  Uhm... you know, I was planning on incorporating them into the thorny fedge, but now... it's probably best if I just dispose of them all.  If I do get roses, I'd rather they be less laborious.  I'll have enough work to do.  Well, I'll try a neem oil application and see if that helps.  I wonder if you can see the fungus under the microscope.

Now, the potatoes.  From https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/brown_leaf_spot_in_potatoes_plan_for_this_early_blight_look_alike_in_2013:

The fungus that causes brown leaf spot, Alternaria alternata, is closely related to early blight (Alternaria solani). Like early blight, brown leaf spot overwinters as spores and mycelia on the infected tissue of various Solanaceous hosts. Warmer temperatures in spring trigger fruiting and the release of spores from both fungi, which are moved by wind and water onto potato plants. When moisture is available, the spores germinate and penetrate potato tissue, often through existing wounds. Initial infections of the two pathogens create similar symptoms: small, dark spots on lower leaves.

Great.  Another fungus.  

However, the foliar lesions caused by brown leaf spot never develop the dark concentric rings characteristic of early blight. They coalesce across large veins until whole leaves turn brown and hang from the plant. The tuber symptoms of brown leaf spot are commonly referred to as black pit, appearing as small black holes in the tuber surface. Brown leaf spot can also result in skin patches similar to those caused by early blight, most often observed after washing.

I'm not messing with this.  I'm gonna yank these 3 to save the other 20.

Sigh.  Now, what to do about slugs?  Someone told me to put a ring of coffee grounds around susceptible plants.  I can do that.  I'm also gonna harvest all of my blackberry canes and try to dry them straight.  Those not straight, I'll chop up.  I'll make little fences and minefields out of them.

Rabbits... well, Dirt Patch Heaven lady battles rodents and bunnies.  I'll have to re-watch her videos.  I know she uses cages, bird netting, fleece, and gallon milk jugs that are pinned down.

I'm done for tonight.  So demoralizing.  :(

But I will say that the researching and troubleshooting lifted me up again.  You know, when I first embarked on this project, and before I even moved the first wood round into place in the terraces, I made this huge plan.  I didn't follow it.  Now I realize I should have.  Until I find the notebook that has the list, I'll try to recreate it here:

1. Make a mapped plan.  Done.  I need to mark places for specific plants, storage of delivered material, and future animal housing, etc.
2. Clear driveable paths (so you can bring in stuff).  Not quite done.  Kind of important.
3. Start building fertility in the soil.  This includes regular inoculations, and composting.  I've got my 3 pits, but they're not full of anything.
4. Start propagating the plants you want in a nursery bed or in pots.  Plants for these areas, listed in priority:
1. The plants you're moving out of the drivable paths.
2. The pleachable plants for the fedge.
3. The trees for the food forest.
4. The supporting plants for the fedge and the food forest.
5. Perennials that will go all around.
5. Blah blah blah.

Notice that building fertility came before anything else.  Even though I was a raw beginner, that was a really good rule I should've followed.  Look what lack of fertility has done for me?  Struggling plants, diseased plants, weed overgrowth.  I think I need a new plan:

1. Finish mapped plan, including things I need to add like animal housing and storage of materials.
2. Finish planting my trees and starts.
3. Clear the drivable paths and find out what to do to make the soil stable.
4. Start building the fertility in the soil.  If you can add fungi to the soil, great, because that'll prevent weeds.  If not, maybe cover the soil in black plastic or wool carpet to keep the weeds from growing.
5. Start determining and collecting my short-growing perennial cover crop seeds.  Prep the places where you'll sow it in January.
6. Build the physical structure of the garden.  That means finishing the terraces complete with pretty retaining wall and embedded hardware for cold frames, trellises, and hoops.  Identify the big jobs and attack them one at a time, and see them through til they're done.
7. Schedule the things I need to do.  Ie, look up when to transplant the daisies and shrubs out of the drivable path, and put it on the calendar.
8. Once fertility is there, begin bringing in the perennial plants, and start your annuals.

Update 6/1/2020, 4 days later:

I didn't go out for 4 days, I had been so bummed.  Today I bit the bullet after the sun's intensity diminished, and went out to plant my pumpkins which were getting really big on the covered porch.

After planting about half of them, I turned around and saw this:

I felt so ashamed for being so pissed off on the 28th.  What a bounty!!  So delicious.  I think I ate 20.  There were about 100 though.

And then I saw carrots that weren't there 4 days ago:

I also cruised by the "other apple tree", which I forgot wasn't an apple tree.  It's got little yellow oblong fruits growing.  "OH!"  I forgot it was a plum.  OMG, I can't believe it.  There are apples, pears, and plums.  Also raspberries on the healthier raspberry bush.  

I'm kinda ashamed of myself.  I gave a little lovely ... chat (I won't say prayer) to everything to thank it all.  :)

Seed starting next season

OK, the skylight shelves were great, but the temperature quickly got too high before I was done using them.  So I need them on a pulley system.  This would make caring for them much easier.  My hubby is against such a visible and permanent installation (currently the shelves are held up by Command strips).  Maybe if I can make it look stylish (steam punk?), with brass bits?

Regarding seed trays... yeesh.  I hate the ones that I have.  The cells are often too small.  And it's super hard to get the seedlings out.

I like the floating cell idea from Rodney Sidloski (https://globalnews.ca/news/5014096/weyburn-sask-man-finds-a-way-to-plant-a-two-penny-tree/).  I'd love to mix it with all of the alternative seedling containers I'm collecting.

So, maybe I can get styrofoam blocks from https://www.amazon.com/large-styrofoam-blocks/s?k=large+styrofoam+blocks and just cut holes in them, or depressions, which will allow me to sit my containers in them, with a hole through which the water will soak in.

Lesson learned: Look up the F:B ratio required by a plant

Dr. Elaine Ingham says, "Asparagus likes mostly bacteria, very little fungus."

Nyohhhh!!!  Is this why my asparagus didn't grow?  I inoculated them with mycorrhizal fungi.  :(

Why?  Because this list said it was ok.
https://fungi.com/pages/plant-list

But this list doesn't list asparagus. 
https://www.bio-organics.com/pages/specific-plants-trees-endo-mycorrhizae-and-ecto-mycorrhizae

Oh well.  Lesson learned... though I'd need to repeat the experiment to see if the results are the same.

Photo notes on May 19th, 2020

There's a bunch of these scattered around the property.  A friend on Facebook thinks it's barley.  I hope so.  I'm going to collect the seeds and use them next year.  Or, wait, isn't barley a winter grain?  I'll used them when I can.  The drivable path can't be used for row crops until I'm done trucking stuff onto the property, though.  :(

I finally decided where to put the hops.  I potted them carefully, with mycorrhizal fungi, and sowed clover for nitrogen, and watered with EM-1, and finally added some sweet alyssum seeds.  That was a week ago, and look how fast the clover sprouted.

The thingies are already curving around the post.

Finally set up the trellis for the kiwi plants I have, on May 14th, with fungi and clover.  I slash mulched all of the vegetation first.  I have 2 male Hardy, and 6 female of slightly different strains.

They're going gangbusters now.

Already winding like crazy around the wire.

Holy crap, look at the rhubarb!  It's setting seed.  It's taller than me.  And last year I thought it died.  Gonna harvest these seeds because they'll be genetically adapted to my soil and my neglect.  :)

Look where it was on April 30th when it started sending up the stalk.  The leaves were already big.  

Every day or so, I MUST go check on all the big plants I paid money for.  Because moles.  They raise up soil, often covering my stuff, but more importantly, exposing soil, which increases evaporation.  I spotted this around a new rhubarb and covered the exposed soil with slashed vegetation.

Holy cow!  The King Stropharia spawn I got last fall worked!!  This is at the base of one of my apples-from-seed.  Now I need to learn how to harvest the spores.

I saw so many damselflies today!!!  They started coming back last year.  Never saw them before that.

Another thing that came back!  This was a hazel that I got for free from a KNF meetup.  It seemed to die last year.  Man!  Patience pays off.  It went from a little barely-visible sprout 10 days ago to this.

This is disturbing, these brown spots on the rose leaves.  Last week, I made a point of spraying the roses with the EM-1 that I propagated.  I think I did this damage.  It's on all of the roses I sprayed, it's not on roses I didn't spray.  But luckily, it's not on anything else that I sprayed, which includes the veggies.  :(

Oh man, the dwarf apple--I sprayed the dwarf apple!  And now it's completely dead.  It was only mostly dead before I sprayed.  Fucking goats almost ringed it at the base.  But I thought it might come back.  I think they ringed the rootstock and not the scion.  Maybe that's why it didn't survive and thrive like the other two apples.  But I think I pushed it over the edge with the spraying.  I mean, there were 2 tiny, half-formed leaves that were alive and which are now dead.  Bummer.  MUST improve my EM-1 propagation skills.  I now have the pH test paper to make sure it's potent and not growing bad guys.  But I also need to get my microscope out and start identifying what's in my brews.

Notes on potatoes

Note to self: Next year, dig trenches for your potatoes because look how much they have to be hilled up.  They're requiring so much soil that the level needs to be above the retaining wood!  May 18th.

In fact, I hilled-up a few last week, and that seems to have spurned them on, to grow even more by today.

Here's how they looked on April 30th (18 days ago).

Keep the dug out soil near the trench for easy backfilling and cover it with something to prevent weeds from making it hard to break up.  Or use clover.  Yeah.  Potatoes love nitrogen so use clover seed on the backfill soil.

Remember, though, that trenches will be cold traps.  Maybe put a cold air barrier on the uphill side of the potato bed, or just wait until the end of April to plant.

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!!