I mentioned the raspberry growth behind my garden already, there is even a picture in one of the older posts. Here is a new one.

It is just outside my garden, on the east side of the fence. It is an ideal spot for raspberries – they get full morning sun, but as the day gets hotter in the afternoon, they become shielded by my copicce poplars.

It is a mixed growth of probably domesticated, wild, and hybrid raspberries. Some shoots have prickles, most do not; some have fruits consisting of a lot of small drupelets, some of just a few big ones. Technically, it does not belong to me, but I take care of it and harvest most of the fruit. And anyone who goes by can harvest that fruit as well, and nobody, not even the owner of the meadow, can object to that. The Czech Republic has roaming laws about accessibility to landscapes, so a meadow is freely walkable unless it is currently being grazed by cattle or for similar safety reasons. And wild fruits and mushrooms are a common good that anyone can take. So even when these raspberries technically grow on someone else’s property, I am neither trespassing nor stealing.

Shortly after the Iron Curtain fell, some of the new forest and meadow owners tried to restrict public access to their land. Yet others tried to collect fees from people who took wild fruit or mushrooms.  There was a very public education campaign teaching people what is and is not allowed.

I also have to mow the grass about 1 to 1,5 m adjacent to my fence. The owner uses the meadows surrounding my house mostly for hay production, and the tractor cannot mow that close. And even when they used the meadows as pastures, there was a gap between the electric fence and my property that I still had to mow. That is how the growth got established in the first place when I was a kid – my father did not mow the grass around the garden, nor did the tractors, and thus raspberries took hold.

Occasionally, I flatten and subsequently fertilize the whole growth to rejuvenate it, forgoing that year’s harvest. But this is one of those years when I have a huge harvest.

The fruit is so aromatic that even my stunted sense of smell can enjoy it.

We have several kg of fruit already, and we should get even more in the next week or so. Luckily, we finally got some rain, and although it was not much, raspberries did benefit from it. I cannot water them; that would really be too much strain on my water resources.

So far, most of the fruit goes into the freezer. Once the harvest is over, it will be thawed, juice pressed out of it, and cooked into jam that lasts for years. However, I did take about 1 kg and dehydrated it.

Dehydrated raspberries are not very good food. They are sour and have the consistency of coarse sand. So why make them? Because I plan to mix them with sweet dehydrated pears in the fall, put the mix into a food processor and blend them together. The resulting powder makes for a very tasty and aromatic fruit tea in the winter.

So far, I have had very little success, since most of the growth season is still in the future, and thus only time will tell. Unfortunately, I had several definitive fails already. Some anticipated, some new.

Let’s start with the radishes. In the greenhouse, they were a definitive success. I harvested over 3 kg of radishes from sowing two packets. Outdoors, they were a failure; I harvested barely over 0,5 kg from one packet. Some were woody, some bolted before bulking, and all were heavily damaged by flea beetles. The cause of all that was likely the same that led to the failure of spinach: an abnormally warm and dry spring. The season essentially started a month earlier and got a rude interruption a month later.

The basil was a complete fail. It was heavily damaged by the late frost and completely dried in the subsequent drought.

Next, the strawberries. I had some, but just enough to eat them raw for breakfast for a few days. This was expected. I essentially started them anew this year, so they did not have deep enough roots to cope with the drought and the heatwave. No amount of watering can help with that.

All of the garlic Havel and a few plants of the other varieties got some fungal disease, and I had to harvest them prematurely in order to try and salvage something. It is still questionable whether I will have a lot of garlic or none at all. I do not know what specific fungal disease it is; it might be Botryotinia porri.

I have no slug damage worth speaking of this year, but the vole infestation has reached unprecedented levels. My garden looks like Emmental cheese.

They dug under the onions, although they did not eat any. They also dug under and ate some of the carrots, forcing me to start harvesting them prematurely to prevent losing them completely. They ate the roots of several bean plants. And they started to try to dig their way to the roots of my newly planted trees as if they were honing in on them – holes started to appear around the wire mesh circumferences that I used to protect them.

I tried to put down traps, but the fuckers learned how to trip them and take the food out afterwards. In the end, I had to resort to poison to at least reduce the pests before they completely overrun my garden. To reduce the risk to cats, hedgehogs, and other mammals, I am putting it directly into the burrow entrances and covering it with a bucket. I did not have to do this for decades, and I hope I won’t need to do it again.

If not for the voles, planting carrots in the egg trays would be a success, although I did not water them all quite enough. Some got big, some remained tiny.

So the lessons:

I won’t grow radishes outdoors anymore, only in the greenhouse as a pre-crop. The weather is too strange now, and older wisdoms and pranostics no longer apply. I can no longer rely on my books, Google,  or even the seed packets for proper planting/sowing times.

I need to wait to plant basil outdoors for later, and I need to water it a lot. It seems rather thirsty. I did not give up on it this year yet – I bought seedlings in the supermarket in the vegetable aisle. The weather is now cool and cloudy, ideal for hardening them off before planting them outdoors.

Next year, I will do minimal disruption to the strawberry growth that I planted this year. Strictly speaking, this is not a new lesson, only a reiteration of one already learned.

To grow garlic, I need at least three beds with more permeable soil that I can disinfect, and I probably should spray my garlic with some fungicide, just as I do with potatoes and tomatoes. I am also making sure that no peels or offcuts of garlic get onto the compost pile; from now on, I will burn it all.

And lastly, to grow carrots and other root vegetables, I need rodent-proof beds.

Those two last lessons coalesced in the conclusion that I need at least three separate raised garden beds that I can fill with a custom soil mix. I wanted to build them from materials I have lying around, since they were rather expensive the last time I looked. But before I started to build, I checked again and I found three very nice 322x100x36 cm raised beds at a discount price I could afford, so I ordered them. I will reinforce the bottoms with wire mesh, and fill them with a mix of soil that I am reasonably certain is healthy, sand/clinker (I have two piles over 50 years old, of coal ash, clinker, and sand in my garden, overgrown with grass, I use it to lighten the soil for bonsai already), compost, and biochar. Then I can rotate garlic, carrots, beets, and bush beans between these beds to ensure the soil is not overtaxed by just one crop planted in it repeatedly, and that species-specific pathogens do not accumulate. I will probably add sunflowers or hemp in the rotation a few times, in case there are still some bioavailable heavy metals in the old coal ash piles.

And that is that for now, I will continue to grow, and we will see what comes out of it.

 

I was able to mostly water the garden adequately, and most plants now appear to have deep enough roots to thrive. Except for a few fails, about which I will write another time. And when the plants get their roots deep enough, the leaves get nice dark green color and they start to bloom.

Though the first picture today is not a bloom, it is my first bell pepper ever. It was tiny (just 70 g), but according to my father, it was delicious.

The bell peppers continue to bear fruit, and the tomatoes just started to blossom last week when I took this picture. They are much bigger now, and the first berries are starting to show up. So far, so good. Due to the heat wave, I did put a shading net over the greenhouse, tomatoes do thrive best in temperatures up to 35°C and with direct sunlight, the greenhouse could easily overheat in this weather.

The humble pea had lots of white blossoms everywhere I planted it. The pods are now in their flat stage, and I expect them to bulk up within two weeks or so. After that, I can harvest the peas and plant a second round of the same. Or I can try for spinach again. At least this supply of pea seeds had very good germination rate, and I should get at least my money’s worth and some of the time too.

I already harvested the first variety of pea that I planted, the one with a poor germination rate. I got just about what the packet cost out of that,too.

The three sisters patches are doing OK-ish. The beans finally started to climb the poles. Normally, once they do that, the growth accelerates significantly.

The purple blossoms of the runner bean are beloved by pollinators of all kinds – bees, bumblebees, and butterflies. I like them too, they ad color to the garden. Some of the other beans started to blossom too, but most did not, and there are still some that did not catch onto the support.

The marrow pumpkins started with female flowers this year, which is unusual. Normally, pumpkins start with male flowers to attract pollinators and only later add female flowers. This way does not make much sense, because female flowers are a bigger investment, and without any male flowers around, they simply dry and fall off uselessly. But after about a week, male flowers started to show up too, so from now on, I should be getting some pumpkins.

This week, the first Hokkaido pumpkin started to bloom, with male flowers as is proper. Pumpkins and beans are the OK part of my three sisters experiment. The -ish part is corn.

So far, most of the corn is still stunted. And those plants that looked big and healthy started to bloom now, but only male flowers. I suspect this is corn’s reaction to the wonky weather. I might still get some harvest out of some of the large number of plants that I planted, but it just appears corn is not worth the effort in my garden. It is too unreliable. Out of the four years I am trying to grow it, only the first year I had a definitive success; every following year, it was a lot of work and a lot of failure.

Potatoes are not doing well; the weather is too dry and hot for them, even with watering. I will get some, but it won’t be spectacular. They started to bloom last week, and in about two months, they will be ready for harvest.

And last, some weed that sprouts every year in my gladiolas. I never bothered to identify the species, and I am generally leaving it be. It does not spread, and it has nice, big white blossoms.

Next time, I will unfortunately have to write about some of the fails I had this year.

I mentioned a few times that I have a sewage treatment facility at my home and that I do get some use out of it outside of it cleaning water. I will say a bit more about it today, since it is rather important these days.

I have a five-stage system:

1. 3-chamber anaerobic septic tank – here the water undergoes the first stage of biological cleaning where it separates solids and the slowly decompose and ofgass. The sludge that is left behind needs to be pumped out and disposed of approximately once a year.
2. Biofilter – essentially a column of plastic foam where some further biological shenanigans happen. The water that comes out can, under certain circumstances, be let out. In my case, it undergoes further cleaning because…
3. Pumping station – the septic tank and biofilter have the water surface too low below the ground, so the biofilter is permanently and completely flooded. It was not supposed to be like that, and we had to insert the pumping station during production to compensate for a mistake in the project.
4. Gravel reed bed – a 5×10 m hole, 1 m deep, lined with heavy-duty foil and filled with gravel. I actually built this first, illegally, to clean grey water only. It was a significant improvement over what we had before, which was simply to let uncleaned grey water to seep into the ground. To this day, many households here still have some semi-legal arrangements like that.
   The gravel bed is planted mostly with Phragmites australis. The reeds clean the water further, and although they are most effective during the vegetation season, they do work in winter too. In the summer, they use up nitrogen and phosphorus to grow and create biomass. In the winter, some of that biomass dies and provides carbon for bacteria that also use the nitrogen and phosphorus. At the very end of the gravel bed is a charcoal filter, where most particulate matter and remaining chemical pollution (still mostly phosphorus and nitrogen compounds) are further absorbed.
5.  Seeping pond – a shallow (~50 cm at most) pond where the water seeps into the soil around the edges. Around the pond are planted willows and my mighty walnut tree. The willows provide me with firewood and long sticks for growing beans, the walnut provides me with food and shades the pond completely most of the summer. In the pond is a big growth of duckweed, which cleans the water even further – although that is no longer strictly necessary, since water is tested before the pond, after the charcoal filter. Ammonia is a bit of a problem, but not really.

I tried to have fish in the seeping pond and they did survive the summer, but not the winter. I would need to have active aeration in the pond for that – when sudden -20°C came, the fish suffocated under the ice. But the pond is full of life even without my interventions.

I have introduced duckweed to the water, and it does not look very appetizing (to a human), but it is actually a sign of healthy water. I never had a harmful algal bloom in my pond, which is caused by cyanobacteria. Those thrive in environments with excessive phosphorus pollution but a lack of nitrogen, and they do release nasty chemicals into the water. This water is not drinkable, and it is not clear, because there are dead leaves, etc., in it, but it is healthy.

This year, the weather seems to be especially favorable for the duckweed; the pond is completely covered. Thus, I finally rigged a sieve with a long handle to scoop out some of it. I am composting it – it adds nitrogen and phosphorus to the compost heap and the life cycle of shit is thus completed. When taking it out, I took out some other life forms too.

Damselfly larvae are a frequent occurrence. I do my best to toss them back as soon as I notice them. They are the main reason why I do not simply throw a pump into the pond when I need water for irrigation anymore. However, this year I got a surprise that made me really happy.

Alpine newt (probably) –Ichthyosaura alpestris. I did post about frogs in the pond in the past, but newts are even more sensitive to chemical pollution than frogs. That is why I was happy to see one. Especially since this year is very dry and the amphibians need every help to survive they can get.

For smaller amounts of irrigation water, I can use watering cans to scoop water out of the pond. But since I expanded my gardening this year, right when it seems we will have another climate-change-induced drought, I have to use it to irrigate my crops. And in this picture, you can see the pump under the water level in the last stage of the gravel bed, before the water goes through the charcoal filter. It is see-through for several decimeters even before that last filtering, and it is safe to water crops that are a long way away from harvesting and that are not eaten raw. Just to be on the safe side, I still do not use it to water strawberries or anything similar that could get splashed. Potatoes, tomatoes, onions, peas, beets, and bonsai benefit greatly, though.

The hot compost is a lot of work, but so far, I find it at least interesting. In the meantime, I learned that the white stuff that I thought was fungal mycelia is actually bacterial growths of Actinomycetes. An easy enough mistake, as the name suggests, there are similarities.

My garden needed trimming again, and this time it was too much grass to cut it all in one go. On the first day of work, I got a pile that was roughly the same size as both previous piles combined.

Again, I did not wait for the grass to dry, and I piled it directly on the heap. The weather was so dry and hot, and it took me so much time, that the layers did wilt and slightly dry anyway. Even though this time it was mostly fresh grass, I added calcium cyanamide to the pile straightaway to see what happens. What happened is that it went all the way to 70° and higher overnight. I had to do other things for a bit, so it took a few days before I managed to mow the rest of the garden and add it to this pile again.

This time the grass did dry up completely, because I had to mow grass around the garden too, and it is less walking to mow it and let it lay until it dries and then collect it with a wheelbarrow than trying to cart it to the pile directly from the lawnmower. So for the second (top) half, I had to water it thoroughly too. It took a bit longer to reach the temperature, a whole day instead of overnight.

Now it is going to sit in this place until it starts to cool off, then I will turn it and fluff it up a bit and leave it be again. Probably until next year – this pile is now on the part of my vegetable bed, where the soil had to be dug out when building my sewage cleaning facility. When filling it back, the workers were not careful enough to put the topsoil back on top properly, and it got mixed up a lot with the infertile clay underneath. It has been lying bare for a few years now, with grass and wildflowers working on the soil to improve it naturally. Now I want the compost to finish that process and expand my usable garden bed to its full former glory.

The second muck heap is cooling off, but it is still higher than the ambient temperature, 30-40 °C. The first heap has been cold for several weeks now, so I decided to put it between the rows of the potato patches. It was five wheelbarrows per patch, and even though it is not completely decomposed and cured yet, it should add the needed shade for the tubers and some nutrients for growth. It will continue to decompose in situ, and potatoes do not mind a lot of organic matter around them – I grew them directly in non-composted grass the last two years after all.

I was busy as a bee since the last article, and I did not have much time (and strength) for writing.

For one, I had several tomato plants that did not fit into my greenhouse. Simply planting them outdoors would, in all likelihood, end in disaster, as it did in the last three seasons. Thus, I have built an impromptu shelter to shield them from rain. The roof is made from old and damaged PC greenhouse sheets. We will see if this really helps to stave off the Phytophtora infestans.

Beans behind the house started to climb the supports, even flower, and the corn looked very promising. And today, a disaster struck. Voles dug holes right near my house, and they destroyed three bean plants and one corn plant. They never made holes this close to the house, so it took me by surprise. I put down bait and traps and I hope to eradicate those fuckers before they do even more damage. This year is relatively dry so far, which helps to keep the slugs under control. On the other hand, the dry weather suits voles better. Last spring, voles destroyed nothing, and slugs did significant damage. This year, it is the exact opposite.

All three Three Sisters patches are now fully planted. The plants take it slow so far; most beans are not climbing yet, and the corn and pumpkins are still growing very slowly, if at all. I do hope that changes soon. It usually does. Especially the pumpkins tend to have kinda exponential growth – starting slowly at first and after a certain point becoming unmanageable in a very short time.

I still had ten surplus butternut squash plants. So I took a fork to a patch of land between my greenhouse and the coppice, where compost lay in previous years. The soil is not very good, but it is relatively stone-free, and the grass was not very deep-rooted yet. I worked some fresh compost into it; pumpkins do not mind.

I want to try to grow the butternut squash vertically on this patch, so I built an impromptu scaffolding for them to climb. These are old fencing panels that my father made from previously mentioned aluminium profiles when I was a kid. He used them to keep ducks and geese off the vegetable patches. They are useful around the garden to this day.

I was thinking about what companion plant I could add to these pumpkins, and I decided to sow the whole bed with red beets. Beets do not mind shade, and if the pumpkins grow vertically, it could work. We shall see. The green stuff on the ground is duckweed – I watered this patch thoroughly with water from the pond at the end of my sewage cleaning facility. A bit more about that next time.

I have three “Tree Sisters” patches, with 10, 15, and 25 squares. In all the patches, I planted or I am planning to plant 2 beans in each corner, then either 2 corn in each square or 4 corn in every even square, and either 1 pumpkin in each square or 1 in every odd square.

So I crunched some numbers to see how much of the full capacity of these areas I am using concerning each plant:

~80% for the beans
~90% for pumpkins
~30% for corn

So overall, I am using only half the area that I would need if I were growing each of the crops separately at optimal spacing. Which is one of the points of using the companion-plant system.

I do not know whether this ratio is good, bad, or ugly. To be completely honest, I did not look it up, and I am playing it by the ear. I planted the beans as a main crop because I have marginal soil, and I know beans thrive on it and will improve it. Then I planted only as much corn as I had receptacles for. And I might plant even more pumpkins than I initially planned because one of the seed suppliers had almost a miraculous germination rate and I loath to toss a viable plant.

That last point is still not entirely decided. I already planted 10 marrow squashes, and so far they have survived and started to grow. Today I also planted the first 3 Hokkaido because they had three true leaves and thus should, hopefully, be sturdy enough to survive slugs (I will add slug pellets around them anyway). The butternut squashes still have a huge question mark over them, but if they survive, I might have to establish a solitary patch for some of them. I do have the place,  although I do not know if I will have the strength.

I will probably have to add some liquid fertilizer to the irrigation water due to the marginal nature of my soil. The improving effect of beans will only show up in the subsequent years. I do not know if the plants will grow to their full capacity or if the capacity of each species is going to be diminished. Unless it is reduced by more than half, the patches should produce more than separated ones would.

Based on past experience, if grown separately, I should get around 70g of beans, 50 g of corn, and 5000 g of pumpkin on average from one plant. So if all plants grow well, I might be looking at about 30 kg of beans, 5 kg of sweet corn, and 150 kg of pumpkins. I will only believe those numbers when I see them, and out of all of these, I am most inclined to believe the first and the last one. Of all these, it is usually the corn that performs the poorest.

I did try corn as a companion plant to potatoes about five years ago. I did not write about it, but it was a success – the potatoes grew at 100% capacity, and thus all the corn was extra, albeit a small amount. Shame that it is so much more work to grow everything here. I could get a lot more use out of my garden if I could just toss seeds in the ground and let them grow. It is one of many downsides of living in a semi-mountainous area. Sigh.

Now I’m going outside again.

I already mentioned my woes with beans this year. Unfortunately, with the late frost, they only got exacerbated. I planted all my yellow beans, and we unwisely ate the rest, so I had none left. Thus, after they froze, I bought new seed packets. I will have some yellow beans, but nowhere nearly as much as I would like to.

I was always fairly confident in the germination rates of seeds, both bought and homegrown. When I wanted to grow 100 plants, I would buy somewhere around 100 seeds. For whatever reason, that was not the case this year. Homegrown seeds have a 90-100% germination rate, but bought seeds have between 0-50% germination rate. All other variables – temperature, light, substrate, watering – are identical, so it definitely is the seeds themselves. I noticed that many of the bought seeds had necrotic spots, and even when the germ itself was intact and the seed sprouted, the resulting plants are often tiny and sickly-looking.

Those are the remnants of over 100 seeds planted two weeks ago. Only a handful sprouted, and the plants are still tiny, some barely poking out of the ground.

Compare that with these black beans, planted from my own, two years old. These started to poke out of the ground just yesterday, and already some are bigger and healthier-looking than the older ones. And although it is not clearly visible in the picture, there is actually a 100% germination rate, I checked every receptacle.

These last ones are yellow beans grown from newly bought seeds, sown before those homegrown in the previous picture. Yesterday I went through them all and I sorted out about 50% of the receptacles where the seeds were either dead or completely rotten away. That is the best result with bought seeds this year. If I were buying seeds and sowing them directly into the ground and then waiting for them to sprout, I would have an empty garden this year.

These are different varieties, but it is the same species (Phaseolus vulgaris), and the yellow and black beans are similar in seed size.

Two years ago, I was growing beans too, mostly from bought seeds (that is how I acquired the black and yellow beans), and I do not remember having this trouble. This year,  I bought seeds from three different suppliers, two of whom I had a positive past experience with, and they all had trouble.

Then there were pumpkins. Since I decided to expand my growing this year, I knew that I wanted to grow three varieties of pumpkin. White marrow Cucurbita pepo “Květa”, orange Hokkaido Cucurbita maxima, and butternut Cucurbita moschata. I had some leftover seeds of Květa from last year, so I put those on a wet paper towel to germinate (a method that we used for pumpkins since I was a kid), and they all germinated within a week, and nothing else needed to be done. At the same time, I put in the same conditions some fresh butternut and Hokkaido seeds. After two weeks, none of those sprouted. So I bought new ones from another supplier. Some Hokkaido sprouted, but butternut did not. So I bought butternut seeds from the same supplier that I had the old Květa seeds from.

Those started to germinate in 3 days, and within a week, 80% germinated.

At this time, I was getting pretty pissed and I tried to break off the tips of the seeds of Hokkaido and butternut. When doing that, I found out that some had rotted in the shell as they became mushy and soft. Some did not rot, but they also did not germinate. But breaking of the tips did induce germination in at least a few, so I do not need to buy additional seeds, I should have enough plants for my garden, and perhaps even to give some seedlings to my neighbor.

The funny thing about all this is that the white runner beans I wrote about in First Fails (Phaseolus coccineus with germination just 20%) were actually from the same seed supplier I had the excellent Květa and butternut seeds from. So, at least as far as the beans go, it does not seem to be a supplier issue. Still, it makes me wonder what is the cause of these troubles. In essence, I had to buy three packets of seeds to get one packet’s worth of plants, and that is really not something I remember happening in the past.

I harvested the spinach all in one go, if such a fancy word can be used. I got just about one serving. It was delicious, but definitely not worth the money I spent on the seeds, let alone the work. I read up on the issue and I am convinced it was due to a too warm and dry April. I will try to sow some again in August for a fall harvest. In the meantime, I had to go with an alternative plan not only for these patches, but also for those where I planned to put the failed bush beans.

That alternative plan is peas. Lotsa peas. Peas here, peas there, peas everywhere. I sown overall 500 g of peas. I filled every square dm of available soil. It is an unknown supplier, so I do not know if they germinate, although I fervently hope they do. However, pea is a true wonderplant – even if it does not germinate, it still enriches the soil. If it grows but fails to bear a crop, it still enriches the soil even more. And if it bears crop, it still enriches the soil.

I hope this year to have some success with peas because the frosty winter and dry spring have at least one good consequence so far – I am not up to my eyeballs in slugs. I only find two/three a day, and they did not destroy the peas that I planted earlier. The variety I have sown now should grow from germination to harvest in just two months, so two harvests should be possible. Therefore, I bought an additional 500 g of seed for that.

I mowed the grass in my coppice last week, and yesterday I raked it out. I still took out more dried tree leaves and old grass and moss than the fresh mown grass, thus I de facto acquired a second big compost heap.

I did not have fresh grass to mix in it this time, so I mixed in it ca 500 g of calcium cyanamide and wetted it thoroughly. We will see if it starts heating up in a few days. I also turned the first pile over, because it cooled to just 20°C about 10 cm under the surface. Deeper inside, it still had 40°C though. It is still soggy and fibrous and won’t be of any use for a while yet.

As I said, I already planted some corn and some beans outdoors. Most of it froze, but those planted near the south wall of my house survived, albeit some plants did get mild damage. I also started more corn, and I’d like to write a few words about it.

Corn has very delicate roots, and it does not take very well when they are extensively damaged during re-potting. Ideally, it should be sown directly into the ground, but I have had bad experiences with that. Last year, half the corn germinated several months later; it was stunted in growth, and it developed a wild teosinte phenotype, including the two-row ears. I did not know that corn phenotype could be influenced by weather this way. In retrospect, I should have taken pictures, but I only realized what the peculiar-looking grass was after I ripped it out as weed and threw it in the compost.

But I digress, I need to start corn in the greenhouse, and I need to plant it outdoors with minimal damage to the roots. Simply planting the seeds in the containers does not work well because it is difficult to get the root system out of the container without damaging it. Unlike beans, pumpkins, or tomatoes, corn roots do not bind the soil together strongly enough for that. Thus, I tried three ways to do it this year. All work well and have their pluses and minuses.

The first idea I got was when some of my old planting pots cracked lengthwise. I am using old yoghurt pots for my seedlings because they cost me nothing, and I accumulate quite a lot of them each year. They hold for several seasons, but eventually, they crack. I took a cracked one, I cut the bottom off, and I inserted it into another. It works very well for starting corn because the 500 ml cup offers enough space to get a substantial plant before the roots poke out of the bottom, and it is easy to get out without damaging the roots. It seems to be the best method so far; the plants behind my house were started this way, and they are already over 20 cm tall. Alas, I could not use it for all my corn because I did not have enough cups for my rather magnanimous plans this year.

Necessity is the mother of all invention. For the second idea, I used some corrugated cardboard that was left outdoors in the rain until it delaminated, and I lined some cups with two layers – one flat layer on the inside and one corrugated layer on the outside. Again, it does help to get the whole root system out of the cup easily. But the soggy cardboard does not keep the roots together as well, and more care is needed when planting and handling them. On the plus side, the cardboard can be left in the ground, and does not need to be carefully removed like the plastic lining in the previous method. I cannot let the plants grow as big as with the previous method, only because I had to use smaller cups.

For the third method, I collected paper towel tubes, cut them in half, arranged them in a flower box, and filled them with soil. When the plants are a few cm tall, they can be either put into bigger containers or directly into the ground. The downside of this method is that the plants need to be moved pretty soon, otherwise the roots crawl under the tubes into the flower box and get intertwined. The upside is that each plant can be easily and quickly plucked and replanted. The cardboard tube holds together well and need not be removed; it too will dissolve in the ground.

Overall, I hope to grow over 100 corn plants this year, discounting the ca 20 that froze (grrrr).

 

 

This morning, I wished I could cry. I got seriously depressed instead.

I do not remember getting frost in the last week of May. Ever. We got it last night, and it might repeat today.  That means that potatoes, which had just started to emerge from the ground, some recovering from one bout of late frost already, froze again. I tried to protect them with canvas, but it did not help much.

I also planted some beans and corn already, as well as basil and oregano. Most of that is dead; tonight it might get the coup de grâce.

Several days of work down the drain, and I am back to square one. The problem is that if I start beans and corn now, they might not mature enough before the first frost in the fall. I will still try, because that is all I can do, but so far this year, I am only counting my losses – first crappy germination rates and too hot and dry April and now this. Fuck this insane weather, this really is not normal.

The raspberries that grow around different places in my garden and behind my hedge are two-year varieties. First year shoots sprout from the ground and grow in height to 1-1,5 m. The second year, these shoots sprout short twigs with blossoms that bear fruit. In the fall, the whole shoot dies and dries over winter. The growth can become pretty overcrowded and inaccessible if these dead shoots are not removed. It was difficult to remove them without trampling some of the one-year shoots that will bear fruit any given year, so this spring I thought about it a bit. I decided to make a new tool specifically for this task, thus I took an angle grinder, hammer, and forge to an old shovel (first used to make a rondel dagger accessories back in the day) and I carved, forged, and ground a small-ish bill hook. I sharpened the inner side of the curve as well as the forward-facing one, and I affixed it to an approximately 1 m long handle. I can grab the dead shoots, and cut them off at or near the ground level without bending down and without going into the growth and damaging it.

Today, I was facing the problem of fast-growing weeds (mainly Veronica chamaedrys) among my onions that I could not remove with any tool currently at my disposal, and that would be too onerous and time-consuming to pull manually. I still had a bit of the old shovel left, so I cut an outline of the tool and heated up the forge again. It is a sort of tiny mini-shovel, just 5 cm wide and with a sharpened V-cut in the face. It too has an approx 1 m long handle and I can carefully push it between the rows of onions, cutting the weeds several mm under the surface without damaging the crop. The weeds will dry and die and eventually decompose. It is not 100% weed removal, but it did allow me to undercut most of the weeds in all of my onion patches in under an hour, and that is a definitive success. Veronica chamaedrys is impossible to remove once established, so I am not even trying anymore. I only do my best to suppress it enough so it does not choke out the crops.

 

This post will be a bit of a downer, I am afraid. Like every spring, it is a bit nerve-wrecking to buy seeds without actually knowing if something comes out of them. In hindsight, I now know that I could have saved a lot of money.

I had several packets of different pumpkin seeds – pattypan, butternut, courgette “Květa”, and hokkaido. I put all of them on wet paper towels to germinate before putting them into the ground, and so far, only the Květa germinated pretty well. Butternut and pattypan failed to germinate at all, and of all the hokkaido seeds, only three germinated. And those three did not emerge from the ground yet, so I do not know if they are still alive. Thus, so far I have about 12 plants of Květa and exactly 0 of others. That is pissing me off, but not as much as the next thing.

I planted beans and sweet corn behind the house. These are red runner beans that I have grown successfully there for years now. I had a 100% germination rate with seeds sorted out of the previous year’s harvest. I also had the luck to find white runner beans on the internet, and I bought a packet of 20. Only four germinated into sickly looking plants; the rest rotted in the ground. In the fall, I bought two varieties of bush beans and a new variety of pole beans to try out. They all rotted without germinating. On the same website, I bought some sweet peas and sweet corn. Both had a germination rate of about 30%. And do you remember the failed onion seeds? The same website. It is a real disappointment because it is the same site where I bought my seeding garlic that turned out well (so far). Not the wintering onion, though, that too mostly failed. Needless to say, I won’t be buying seeds from that company again, except maybe the garlic.

All this means that I have essentially nothing to plant on my big prepared three sisters patch. So I bought several packets of seeds of beans, pumpkin seeds, and corn from a different supplier, and now I am again in the nail-biting waiting stage, if something sprouts. I also planted an additional 160 red runner beans from my own seeds since that seems reliable.

If it were not for the 100% germination rate for my own beans, I might be inclined to blame a failure on my part. But 100% germination of my own seeds and 20% germination of bought seeds of the same species proves that I did nothing wrong.

The spinach is also a bust. Not only did it have a poor germination rate – about 50% – but most of the plants that did emerge were tiny and sickly looking. And some are already going into blossom, despite being barely five cm tall. I am completely at a loss to understand how this could have happened. Maybe April and May were too warm and dry. I honestly do not know, and it is a real head scratcher. This really pisses me off. I like spinach, and I was really looking forward to growing my own. I might still get some out of the few plants that look healthy and do not go into bloom, but I will be lucky to get enough for one lunch. I still have some seeds left over, so I might try for a fall harvest by planting them in July. If I try that, I will plant the seeds in an egg-tray first.

Carrots started to sprout, though not all that I planted. And yesterday, voles dug under one of the trays, completely destroying it. I hate those fuckers.

Potatoes sprouted too early and froze. Funnily enough, nothing else did, not even nearby oak trees, which are also susceptible to late frost. They seem to be recovering and are sprouting again now.

At least the muck heap continues to rot successfully. I turned it over on Tuesday, and this time, it did not heat up as much and as quickly.

It is still warmer than the outside temperature though. Today it had over 30°C when the outdoors was barely 10°C. I will continue to monitor the temperature, and I will probably delay turning it again until it starts cooling off.

To make liquid fertilizer, I took an old plastic canister and an old solar-powered aerator, and I built this contraption. I will put some shredded weeds in there to ferment and dissolve. Then I will add it to the watering cans for citrus trees and tomatoes. On YouTube, some gardeners swear by this “compost tea”, and some say it is a waste of time and resources. I looked up scientific studies on the subject, and I found one meta-study that said that aerated compost tea is actually a good fertilizer, and since I had all the necessary components lying around, it cost me nothing. I should have no shortage of nettle leaves and other nitrogen-rich weeds to feed it.

In the past, I was making only anaerobic compost tea. That stinks to high heavens, which is a bad thing even if it bothers no one. The smell means loss of nutrients (mainly sulphur and nitrogen) due to off-gassing. Allegedly, this should not be a problem for the aerated method. We shall see, or more precisely, smell, if that is the case. It has been three days and I smell nothing so far.

To end on a hopeful note, if the weather remains frost-free, I might have apples, pears, and walnuts again this year. If, however, frost comes in the second half of May – something that I do not remember happening here, ever – it will be a catastrophe.