The Greater Gardening of 2026 – Part 42 – Topsoil Tilling Tiles Trouble

Just after I wrote my answer to dschultz under my last post about why I am inflicting the double-dig torture on myself with my heavy clay soil, I went to my garden to till another row on the potato patch, when suddenly the garden fork hit resistance just barely 10 cm under ground. As I do in such a case, I tried to reposition it to work around the obstacle, expecting it to be a larger stone or maybe a half brick. Occasionally, I dig out even a whole brick, and the biggest thing I dug out so far was a ca 30×40 cm phyllite paving stone. But I could not find the edge, and when I did, I could not get the fork deep enough to lever the seemingly big thing out. Then I managed to pry several small pieces off.

It turns out that just under the surface were buried several white tiles. I did not think much of it at that moment; an occasional tile or a piece of ceramics is not uncommon. And I continued to search with the fork and pry the tiles out.

Then a whole stack of tiles came out, and several more after that. At this point, I decided to put the tiles into a separate bucket.

I thought, maybe I will fill the whole bucket, and I did not want these tiles to be completely mixed with the stones I sort out of the soil, because the tiles are not as useful as, for example, road pothole filler. I was wrong about the bucket.

I almost filled two 10-liter buckets with these pure white tiles. There were several stacks buried in that place. And, funnily enough, it appears they were at the edge of the onerous piece of land. After this, the soil became suddenly less stony and much easier to till.

I already had proof that I was not working on a natural topsoil, but these tiles are definitive proof that something other than grass was on this piece of land before my time, probably before my grandfather got the house after WW2. I do not have a way to identify the age of the tiles. I did not look for any manufacturing markings yet, but they are definitely older than 50 years, since my whole life there was nothing but grass in this part of the garden.

The Greater Gardening of 2026 – Part 40 – Double Digging

So, the end of the growing season is nigh. I have started digging out the potatoes, although I have stopped for now, since most of them still have not died back. But I am continuing to expand the usable area of my garden. And to do that, I have to use the double-dig method for tilling soil.

For example, I tilled the patch on which I grew oats, and as I expanded it, I also removed the dead stump of my late apple tree. But doubling the size of the patch is not what double-dig means.

I took the garden fork to the whole area, and with the first shove I removed and turned the turf. And after I moved a whole row of turf aside, I took the fork again to the same spot, dug it as deep as it would go, and turned the underlying clay too. That way I aerate the soil up to 30 cm deep and I also had the opportunity to remove a lot of stones.

I removed 5 small buckets (about 25 l overall) of stones from that patch, including one half-brick and one ceramic tile. Next year, I will probably only grow peas on this piece – first green peas for food, then yellow peas as green fertilizer. That plan might change depending on the weather forecast in the spring.

I ploughed the alfalfa field, and it was difficult. Not because of the alfalfa, though. One difficulty was ryegrass, which creates underground runners that are tough like ropes. The second difficulty was the weather – it did not rain quite enough to soften the clay. I am not done with this piece yet; I will have to run it with the plough across this run later on. But I have to get a bit of rain before that; otherwise, it will be like trying to plough concrete.

In the top left of this picture, you can see that I am currently tilling this year’s potato patch, where the Ruth Stout method successfully killed the grass again. I am using the double-dig method too, and it is exceptionally difficult. Not only is the topsoil layer even thinner than in other places in my garden – only about 10 – 15 cm- but the underlying clay layer is very stony and, above all, compacted. I am now taking a break from all manual labor, because I am totally exhausted.

And here is one of the possible reasons why some parts of my garden are so difficult:

I dug this out yesterday evening in the potato patch. It is a quartz cobble, and it looks a bit like a potato in this picture. In fact, I did mistake it for a potato for about half a second. But the most interesting things about its history were revealed when I washed it.

Looks quite nice, doesn’t it? And it is the perfect size for a paperweight or a decoration, which is why I took it home and washed it. But why do I keep writing about a stone? Let’s look at another two quartz stones of similar size from my garden.

Even a layperson sees that these all look quite dissimilar to one another. To my knowledge, they have very different geological histories, albeit with some similarities – they all started as sedimentary rocks. (Any actual geologists are welcome to point out any errors that I might make).

The cobble started as sedimentary sandstone that was subjected to immense pressure over millions of years until it mostly fused. But the layers and pores of the original sandstone are still very much visible. Then the massif was broken up by some geological process, and the resulting gravel was churned by running water long enough to make the stones essentially ovoid. This particular stone was then broken again and churned some more until the sharp edges were slightly rounded. And that way the stone arrived at its current shape – round top, flat-ish bottom.

The other two stones look dissimilar to each other, but they both share the same original story. They started as shale, but instead of just pressure and time, it was subjected to prolonged, intense heat from an underground magma flow. As the magma cooled into granite, the shale underwent partial melting and metamorphosed – some parts of it retained the layered structure of the shale, but with changed mineral compositions. This new rock is called phyllite, and it is the blue-greyish parts of the right stone. But some of the shale underwent so much heat that quartz completely separated into nearly pure chemical, albeit not as a pure crystal. And that is the stone on the left and the white parts of the stone on the right. These stones were never subjected to river flow; they were slowly broken off the bedrock by erosion via temperature changes and plant roots. The phyllite was thus slowly transformed into clay again, with large chunks of hard quartz in it. That is why these stones do not have the sharp edges of a rock shattered through impact, but neither do they have the rounded shape of a cobble.

It is evident that these two types of stone cannot originate in the same area naturally – and it is the first one that does not belong here. I am nowhere near a river, in fact, I am near the crest of a hill. It is the phyllite that is the bedrock here. And the cobble is evidence that this particular piece of land is not fully natural topsoil. It is possible that there was a building, a walkway, or a road there where imported cobblestones were used as filler. Or there was a heap of unsieved river sand used when building the houses.

There is no way to know exactly, but this entirely natural stone is just as much evidence of unnatural topsoil as the half brick and ceramic tile are.

The Most Baffling Thing About Tolkien

I am currently listening to various YouTube essays on LOTR lore. I have read most of the books and watched the films multiple times. Now it is entertaining to listen to summaries about deeper lore from people who also read The Silmarillion, The Book of Lost Tales, and have researched various other writings by Tolkien himself.

I find it fascinating how deep the lore he has invented for his world is, and I totally respect the amount of work he put into it. He did create a great piece of literature that I like and undoubtedly will read again.

But I never read The Silmarillion. I tried twice, and I could not get thru the first chapter. It read like the Bible, albeit more coherent.

And that is the thing baffling me the most about Tolkien. He was sufficiently self-aware to notice that what he writes sounds like a religious text, yet not so to realize what it implies. He essentially wrote a creation myth that is more logical, more internally consistent, and in much better prose than the Bible, yet he remained a devout Catholic for his whole life.

I have never believed in any God, god, or supernatural being, or superstition. Not really, really believed, although there were times when I tried, and there certainly were times – and still are – when I would much wish for a benevolent and kind omnipotent being who would intervene on behalf of those in need, me included. It would be nice if I could pray for good weather, for example. But deep down, I always recognized this as an irrational desire disconnected from reality. The only thing that religion more broadly, and prayer and various superstitions (knock on wood) in particular, do is give a comforting illusion of hope and control when there is none.

Thus, I fundamentally lack the understanding those atheists have, who had an epiphany during their life and lost their faith. I never had faith; therefore, I cannot empathise with those who do. I never had an epiphany losing my faith; therefore, I lack personal knowledge of how that happens.

But if I had to guess one way such an epiphany could happen, it would be a direct, detailed confrontation with the human ability to create fictional deities and spin intricate stories about gods out of the fabric of imagination and legend. And Tolkien had such a confrontation as detailed as it gets. Yet he remained a believer in the Virgin Birth and the whole convoluted, contradictory, and downright nonsensical and idiotic mess that is Christianity as a whole and Roman Catholicism in particular.

He is proof that highly intelligent and informed people can believe in objectively proven bullshit. I have struggled to understand that reality my whole life.

The Greater Gardening of 2026 – Part 39 – Bursting Butternuts

Since I do not have much experience growing butternut squash, this is a new-ish problem for me. I have encountered this problem with some tomatoes, plums, and cherries, but I did not know it could happen with butternut squash too.

Four fruits burst in the last week: two lengthwise, two across. The one in the picture broke almost all around; a centimeter more and it would essentially fall off.

I guess this is because the shell hardened prematurely in the heat, and then the fruit grew too quickly after the rain. I had to harvest this one prematurely, and I gave two others to my neighbor because they should be processed ASAP, and we cannot do that right now. The one that burst first has only a small crack that dried out, so I left it on the plant for now. But I will harvest and process it at the earliest possible time too.

I do not think there is anything I can do about this. Even if I watered the plants during the heatwave more than I did, it would not help; they could not take up the water during the day fast enough anyway.

The Greater Gardening of 2026 – Part 39 – Large Loofahs

The loofahs are a-growing. Yesterday, I counted 8 fruits, 7 of which can be found in this picture.

Can you find them all? I made the picture larger than normal, so you have a chance to spot all of them. One is really hard to see, which is why yesterday was the first day I spotted it. The biggest fruit in this image is as big as my forearm and is starting to piss me off, because it is at the exact height where it is hard to see, but easy to boink with the head.

The eighth piece is the first that started early in the summer. It is behind the door to the right and already drying out.

I missed several female flowers and did not pollinate them, but bees and wasps pollinated some of those. If all these fruits manage to ripen enough to be useful, I will be fully satisfied with this crop. Eight fruits should be enough compostable dish-scrubbers for at least two years.

The Greater Gardening of 2026 – Part 37 – Cosplaying Cinderella

Except I am the wrong gender, and I didn’t have a costume. And I was sorting peas of my own accord, not at the behest of an evil stepmother.

I sorted undamaged and damaged peas. In the picture, there are approximately 3,25 kg of healthy-ish yellow peas in the jars. Healthy-ish because I am not entirely certain – some of them do have black spots, which might indicate there is a weevil pupa inside. The same goes for the 400 g of green peas on the right. And on the left are 200 g of badly damaged green peas. Not depicted is about the same amount of badly damaged yellow peas.

The healthy-ish yellow peas will be briefly frozen to kill any potential weevil pupae that might lurk in them. Then they will be used next year as either a pre-crop, companion crop, or even a main crop. To reduce weevil infestation, I will use a technique I read about on the interwebs and tested this year: staggered sowing. I will sow about a third as early in the season as possible and let them flower and fully fruit on some secondary plot. And about two months later, I will sow the main patch where I want them to grow for food. If I fail to grow food-grade peas, still no problem; they will be useful as green fertilizer even so.

The damaged yellow peas I have sown (together with some bad oats) in the raised bed where I had garlic this year. Some will decompose right away, but some will sprout and grow. Either way, they will serve as an organic fertilizer.

The healthy-ish green peas get the freezer treatment too, and they will be used to grow green peas next year as pre-crop with corn. The plan is to sow these as early as possible and harvest them as fresh green peas sometime in May, at about the same time that the Painted Mountain corn is supposed to be sown.

And the damaged green peas will be sown as green fertilizer now in the fall on the patch of land where I grew oats this year.

The Greater Gardening of 2026 – Part 36 – Crusty Camels

Another heatwave has hopefully ended, but the rains have not come yet; thus, I stood before the decision – to harvest the Camel potatoes before or after the rain.

Although the camel potatoes were not completely dry above ground, they were in the process of dying, so the tubers were no longer growing. For long-term storage, it is ideal to let the plants completely dry in the field so the tubers develop a slightly thicker and more resistant skin, but that has to be weighed against the fact that tubers grown in the Ruth Stout method are more susceptible to pest damage from both rodents and slugs. And the slugs are dormant right now, whereas they will come out after a bout of rain.

So I decided to rip out the remaining plants and harvest the patch already while the soil is still dry. Even so, there were many damaged tubers, several rodent tunnels, and quite a few slugs huddling in groups that I destroyed mercilessly.

Again, each of these crates contains 4 kg of tubers, except the middle one in the lower row, which contains 3,5 kg of the tiniest ones. The sack on the left weighs approximately 5 kg and contains 100 pieces of seed potatoes for next year. Not depicted is a bucket with circa 7 kg of heavily damaged potatoes that will need to be sorted and processed quickly.

Even though I put aside seeding potatoes, I am not so enthused about this variety as I am about Bellarosa:

The overall result of 43,5 kg from 5 kg of seed is slightly better than Bellarosa, especially considering that they were partially destroyed by mice in the spring. This variety sprouted later and had a slightly longer growing season.
There was no blight, and the pest damage was slightly more than with Bellarosa. This was somewhat offset (the overall number of damaged tubers is about the same) by my not damaging as many tubers with the rake, but the waste from that bucket will be substantial.
The size of the tubers is more spread out than with Bellarosa. I got one 4 kg crate with just 12 tubers, which is impressive. But overall, the tubers do seem smaller on average – 12 kg of big, 16 kg of small, and 3,5 kg of tiny tubers fit for storage.
The plants did survive the heatwaves well, but…
… as the title implies, the tubers seem to be much more scabby/warty than Bellarosa. So despite the name, they did not cope with the heat quite as well. This is mainly a cosmetic issue, but it slightly increases the waste from peeling.

So still not impressed, but content with how this turned out. We shall now test which meals these are suitable for and whether they can be dehydrated.

I Am Officially Half a Century Old Now

Yay me. Yesterday was my 50th birthday. For those extremely quick on the uptake, that means I was born on Friday the 13th. If my life is anything to go by, the superstitions regarding that date do seem somewhat justified, though not entirely – I was very lucky in some ways, but even more unlucky in others. And from my personal perspective, the balance was shifted towards “unlucky” where it mattered to me. It is most probable that I am well into the second half of my lifespan now, and only time will tell how that turns out. I expect things to get only worse, tbh.

I spent the day working and forgetting that I wanted to write this post entirely.

The Greater Gardening of 2026 – Part 35 – Thistle Test

I love thistles from an aesthetic standpoint, but in the garden, they are admittedly a huge pain in the wherever.

One huge Carduus acanthoides emerged near the south wall of my house among the runner beans. That is a place where it actually does not disturb me in any way. It does not impede mowing the lawn, watering the beans, or moving around the garden in general, so I left it grow. It is beautiful, and pollinators love it.

I especially like the spiky flower buds just before they open. They can be dried and painted for nice decorations, but I am not going to invest the effort in that. I enjoy them outdoors when walking by.

Thistles are pioneer plants capable of driving their roots even through compacted loam very deep. And they are not perennial, so they are actually good for the soil because the roots decompose after two years, leaving channels in the clay through which water can seep into the soil. That way, they help to de-compact it over the years.

But what am I actually testing with this thistle right now, I don’t hear you ask? Well, nothing gardening-related, actually. After eight years, my phone was getting slow, and the battery was no longer holding charge for very long. And to top it off, I dropped it, and the loudspeaker started to sound crackly. So as much as I did not want to, I had to buy a new one. And after a whole day of setting it up with all the apps I use, the thistle provided a nice opportunity to test the camera.

I learned that it makes nice macro pictures, as long as I do NOT use the built-in macro mode. All pictures made in the macro mode were blurry and just 1600×1200 px. I got better results by taking the pictures in the default mode and cropping them afterwards, just like I did with my old phone. Funny how that works.

The Greater Gardening of 2026 – Part 34 – Bellarosa Bounty

I harvested my first potatoes of the year, the very early variety “Bellarosa”.

Since I was growing these on top of the lawn under old compost mixed with some soil, moss, and tree leaves, I did not have to dig. I merely carefully raked the muck aside and picked the tubers off the ground. They did look quite nice, although they were not all nice. But that is normal.

Each of these crates contains 4 kg, except the far left one, which contains 2 kg of the smallest tubers. There were also approximately 8 kg of tubers that had various degrees of damage from mice, slugs, insects, or the rake. Those will need to be processed, i.e., eaten, fairly quickly.

I put aside 100 pieces of 40-60 g seed potatoes for next year because I do want to grow this variety again for the following reasons.

Overall, I harvested about 38 kg of potatoes from 5 kg of seed. This is not fantastic, but it is good, especially for a very early variety with very short vegetation.
There was no blight, and the pest damage is relatively minimal.
I am especially pleased with the size of the tubers and the ratio of big/small/tiny – I got 20 kg of big, 4 kg of small and just 2 kg of tiny tubers in shape good enough for storage, and that is good.
Since I grew them in the Ruth Stout method, it was relatively little work for quite reasonable gain.
Despite not being planted deep, the plants fared reasonably well in the heatwave.
Despite the heatwave, most of the tubers are quite nice-looking and not warty. Which is a cosmetic issue, but even so. They are also mostly round and not funny-shaped, which is a plus for peeling.

So although I am not super impressed, I am quite content with how this specific variety turned out. We will now cook a few meals with them and try to dehydrate them to see what uses they are best suited for.

The Greater Gardening of 2026 – Part 33 – Getting Grains

I extracted and weighed the oats. Let’s talk about it.

The sheaves did dry into a very nice golden colour, although possibly still not quite enough. Maybe the threshing would be a bit easier and less laborious if I let them stay a few more days. But I wanted to be done with this so I can concentrate on other things. Also, the sparrows apparently thought I harvested the oats for them.

It did take a few hit-and-miss experiments to get a process that works for a small batch.

First I put one sheaf heads-first into a thick plastic bag, and I chucked nuns at it for a bit. That softened the straw and loosened most of the grains, although unfortunately not all of them. I think to loosen all of them, the sheaves would need to stand outdoors for much longer, and possibly it would help a bit if they got rained on and dried again. I do not know for sure; there is not much knowledge about this floating around anymore – it was lost to combine harvesters. My mother only knew how to make the sheaves; she was doing it as a child.

After the straw was a bit beat up and softened, I stripped the panicles into the sack using a thick leather glove, and I poured it all into a bucket. To thresh it thoroughly, I built an improvised drill-powered thresher. First I used only the wooden spokes. It worked, but not particularly well. Then I added bits of chain on the ends of all spokes, and that improved the performance quite significantly. When I have time in the workshop, I will probably build a better and more permanent structure from metal, because I want to grow more grains next year.

If we had a bit of wind, separating the grains from the chaff would be easy. But we have almost dead calm, so I had to use an electric fan that I fortuitously was able to purchase last month. It did not work as well as natural wind would because of the limited cross-section of the airflow, but it did work. Unfortunately, the grains still need to be a bit sorted and cleaned manually, which is difficult without Cinderella, on whom such a task could be shifted.

So, what did I get? Approximately 3600 g of clean grain, circa 170 g/m². That is about half of what I was hoping for, and about 70% of what I would still consider a good-ish harvest. According to all the info I could find, 300 g per m² should not be impossible; indeed, most sources mention yields even 500g/m² or more.

I can only speculate about the reasons for such a poor yield:

Poor soil. It was visible in the growth that about half of the patch had significantly poorer soil. The plants there were good 10 cm smaller, and the panicles had visibly fewer blossoms. I did fertilize the patch, but evidently not quite enough for it to really matter. This is a real-life demonstration of why most fields around here were transformed into pastures.
Heatwave. The heatwave did have a negative effect. It was at exactly the wrong time, and as a result, the plants did not develop some flowers into grains. I did water the patch, but I waited a bit too long with it.

I still consider it a success in the sense that I learned something worth knowing. And I think it is worth pursuing growing naked oats (and other grains) next year on another, bigger patch of land. I will till in a lot of organic fertilizer and compost into that patch in the fall, so it decomposes and dissolves into the soil over winter, and I will do the same for the patches where I wish to grow various kinds of wheat next year. We shall see what comes of that.

As far as work goes, it is much, much cheaper to buy the oats, even organic ones, than to grow them on a small scale. I would estimate I needed about 4 hours in the spring and about 8 hours for the harvest. But it was mostly very light work, except the tilling in the spring, and the second time it will be a lot shorter, because I will know what I am doing. And I will not be tilling tough turf grass the second time, too – that also needs to be taken into consideration.

If I double the yield and halve the work time, it would be almost profitable. And I think it is doable, only it will take a ‘hole ‘nother year to find out.

Absolute Peak Masculinity

No comment.

The Greater Gardening of 2026 – Part 32 – Little Loofahs

Three days of devastatingly hot weather were still not enough to dry the oats completely. I threshed two sheaves and got about 500 g out of them. Which is bad; it means I might expect as little as just 3 kg from the whole patch. But I did not thresh the second sheaf completely, because the grains still did not want to separate from the chaff, so I put it aside for now, and I am letting it dry a bit further. The weather forecast so far does not include any major rain; at best, we could get a very light shower.

But there is some progress on the loofah front that I’d like to mention.

The loofahs started to drop the female flower buds that were emerging at the stems very early in the season, which was getting me a bit worried that this whole enterprise might be a bust. Which it still might be, but there is hope now. About a week ago, a new flower bud emerged in the tangled mess at the top of the greenhouse, and it matured and flowered very quickly. I was able to pollinate it, and it grows fast – today, it is about 15 cm long and getting bigger every day. I tied it with twine to the greenhouse construction, so if it gets too heavy, it does not rip the vine.

Today, another one opened, and I did my best to pollinate it again, although there were only two male flowers open at the same time. In the heatwave, the doors to the greenhouse are constantly open, so insects get in there too. I hope they help too.

And more female flower buds are hiding in the green tangle. They are not easy to find – I can find one one day and not find it again the next. Luckily, the flowers are bright yellow, so once they open, they are easy to spot.

According to Google, loofah fruit needs about two months to fully mature from pollination. I have weather data for my garden for the last 12 years, and in this time, we never had the first frost before the end of September, and sometimes we even had it as late as the beginning of November. Loofah is sensitive and will probably die before the first frost, but hopefully not before the fruits reach enough maturity to be able to go the rest of the way indoors.

One thing is clear, though – no matter how they taste, growing loofahs for food is not a viable endeavor here, not even in the greenhouse. If I wanted to grow expensive water, cucumbers would be a better option.

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