I got sick for a few days. The weather is too cold for this time of year, and I did not dress appropriately while working in the garden, which triggered (probably) a mild strep throat infection that would probably not develop in warmer weather. After a few days of being in bed, drinking paracetamol and elderberry tea, I might be finally getting better today – the throat pain subsided, and both teas started to taste awful. That is a peculiar thing – I strongly dislike the smell and taste of elderberry juice, yet I always try my best to keep a stash in my cellar. Because when I get sick, I get a craving for it. And once I heal, I start hating it again.

But before I got sick, I managed to harvest all the peas I sown two months ago.

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I did not manage to do it all in one go; I had to spread the work over several days. It was approximately three buckets of pea pods overall, which my parents shelled in the evenings while watching TV.

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I got about 4500 g of green peas from 500 g of seeds. About 500 g was lost to voles and drought, but 4500 is still a respectable amount that made the whole endeavour worth it. Now they are in the freezer awaiting further fate. We are still considering whether to keep them there and slowly use them in soups and foods, or to thaw them all and preserve them in jars.

And whilst I was sick, I was able to take a picture of a frequent visitor to my windowsills.

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I hear kestrels chirping all the time, but they are not easy to take a picture of. I am very glad to see them. They are an invaluable vole predator, and if I could convince them to nest nearby, I would.

We finally got some good rain. The groundwater table is still below normal, but the situation is less critical, and the vegetation did get good watering. A few more rains like what we had this week, and the drought might be over. At least now I do not need to spare water even if it does not rain for a month or so again, and I have enough surplus to give my greenhouses a good soak.

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Blue grapes are starting to color, although they still have a long way to go. I do not know what causes the drying of the leaf edges on this plant. It does it every year and does not seem to be weather-related. These grapes are delicious, although they do have seeds. It looks promising so far.

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The white grapes do not show any meaningful damage on the leaves, and they have even more fruit. In addition to that, this vine grows so fast I have trouble keeping it confined to the greenhouse. These grapes are seedless, even more delicious, and usually I also get a bigger harvest. And since this year the vines were not damaged by late frost, I might get a really substantial amount.

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My fig trees got too big and I had to cut them back severely. I might not get any figs this summer, but I might still get some later in the autumn. The summer figs are usually better tasting, but in order to get them, the trees need to be left unpruned in the spring. We shall see if some of the bigger ones start ripening in about a week.

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I am trying to grow ginger this year again. I had not much success so far, and I learned that my mistake might have been putting it in direct sunlight. Ginger allegedly likes it warm but shady. So this year I put it under the grapevine in slight shade, but it does not look very promising so far. The weather is apparently not warm enough for ginger, although it is plenty warm for everything else. The gingers are barely starting to poke out of the ground just now.

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Tomatoes thrive, both inside and outside the greenhouse. And at both locations, they began to bear fruit, with more in the greenhouse. The plants are so far healthy, so I won’t spray them in the greenhouse with fungicide anymore. I might spray those outside once more, though. They are shielded from rain, but not from fog and dew, so they are still more susceptible to blight. The fruits are still reasonably far from ripening for one more round of fungicide to be safe.

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And outside the greenhouse, I counted 12 potential Hokkaido squash. The first one is now fist-sized.

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The main Three Sisters patch is now alight with bright red bean and bright yellow pumpkin blossoms. It does look kinda pretty and promising. First corn plants started to show female blossoms too, so that might not be a complete waste of resources in the end. And I am still impatiently waiting for the butternut pumpkins to take off. So far, they still grow very slowly and show no sign of blooming. But as long as the plants grow, there is hope I will get some use out of them, and we still have about 50 days before first frost. When I was a kid, it was not unusual to get the first frost in the second half of September. In later years, though, it usually comes in the second half of October or even later. We shall see how the weather turns out – it is a factor I cannot influence, yet it has a huge impact on the outcome of my labor.

The pumpkins started to grow and appear to be accelerating now.

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The butternut squashes are the least advanced since they are the last that were planted. Funnily enough, one of those surplus ones that I planted with red beets is the biggest, and I had to start teasing it onto the aluminium trellis. I think that these grow faster than those planted in the lawn because the soil is more porous here.

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The first female flower of the Hokkaido pumpkin showed up. It was probably pollinated and is starting to convert into the fruit now.

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Some Hokkaido plants are getting bigger and they started to crawl out of the 50×50 cm squares onto the grass. I probably won’t be able to mow the grass between and around the poles again, which is OK, this was always the plan. I will be chuffed if I get two fruits per plant by the end of the season. If I get more, I’d be thrilled.

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I started to harvest the marrow squash already. When harvested this small, they do not need to be peeled, although they do have prickly hairs that need to be rubbed off. They are sweeter than zucchini and are really juicy and tender.

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That is why this first harvest was simply chopped into slices, covered wth spice and tossed in a baking tray with a duck for the last 20 minutes of baking.

If things go well, they should now accelerate in growth until we are no longer able to eat them fast enough, and they get bigger and with harder skin. I will write about the use of the bigger fruits in due course, with recipes.

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And lastly a picture of a longhorn beetle that I captured in my coppice with my phone. It was a fast moving critter, I would not be able to go inside for proper camera in time. But I think this pic is worth publishing anyway. I am not an entomologist, but it was found on a willow, so I think it is a musk beetle, Aromia moschata. It is beautiful, although its larvae might destroy some trees in my coppice in due course. Which is not a big problem, the trees need to be replaced each decade or two anyway.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.