Calli's Conundrums
- Thread starter calliandra
- Start date
calliandra
Well-Known Member
Greetings from the garden!
soilified patch
The roses are being dwarfed by the lovely dark red hollyhock that came up between them last year.
Still resisting fungal pressures btw
The two bean plants that made it, and the muscade pumpkin exploding in growth
again, with tomatoes and waay in back to the left of it, the lovage in bloom
All the calendula, borage, and tree spinach is self-seeded and selectively weeded, to then be successively chopped and dropped. Been making spinach dumplings to clear the paths haha
But am having problems extracting any of that green matter from the system for the next compost
Cheers and peace!
soilified patch
The roses are being dwarfed by the lovely dark red hollyhock that came up between them last year.
Still resisting fungal pressures btw
The two bean plants that made it, and the muscade pumpkin exploding in growth
again, with tomatoes and waay in back to the left of it, the lovage in bloom
All the calendula, borage, and tree spinach is self-seeded and selectively weeded, to then be successively chopped and dropped. Been making spinach dumplings to clear the paths haha
But am having problems extracting any of that green matter from the system for the next compost
Cheers and peace!
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Tim Fox
Well-Known Member
wow i would pay money to tour such a pretty gardenGreetings from the garden!
soilified patch
View attachment 3984629
View attachment 3984634
The roses are being dwarfed by the lovely dark red hollyhock that came up between them last year.
Still resisting fungal pressures btw
View attachment 3984635
The two bean plants that made it, and the muscade pumpkin exploding in growth
View attachment 3984630
again, with tomatoes and waay in back to the left of it, the lovage in bloom
View attachment 3984631
All the calendula, borage, and tree spinach is self-seeded and selectively weeded, to then be successively chopped and dropped. Been making spinach dumplings to clear the paths haha
But am having problems extracting any of that green matter from the system for the next compost
Cheers and peace!
calliandra
Well-Known Member
Nope I didn't, she was more of a sideshow, as are her successors - I had to start them in small pots as my new soil
wasn't done yet, so they're quite stunted from uppotting - but trying - at 3 weeks:
Another round of automatics - Skylar White left and another Pineapple Express right, in 10L and 15L respectively - the SW in the previous PE'S soil, topdressed with some VC (and will be getting more of that).
I'm going to be feeding them some comfrey juice, perhaps another SST, and such to get them going. Now they're established maybe they can catch up on their reticent growth
Doubling back,
I did want to share that soil mix, a hillbilly version of the recipes using all those exquisite ingredients:
- 10L Coco coir
- 10L Compost:
2,5L VC (VC2 + Chilloutzone VC, both w/added oats for fungal growth)
4L each of 2 batches of externally sourced compost (not very good quality)
- 10L Aeration:
from bottom up:
1,5L grain hulls
1,5L buckwheat hulls
1L crushed pottery shards
1L sand
1L lavarock 1-2cm diameters
---> 3L comfrey smoothie (=juice+plant matter left in) + water run through all to soak
3L biochar
----> soaked with 500ml diluted urine(100ml) + 1L comfrey smoothie
1L perlite
0,3L pistacchio shells
- Amendments:
250ml kelp soaked in water
fresh alfalfa & borage, chopped, in intuitive amounts
egg shells
I checked on the fungi, they're beneficial ones:
I think this was at 100x, forgot to mark the pix
Very wide and even diameters, nice color, and septae, yes, far apart, but they're there
and check out the goo on this hypha's surface - there's this mechanism by which fungi bind nutes to oxalates to keep them from leaching, either (not sure of anything these days!
) this could be some of that - though usually I see them as crystals... or ti could be digestive enzymes the fungus puts out to process nutes from the environment...
In any case, the soil sat for 10 days, after which none of the fresh ingredients were visible to the eye and it had a lovely earthy woodsy smell.
The plants are liking it, the PE is in that soil & the other part of it got used for a brandywine cherry that had decided to self-sprout in a pot on my deck a few weeks ago
Cheers!
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calliandra
Well-Known Member
Aw thanks! It is quite a magical place, I often get lost in there haha
mattyblade1
Well-Known Member
From in door to out door CaliUpdate @ Conundrum #6
The cycle of living matter
Seems I've found my way of dealing with those "salad slugs" - setting up mechanical barriers until the plantlings are robust is the way to go.
View attachment 3973252
For the first time ever in this garden, I may actually get carrots!
When I sowed them the second time, I removed the mulch a few days before and let the soil dry, since these little slugs also like hanging out in air pockets in the soil.
Plus I built that frame you can still see in the pic and kept it covered with gardening cloth - not sure what it's called in English, it's usually used to protect plants from cold and sun. This allowed the seedlings to sprout and establish without any greedy critters nibbling them to death.
When I finally went to plant out the chards, at first I was disappointed, as the soil had gone hard, the earthworms having retreated to estivate in the depths, and then the heat wave, drying up the soil even under the mulch. I thought I had lost the benefits gained by the soilifying because there were no plant roots to maintain the biology when spring came.
But when we compare how the chards on the soilified bed are doing as compared to another spot
View attachment 3973253
it does give me the feeling that fertility in the soilified patch has increased after all.
Also, when you look at the onions bottom left, the ones on the edge of the bed (that didn't get soilified) are much weaker than the ones that are definitely in the soilified zone.
And that although I stopped feeding the soil - first, because nothing was growing there anyway, and then, because my tools are inadequate; my blender was just going up in smoke with the amount of stuff I was blending, so I'm only making the juices and smoothies for my indoor & deck plants in it now.
To really keep the soilifying going, one would need one of those scary shredders people have built into their sinks in movies (never seen one live though, so I don't know how well they actually shred?) or similar - in fact, Pommeresche does his juicing for the garden with something like that too.
So I'd say this one is partially successful, whereby a phrase Pommeresche uses when explaining the soilifying process has been haunting me as I observe: ....good soil...
The devil is in the details.
Because my soil there wasn't good for starts, so no wonder my results are going to fall short of his?
And no wonder I still have the pests too!
MAYbe Pommeresche's soil wasn't good either, when he started using that method in his garden like what, 20 years ago? But when you've been doing this for decades, I'm pretty sure the microbial herd will be so much more diverse, robust, and beneficial.
Whereas the soil I did this with had an unknown period of bad treatment (tillage & removal of organic matter, no giving back anything), followed by 3 years of mechanical aeration & mulching, mainly greens (yes and also browns, but way more grass clippings and chop-and-drop stuff).
Impatient people may do better giving bad soil a good compost, especially for starts...
calliandra
Well-Known Member
haha yeah, though with the approaching cold, I do hope to get more indoor action going again too
Hope all's well on your end! What have you got growing at the moment?
calliandra
Well-Known Member
oooo really looking forward to that!Thanks for the stunning photos
farmerfischer
Well-Known Member
bumping it back to the top..
Tim Fox
Well-Known Member
top we go