I finally finished what I started last year – I filled my third rodent-proof raised bed with a mix of sieved soil, sand/coal ash, and biochar. The garlic in the first bed seems to be doing well so far, so I hope other plants will perform OK as well. In the meantime, I was left with a patch of bare land, where the sieved components were heaped over winter. I did not plan for that – I wanted to fill all three beds in the fall, before my injured back threw a stick into the spokes of that particular plan.

So what’s best to do with a completely dead lawn? Convert it into a vegetable patch, of course. It was a matter of just a few hours with the garden fork to till it all. It is a relatively small patch, just about 11 m². And as you can see, I already harvested a full bucket of stones from it.

This is heavy, compacted clay, so even when tilled, the lumps held together rather strongly, and despite rainy weather, they were still a bit hard. I have thrown on it all the rest of my last year’s compost pile that was not used for the potatoes. This will add a lot of organic material that should, hopefully, attract enough earthworms to break it all up over time.

However, earthworms will need years of burrowing through it, and I would very much like to grow something in there this year already. This area was not planned for, and I already have enough legumes in my plans to not need another patch with them, so I decided to put butternut squash here. I have more than enough viable seedlings of those. However, all squash dislike compacted,  clumpy soil, so I threw four buckets of biochar on the lumps. That should lighten the soil a bit, hopefully.

And the last step was to use the electric hoe to break up the clumps as much as possible and mix the compost, the biochar, and the clay together. Before I plant the squash plants, I will probably work some fertilizer into the soil as well.

This means that this spring, I converted 90 m² of useless lawn into arable land. Let us hope it will be productive and useful. It was a lot of work.

Let’s tie the tangent with the main series again and talk about seeds.

For many crops, self-sustainability with seeds is perfectly doable, as long as a few precautions are observed. I will illustrate some of those precautions with various crops.

There are multiple species of edible beans; probably the most important are runner beans (Phaseolus coccineus) and common beans (Phaseolus vulgaris). The species do not hybridize, but they both have multiple cultivars. And here the first care needs to be taken – in any given season, only one cultivar of each species should be grown to avoid cross-pollination. Otherwise, the cultivars lose their properties and, for example, one ends up with neither white nor red beans, but with black ones with white spots. Also, bush beans can cross-pollinate with climbing beans, resulting in freaky plants with unpredictable growth. Thus, if multiple cultivars were to be grown together, it would not be possible to save seeds for the next season. But dry beans and canned bean pods both have a long shelf life when stored properly, so it should not be a problem to grow one variety per species per year and still maintain a good variety of colors and shapes.

Potatoes do not hybridize and produce seeds; they are grown from cloned tubers. In theory, it is possible to keep growing different varieties together in perpetuity, as long as one manages to keep the tubers separated. And herein lies the problem of volunteer potatoes. Those are plants that grow here and there from tubers that were accidentally left in the ground from the previous season. A tuber the size of a pea can survive in the ground and the next year produce tubers the size of a fist. And even with crop rotation, it can happen that these volunteers spread underground, and thus the varieties get mixed up a bit. It would never be a big problem, but it can lead to slight inconveniencies, like firm salad potatoes getting mixed in with soft potatoes for mash.

Spelta, wheat, oats, and other grains are generally grown in stable varieties, so saving one’s own seed should not be a problem.

Peppers and tomatoes are a bit tricky. There are stable varieties, and the plants mostly self-pollinate, so it is possible to save seeds. However, cross-pollination is possible, and thus contamination can occur when multiple varieties are grown together. Moreover, there are multiple F1 hybrid varieties that do offer significant benefits, with one downside: saving seeds is impossible, and they need to be bought. Overall, it might be best to find one-two varieties that work best in a given environment, and ignore the rest, if saving your own seeds is a must.

Pumpkins are a headache. There are multiple species, each with multiple varieties, and the species can hybridize together, producing infertile and/or freaky offspring. If wild gourds are in the area, they can introduce genes producing bitter tastes, etc. Saving one’s own seeds is thus inadvisable, unless one pays care to isolate desired flowers, prevent insects from accessing them, and pollinate them manually.

All these problems or lack thereof apply to a wide variety of plants, so a 100% seed self-sufficiency is not as easy to achieve as one might think. But it is possible for the main foodstuffs grown on the five big fields with minimal effort.

Well, the title gives it away, dunnit. This year, I have the exact opposite of the problem I had last year. At least as far as pumpkin seeds go so far.

My mom watched a TV show about gardening where they said that lufa has a low germination rate and very long germination times. She then encouraged me to watch it, and that spurred me to put 9 lufa seeds to germinate on a wet paper towel a few weeks ago already. 8 of them germinated in three days. Now I have trouble finding a space for the plants that is not so warm that they grow too much, not so cold that they stop growing completely, and also light enough so they do not get thin and stretched out.

After last year’s debacle, where butternut and Hokkaido squash seeds did not germinate for weeks, and had only about 50% germination rate when they did, I put a lot of different seeds to germinate this year, and early. I had an over 90% germination rate so far, including for the leftover seeds from last year, which were 1-after expiration date and 2-from the same supplier that was so troublesome. I only put those to germinate with the assumption that they most probably will rot anyway. WTF???

I had to relocate some of these squash seedlings to the only south-facing window in our home, which is in my parents’ bedroom. The hibiscus flowers that were there will have to do with a few weeks of inferior lighting. I will have to put cardboard with aluminium foil behind them so they do not stretch towards the window as much. But I had to do it, since I needed space under the grow lights for tomatoes.

And there are 20 butternut seedlings in the greenhouse, near the pepper plants, which are in the soil already. I am doing my best to keep temperatures above 10°C in there. I built a miniature charcoal burner from an old T chimney pipe segment that I had lying around in my scrap metal pile. Every evening I burn about 1 bucket of charcoal to heat 40 l of water to steaming hot, and I put it in buckets near the plants. So far, it seems to work; the pepper plants seem unbothered. We will see if those 20 butternut seedlings amount to anything. We have right now a bout of rainy and cold-ish weather, so even during the day, the greenhouse is still a bit cold. However, I am not going to complain about that, the rain was sorely needed.

 

To connect this series with my regular gardening a bit, let’s talk about fertilizing the fields and garden beds in a self-sustainability scenario.

A bit of the topic was already mentioned here and there in previous posts, but there is definitely more to it than I have written so far.

First, let’s assume that the solid sludge from the sewage cleaning facility is recycled back into the environment via composting instead of being taken out to be treated elsewhere. Dealing with shit is not pleasant, but it is an essential part of agriculture. Second, all the wood ash from heating would need to be recycled back into the coppice and the fields. Third, all other waste – manure from the animals, inedible biological leftovers etc. would have to be composted. Building up enough organic material in the soil fairly quickly should not be a problem.

Yet still, some outside inputs might be necessary from time to time.

Depending on local geology, calcium could be a problem in two different ways.

If the bedrock is too rich in it, then the problem might be that the groundwater cannot be used for watering the plot too much, because it would alter the soil chemistry. And some plants (like blueberries) could not be grown.

With geology close to my real-life garden, however, calcium inputs would be necessary, at least in the beginning. Once good levels in the soil and the environment overall are established, it might not be necessary anymore. Hens will happily eat crushed eggshells and crushed bones, thus recycling the calcium and making it bioavailable fairly quickly.

The second nutrient that could be a problem is sulphur. An anaerobic septic tank can convert some organic sulphur into elemental sulphur, and thus reduce its bioavailability to the grass in the subsequent gravel bed. And it would also be depleted by burning the wood from the coppice. Some sulfur would return with rainwater, but it might be needed to supplement some plants that need more, like garlic and onions.

Nitrogen is also lost in all stages. Whenever a stink occurs, nitrogen is lost (and sulphur too). In an ideal scenario, the legumes should fix enough of it to keep the growing going more or less indefinitely with proper crop rotation. Still, occasionally it might be advisable to add some to boost the harvest, especially at the start, before a buffer in the pantry is accumulated to account for dips and outright crop failures.

AFAIK, potassium and phosphorus are not depleted by offgassing during decomposition or burning, so they might need to be added only in the beginning to jumpstart the system. Once that is done, they will be recycled through the sewage cleaning and ash nearly perfectly.

A 100% self sufficiency is possible in this regard, but having the ability to get some inputs from outside reduces the reliance on nature’s lottery a bit.

 

This year, I decided to fertilize all my little fields, vegetable patches, and greenhouses. The biggest one is the newly established, 60 m² field where I run the Three Sisters experiment last year.

Fertilizing this plot of land will consist of growing legumes this year. An approximately 1,5 m wide strip was sown with green peas, a ca. 4 m wide strip was sown with yellow peas, and the rest was sown with alfalfa. I had to use planks to do it; the ground was extremely wet at the time.

I will harvest the green peas for canning, I will let the yellow peas ripen and dry in situ (if the weather allows it), and I will probably mow the alfalfa once with a scythe, and a second time with the lawn mower. The current plan is to leave most of the biomass in place, and till it under in September. After that, I intend to sow it with spelta.

The oats started to poke out of the ground, which makes me happy. I did not fertilize this plot at all, but I will do so with lawn fertilizer in due course. The reasoning is that since oats are grass, a lawn fertilizer should be adequate and not harmful.

For potatoes and fruigetables I bought organic granulated fertilizers that should release the nutrients slowly over the vegetation period. For the potatoes, I just estimated the ammount and I have spread it on the patches before planting the tubers. For tomatoes and peppers in the greenhouse, I weighed the amounts more precisely, and at the lower end of the recommendation written on the packaging. In a greenhouse, too much fertilizer is more harmful than outdoors. I will also fertilize the pumpkins and squash patches.

I watered the greenhouse thoroughly after I applied the fertilizer. I don’t have any tomato plants yet to put there, but I do want to jumpstart the soil biology before planting. And I do have three bell pepper plants that successfully overwintered, and I would like to put them back into the soil asap.

 

It is the time of the year when a gardener has so much work that it is impossible to take a proper rest. And today the time has come to plant the main crop of this year, the mighty potato.

It was only this year that I learned the term “chitting”, i.e., sprouting the tubers before planting them into the ground. I do not actually do that on purpose. The potatoes do that by themselves, and they force me to go along with it.

About a week and a few days ago, I noticed that the potatoes were sprouting, so I took them out of the cellar, sorted them out of the mesh bags into crates, and I put them outside in my tool shed. There they were protected from night frosts, but the temperature was a few degrees lower than in the cellar, so the growing stopped. And during warmer days, I actually took them outside, and I laid them out in the shade so the tubers get a bit of light. That way, the sprouts remain short, thick, and relatively strong, instead of becoming long, spindly, and brittle.

When doing this, I also noticed the differences between the varieties. The red varieties Bellarosa and Camel have white-pink colored sprouts. Dali has yellow-white sprouts. And Agria had sprouts of an interesting purple-lilac shade that I forgot to take a picture of.

I managed to plant both yellow varieties today. They went into the ground and will be hilled up. The Agria is an indeterminate variety, and I remembered from the past that Dali can also make more than one layer of tubers when hilled up. So both of these should benefit greatly from being planted deep and subsequently being hilled up with soil.

Tomorrow I will start planting the Bellarosa and Camel varieties directly onto the lawn.