I had such a surplus of tomato plants this year that I decided to make another makeshift shelter to grow them outside the greenhouses.

I used the portable trellises to do so by wiring five pairs slightly offset to stand in an A-shape and then using the last pair for a roof to support the plastic foil. I then planted the tomatoes between the A-shapes so when they start to grow in height, they can lean on the trellises. We shall see how this goes. The biggest problem could be temperature. If the summer is too cold, tomatoes won’t grow outdoors fast enough. The second big problem could be sunshine. This area gets only about 6-8 hours of direct sunshine; the first half of the day it is in shade. In my experience, tomatoes do not actually need direct sunshine to thrive; temperature is more important. But like all plants, they need enough light to photosynthesise, and I am not entirely certain they will get it here. Well, we shall at least see if these trellises work for this purpose.

Things are growing. Some well, some badly.

The indeterminate potatoes “Agrie” look promising. They are now tall enough to be hilled up, which I will do this weekend.

The same goes for “Dali”, although those might need a few more days to reach sufficient height. These two varieties look really promising, they even were not damaged by late frost.

The very early variety “Bellarosa” was damaged by late frost, despite being covered with white cloth. But the damage was not very severe and it appears that the plants are recovering now.

The early variety “Camel” is a headscratcher. They still did not all emerge from the ground, and those that did are still tiny. Some were also probably destroyed by voles who had nests under the PVC mats. But that only explains the empty spots, not the stunted plants. Maybe they will take off later.

The garlic “Dukát” looks promising, albeit the leaves are a bit yellow near the tips, so I added nitrogen today (very dilute KNO3 solution). Mulch from old leaves works very well at suppressing weeds.

Onions and carrots, on the other hand, look downright pitiful. The seedsnails for the onions did not work well – using the landscaping cloth was a mistake, plastic wrap would work better. On top of that, they really suffered in the cold May weather.

For some reason, the trick with egg trays did not work for the carrots either; only about a third emerged from the ground. I think I made a mistake and buried them too deeply. I tried to sow some seeds directly into the soil now, it should still result in reasonably sized carrots, if they manage to survive the heat

Spinach from seeds sown directly into the ground failed again; spinach from seedlings fared a bit better, though still nothing to write home about. It just seems I do not have the soil or climate, or both, for it. I will harvest it this weekend, and I will plant summer squash in its stead. That was the plan all along, only I was hoping to harvest more Spinach than I realistically will.

I concentrated on increasing my ability to grow things vertically in several ways this year. I already mentioned some in passing, but let’s write specifically about just that.

I completely reworked the supports for runner beans near the south wall of my house. Instead of running the clothesline in a zig-zag fashion between the rain gutter and the poles at the bottom, I run it in such a way that each pole has only one clothesline running to it from a wire support on the gutter. The wire supports also serve a secondary role of strengthening the gutter laterally (it got bent out of shape by heavy ice and snow). I also increased the number of plants that can be planted there, so hopefully, I will get bigger harvests and a better coverage of the wall against the hot summer sun.

I repaired more of the old aluminium fencing that my father used to keep poultry in check. I used it last year as a trellis for butternut squash, and I am trying to do the same this year. Growing butternut squash vertically allows for denser planting of the plants and thus better use of space.

Unfortunately, all my butternut and hokkaido plants are rather pathetic. I was away from home for three days, and I did not want to burden my nephew with having to drag them indoors every evening, so I left them in the greenhouse. And as bad luck would have it, it was exactly those three days when the weather was so cold that even in the greenhouse the temperatures fell below 10°C. As a result, all my winter squash plants are yellowish and sickly looking. But I got them outdoors a month earlier than last year, and most of them are starting to grow healthy green leaves again, so they might not be lost yet.

I also had several aluminium frames approximately 180×90 cm in size. I repaired them, and to convert them into portable trellises for beans, tomatoes, and pumpkins, I covered them with PVC-coated welded wire fencing mesh.

I made 12 of these portable trellises, and I hope they last me for years. This year, I intend to use them mainly for an improvised shelter and support for tomatoes, because I have more tomato plants than fit into my greenhouse, and I do not want to throw them all simply away.

To finish the post, have a look at some very nice Aquilegia blossoms.

I am not a happy camper right now. Of all the soy beans that I have sown, none emerged. I dug up a part of one row, and I found a few badly damaged and dead seeds; the rest has completely rotted away already. Either the seed batch was bad, or the weather was too cold. I am inclined to suspect the latter, because we had abnormally odd weather – it was sunny, dry, and very cold until about three days ago, when it suddenly became very hot. We had a change in temperatures 12°C within a week.

I removed the rubber and PVC mats that I put on my lawn in order to kill it. They fulfilled that role perfectly, and although it was very compacted clay, with the roots being dead and partly decomposed, it was comparatively easy to till it with a garden fork and flatten it with an electric hoe. Whilst doing so, I dug out two vole nests, with stashed-away potatoes and grass. I was expecting the voles – they would do the same thing under thick snow cover, only it would be more difficult to see in living grass.

I sown it with white bush beans. And I put aside five beans to check the germination rate. Two sprouted, three rotted away. I am really pissed. I hope that at least enough of them sprout out of the ground and ripen in order for me to get my own seeds for the future. I do not know what it is with leguminous seeds these last two years. If you remember, I had the same problem last year with pole beans. Speaking of which…

Last year, I had barely enough white runner beans to put aside fifty seeds for sowing. Luckily enough, they had 100% germination rate.

I changed the trelis behind the house to 26 poles spaced circa 40 cm. To each, I planted two plants. There is a 27th place too (not in the picture). That is occupied with a frost-hardy seedless grape that I bought this year. I was worried that it died, but it started to grow this week and looks healthy (albeit tiny).

The green peas on the large leguminous patch are growing well, and they had a nearly 100% germination rate, too. Today, they even started to bloom.

Alfalfa is still tiny, and for some reason, it is spotty – there are areas where it did not germinate at all, and there are areas where a lot of the seeds germinated.

Yellow peas should be the most advanced by this time, yet due to the abnormally cold weather, they barely emerged from the ground, and the germination rate is also nothing to write home about. At least the germination rate was hopefully good enough for the crop to improve the soil, even if not to harvest enough peas for food.  I do wonder what the hell is going on with legumes.

I ordered some more white bush beans and a new batch of soybeans. Unfortunately, the soybeans very probably won’t manage to ripen when I sow them this late, but I will try it anyway. Maybe I will get lucky, and frost does not come before late October – it can happen.

The oats look promising so far. It is lush, dark green, and almost knee-high. I do hope this continues.

The bamboo survived the replanting in December. Most of the stalks above ground died off, but there are new shoots emerging from the ground, and they are pencil-thick. That is a good sign that I might finally get some bamboo growth – the soil is now not compacted, and I added a significant amount of eggshells to elevate the pH a bit.

I did a lot more other work too, but this post is long already, so I will finish with a picture of my new compost thermometer. I decided to buy one, because I almost forgot and lost my digital thermometer in the pile, not to mention that it was too short and hard to read. I spent two days mowing 2 thirds of my garden. I mixed the grass with old brown grass and leaves at approximately a 1:1 ratio, and the next day, the pile was almost hot enough to cook an egg. I still have not found the time to mow the last third of my garden, and in the meantime, the first two-thirds are getting covered with new growth already. There is enough time in the day to manage all the work that needs to be done, but alas, there is not enough strength in Charly. Currently, I am doing my best to keep on top of the work without injuring myself or getting completely exhausted.

 

In our hypothetical scenario, despite the carbohydrate-heavy diet, caloric excess and a lack of exercise would not be things that happen, ever.  But a healthy lifestyle does not guarantee health. And it is not possible to be self-sustainable with regard to medicine. With that being stated, medicinal herbs do exist, and they do work. And since I am writing this series from my point of view, I would like to mention three that I consider essential and extremely helpful. For all three, I did look up studies on PubMed in the past, and although there are not a lot of them, to my amateur eye, it looks like they are proven to work to some extent. I am including quickly found links today, too, although I need to stress that I am not a physician and this article is not meant as medical advice.

So what health problems could arise that need to be addressed frequently-ish, but do not necessarily need professional medical attention?

First thing would be minor scratches, cuts, splinters, and suchlike. I have a lot of scratches and cuts on my hands and legs. Most heal without me even noticing them, but a lot of the work involves soil, and thus some get inflamed (which is why I am up to date on my tetanus shot). And for minor inflammations, there is nothing like hot chamomile tea, IMO (-click-). In my experience, soaking an inflamed area in chamomile tea as hot as is bearable cuts the healing time by several days, and reduces the pain to almost nothing within minutes. I also occasionally get sniffles bad enough that my stomach gets upset. In that case, drinking a chamomile tea also helps to clean the tubes and restore lost appetite.

The second thing happening probably on a regular basis would be a sore throat, sniffles, and suchlike, from exertion in cold weather. Most would resolve without a problem, some could become a mild strep infection or viral infection if the conjunction of pathogen presence and bad weather is just right (bad). And some of those can become bad enough to need antibiotics, which only a medical doctor can prescribe. I know I have a bad case of sore throat coming when I get a craving for elderberry tea, made from black elderberry juice (Sambucus nigra). I absolutely loathe the taste of elderberry juice, hot or cold, but when I get sick, I get a craving for it that I never get for anything else. It helps (-click-), sometimes to the point that I do not need to go to the doctor after all. However, once I heal, I go back to hating elderberries again. I haven’t drunk elderberry tea for over two years now, but I do keep a stock in my cellar just in case.

And the third often appearing problem would be bruises, sprained ligaments, slightly banged-up-but-not-yet-broken bones, as well as stress fractures, and, of course, back pain. In this regard, comfrey root is your friend (-click-). I am either using store-bought creams or an alcohol-based infusion that I made a few years ago, and I apply them directly to the affected area.

All these could be easily grown in our self-sustainability scenario. An elderberry bush could be part of the fruit shrubbery. Cammomile, once introduced, would probably thrive quite well as a weed that would need more to be managed than harvested. And comfrey could be grown anywhere near the compost heap, in half-shade and with plenty of water. In addition to the medicinal use of its roots, comfrey leaves are also a great nitrogen source for composts.

I did other work too since the last post, but today I have sown the soybeans. Which, as you might remember, is the first time I am trying out this crop at all. Theoretically, I am a tiny bit too far north and a tiny bit too high up for it to prosper here, so there is a huge question mark over this endeavor. I tried to read up on it, and allegedly, tiny seedlings should be frost-resistant for a while. The current weather projection for the last frost of the spring is 8 May, so sowing it today should not be too early. It is the variety “Liska” that, according to the interwebs, grows in Canada. We shall see- even if the seeds do not completely ripen and dry on the stalk, I should still get unripe but edible green seeds similar to green peas.

First, I had to use a string and a hoe to mark the rows on the plot where potatoes were grown last year. I got eight rows, a nice number. Whilst doing that, I collected nearly a full bucket of stones.

The stone hoard behind my shed keeps growing. Shame it is worthless and, mostly, useless.  I do not think I will need this much gravel anytime soon. I have done all the concrete and paving works that needed to be done. Now, I just keep pouring buckets of stones on the growing pile.

After I was done sowing, I watered it thoroughly with water from my sewage cleaning facility. The weather is way too dry this year so far, and I am hoarding rainwater like Scrooge McDuck coins.

Since I expanded my growing operations significantly (by at least a factor of three over two years ago), it is no longer possible for me to water everything with watering cans. I had to use a pump and a hose last year already, but I had to stand there like a scarecrow for the whole time. Which was boring and also a huge waste of time.

So this year, I bought a cheap adjustable lawn sprinkler. To be able to water taller crops too, and slightly increase its scope, I rigged it on a ca 1 m tall pole that I can stick in the ground. In 20 minutes, it covers an area of circa 4×4 m with an equivalent of 10 mm rainfall and can be moved to the next piece of land. It is a significant labor saving, albeit at the cost of some electricity. At least I can put it in place, set a timer on my phone, and go do something else while it is doing its thing, thus using my time more efficiently.

Tomorrow I will sow some leftover peas and soybeans, and I will plant gladiolus bulbs. After that, I will be done with sowing and planting until the last frost day, after which I will do the rest.

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.