Dig We Must

I never know 100% if I'm doing things in the best way.  All I ever do in gardening is to try things and see how it goes.

Sure I read books and watch videos.  But in the end it's try it out and see what grows.

I do have methods that work.  Work is the operative word, I put a lot of effort into the intensive methods I use.  Currently in the South Garden, I'm getting good results only by digging the planting bed up completely, removing all the soil, heaping it up somewhere, digging out all the tree roots...again...and then mixing the soil with compost before returning it to the bed.  This reeeeally works, I can vouch for that.  And it's time-tested, Asian farmers have produced food this way for a very long time.

Today I was out there with a hoe, hacking away at roots in the South Garden.  I'm getting just as big a pile of them as I did the last time I did this.  So far I can't get the landscaping cloth out, it's too bound up in roots....that's so not supposed to happen...LOL...some "root barrier" that turned out to be.  I'm definitely not using any more of that.

When I'm satisfied I've gotten enough roots dug out, and I've got enough compost, I'll start mixing soil for the bed and bring it all back from where I piled it all up.  I'll say this, intensive gardening is not for lazy people.  That's for sure.

Maybe someday I'll be in such good shape from all this digging that it won't seem difficult at all...well, maybe.  Does the means justify the end?  Will I turn into the Incredible Hulk?  Have I gone over The Edge?  Does anyone care?...best question of all...LOL.

My neighbor's garden looks great this year.  But of course he spends money like it's water sometimes...buys all his soil in huge truckloads, uses a power cultivator, irrigates with a permanent set of sprinklers on timers, uses a bunch of different fertilizers simultaneously, etc. Then he doesn't seem to use much of it...OK, none of my business, I get that.

Turnips Growing

Big headline...turnips growing...LOL.

Well, to each his or her own...and I put a lot of work into my gardening, so it's a big deal for me.  You can really see the difference now from what they were when I set them out...

Newly planted turnips 12/9/14

Same turnip bed 12/25/14

But of course they're still young.  I think they'll do OK, so long as the pine roots don't mess them up.  I've tried to figure out a good way to deal with the pine roots that invade my beds, but the only thing I can think of is to remove all the soil, heap it up somewhere, dig out the roots, and return the amended soil to the bed.  It can be exhausting work, but it gets results.  I've proven that.

So far I've removed all the topsoil from the next bed over, except for a little patch of onions.  Meant to take a pic, but forgot.  Now I've got to get going with my hoe and my hatchet.  I don't have enough compost right now to amend the soil, so there's no rush.

The compost operation is running slowly right now, I need to get out there and run the shredder...so I can reload the bins.  The compost in the bins was all ice cold in the morning, so I dumped them all in a big pile, mixed it all up...and now the pile is getting good and hot.  I had steam coming out when I added some household trash the other day.  There's a minimum size for a compost pile if you want it to get hot...something like three feet across and three feet high.  Anything less and you've got to run it with high nitrogen levels...that can be tricky, you don't want flies breeding in it.  I have trouble sometimes with soldier flies...they don't do significant harm and they don't carry diseases as far as I know, but they can slow a pile down quite a lot and turn it all gummy somehow.  Don't like soldier flies in my compost.  I have lizards that patrol the compost for soldier flies who come to lay eggs.  Phorid flies can also be annoying, and they also slow a pile down...plus they nip you on the face a bit.  But they're very tiny, like gnats.  I ignore them.

Right now I've got fire ants in my pile again...Solenopsis invicta.  I'll have to poison them with spinosad...again.  I'm surrounded by thousands of fire ant nests in my area, so they always come back. Spinosad is approved for organic gardening and farming.

Here's a quick tour of some container plants...been doing a lot of work with containers.

 Eggplant aka aubergine

 Pepper Poblano

 Pepper Jwala

Eggplant aka aubergine

Pole beans...just starting to climb a bit.

Lots of other stuff in the background...sweet potato, vegetable amaranth, etc.

Holding Steady

Things are going OK now, no major problems anywhere in the beds or containers.  The liquid feeding every day or so has been a huge help...you can really see the difference in my seedling trays.  I've got tiny little pots with great big plants climbing out of them.

Up till recently I've been unconvinced about liquid feeding of nutrients to crops.  I knew that's the way commercial agriculture has been practiced here for a long time, but logically it seemed as though the improvement of the soil would take care of nutrient supply more efficiently.

But a gardener is nothing if not a pragmatist.  I can see the difference in my crops no matter what they are.  About a month or so ago, I set some leggy eggplant seedlings into 34 cm pots and hoped for the best.  Now they have side shoots coming out of every node.  Bushy plants are a sure sign of health in vegetables like eggplant aka aubergine.

I've re-evalulated my methods for containers too.  From now on, I'm mixing the potting soil from older pots with compost before fallowing, not after.  This gives time for the soil microflora to become reactivated and disease organisms like plant-parasitic nematodes to die off or get consumed by predatory fungi.  Yes there are predator fungi...they ensnare nematodes, kill them, and consume them.  It's a jungle down there in the ground.

I can't decide which is better...containers or planting beds...so I'm doing both again.  If my health holds up, maybe I'll be awash in produce soon...LOL.  But no tomatoes this year.  Last year I had a huge crop of cherry tomatoes and they made me sick.  So I'm certain now that I'm definitely allergic to tomatoes and to sunflower plants...roots and seeds.  Got to be careful, they use pulverized Jerusalem artichoke in things like pasta...cramps for sure if I eat that. Jerusalem artichokes are sunflower roots, in case you didn't know.

Lots of radishes ready to pull in the container garden.  That was a good choice for planting.  They grew like weeds and the cool weather has made nice crisp roots.  Not too fond of them in soups, but for fresh eating as a garnish, in salads, or in stir fries they're very good.  As I've said before, radishes used to be very popular as a main dish at American dinner tables, but for some reason they fell out of fashion.  They're a mainstay of Asian cuisine, and also very popular in Eastern Europe. I'm growing Miyashige, Hattorikun, and China Rose.

My Jwala peppers are starting to mature now too.  The plants do very well in containers, I strongly recommend them for subtropical gardeners.  They're a good hot pepper for seasoning stir fries and soups, and they get absolutely covered in fruit any time of the year. You can find the seeds at rareseeds.com.  I've found the plants to be much tougher and more reliable than other hot peppers like Cayenne.  That could be a regional issue, my climate and soil is probably similar to the places in India where Jwala comes from.  I understand that they're a very popular pepper in India.

If Cuba opens for tourists, I would love to go there and find local varieties for my garden.  First place I'd go is a street market in a rural area.  Where I'd get the money I have no idea, but it's only 104.91 miles from Key West to Havana...how tough could it be?...something to dream about.  They have tropical jungles in Cuba...always wanted to see one.

The embargo was a failure, obviously. But if there's one thing our Congress believes, it's that failure is not an acceptable reason for abandoning something after only a half a century.  You have to give things time to work...LOL.

Turnips Settling In

It's been a week since I set out those turnip plants.  And as you can see from the pics I took today, they've not only recovered from transplanting, they've also grown.

Compare these pics with the ones I took a week ago and you can see the difference. So I'm optimistic this will work and I'll have some turnips to eat before long.

As you can also see, I've mulched them to protect the soil from the sun.  Without that, the surface dries in a few hours and repels water when I try to irrigate with sprinkling.  This causes the topsoil to develop little gullies and wash into the paths...definitely not what we want.  With the mulch in place the bed is like a big sponge and readily absorbs irrigation.  I've been sprinkling them with liquid feed every day.

The exact ingredients in the feed vary, and I've tried different things over the past year.  There are a lot of rules about gardening and farming here...you can't grow kang kong, for example...that's a felony.  Kang kong is a crop universally grown throughout the Tropics as a nourishing and tasty green vegetable...but it's considered invasive here.

So my liquid formula is not for publication.  It's nothing special, look on Youtube or just research online to find dozens of different formulas...all of which seem to work. The most common one is to soak compost in a sack of landscaping cloth or old pantyhose in a bucket of water.  I don't know all the ins and outs of local laws, so mum's the word on what I currently use.

The important thing is that it supplies nutrients to the plants regardless of how well the soil microflora is cooking.  It's kind of like a booster to get you through the changes in soil moisture and other variables.  You want your plants to really thrive, not just survive. Liquid feeding also boosts the soil organisms...it's all good.  I like to do it every day in small doses so the area just under the mulch stays well moistened.  That's a hot spot for microbial activity...a lot goes on there.

The next bed over from the turnips has been nearly all evacuated of topsoil so I can get at those pine roots that invaded the bed.  I moved the soil to a cleared spot alongside the driveway.

I'll keep it moist and mix it with compost when I have enough. Meanwhile I'm on a mission to clear the pine roots out of the area where I removed the soil.  Last time I filled two or three wheelbarrows with the darn things, and it looks like a similar pile of roots is growing out there again as I pull them out.

I have plans for a new container garden too.  The current location isn't getting enough sun these days...the trees to the south are shading them most of the day.  So I'm eyeing a sunny spot north of the house for some concrete blocks and containers.  That's one advantage of containers...you can set them up anywhere you want. With the right kind of cart, they're not hard to move around to new locations as conditions change.

So I'm feeling good about the garden.  I've had some days where the air was free of smoke and chemical fumes, that always makes me more optimistic.  Last evening the smoke was thick enough that you could easily see it without even going outside.  I cleaned my truck windows of dew yesterday morning and the towel came away all black from soot.  Lung cancer here I come.

But it won't spoil my optimism.  Lately I've been harvesting lots of greens...mustard, pac choy, vegetable amaranth, radish, etc.  Yes radish greens are edible, in fact I'm growing a variety that's grown just for its tops...the roots are woody and not very good.  Radish greens are very good for stir fries and soups...and also salads if you like a spicy taste in your greenery.

I have a lot of seed I haven't planted yet, and seedlings coming along.  I hope to have a wide variety of greens to eat this cool season.  That's for the nutrition and for the taste as well.  Nothing can take the place of a well-maintained kitchen garden.

Sticking With Intensive Methods

After giving it some thought, I've decided to keep going with the South Garden as well as the container garden.  Even though the landscaping cloth didn't block root invasion like it was supposed to do, the intensive method of removing all the soil from each bed after a crop and amending it in batches before returning it...that seems to really work well.

I had planned to get several crops before doing anything as drastic as overhauling the bed, but clearly that won't work.  I removed nearly all the soil and heaped it up by the driveway, and found out that the whole bed was a thatch of pine roots.  Most of it came out in chunks with some effort, and there were some impressively thick roots running through the bed.

I think this is what has caused all these crop failures.  It's the pine trees...they invade any rich soil they find and saturate it with toxic chemicals to prevent other plants from seriously competing with them for moisture and nutrients.  I remember one planting of peppers I made years ago at a different site northeast of the house...it was ludicrous...the plants reached a height of about three inches and then just stopped growing altogether.

That's why everything grows so much better in the containers...no pine roots.  What I'm planning, when I have enough compost to do it, is to mix all the soil from the bed with compost 1:1 and plant something in it that matures quickly so the pines can't essentially just steal all my compost for their own use.  Then after the crop is done, I'll remove all the soil again and heap it up alongside the driveway temporarily.  It's a laborious process, for sure, but from what I'm learning about intensive gardening and farming, it produces stellar results.  Intensive farming like this is practiced extensively in Asian countries. Certainly the tomatoes I planted that way were impressive...I got buckets and buckets of those things from just one small section of one planting bed.

My hope is that the pine roots won't have enough time to invade, especially if I go down into the subsoil and extract them all before replacing the topsoil in the bed.

The other solution would be to buy dozens of the large size nursery pots, put them on concrete blocks, and shovel my soil into those. Instead of a long mound of earth, I would have rows of blocks with big black pots lined up on them.  Somehow that solution doesn't appeal to me much.  But it would eliminate root invasion, wouldn't it?

Comments would be appreciated pro or con on this...I really haven't decided which would be best.  I tend to go with the more laborious and less expensive ways of doing things...and those pots and blocks would be a substantial expense for me.  When you're retired and living on Social Security, your choices are different.

One big advantage of pots...if I have to move, I could take the whole garden with me I suppose...assuming I don't move to New Zealand...LOL.

Well, This Didn't Work

I got to work on the planting bed next to the turnips today.  But when I tried to work the soil with the fork, I ran into a tangle of pine roots.  That wasn't supposed to happen, not after I laid all that landscaping cloth over the subsoil before returning the amended soil to the bed.

When I carefully worked my way down to the landscaping cloth, I found a mess.  The pine roots had not just penetrated the cloth, they'd attacked it and ripped it up.  That's what I call aggressive root growth, it's no wonder these pines do so well here.  I've also had them seek out the water in underground plastic pipes and get into those.  Just a small leak is all it takes, then the roots invade the pipe and make it their own.

So I'll have to rethink my gardening plan.  No more landscaping cloth as root barrier, that clearly does not work.  The crops seem to do fine for a while, then the pine roots compete with them and they die back.  There's a pungent odor to soil that's been invaded by pine, it smells like the ground is contaminated with industrial waste.  I've learned though, that it's just the pine trees repelling my crop roots with chemical warfare.  Plants seem so lifeless to us, but put a time-lapse camera on them and you'll see they and their roots are constantly doing things like fighting with their neighbors for the sun and aggressively hunting down little pockets of richer soil beneath the surface where we can't see them.

If you lay a piece of rotten wood on the soil around your crop plants, then lift it in a few days, you'll see how the roots have grown up from below and invaded the moist wood.  Studies of this behavior have shown that somehow the roots smell things like rotten wood and grow towards them.

So I've decided to rework the beds completely between crops and remove all the pine roots...then plant crops that mature quickly so they can stay ahead of the pines.  I want to grow things I can eat, not pine cones.  They say pine nuts are generally edible, but maybe I'm not that hungry yet...LOL.  I'll leave those for the squirrels.

So next step for the South Garden...dig out all the soil from bed S3 and move it to a heap alongside the driveway again.  Then I'll purge the area of pine roots as best I can before mixing the soil with rock powder and compost.  Then I'll return it to the garden.  It's a lot of work, but it's the only way I know to get anything decent out of that ground out there.

I suppose I could buy a roto-tiller and do things that way.  I'm not a fan of noisy gadgets, though.  I'll give the matter some cogitation.

A Cool Garden

We're supposed to have a week or so of cool weather, so I decided that this would be an ideal time to get my turnips in the ground.

Golden Ball Turnips - Planted Today

I'll mulch them after they settle in a bit.  It was disappointing to find as many pine roots in the bed as I did when I dug in the compost.  I had thought the landscaping cloth beneath the soil would have kept them out.  It's OK, I dig up the beds after each crop is pulled out, so they won't be able to take over the bed...I hope.

Turnips are traditionally planted in the South in the cooler months. They tolerate poor soil and they produce a lot of food, since you can eat the entire plant.  Here in the subtropics, it's a gamble...if they get too much heat, turnips tend to be bitter and strong-tasting.

The container garden is doing fine.  Ever since I started liquid feeding almost every day, the plants seem to be doing better.  Here's a few pics I took today.

 Pole Beans 

Asian Radishes

 Pepper Caribbean Red

 More Radishes

 Purslane, Thai Basil, Pac Choy, Oregano

 Radishes...I went in big for these.

 Onion, Chives, Oregano, Thai Basil

Eggplant aka Aubergine

Everything is planted in either 34 or 57 cm nursery containers. They're set on concrete blocks and racks made of local wood.  This protects them from animals and the frequent flooding we get here...and the fire ants, Solenopsis invicta.  They get into the pots and eat the roots.  And they're extremely unfriendly.

So that's the garden, more or less, the second week of December 2014.  I didn't take pics of the sweet potatoes, but you can see some of their leaves in the last pic.