Getting There

This morning I got very close to finishing the prep work on the first sections of my planting bed of greens.  I have seedlings of pac choy and kale ready to go into the bed and a small heap of mulch ready too.  All I have to do now is finish amending the last of the reserved soil from the bed with compost and rock powder, dump it into the bed, and rake it level.

I'm really anxious to get some pac choy going in the bed.  My container crops are winding down now...the okra plants are dying back, the peppers aren't producing as much, and I'm reluctant to eat any more eggplant.  It's looking more and more like I'm too sensitive to nightshade toxin to be eating eggplant and nightshade potatoes. Both eggplant and "white" potatoes contain solanine and chaconine. Those are glycotoxins that can cause a variety of problems for sensitive individuals.

I abstained from nightshades for two weeks, then went back to eating peppers and eggplant almost every evening to see if they would bother me.  Apparently they did, I'm currently dealing with several different problems which I think are being caused by the eggplant.  Food sensitivities can be hard to pin down with certainty...the effects may take a few days to show up sometimes.

So I thought I would focus on the South Garden for a while.  I also have other greens coming along in the little plastic pots...tatsoi, chard, Red Russian kale, etc.  Looks like I'm going to be mixing a lot of soil in that wheelbarrow for a while.

I use the intensive method of bed preparation...that involves removal of topsoil and thorough mixing with compost and rock powder before returning it.  I've had really good results with this method...just digging in some compost with a shovel led to repeated crop failures.  My soil is very alkaline and sandy, this encourages plant-parasitic nematodes and the roots have trouble accessing nutrients in alkaline sand.  Mixing in compost seems to solve these problems, but it takes a LOT of compost to do it.  As soil humus builds up, maybe I won't need quite so much of the stuff.

As always, we'll see how things go.