Doing What I Can

The air is smoky in the early morning when I get up, so I do my gardening later now.  The sun is starting to lose some of its potency as we move into August.   That really helps me with my sun sensitivity. The grass is growing really fast now, so there's a lot of mowing that keeps me busy...I don't have a rider mower.  But I squeeze in some gardening, got to have things to eat.

This morning I refilled a 57 cm container with pine twigs, a swatch of landscaping cloth, and enough fallowed and amended soil to reach the rim.  Then I hauled it to the container garden north of the house.  I brought along a sickle and leaf rake in the cart, so I could move the block temporarily and clear the tall grass around the area. Then I replaced the block, slid the pot back onto the block, planted a small Basella alba, and mulched it with the grass clippings to protect my moist potting soil from the tropical sun.

Of all the crops I'm growing now,  Basella seems to be growing the most vigorously...so I went for that.  Basella alba is also known as Malabar Spinach...it's the green variety, not the red one you see in most catalogs.  That's Basella rubra.  The other crops that are doing very well are okra, sweet potato, molokhia (Corchorus olitorius). But I'm growing lots of other things like bunching onion (Allium fistulosum), Jwala peppers, chives, oregano, mustard greens, and Red Russian Kale.  Not all of it is doing well, of course.

The best fertilizer, I've heard, is the footsteps of the farmer.  I wish I could spend more time gardening, but there are other things to do. The South Garden is completely fallowed now, I just don't have the opportunity to do much with it.  It's mostly overgrown with Dactyloctenium aegyptium and Panicum repens, two very invasive grass species.  The way I garden, it won't make much difference. My current method is highly intensive, I remove all the soil from the planting beds, then mix it with compost and rock powder before returning it to the beds.  I need to do that to get rid of underground roots from the pines and P. repens, which would otherwise completely take over the beds.

It took a while for me to figure out why nothing would grow out there.  Finally I realized that the pine roots were forming mats of small roots and secreting toxic terpenes to poison my crop plants. The soil smelled like it was contaminated with chemical waste from a manufacturing plant.  Once I ripped out the pine roots, the garden really started producing for me.  Live and learn, they say.