The Death of the Mind

hababeros, serranos, and bird’s eye

herbs, catnip, stunted peppers

rosemary and parsley

poblanos are doing ok

hey there

the first platform–banana peppers and tomatoes and awesome

growing nicely

so many peppers

slugs love to hate the garden bed

seems to be recovering, needs a dose of nitrogen

squash was eaten partially, cucumbers finally taking off

melons are sluggish

tomatoes are doing great

it won’t stop growing

I have to eat like five a day

sup

The garden is doing things. Dying a bit because of slugs and awful weather, but eh. I have lots of tomatoes at least.

I definitely just spent the last two days fighting potting media. The soil mix that seemed to be alright in the raised bed failed in the pots. This was expected, because half compost is just bad, and I’ve failed with that before. So I dropped it to 1/3 of the mix… no drainage Eliminated it entirely. No drainage! I tried using pine park. No drainage. I guess the perlite wasn’t rinsed and maybe the dust was binding with small particles from the base media and creating a muck? Nope. Nothing.

My first mistake was not pre-wetting the sphagnum moss. The garden bed was made with a bag of peat moss from the previous year that I had cut open and let sit out on the deck absorbing water for six months… so that explained that. Soaking the peat moss and premixed media and letting it sit overnight still did nothing!

I tried five or six different mixes in the end… mixes that worked perfectly before. Seemingly no difference, and yet utter failure!

In previous years, I had been buying a few gallons of peat moss at a time down at the hardware store. This year I used a huge compressed bail because it’s like 5x cheaper… and … not treated with a wetting agent.

After giving up, I decided to try one last time… I filled a pot with two quarts base 1:1:1 peat:perlite:vermiculite mixture, mixed a few drops of detergent into two gallons of water, and soaked it… and it drained normally! I soaked it with three more gallons of water and it clearned in about fifteen minutes. Success!

And now back to actually gardening instead of cursing the universe for deciding to hate me.

After three really great years of gardening, last year I got way too ambitious and the garden failed miserably. Note to self: don’t try to build raised beds and grow most of your plant from seed with limited capital…

Oh well, you live, you learn, and then you have empty garden beds you just have to fill with dirt the next season.

And so here we are this season! Bpt and I got a huge pile of compost from the city and over the last week mixed up media and compost and now the 5’x3′ bed is filled! And I even planted parsley in a corner.

Unfortunately, I neglected to sift the compost… not really a problem, but a few small sticks and whatnot ended up collecting on the top of the bed. Luckily I built a crappy sieve last year, and rebuilt it today so we can sift through that and top off the last bit with sifted compost and media…

It turns out that living near the state farmers market has advantages! Most vegetable seedlings are about $2 for a pack of four, making me feel a bit dumb for not salvaging a garden after my seed growing failure last year…

In light of how cheap seedlings are, I blended up 30 gallons of media (= 60 gallons finished after mixing with compost) and am going to just fill all of my containers (a ragtag bunch of about 14 pots of varying sizes) tomorrow with generic media… and then grow so many things.

Two years ago I discovered (accidentally!) that planting four peppers in a 20 gallon rubbermaid container together yields tons and tons of peppers… it seems that their root systems merge and they help each other out, and the dense foliage creates a nice microclimate protecting all of the fruit from getting burned. This year the bucket returns! I’m growing a bucket of four banana peppers, and then another with four hot peppers… I’m thinking two habaneros and one each of two other hot peppers, since the hot ones seem to produce prolifically and excessively (what do you do with 300 habaneros?).

My overwintered bell pepper also appears to be alive, making this (hopefully) a third season. Last year I lost most of my crop to what I thought was fungus, but turned out to be stink bugs (the spots they leave after puncturing the fruit look awfully similar to anthracnose)… unexpected, but I guess they’ve migrated this far south now. Hopefully I can manage them this year…

On the herb front, I’m going to start some Basil seeds soon (meant to last month, but what can you do). The dang squirrels killed my two year old oregano bush by digging up its entire root system to stash acorns last year, so a new one shall appear. My old peppermint is hitting five years now and is kind of eh, so I got a new moroccan mint and it smells pretty nice. The catnip came back to life despite being neglected and compacted so I guess Maytag and Morgoth will have a nice summer (Merlin seems insensitive to catnip, sucks for him!). That basically covers the mint yoghurt and pasta front for the summer!

I think I’m going to plant some new rosemary. My largest one (two years old) is going to go into the front plant bed because the existing shrubs were so neglected in previous years that I think they are going to die (and I don’t want to get a larger container!).

So… looks like the main garden bed is going to be at least half populated by the end of the week, and many of the containers. I’m saving the trellis beds for last (I guess squash and melons don’t need to be planted for a few more weeks at least) but I’m hoping to get some musk melons and whatnot, because who wouldn’t want to have a cookout consisting entirely of garden harvested vegetables and fruit? But I’m trying not to think about that yet, lest I become overwhelmed at the next month of effort instead of gradually working toward it over the next month…