Rambling about gardening (Patreon)

Starting off

This is my first year growing anything outside.  Now that spring has passed and we are in mid summer most everything I planted is providing me food. The goal this year was to see if I could actually grow anything and i've been very surprised on what I pulled off.

I started everything from seed except the fruits. Since these take years until they provide I wanted to start them off at a further state.  I planted very little in the ground. I know my soil is not in good condition as I did a simple soil test to find out how much clay was in the soil. It was mostly just clay. I also didn't know what nutrients the soil had. In plant available form.

With this in mind I decided to go with pots or raised beds. In a couple raised beds I did use the native clay soil, in others I used a mixture of compost and clay. The mixed beds where obviously better and produced better looking plants. Keep in mind i'm doing all this with little to no money. Every extra penny I get is going into this so I can hopefully have a sustainable way to get food. Going out and buying amendments was simply out of the question. The pots where tough too, I would find any buckets on the side of the road or that washed up from the lake, got some my family and wanted to purchase more. Cheapest bucket available was Walmart at $3 a bucket. 

I did well growing in buckets but I wanted to plant more and walmart ran out of buckets and never restocked, next best price was $5 a bucket from home depot or lowes. Too much then I found fabric grow bags/pots and you could get them for under $2 each. My entire garden besides the raised beds is in these garden bags now. Buckets are now used for rain water.

I like the garden bags/pots, easy to use, breathable so roots don't get root bound, makes it harder to over water, and many more things. The thing is they are fabric so I knew whenever I was feeding the plants those nutrients would get washed out. As you water more then you wash more out. This becomes a cycle where I believe you use more nutrients because of the bags.

Learning

You learn a lot, if you want to learn. I watched the plants from when they were little things coming out of the ground until they where producing things I ate. In doing this you learn when a plant is unhealthy or when it doesn't look as good as it should. I don't know how to explain it, but you just know. You may not know why but you know something is off. This lead me to research. What causes yellow leaves, why do my leaves point up, why is there dots on my plants, what attracts this insect, etc. A lot of questions that need answered. You research, watch youtube videos, download apps that tell you what could be wrong or what type of bug this or that is. You get immersed in this. I've been here before, I learned to code by myself no teacher, no schooling, by trial, error, and research. Except this time it was different. This is nature. This is as real as it gets.

Feeding the plants

I knew plants need food so I learned about NPK what minerals do what for the plant. It seemed natural to me that plants need certain things at certain times and was very confused on why others didn't understand this. Example a lot of my family uses Miracle Gro all purpose. High in nitrogen, low in phosphorus and mid in potassium. For everything. I on the other hand used higher nitrogen when plants where putting on greenery and when they started to bloom or produce high in phosphorus. These chemical balances I believe are easy to figure out in very little research. I think I managed that very well.

That brings me to why i'm even writing this post. I know we shouldn't have to micro manage these things. It just don't make sense. I live in a very wooded area and I don't feed the trees or the wild blackberries or grapes etc. They just grow and the look amazing. I've never watered them. So why do we need to water and feed our garden plants. The simple answer is they don't have soil, they have dirt. I'm growing in pots that don't even sit on the ground. It makes sense why I have to micro manage them as i'm removing them from where they need to be. Can I do it successfully? Yes i've proved that to myself. Doesn't make it right.

When I opened my eyes

I took science when I was a kid and learned that plants use photosynthesis to make and store food from carbon dioxide and water. That's pretty much it. This was the magic photosynthesis. Through research papers I learn plants use this to create oxygen and energy in the form of sugars. These sugars are then excreted from the roots and attracts bacteria and fungi. The bacteria and fungi then basically make the roots their home. They get what they need and in turn help the soil structure. They aerate it by making tunnels, they stop erosion by binding it together. When things like nematodes eat bacteria or fungi they release guess what, the food for the plant. I love this depiction of the underground food chain.

This takes me into a whole different mindset. This makes sense where as me "feeding my plants" really didn't.

The rabbit hole

How do I feed the soil instead of how do I feed my plants. I have clay soil I need to feed it in a way that it will invite these bacteria and fungi into it to make it a good place to grow plants. There is a lot of info about this. Most of it is just people who give something a name and make it seem like they invented something then charge you for a $100 book. Or they make a youtube video about a process then say I use these items, then have a link to their amazon store. Why are they telling you about this equipment? Because it makes better soil? No because they make money when you buy it. This is the info we get in 2023. You must go through a lot of resources before you find common occurrences. What is something you see over and over. Compost. No matter how it's delivered you can see compost is a very common thing in natural gardening. Why? You basically create a breeding ground for bacteria, fungi, earthworms, etc. You then put this on your garden and bam you introduced the things that help feed your plants! It's not as easy as it seems though.

Compost

I'm in two spots right now. I've been making compost but it takes awhile. Yes there is ways out there to make it faster but natural compost takes awhile so i'm continuing that. There is other methods I found for getting fungi and that is through KNF (korean natural farming) you stick some rice in the forest (i have that) and fungi will grow on the rice. You then mix this rice with brown sugar and it can become shelf stable. The sugar steals the water from the fungi and puts it in a hibernation state. You can collect fungi from every season and keep it on a shelf. Then when you want some amendments mix a little of each in a 5 gallon bucket and you have a bunch of fungi some that thrive in the season you're in and some that don't. I would call this a shotgun method because you have multiple fungi from every season so more than likely you have some that will thrive in your current season. This is good for fungi but I need to create all the soil microbes bacteria, fungi, etc. if it's fungi dominated then that already kills our food chain as the fungi will overrun everything else. Would be good for things that require a fungi dominated soil like trees, not so much vegetables.

Getting frustrated

One would think that this information is everywhere. This is a very important thing. Farmers don't care because the government sends them the seeds and what they need to fertilize, kill pests, etc. Most farmers don't even eat their crop. They don't care about soil health, they care that they can grow corn next year with no weeds. Which in turn just ruins soil and just creates dirt. If you look up the history of things like roundup or fertilizers you see that these where mainly by products of waste. People knew that you could effect plants, fields with these chemicals and companies needed to get rid of these chemicals/waste so they were marketed to help you grow plants. What they didn't say is once you start, you have to continue. See when you put these organic or inorganic elements in your soil at the amount you do, you kill the food chain. No food chain and now your plants rely on these elements you put in. You will have to continue adding them for your plant to survive. Talk about a money maker. Now speed up time for lets say 60 years. Everyone does this, its common. Everyone knows you need to add miracle grow to your plant for it to produce the way you want. Why would you teach how plants naturally get their resources when this cash cow exists. This really frustrates me.

Coincidence

However you see coincidence. This blew my mind and the whole motivation to make this post. Family came to visit yesterday, we always visit each other on Saturday. I talked to them about all this gardening stuff, they like seeing my garden and looking at all the weird experiments I have going on. My dad mentioned he had some of my grandpa's old Organic Farming magazines. My grandpa grew a lot of of food and he did some very crazy things. Growing the biggest tomatoes i've still ever seen in my 39 years on this earth and some of the things he did was not normal at all. My mom (his daughter) explained how he would do things like grow a certain plant just to cut it down the next year (cover cropping basically). Now that i'm looking into this myself I understand that he knew what was going on. I wish he was here to explain it to me. Anyway. They left and last night I decide to look up "Organic Farming Archives" and what do you know they have some archives. Nothing recent but had some from the 40s the first freakin one I click on guess what it says.

"There have been reported cases in England, where, after fifteen years of organic fertilizing, the land became so rich that bountiful crops were grown for four or five years without any further outside fertilizer applications. It is not altogether a matter of nutritional elements, that is, nitrogen, phosphorus, potash, and the other soil constituents, but it is more a question whether the digestive processes of the soil are functioning in a healthy manner, so that these substances may be properly broken down and fed to plant roots. It is a matter of the biologic condition of the soil, not its chemical make-up, which plays such an, important role in the interplay of the complex soil forces." - Organic Gardening 1946

I don't know why I clicked on that one out of the 295 that are there. I don't know why it explained exactly what I was looking for in the first paragraph. Keep in mind this was in 1946. I truly believe we have lost our way in more ways then one, but this makes me think i'm on the right track.

Here is the source: Organic Gardening 1946 

I recommend if you are looking for this type of information look back past the age of the internet. I read further until late in the night. I found a description of the compost bin I made. I followed a tutorial on youtube of course. Said it was "created" by a man in the 90s and everyone knows it now by his name. I found the exact same design from the early 60s. Weird how that works.

I will continue on this path and will attempt to grow my soil so next year I can plant in the ground. If you would like to contribute to this, a couple bucks goes a long way.
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Thanks for reading my ramblings.