Spring is Here!!

Ok, so not officially, but we're past the last frost date and that is spring to me! Oh how I love spring! My pocketbook doesn't love it though. I spend the most money on the garden in the spring because I'm just so excited to plant and I wanna buy ALL the plants and make my garden bigger and better!

Back at the beginning of February I expanded my garden plot from 20'x20' to about 35'x20'. I ordered some compost from Living Earth, the same place I got it from last year, Since I had some trees removed last year and I had the company dump their entire truck of tree chippings for me, (it literally took a week to move all the wood chips from the driveway to behind the fence) I had plenty of mulch. I decided to plant my garden in such a way that I could compare growth of the same plants between a first year garden and a second year garden. When I teach a class I always stress that year 1 of your garden is going to mostly be disappointing and possibly a complete failure. Unless you are really rigorous about supplemental fertilizing with chemical fertilizers, just don't expect much. I felt that pain so hard last year, we didn't get much out of the garden all last year, a few sad ears of corn, a handful of green beans, a dozen tomatoes, and a cucumber or two.

April 2015. These plants should be dark green and twice the size

The reason for this is because new compost is almost completely sterile, compost piles get so hot during the decomposition process it kills just about everything living in it. Once the process is finished, you need fungi and worms and nematodes and all forms of microbial life to convert the compost into water soluble nutrients for your plants. It just takes time for that life to make its way to your new garden and get to work, about a year of time here in Houston. Commercial mulches are usually devoid of this life also.

 I hope to take weekly pictures of the garden this year so that the growth differences are more apparent in a single photo. This may be slightly inaccurate because on my garden expansion I put my year old wood chips as mulch instead of commercial mulch and so I likely inoculated my extension with worms and bugs and fungi et al that have been growing in the wood chip pile all year, not to mention all the life already in my existing garden could venture over. But it will still be good documentation because I do expect to still see some difference.

March 6, 2016

The left of the worm tower is the year 1 garden expansion, I have green beans, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, potatoes, sweet potatoes, corn, cantaloupe, and watermelon, sweet onions, zucchini, yellow squash, and garlic. To the right of the worm tower is the year 2 existing garden. Cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers, sweet onions, corn, eggplant, zucchini, yellow squash, lima beans, green beans, and garlic.

So I have a almost everything on both sides, but a few things only on one side but it should give me a fair comparison of the same plants and how they grow being treated the same but only difference being a year 1 and a year 2 garden. I'm excited for the experiment and I hope everything I've been preaching is true!