BTE Year 1 vs Year 2. 8 Week Update

This will probably be my last in depth comparison post because most of the plants have reached their terminal growth and have entered into fruit production mode and the differences from here on out will simply be in harvest. Even that will be quite obvious as a stunted plant is just not going to produce the same as a well fed huge healthy plant.

There really is nothing more to say about this picture, the second year garden (Est. March 2015 to the right) is so green, tall, dense and productive. Year 1 (Est. Feb 2016 to the left) of the items that are also planted on the right  tomatoes, squash, beans, corn, onions, peppers: the plants are all stunted, yellowed, and any fruits are small and under developed.

Year 2, We had some really severe weather the last two weeks, I lost one of my zucchini plants. The huge leaves just caught the wind like sails and it broke the vine. The remaining plant is still putting out male flowers and seems healthy. I left it there to see if it would start to produce another main vine stem. The remaining zucchini plant is putting out plenty of fruit so I'm certainly not crying for lack of zucchini.

All my trellis systems have fared very well during the high wind and rain storms. I'll never trellis another way again, I've found my perfect system. The tomatoes seem to have stopped growing up so much at about 5 ft. The cucumbers are still vining high at over 6 ft. They'll continue to fill out the trellis I'm sure. The 8 week corn has tasseled and the silks have emerged. It's amazing on the Year 2 side the stalks are over 5 ft. I haven't seem double silks though so I may have not quite thinned out the corn enough to get two ears per stalk, but there will still be plenty of corn. The stalks on the Year 1 side are about 2 ft and have little or no silk emergence.

Year 1. Just really pitiful looking. I did give a few tomatoes and corn some chemical fertilizer feedings to see what would happen and they greened up and grew a bit above their non fed counterparts, but not enough to compare to the no feeding required on the year 2 side. It's starting to get pretty hot during the day so I have more or less only been going out to harvest now.

This harvest was from about a week ago. The beginning of what was to come.

This is from this morning. To date I have harvested (all from the year 2 side..year 1 has yet to produce any fruits of harvestable quality):

15 slicing cucumbers (these plants were started indoors, so they had a head start),
4 pickling cucumbers (these plants were started from seed in the ground),
10 LARGE zucchini
11 yellow crookneck squash
3 lbs of green beans
2 bell peppers

We'd been grazing on cucumbers  for about 2 weeks but the first real harvest started just last week when we returned from camping. So almost all of the above has just been in the last 7 days.

Amazing. I LOVE my garden.

5 Week Update BTE Year 1 vs Year 2

The changes in the garden are really getting exciting now as some plants are flowering and setting fruit, the others won't be long behind.

Year 1 (established Feb 2016) to the left of the worm tower and Year 2 (established March 2015) to the right. It's like looking at two starkly different gardens and yet I have treated both the same. The cantaloupe and watermelon plants that are between the cucumbers (center) and the year 1 corn I am supplementing with fertilizer (mix of organic and chemical) weekly since I don't have those plants in the year 2 side and I want them to survive and produce. You can see they are greener than the plants I am not supplementing but aren't thriving in the same way all the plants in year 2 are which I am doing no supplemental fertilizing.

Year 2 side. Front to back: Beans, Limas, squash and zucchini, eggplant, corn, peppers and tomatoes and cucumbers.

Facing south, Year 2 left and Year 1 right. the corn plants visible here are all the same age. amazing what a little decomposition and soil activity can do, right?

Year 1 side of the garden. front to back: beans, eggplant, peppers, sweet potatoes, potatoes, tomatoes, corn, cantaloupe and watermelon

Here are some close up comparisons I did as in week 3 update.

Left: Year 1 corn and tomatoes. Right: Year 2 corn and tomatoes.
Left: Year 1 Zucchini. Right: Year 2 Zucchini
Left: Year 1 green beans. Right Year 2 green beans

The proof is right there, the Back to Eden method works, but it just requires a little patience and a little idle time. Time you can spend doing other things, not time slaving in a garden worrying if your plants are getting enough nutrition or too much. You can leave it to care for itself without worrying about weeds getting out of hand or needing to water through dry spells. It's truly the most relaxing and satisfying way of gardening I've ever tried.

Also at this 5 week mark several of the plants that were started from seed indoors or purchased from a nursery are setting fruit.

 Very healthy peppers that are thick walled and very green. On the year 1 side the pepper plants are not flowering well and have become riddled with holes from teeny caterpillars.

Cucumbers should be ready to start eating very soon, they grow fast. The abundance of flowers on these plants is just staggering.

Tiny tomatoes. it's going to start getting hot soon so I'll be coating my tomatoes with kaolin clay this year so see if it helps with stink bugs. All the large foliage of these year 2 tomato plants shade the fruits so they are less visible to birds and less susceptible to sun burn.

Season 8.0 Three Week Update

(Legendary Garden 2.0) I'm so excited to see that I've been telling the truth to everyone that ever asks me about gardening or has attended one of my classes. Weeks 1 and 2 I didn't really see much difference in the year 1 and 2 garden spaces. I was starting to become a little concerned I may have lead people astray in their gardening adventure. But during week 3 I started to see significant differences between the two garden spaces. See for yourself:

Year 2 (Established March 15, 2015) to the right of the worm tower and Year 1 (Established Feb 5th 2016) to the left of the worm tower. It can seem a little difficult to tell from this panoramic shot, so here's some key photos to show the current differences.

Left: Year 2: 3 weeks since planting corn from seed and tomatoes from plants
Right: Year 1 corn from seed and tomatoes from plants
Notice how the year 2 plants are much greener, the corn stalks are thicker and taller and the tomatoes have more abundant foliage and are greener. The year 1 tomatoes are beginning to yellow towards the bottom

Both sections have been treated the exact same, there is no supplemental fertilization. When I fertilized the year two section with poultry litter fertilizer I did so at the same time as the year one section. The only difference is the passage of time.

Left: Year 2 zucchini from seed at 3 weeks. Notice 4 true leaves
Right: Year 1 zucchini. Barely 3 true leaves.

Left: Year 2 green beans from seed at 3 weeks. Most plants now have the second wave of true leaves and are very green
Right: Year 1 green beans. These are much further behind in setting out the second set of true leaves and are not as rich in color

Here's a panoramic from the north side of the garden you can get a better view of the tomatoes and corn and how they differ.

Left of worm tower is year 2 and right of worm tower is year 1.

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!

Final Winter Harvest

The worst (best?) part of growing a happy garden is that it grows A LOT of food. That's awesome especially when you can put it all away for another day, but putting it up is often quite time consuming. I finally went out a couple weeks ago and harvested the last of the collards and cabbage. I thought i'd post a little tutorial for how to freeze collards since they can be a very prolific vegetable.

I took a large beach towel out into the garden and broke off all the collard leaves and stacked them in the towel so they would be easy to carry into the house,

Fill the sink with cold water and  swish the leaves around in there. I had to drain and refill the sink several times because it had just pollinated a few days before I harvested so all the leaves were covered in yellow tree pollen.

I stacked them all on the towel to drip dry while I cut out the woody core of each leaf.

Fold each leaf over with the rib to the top. It should naturally want to fold up this way some.

With a knife cut the rib away from the leaf

Should look something like this when you open it back up. You don't have to fold the leaf, but I only have to make one cut that way rather than two.

All cut and neatly stacked. The cores went out into the worm towers or compost pile

Now I roll up a portion of the stacks at a time and rough chop the leaves.

Submerge in boiling water for 1-2 minutes until nicely wilted. Strain the leaves and pack in freezer bags.

My final harvest plus what I had already put up amounted to 6 stuffed full quart bags of collard greens. Now you can have braised collards with bacon all year long! Or creamed collards, or if you leave the leaves whole, collard wrapped meat balls. Yummy!

Cabbage keeps a really long time in the refrigerator but I put up two of the heads in the freezer by cutting them in quarters (leave the core intact) and blanching for 1 minute and then bagging them. Collards can take blanching longer but cabbage doesn't take very long to cook so you only want to blanch just long enough to stop the maturing enzymes. Next year I might try canning the greens instead of freezing but I was tired and my feet hurt and I had a cranky baby so the freezer was just faster.

Makin' a Comeback

Since we moved a year ago and I had to start over my whole garden. It's been pretty painful having such a poor year after my most amazing year ever. I knew it would be bad and that I wouldn't get much from the garden (mostly because I'm too lazy to do all the supplemental fertilizing that the plants would need while the soil ecology is building up). But I planted a fall garden anyway and I got a couple good things out of it. it was pretty apparent that if the plant didn't root well it didn't survive or just stunted.

It can be difficult for young plants or seeds to grow up around such a thick layer of wood chips and wood chips that haven't fully aged at at that. The nitrogen fixing is true, but only for the very top layer, underneath the wood chip layer the compost is very nutrient rich. But as some of my plants overwintered this mild year some of them have suddenly renewed themselves. The peas have exploded in growth. Since I planted them in September they've been weak yellowy small plants barely hanging on. Now they are flowering every day and I'm starting to get the benefit of grazing on fresh sugar snap peas every couple days. It also gives me good hope that the soil ecology is doing very well and I should have a good crop from the plot I built last year.

I also grew several cabbages this year that are bigger than any cabbages I've ever grown. Even a crown of broccoli and cauliflower that were decent size. Two of my collard green plants have fared very well, enough to put up in the freezer. and we ate turnips and greens several times. I guess when I look back the fall garden didn't do so bad after all. I usually have great success with carrots and this year the seeds had too hard a time with the wood chips and they got smothered before they rooted well.

I love fall gardening because the plants really don't need much attention, but it's also the hardest to feed my family with because I'm the only one that likes to eat vegetables from the cruciferous family (minus broccoli).

I always leave some broccoli to flower because they're the bee's favorite. I killed my thyme last year (under watering in a pot --I'm a terrible pot gardener) so I don't have those to attract bees. They also love thyme flowers.

Seed Starting

I usually seed start in my Aerogarden which has always been very successful and I never have a problem with the seeds germinating and being perfect for transplant. The last two years I haven't been able to start my own seeds since life was so busy. The problem with the Aerogarden is you really have to replace the bulbs every year and buy more nutrients and the bulbs are pretty pricey. I tried not replacing the bulbs for two years and the seedlings were significantly more leggy that second year.

3 or 4 years ago

This year I spent a significant amount of money expanding the garden so in the interest of saving a little and starting my own seeds means I won't have to buy as many plants (I still bought potatoes and asparagus and plan to get strawberries as well) I tried to go the more traditional route. I bought a 72 cell seed starter jiffy tray with peat pellets for about $8 at Walmart and dug into my stash of seeds I've had for the last  7 years. I keep them in the refrigerator or freezer. I seeded the tray and so far things are working out great. I had several of the oldest seeds still germinate in the first 4 days or so. Seeds are truly amazing.

The next problem I went out to solve was since I wasn't growing these indoor under lights and my south facing windows just didn't get enough strong sunlight, I wanted to figure out a way to get the benefit of germinating outside (the sun and some wind to keep the seedlings strong) and the benefit of starting indoors (warmth over night, controlled germination). Enough Googling around led me to the use of clear storage containers as mini greenhouses. Once most of the seeds popped up, I put the whole tray inside a storage container (about $6 at Walmart) and brought it outside when the sun came up to my sunniest spot and if the day was going to be warm then I left the lid off and when the sun set I'd bring the seedlings inside. If the night wasn't going to get below 50 degrees, I'd just put the lid on and leave them outside over night. So far it's been working out great, but it's definitely A LOT more work than my Aerogarden, but it's also been cheaper as I hoped.

The tomatoes and cucumber plants were starting to root outside of the peat pellet nets so I used some old 4 inch pots I kept from years past and a bag of potting mix ($4 at Walmart) to pot them up in there with a little diluted fertilizer and they're looking pretty happy now.

Several of the seeds have yet to come up, peppers, cilantro, parsley, rosemary, oregano. And I've read most of those take a longer time to germinate, but it may also be age of the seeds working against them too. It's been 14 days since I sowed the seeds. Time will tell. I love watching those little plants reach their potential in this world. Gardening never ceases to amaze me, even when I know what to expect and see the same little miracles happen over and over again.