1/2" a rain and promising carrots

Winter stuffs

Sowed spinach, leeks, beets, carrots, kale, chard and arugula.

More carrots, more paths, more mulch

Last carrot sowings failed due to heat wave (95+ in Nov!) And lack of mulch. Trying again...

Well shit. Maybe ill fertilize...

My garden just sucks. I've weak plants for probably two years now and the only thing I can think is that my once fertile, regularly amended with compost soil has gone dead. I don't have the time to stay up on composting so I decided to fertilize. Inspired by Steve Solomon's Complete Organic Fertilizer I bought the materials and will be applying later tonight. $70 for the ingredients in 5&6 lb quantities. If it works I'll bump to 25# or 50# quantities next time.

- 6 quarts cottonseed meal, 6-2-1
- 3 cups #65 dolomite lime
- 3 cups gypsum
- 1 quart high phosphate guano (note: ran out, should have been 6 cups)
-

Winter carrots and a pea experiment

Sowed 5' of danvers and Nantes in the new bed. Nice loose, friable bed that should be great for carrots.

Also doing an experiment to try to learn why my last 2 pea sowings have yielded such terrible results. Doing side by side sowings of Johnny's (98% germ rate!) And the who-knows-what botanical interests from local nursery.

Hasty spinach and chard

Hasty spinach and chard

Sowed some old and new seed. Hastily... too busy with work but need to get something growing g for Cal!

First fall/winter crops emerging

Kale seedlings

Broccoli

Carrots under mulch pads to keep them from drying...

Dave G. Helped out last Saturday and sowed 2 kale varieties, 2 broccoli varieties, peas, beans and carrots- thanks Dave!

So far the kale is making a solid arrival and some of the broccoli is pushing through as well.

I also sowed 2 rows of Swiss chard in the new North/South bed.

Data...

• SodaDB - Maybe the new version of Grubba?
• Grubba - Hmmm. Closest Google Base substitute I can find
• WuFoo which sounds great, but they wants $14.95/mo once you have more that 100 rows.
• ZoHo also looks nice, but $5/mo. Which is fair, don't get me wrong, but free would be better
• FormLogix Too expensive at $12/mo w/ annual commitment

Hmm, but maybe Grubba is no more...

What in the world?...

New Bed Orientation for 2016

Finally realized that having east-west oriented beds isn't a great idea due to the shade from my neighbor and the trees. I chewed up EW-1 and EW-2 and used the soil to extend and widen NS-1 and NS-2, now known as NS-4 and NS-5. I created a new bed, NS-3 that is nice and wide. All of these beds are basically the same length (~20'). In creating NS-3 I chewed into EW-3 as well, which is fine as it was always odd with it's bend. I'll add a photo or drawing later.

Planting Plan

Quickly and hastily sowed some old seeds in some available bed patches to use up my old seed stock so I can stop mentally tripping over them. I also tried creating a planting plan the night before in the hopes that when I walked into the yard I could execute efficiently rather than walk around over analyzing everything and in the end, accomplishing nothing. Well shit-howdy, what do you know?! - it worked! All sowing done in 30 minutes, fast and efficient.


For my records, here's what I did:

We just had a bunch of rain, soil was soaked. I roughly trowl leveled small areas, then with the trowl edge formed apprpriate sized furrows. Laid seed and covered with aged compost, patted firm and watered lightly. It's cold right now, I will likely have some seed rot and poor germination but these are bumper crops.

• Raised Bed: 8 sowings of Sugar Snap peas on tomato cages. Double sown, 8-10 holes per cage and topped with compost.
• Raised Bed: 2, 7' rows of mixed carrots. Trowled furrows, topped with compost. Expectations low.
• [NEW]NS-4: Filled in some mixed carrots in areas that failed to germinate well from a couple months ago. Trowled furrow, compost topper and light watering
• [NEW]NS-5: Filled in swiss chard in area that failed to germinate well from a couple months ago. Trowled furrow, compost topper and light watering
• [NEW]NS-5: Some red russian kale at the North end where the Siberian kale was weak. This was just kind of random...Trowled furrow, compost topper and light watering

More spinach

We're using the spinach like crazy, I've harvested at least 5 times now for probably 5lbs or more of spinach. The little plants are getting tired and I decided to sow a bunch more.

For my records, here's what I did:

[NEW]NS-5: 3 rows of two types (red kitten and another that I can't remember). Each row about 4-5' long. Topped with compost.

Confirmed

Fish Guts

1/18/16 Steve:

"Do you think I could get some fish carcasses or waste from Anne's brother? I'm interested in occasionally getting my hands on 20-40 lbs of waste (heads, guts, tails, scale, etc.) raw, fresh and wild caught. For free."

Blueberry Addition and some other stuff

"Jewel" early-mid blueberry

I picked up my early-mid blueberry solution in the form of a "Jewel" grown by "L.E. Cooke Co" and sold by Gary at Laguna Hills Nursery. I now have very early, early, early-mid and mid. Next up will be mid-late and late. I still need a pot solution.

Also today:

1. Fertilized seedlings with fish emulsion
2. The second sowing of Kale has emerged
3. My chard and carrot crops are so pathetic I may start over :(
4. Did a bit of light weeding before seed heads show up, composted

Spinach looking very healthy, need to thin soon

Snap peas also looking great, don't plan to thin.
Hopefully the fish emulsion will kick them into a growing/climbing pattern

Pump Hole

Sounds dirty...

Pretty Small for a Month Old

Beet seedlings - once they emerged they stalled without
producing true leaves...yet

I don't have much experience growing from seed in the winter, and what experience I do have is from quite a while ago. I'm not sure if it's normal or if I'm failing, but my current seedlings seem awful small for their age. The Kale, Beets, Swiss Chard, Spinach and Peas were all basically sown on 12/15 making them about a month old.

Siberian Kale - after the peas this these guys show the most progress, but STILL...
only maybe 1" tall, MAX

Snap peas are doing the best, but same as the others: they seem to have stalled.
1 month old plants should be bigger than this

BTW, photos taken late dusk with Katy's iPhone - I must admit the white balance and contrast is way better than my phone.

No Need to Flip Yet

Two compost piles are still cranking away. Back on the 2nd I combined and flipped two older and cold piles and worked in 15 pounds or so of aged chicken manure to activate it. I also started a new pile with a fig and tree trimmings. Well, the new pile peaked a week ago around 150 but is strong at 140 still and the "old" pile also hit 150 but is currently at 120. This is great, no need to flip until I see them hit 100 or so.

14 days and both piles still hot! I'm thinking next weekend will probably be time to give at least the combined pile a flip.

Ants 1, Steve 0

My insecticidal soap experiment failed - the ants live on. Didn't do much today, put some barriers around a few Kale that are getting chomped on. Checked the organics in EW3, I raked a bunch of much in there a few months ago and much of it is still in there. Saw some termites :( but also some worms :)

And now a random picture of my adorable wife.

Survived the storm

Spinach sown 12/15 (25 days ago)

Kale, 25 days old

Beets, also 25 days old

My efforts to protect my new seedlings paid off: zero rain damage.
It's interesting how much slower everything is in winter. Emergence and growing is taking at least 2x as long. Vegetables are retarded in winter.

Twice now we've had an eruption of ants around this pothos. An 11 year old house plant deserves at least a bit of effort to save, and save I did: depotted, submerged root ball in a home made batch of insecticidal soap, cleaned pot, broke up bound roots and repotted with fresh soil. Fingers cross.

Outlaw Water?

It's possible... and in California I really wouldn't be surprised if it were illegal to collect rain water. So I checked a bit and found

California enacted Assembly Bill 1750 or the Rainwater Capture Act of 2012

Hmmm, digging deeper I find this gem in part 2.4 of the Rainwater Act of 2012

10574. Use of rainwater collected from rooftops does not require a water right permit pursuant to Section 1201

Well thank god!, looks like I can keep my water...

Pump Success

My little 1.5HP pump turned out to be a great piece of equipment. The rain came down hard today, just over an inch in a couple hours which resulted in the flooding I had expected. With enough volume of water I was able to crank up the pump to full throttle and let it run for more than 5 seconds! Here's a video of the murky output at the curb (this is 150' of discharge line, up-grade)

The North-West corner of the yard also floods very bad, I've got a big ass concrete slab back there so can't use the same technique of digging a small hole for the intake line.

I think I can put a hole just on the other side of the compost pallets which also seems to be the lowest point. BTW, for that hole, the gate hole and the side yard hole I plan to use a sprinkler valve vault which will allow me to keep it covered when dry, but quickly pop the lids and drop the pump intake when raining.

Mighty Little Pump

First Big El Nino Storm - Rain Prep

With the first big el nino storm coming I spent just about all day prepping the garden for heavy rain. I have a bunch of tiny, fragile seedlings right now and the rain could easily destroy them. I'm not really sure the best way to protected them, decided to try two different methods of using floating row covers. I give it a 50/50 chance of working.

Nina and the snap peas

Rain water collection

Compost Cleanup

With the rain coming I made a big push to consolidate compost bins #2 and #3 into #2, this leaves #3 empty. I set #1 up with all the recent shredded tree and fig trimmings as well as some junk that was sitting in there. NO SIGN of the chicken carcass I threw in here a few months ago, this is great and means I can throw my stock waste in the compost. I scraped some finished compost from the bottom of the bays and tossed it in the tumbler which has been re-purposed as my finished compost storage.

BTW if you want to know what finished compost looks like check out the below video.