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Location: Southern Ireland
Picture: Cerberus heatwave over the Iberian peninsula and southern France
Location: Offline
It’s been several weeks since my last post. In that time, the garden has come along nicely. As a refresher, it’s a first year garden built on poor soil that I’m building up.
My irrigation canals are preventing pooling, and seem to be distributing the rain well. We’ve had bouts of erratic weather, but in between those bouts it has normalised a bit compared to the spring. I’ve had to continue manually watering (no auto irrigation set up yet, and not consistent enough rain). A lot of the young trees that I planted early in the year have died. A few are hanging on. One is doing quite well, but it’s only ornamental.
The corn is all over the place in terms of height, but maturing well nonetheless. I’ll get quite a few ears - I might even have enough to eat a few, haha.
My sunflowers are decent. The heads are maybe a bit small but these are new varieties, and there are numerous heads per most plants. I have one very tall sunflower that hurts my neck to look up at.
Two types of buckwheat, which are my first time growing but they seem to be quite at home pretty much anywhere I plant them. Same with one of my amaranth varieties. My barley varieties both did nicely as well.
The squash are miserable but flowering anyway. Peas are thriving in tilled and lightly amended amended soil. Tomatoes are finally hitting a growth spurt and I have one that has started producing, but the sprouts were temperamental about soil so I only have a handful of plants.
I think the drought was not good for my soil bacteria. I will have to continue adding more. I buried some used grocubes full of fertilizer and inoculants awhile back, and I have a massive cabbage growing there. That whole area is particularly productive, so I’m sure I need to amend the other areas a lot more still.
Grape leaves are being eaten alive but the fruits are slowly developing. I have a huge muscat plant that was here when I got the place, but it has never produced fruit. I will work on that one for next year. If nothing else it might make nice grafting stock.
My hops are miserable. I had one get eaten to the stump twice, so I potted it and brought it inside, and it is thriving. I’m going to need to improve the area where they are, and probably trim some trees to allow for more light. I don’t think I’ll harvest any this year except maybe from the inside plant (which has taken over my exercise bike lol).
Green lettuce did well. Red lettuce sprouted and went straight to bolting. I think I planted them at different times, though.
The peppers (many varieties) are not really doing to great. Some of them were discount store buys, although a few were grown from seed.
A whole bunch of things never sprouted. Berry plants might need more acidity still. The new fruit trees are mostly still hanging in there - more than most of the tree types - but not all of them. Rhubarb is a bit sad. I lost my potatoes somewhere under the grass.
Most of the seeds will be collected for later seasons. Some remnants will be allowed to spread naturally. The leftover annual plant matter will be used for mulch and compost. Perennials will be left and will likely get covered in late autumn for protection.
Not a ton of pollinators, but some. Loads and loads of bitey bugs. I have 4 or 5 bottles of anti-itch creams sitting next to my desk.
All in all, something seems to have changed in the weather and it must have made the garden happy. That was a pleasant surprise. Hopefully we can make it through to harvest without any major losses, and I’ll count this year as an unexpected success. It started rough and I see crops are failing all around. I know the only reason my crop grew is because of diligent watering, but lots of farms don’t have that option.
Thanks for keeping these coming. It sounds like you could profit from splitting your plot into experiments, including baseline for control.
How is your soil pH doing? Have you considered paying for soil analytics once to check for potential problems?
I’ll be adding some wild type sunchokes to my grass roof this autumn. The last time I used commercial cultivars which became a pest but never flowered.
Most of the new plants I add are eaten alive by snails and bugs. Jerusalem artichokes seem to thrive and bear fruit, which is rare.
I have a few informal experiments going, but unfortunately I did not have the time to do anything like that properly this year.
Alkaline. I’m working on bringing it down. It’s going to take awhile to get the whole area adjusted. It’s not awful, though, the berries are hanging in there well enough.
Yes but I’m poor on cash and poor on time so I haven’t done it yet. I’ve done some home tests so I have a basic idea of the major nutrients - severely deficient, except a few spots with potash content. I had very little success with growing anything in the local soil. Some things are in entirely outside-sourced soil, and a lot of other things are in a mix of the original soil and the imported soil.
I’ve always wanted a green roof (unless you mean a thatched grass roof - I’m going to assume not, haha). I’m not sure my current place is ideal for one, so I will probably end up just painting the roof with one of those white coatings that reflect the heat. I’m also thinking that a reinforced roof would be rather wise in a state of collapse…
That’s always annoying. I have pest problems but they aren’t that destructive. Not much you can do at the sprout stage, except to sprout them outside of the ground and transplant them when they’re a bit bigger.