Hey, I Won Something!

One of the best blogs on this whole home production, storage, use, reuse and urban farming concept is done by Erica and her husband Nick and it's called Northwest Edible Life. You can find it on nwedible.com and I highly recommend it. What they are doing is definitely in harmony with the whole Stealth Farm concept. (Besides that, she likes to cook in cast iron. How cool is that?!?)

Last week for her 100th posting celebration, she ran a 'thank you for reading' contest for her readers. As a nearly daily faithful reader, I left a comment which was her preferred way to enter. Today I found out I was the randomly selected winner of the home canning book she has as a prize.  I'm very excited.

I'm sure with all that is going on in our lives right now, we'll be able to put this book to good use.

Thanks, Erica and Nick, for doing a great job with your family, with your home production efforts and with the way you share what you're doing. I hope you are blessed with all that you want and need. (And thanks in advance for the book.)

On the local front, here are some photos of part of this past weekends radish haul. They are still tasty and crunchy and full of flavor. Their tops are good in salads, especially the smaller leaves. Their shapes are a little non-standard because these are being grown in the onion bed which doesn't have as much organic material in it and the clay soil compacts pretty tightly. I mulched this bed with straw and cultivate it regularly, but it still gets pretty hard.

This guy, however, didn't grown in that bed. He was in the chard bed which has much more compost and leaves and other organic stuff in it. Notice a difference?

This guy is over 8 inches long and at least an inch and a half in diameter. it wasn't woody or bitter. It was crunchy and sweet and tangy, just the way a radish should be. With the softer and more hummus-filled soil, it got a lot bigger in a hurry.

I think that it'll take me about 5 years to grow the soil to the point that it will grow anything I want. If I keep tilling in the mulching materials and adding compost and worms to it, I'm sure that in that much time I will have good, rich soil that will support my plants.

On the flower front, the hollyhocks that I planted last year are starting to flower. They aren't the really tall varieties and they only stand between 3 and 4 feet tall but the flowers are big and very pretty.

I've also noticed that some of the beans are starting to flower. This is good. This is another thing I'm doing to try to improve my soil, legumes. I grew black-eyed-peas last year and I was quite surprised with what I saw them do. When I cleaned the plants, there were many nodules on the root systems. I tilled the plant stems and leaves into the soil, also. I'm of the opinion that you can't have too much organic material in your soil.

This tough guy is a pepper that actually survived from last year. When we got our cold snap, which I think was on a Tuesday this year, all the rest of the peppers and tomatoes finally gave up the ghost. I though that this one did, too. But I was mistaken as I found out in February when I was getting that bed ready for the Spring. On the old root stock there were four or five green leaves. I decided to not pull it up and chop it into the compost bin and sure enough, it kept right on growing. I now have at least 6 peppers on this plant and it's only April. I'm pretty excited.

Sorry about the fuzzy photo. I'm still working on that macro thing.

My cilantro is growing quite well and I'm ready to start another batch. This stuff is aromatic, flavorful and prolific. I've taken several bags into work to share with my coworkers and my wife has used a bunch for some of her recipes, too. It's good stuff.

Thanks again to Erica at Northwest Edibles for the great canning book. I'm so looking forward to it. Best wishes to your family (including your chickens!).

And if you're ever in Las Vegas, please make sure you stop by.

Tomato Sucker Debate and Bucket Update

When last we left you, our hero was considering...Screech!! Oops, sorry. I forgot this wasn't a melodrama. It's a gardening blog. But from what I've been reading in "the literature" from Extension Services, seed companies, "professional" growers, backyard dabblers and the infamous internet experts, the concept of trimming the tomato suckers is exactly that, a melodrama.

Some say do, some say don't, some say do it sometimes, others do it never. For some folks, this is as important an issue as what variety to grow or whether or not to plant by the cycles of the moon. For others, it's a silly topic and one on which they expend no effort either discussing or doing. So, I've made my decision.

In order to keep the concept of Stealth Farming, the work has to be the easiest and most productive it can be. It has to take care of the plant, the garden and the produce and still produce the highest yield and most flavorful, healthy food possible. With that in mind, I have decided to ignore the suckers. In fact, I'm not even going to call them suckers. To me they will just be additional branches or shoots on which more tomatoes can grow.

If my point was to grow a prize-winning tomato for the county fair, I would let several fruits set on the plant and then I would monitor them as they began to grow. I would make sure that no suckers, I mean 'additional branches' were allowed to grow and flourish. I would then select the best fruit from the plant and remove all of the others. Then I would hope and pray that no bug got to that one while it grew.

Because these additional branches will allow for more leaf production and flower production, there will be more fruit from the plant. Because a plant has a finite amount of energy and nutrients that it can produce over the course of the season, more fruits generally means more average fruits and fewer phenomenal fruits. I'm OK with this as my purpose is to produce as many tomatoes as possible. So, the additional branches will remain.

I'm not that emotionally invested in my plants to worry and fuss over every detail like the 'additional branches.' And although I know that some people are, I don't think I will ever get that way. And if I do, somebody please slap me and wake me up.

Over the past few days I have been attaching the supports for the tomatoes in the buckets. These are made from wood that I ripped last year into 1" x 1" pieces approximately 6 feet long. I put one support stick on each side of the plant generally perpendicular to the fill tube-drain hole line. I secured them with a simple cable tie.

This photo makes it look like the support stick is only a couple inches away from the fill tube, but it's not, really. I thought the green cable ties made a nice statement, don't you?

When I had both of the supports in place (they push down easily in the compost/mulch/soil mix) and anchored, I used a piece of nylon twine to form the trellis support on each side of the plant stem. I've used this method before and it allows for the plant to grow and enlarge without binding or restricting but it still provides enough support to the plant to keep it upright and protect it from the wind and the weight of the fruit.

By following a figure-eight pattern between the posts and the plant, there is enough 'give' in the string to support but not rub an injury to the stem. An alternative to this is the simply tie the string from post to post and use plant ties or ribbons to make the support on the plant. They both work, your call.

This picture makes my leaves look yellow but that's from the floodlight I was using. As you can see, I have to garden in the evening and early morning to get it all done. (I have a life, you know.)

I've got a dozen tomatoes and three peppers growing in these Sub-irrigated planters this year. I may add some more, too. Eventually, I want to have all of my garden area in sub-irrigated planters or wicking beds. With the cost of city water rising every year, I can't afford to top water and let the excess run off back to the water table so the water authority can charge me again for the same water. By using this system, I only use the water once, same as before, but only I use the water, and only about 10% as much, too.

As a side note, I have a friend who has some pet rabbits who live in her house. They are litter box trained and she considers them members of the family. I bring her some radish tops once in a while for her bunnies. Here is a picture of last night's radish pull and the tops she got today.

I really love radishes. I like them raw, in salads, by themselves and in soup. I think they add a great flavor when grated or shredded and put in other dishes. I even like to pull one or two and munch on them as I'm working in the garden.

When you grow your own as an intercrop with other plants, it's like a bonus, almost free. I once calculated the cost of a radish to grow and it worked out to about 8 for a cent. That's cheap. And when you grow them yourself in your Stealth Garden, they are picked at the exact moment of intense flavor and nutrition. How cool is that?

Feeding My Worms

I got to feed my worms last evening. Since I'm new to vermiculture, this has not lost its newness or interesting-ness (if I can say that) yet. I'm still fascinated by these little guys and am learning a lot more about them.

Before we got some worms, I had known that they were necessary. When I was growing up, we always had worms, you just assumed that they were there because you always saw them on the sidewalks after a rain storm and when you dug a hole in the ground or turned over your soil in your garden, you saw them (and so did the birds!). So we always just took them for granted.

But I live in the desert of Las Vegas and worms are not the norm here. You can find them, just not in my neck of the cactus. A desert is really a place with limited organic material. Our soil here is highly mineralized with almost no organic material at all. Sand and rocks and the dreaded caliche are the norm. We have excellent drainage, but there is nothing to hold the water in the soil. We have to build our soil in our growing areas which is why raised beds is such a great idea here. (Wicking beds would be even better. I hope to convert mine in the next year.) And because we have to add every thing organic, we have to add our own worms.

My son-in-law stopped by one of the plant nurseries in town about a week ago and bought two half-quart cartons with worms from them. They each advertised 100 worms. When we popped the lids off, we could find a bunch of writhing, wriggling worms nested in a bed of coconut coir. Seems like that is a versatile material. I didn't take the time to actually count the 100 worms, I'm sure they do it by weight with the average being 100. (I did feel sorry for the guy whose job it is to count worms into little cartons for sale. One, two, three, four.... There's a job to die for, or from.)

So now that we had worms on the Stealth Farm, we had to make some living arrangements for them. We grabbed one of the 55-gallon barrels and my son-in-law cut it in half longitudinally. We drilled several holes in one end to act as a drain for the naturally occurring juices that come from worm composting and attached a piece of two-by-four to the other for stability and to provide some slope for gravity to work on the juices.

All we needed was to add some semi-finished compost from the compost tumbler (also made from one of the 55-gallon barrels) and dumped in the worms. We put one carton with its population at each end of the barrel. Then I added a chunk of 'worm food' that we had previously made and frozen to the center of the bed. More on the worm food later.

We added some shredded newsprint and then a few inches of straw for insulation. I'm more concerned with overheating than being too cold, at least for the next 6 or 8 months, so I'm a bit over cautious. That was that. We placed the new worm bed on the water container that will become the centerpiece of the aquaponic system we are building. This will only be temporary until we figure out exactly how we are going to do this long term.  Here's what it looks like:

 This is the side view of the bed. It is just under half full of bedding and straw. You can see the stabilizing two-by-four on the left end. It is attached by means of several drywall screws and keeps the barrel half from rolling around. It won't tip over, but I don't think seasick worms will do what they need to do as well. The worm bed extends over the side of the base so the juices can drip from the drain holes into a 5-gallon bucket below.

Here's another view where you can see the bedding.

Here are a couple of view of the worms in the wonderful semi-compost. See how many you can see. Look closely, they're there.

Maybe later I'll add some arrows to point them out. Since I know what I'm looking for, I can see them.

Here is what the food looks like. Now doesn't that look yummy? I made it myself. We have a compost bucket under the sink in the kitchen. When we have food wastes that would normally go into the trash, we put them in the bucket. When it gets full, I take them out and liquefy them in the blender. No, I didn't ask my wife's permission. Yes, I'm going to get my own blender from the thrift store.

Once the stuff is blended well enough, I pour it into a zipper-locking bag and put it in the freezer. No, I don't put it where my wife will easily see it when she opens the freezer. Yes, it looks a little gross. Once it's frozen, though, it just looks like a blob, you can't see what is in it.

I read in my research that you don't have to do it this way, you can just toss the scraps into the worm bin and let nature take care of the rest. However, I also read that worms only eat what they can put in their little mouths (makes sense) and since I want them to eat a lot, get fat and poop a lot and make a lot of baby worms, I don't mind grinding it up for them. Besides, I only have a couple hundred worms so far. Any unpleasant odor I can avoid I will. The theory is that they can eat and process this stuff faster than just rotting food in the ground. We'll see.

I dig a small hole in the worm bed by pulling back the straw/newsprint cover and lay the frozen mass on the compost below. Then I cover it up. It melts and the worms eat it.

I know this is the case because this is the second blob of food I have put in there. The first one was much greener than this one (I think it had a bunch of watermelon rinds in it.) and in less than a week, it was gone. I could not find a trace of it left. Wow. The little buggers were hungry.

Remember that I said we dumped the worms in at each end? Well I put the food in the middle. A couple days later I checked on it and I could find no worms at either end. They were all over, in and through the blob of worm food. When I checked on it again yesterday, it was all gone. 200 worms ate through about a pound and a half of food in less than a week. I'm impressed.

So, if they keep eating, I'll keep feeding. I have 5 or 6 bags of food in the freezer ready for them and I'm making more.

Here is a view of the drain holes on the bottom of one of the ends.

Just a dozen holes drilled into the barrel. We made them small so that the worms would be less tempted to venture through them to see what's on the other side. So far, so good.

Here is the bucket with the worm tea already in it. I'm sure that the food had some moisture to add to this, but the rest of it comes from whatever these guys do to the food and the water we use to keep their bedding moist. They don't like dry conditions and will actually die if they dry out.

So far we haven't had any worms show up in the bucket and I hope it stays that way. If you look, you can see that I had the bed insufficiently extended past the edge. I fixed that problem. The tea I pour on my garden. I'm thinking about using it on just half of my onions to see what kind of a difference it makes.  Could be interesting. Could be nothing.

I'm excited about these guys and hope we are successful in breeding lots of them. I want to be able to put them in the garden as well as have a great supply of castings (worm poop, don't you just love euphemisms?) to use in the buckets and planters and to side dress the plants. You can never have too much good stuff in the soil and worm castings are a great way to keep beneficial microbes alive and well and they make many more nutrients available to the plants. Healthy soil makes for healthy plants which reduce disease and pests which yield a greater harvest which provides more for the compost bin and the worms which.... Well, you get the picture.

C'mon, Worms!

Some of Last Year's Bounty

The cucumbers and watermelons cascading down the wall.
You'll notice that although green is a nice color, I like marigolds and flowers to add some variety.  My beds are three feet wide from front to back and 75 feet long. We made them by cutting back the berm in my backyard that extended at least 30 feet into the yard. The houses on the street behind my home are much higher in elevation than my house and that's why I had such a big pile of dirt. The terraced grow beds are quite nice as the vines can cascade down the front without interfering with other plants. I think that looks cool, almost like a living wall.

 Here is my lone pumpkin from the garden. Although I had several plants, this is the only one that reached any kind of size. I was overwhelmed with squash bugs last year and they took their toll both on the plants and the fruits. My daughter would kill literally dozens and dozens each day and destroy hundreds of eggs on the leaves, but we just couldn't keep up with their reproductive rate.

I have found that when you have poor soil, like I did in these beds last year, you have more water stress in the heat of the summer, weaker plants and a greater likelihood of disease and insect pests. It's nature's way of making sure that we feed the soils. I don't expect the same type of problems to anywhere near that degree this year.

I grew some green manure crops of peas and beans and turned all that matter into the soil. I supplemented with an untold amount of leaves this last fall and several bags of compost from the garden center. We also mulched with alfalfa last year and turned that all in when we dug the beds. I am mulching with straw this year and am growing worms in my worm bed. I hope with all of that, my yields should be higher and my plants should be healthier. Feed the soil and the soil feeds the plants.

 Here is a cantaloupe hiding under one of the eggplant bushes.

 These guys got really big really fast. It was amazing to me to see how fast they would grow in a week. They could go from flower to harvest-able fruit in less than 2 weeks. Now all I have to do is get my wife and kids to like to eat eggplant. Time to get creative in the kitchen.

 This was a fun experiment that actually failed, but it was fun to watch and see the progress as far as it went. These are sweet potatoes growing in some soil-filed tires. I had told my daughters that you could grow spuds in tires and they went out and found some tires to try it. We planted Yukon Gold potatoes at first, and they grew very nice tops and we even got to add the second tire to it, but the dogs decided that they wanted to see what was down there and dug them up and basically destroyed everything but the tires. So we tried it again with the sweet potatoes (we had some that had developed slips) but we didn't have enough of the season left and they produced not new tubers.

We'll do it again, but maybe not in tires.

If you try this, get a jig saw and cut off the sidewalls of the tires before you plant. That makes it more of a barrel and it is easier to break down in the fall when you harvest. It also removes a serious place for black widows to hide, a real concern in the desert.

 Mmmm, melons. Now THAT's breakfast!

 Corn in the front, beans behind and tomatoes in the distance.

 Some of the doomed squash. Great flowers, terrific plant growth and way, way too much fruit.

 This one 3-year-old almond tree produced nearly 3 pounds of almonds this past season, the first time it has produced. Some are weirdly shaped, but they sure taste good.

 Another melon hiding in the leaves. Love these things.

 This is actually only two watermelon plants on the second level. The vines would grow over the side and cascade down to the level below and then on to the ground level.

This is one day's harvest from the garden last year. Lots of tasty eggplant, several over-sized zucchini, a couple of yummy crookneck squash and 4 cucumbers. The pale green ones are Armenian cucumbers, a giant variety that makes great salads and is wonderful for eating, but silly for pickles. The one with the darker speckles is what happens when you grow "regular" cucumbers close enough to be cross-pollinated by the Armenians. It made for an interesting color and pattern, but the flavor was wonderful.

I like growing unusual plants like those giant cucumbers. They make great conversation pieces at work when you bring in produce to share.

No Whine With This Garden!

OK, so I have to apologize for that last post. Frustration can inspire many things, including poor judgement when it comes to blogging. Let's just charge the last post to frustration and move on. I promise to be more positive in my posts from now on.

This past week has seen really strong growth in my portable sub-irrigated planters, also known as my 5-gallon tomato buckets. If you remember, I had some concerns regarding a few of them during the ridiculous wind storm we had two weeks ago. Gusts in the 50 to 60 mph range can do serious damage to tender plants. But I staked the ones which had gotten bent over and watered them a bit more than normal. They have responded quite nicely and are doing well. It seems that there should be no problems from the wind in these two.

All of them are quite strong and showing good color and good stem and branch development. Since I'm a little confused on the whole idea of which branches are good and which ones should be removed, I'm going to have to research that some before I go pinching back the suckers. I would rather be sure which ones are the suckers.

The very warm temperatures here have caused most of my lettuce to bolt. They just don't like temps in the upper 80's. I don't blame them, I like the lower 70's myself. Some of the loose leaf lettuce varieties are holding their own and continuing to produce new leaves, but I'm starting to notice a bit more of a bitter flavor rather than the sweet flavor they had before. It's not a bad taste, just different. But since this is my first effort at growing lettuce in the desert, I'm still going to call this a success.

Next year, I'm going to get an earlier start on the greens by using some cold frames in the beds. I think I can start them indoors again, that worked out quite nicely this year. There was no noticeable transplant shock and they took off right away when I put them out in the garden. But if I use the cold frames or even a mini-tunnel, I think I can get them in the ground nearly a month before I did, by January 15th at least. That will give me fresh greens by the end of February or the first of March.

The onions have recovered somewhat from the dogs in the garden. I didn't lose as many as I had initially expected. I don't know if the reduction in green tops will slow down the development of the onion bulbs, that kind of makes sense, but most of the damaged ones have begun sending up new leaves. They still taste good when pulled green and taste is important. I hope they get well developed before the really hot weather gets here. I'm not sure what they are going to do then.

Speaking of hot weather coming, I'm putting in my melons and squash plants this week. They love the heat we get and last year's cantaloupes were the best I think I've ever eaten. I loved having a half melon for breakfast, especially when I walked to the back yard and picked it fresh. I'm only using non-hybrid seeds on them this year, I don't want to buy seeds next year so the F1 hybrids are out.

Also, I'm only going to put in 2 plants of each squash type. I don't think I need quite as many gargantuan zucchini's as I got last year. It was disheartening to see so much go to waste because we didn't eat it all and didn't give it away fast enough.

The experimentation with the worms is quite interesting and I'll blog about that soon. I'll even add some photos to show what we're doing here. That should be interesting.

Late spring is an exciting time for me. With the early veggies to taste and the growth in the garden to get me excited about summer's possibilities, I find I want to spend much more time in the garden each day.

I should have been a farmer.

What's The Use?

I'm a little bit whiny today. I'm frustrated and disappointed and need an outlet to vent so I'm using my blog.

I went out into the garden yesterday afternoon to harvest some produce for the dinner salad. My wife had asked that I go get some but added that she wanted me to make sure that it didn't have "that spicy stuff like last time." Apparently, there were some leaves of some varieties of lettuce that had an actual flavor that didn't set too well on her tongue. So I made sure that I only harvested some delicate greens and reds that would be mild in flavor but still tasty.

I added some white-stemmed and some red-stemmed chard to the pile thinking that it would be a tasty addition without any "spiciness." Then I went over to the onion patch for some green onions. And that's when I saw the devastation.

This spring I had planted about 400 onion sets, mostly white but many yellow and some red varieties. They have been doing phenomenally well this spring and we have enjoyed them for several weeks in salads and grilled with chicken. I have interplanted several varieties of radish, cherry belle, icicle, French breakfast and several others. I have enjoyed these as well for the past month or so. This section of the garden has been doing quite well and I have been very pleased with it.

What I saw made me both angry and heartbroken at the same time. Apparently, the dogs had been up into the onions and had rolled around in them, leaving their huge piles of crap and digging up dozens of onions as well as breaking off the tops of dozens more. I estimated that I have lost nearly a third of my entire onion crop.

I have a dog, Indiana who is big and fat and lazy and generally stays in the house. However, I have been forced to have three other dogs in my yard, my strenuous objections notwithstanding, as a result of my daughter and son-in-law staying with us for a while with their two and another daughter and son-in-law who decided they wanted a puppy but have no place to keep it. So I am surrounded by canine deposits in the back yard, weekly clean-ups just don't cut it. If I want it cleaned up more regularly, I will have to do it and I refuse to clean up for dogs I objected to having in the first place. Seems a little unfair if you ask me. I get furious when I find these deposits in the garden because they always seem to be directly aimed at a cabbage or a single lettuce plant or some such target. Would you want to eat a head of lettuce that had been the recipient of such a generous dog?

But the wanton destruction of the onions was just too much. I was almost moved to tears when I saw it. I don't understand that.

And to add insult to the injury, my wife said that she didn't like the flavor of the chard and that she wouldn't eat it, nor would she serve it for dinner. So I will be bringing in chard to my co-workers one of whom has a couple of house rabbits as pets/family members so I'm sure we could find some uses for it. I didn't grow so much, only about a dozen plants of the two varieties, but that is much more than I am going to be able to eat before it goes bad so I am willing to share.

Dog owners need to be responsible for their dogs, even if they belong to my daughters.

"Can Ya Save 'im, Doc?"

That dang wind! Just when you think it's safe to set your tomatoes out for good, the wind whips up and kicks sand on your picnic.

Yesterday, we had some of our famous spring winds. Usually, they are steady and mild with moderate gusts but mostly they just bring cooler weather. In the summer they usually just dry everything out. But yesterday we had serious winds with gusts up to 50 miles per hour. That's a serious gust! And it darn near broke two of my tomato plants.

When I got home last night from work, the first thing I noticed was the state of my plants. Right in front two of my tomatoes, including the one with the blossom from the day before, were laying down on their sides. It's a sad thing but not a major deal.

I made some supports for the little guys and put them in the garage out of the wind. I watered them all well because the wind does have a serious drying effect even in the springtime. This morning when I checked on them before I left for work, they were still there and didn't look too much the worse for the wear. Here's hoping they make it through. If the stem didn't pinch itself, I don't think I'll have a problem but if it did, I might have to go and buy some replacements from the nursery. I don't want to do that as all of mine this year are from seed.

That got me thinking. It's just a tomato plant. It hasn't produced any fruit yet. I don't even know for sure that they will, I'm just hoping. But because I have invested some effort and several weeks time in planting, watering, nurturing, potting up and then making their sub-irrigated buckets and doing the final transplanting, I really want them to at least have a chance to produce. It won't end my world if they don't, but I will be disappointed.

If one of my kids got knocked down (figuratively), I would be there to prop him (or her) up, dust him off and then send him out again. When they were little, I could do that literally and even kiss the boo boo to make it better. Now, the hurts are mostly inside hurts and most of what I can do is to listen to them work through it, offer advice and counsel and then hope and pray they work it out. (But I certainly wouldn't go to a nursery and pick out another one. I'm too old for that.)

I really can't do much for the plant other than what I have done. I can't do the healing if the stem is cracked or crushed or broken, only the plant can.

I really can't do much for my kids, either, other than what I mentioned. (Material things don't count. That doesn't make one 'broken' only 'broke.') I can't do their healing for them, either.

Gardening is like life in way too many ways. The more time I spend doing it, the more I finally see it.

First Tomato Blossom--A Sign

I noticed last night as I was looking over my tomatoes planted in buckets that the first blossom of the season had opened. The delicate pale yellow flower is on one of the larger plants and one of the stronger stems. I have labeled this plant the Alpha Tomato or Alpha Tom or A-Tom. I like that ATomic tie-in, since most of our nuclear testing was conducted not far from my home here in Las Vegas.

I had also noticed that the few plants who were suffering from a lack of iron and showed it with their yellowish leaves have greened up quite a bit since I added an organic iron supplement. It's funny, you know, to look at the plants and actually have feelings for them. Not in some weird trans-personality kind of way, but in a personal "I know my plants" kind of way. I hope for them to do well.

When I notice that they lack something, I try to find out what it is and provide them with it. I noticed that the leaves on some of the plants were showing yellow edges and veins. When I researched this, I decided that the evidence pointed to a lack of iron in the soil. That made sense to me so I found an organic iron supplement at the nursery and applied it according to the directions. I tried not to over supply them, too much of a good thing is still too much. I tried not to under supply them because I didn't want to think it was solved and then not have the results I wanted. Balance. I was seeking balance.

I try to anticipate what they will need and make sure that it is in the soil waiting for them to need it. Tomatoes need calcium in the soil and ours doesn't have it. So, I added some dolomite limestone, powdered, to the soil to provide it. It's supposed to ward off blossom end rot among other things. I made sure that it was mixed in well and was down deep in the bucket so it would be there when the plants got mature enough to reach it.

I know that they will need support later in their productive lives and I have it ready to apply. I have some tomato cages to put into some of the buckets and I have some tall stakes to put into others. My meager budget prohibits me from supplying them all with cages but the stakes were free, ripped from boards recycled from shipping pallets. I actually like the way the stakes look. As the plants grow, I will add layers of string to help hold the stalks and stems vertical.

I'm finding that I really like gardening. I like the challenges, the work, the almost instant gratification of seeing your plants do their thing. And I certainly like the rewards or eating fresh, clean, pesticide/herbicide/life-aside free food, harvested at their peak of ripeness and enjoying them "in the season thereof." I like the life corollaries that accompany gardening. I like the mandatory slowing down of life when I tend to my garden. I find that I look forward to it every day.

I like the spiritual aspect of growing things, too. I love the feeling of connection that I have with the natural world. I am beginning to understand much of what I read in the Scriptures, too, because so much of those teach about life by using agricultural parables, metaphors and similes.  I like the direct correlation between what I get to do for my plants and what God has done for me (and you!). I like that it allows me to focus on what I should be doing in my life with my family, the people that I meet and the blessings that I receive. I like the few minutes each day I get to ponder these things, to feel them and to resolve to do better at honoring them.

Gardening lets me do that. It lets me be a better father, friend, person. It helps me be a better me.

Tomatoes are planted and the greens are crisp!

I have finally finished transplanting my tomatoes from their smaller cup/pots into their final 5-gallon bucket sub-irrigated growing containers. It took me a little longer than I had thought it would because I originally planned on having some help with the process and the construction. That didn't happen so it had to fit into my schedule. I ended up finishing and cleaning up last night at about 9:30.

I really like the idea of these things. There are several benefits that, if true, will support gardening in the desert more than some of the other things I do. First, they contain soil and nutrients that are contained in a closed system. They don't have any native soil, what we have here is rocky and generally without any non-mineral content. Tomatoes don't do too well in that.

Second, there is the potential for an uninterrupted water source for the plant. By having a reservoir of water in the base of the pot, and thanks to the natural phenomenon of capillary flow, the plant can have a life of reduced water stress (a documented splitter of tomatoes here in the arid southwest) and can enjoy having temperature-adjusted water (no cold shock in the summertime).

Third, the dang things are entirely portable, even late in the season. Although I can't imagine having to move a fully fruit-laden plant around the yard or to some other location, if I need to, I can. Since this is my first year doing this process, I don't know exactly where in the yard the best locations will be so I expect to move them around a bit at first as part of my learning experience. It's not too bad, they're not too heavy and most have handles.

I read online about a company that has produced a commercial version of something similar to my buckets and the developer/inventor has some instructions that are different than some of the others I've read. One company places a plastic cover over the dirt with only the plant and the watering tube protruding above it. One advises to simply mulch heavily and depend on that to reduce the trans-soil evaporation until the leaf cover of the plant takes over and provides the shade to the soil. I don't see how either of these will work with carrots as they don't have a thick leafy structure and you would have to literally perforate the plastic cover to provide enough holes for the plants. On the carrots, I'm opting for the mulch concept.

On the tomatoes and peppers, I think I'll go with the reflective mulches, either the red or the silver. I may even go with aluminum foil. I've seen examples of that working well. (Plus, it's really inexpensive and easy to fit in the pot around the plant and the fill tube.)

Another thing that I have learned that works for me here which is different than what some of the commercial units' instructions tell you is that I have to top water the plant until the roots reach down to the more moist levels of the potting medium. Most indicate that you would only have to add water to the reservoir and the plants do well. Apparently, they've never seen what a desiccating wind will do to a young seedling here in the desert. By top watering until the plants were more established, I find that the plant suffers water stress less and grows more vigorously. The need tapers off as the plant gets bigger.

My ruby chard and my white chard are both doing quite well. I am having a hard time getting my kids to eat it, they didn't grow up with it so it's new to them. New vegetables are difficult for most people to try and like. It all goes back to the old saying, "You don't know what you like, you like what you know." Since they don't know it, the learning curve (or the liking curve) is pretty steep. But we'll get there.

My lettuce field has done phenomenally well. I can get my kids to grab a pair of scissors and head out to the garden if they need to make a sandwich. They aren't having too hard a time trying the different kinds of greens I have growing there, the cut-edge varieties and the reds and purples. They seem to adapt well to that.

I am still amazed at the flavor that comes in freshly harvested greens. You don't get that at the supermarket. I don't know how long that lettuce has been on the shelf since it was harvested but now it just tastes old. I really love the fresh stuff and I know that there is no pesticide, herbicide, fungicide or any other -icide to deal with. Heck, you don't even have to wash if off before you eat it, just blow off the dust.

My onions are doing quite well. The tops are strong and dark and the flavor of the ones that we pick for the salads and such is so intense. They aren't any hotter than store-bought onions, merely more flavorful. You gotta love it.

My wife made some really great salsa the other day with some black beans, some corn, some mango and some cilantro. The cilantro was freshly harvested from the back yard. Cost? Zero. Flavor? WOW! You don't need as much when you harvest it minutes before you eat it. Amazing.

I'm really liking this fresh food concept. Can't wait to take it to the next level.