Homestead and garden update: 6/27/2021

I promised an update on my homestead a while back, and then went radio silent. It was because of several reasons: apparently Blogger causes my laptop to overheat so I can't use it easily unless I can go hang out in an air-conditioned place long enough to write up some posts, and even though I can code HTML, I have to finish my posts online because I can't code for the images offline. I've also been super busy with the homestead, which, dun dun dun...

...did survive.

First of all, foremost of all, let's talk about the garden. I took this set of pictures right before I left for a trip to Denver, which I'll schedule to post sometime later this week. (I'm writing all of this on Friday, trying to work my way through a vast set of photos.)

I was worried that leaving this garden alone for a week would result in some dead crops. But outside of a couple of the more weakly-rooted mustard leaves, that didn't happen. Instead, the crops seemed to take the opportunity to spread their roots deep to suck out the remaining moisture, and now those huge root structures are helping push them up. So I'm super stoked. Follow me past the jump and see something besides this gorgeous repotted cactus that I tricked into thinking it's raining.

So my foray into mycology. This here is a genuine golden oyster mushroom in a fruiting stage. I'll cut it in a few days, cube up the mass, and fry it with onions to make mushroom sandwiches. I am definitely going to expand my mycological holdings as soon as I have the space to. I'm thinking I might buy some spores and some sawdust, and just grow it on the floor on the walkways. I won't be likely to step on one, and usually the grainmass isn't fruiting so it'll usually be an empty walkway. But I have to build that greenhouse first.

When I do though, I'm going to expand into blue oysters, wine caps, and maybe even lionsmane. Especially that last: my mother's got neuropathy and it sounds like fresh hell, and lionsmane is supposed to help with it. An ounce of prevention and all that... maybe I can avoid her sufferings. I've offered to grow some for her, but she's skeptical and I'm not pushy.

My peppers aren't doing so hot for this time of year; they had run-ins with mice before I salted the earth with their most hated plant, onions. Every five-gallon bucket I plant out these days either gets several onions of its own, or gets placed near one that does.

This first pepper here is a survivor. I planted it with the aforementioned onions, as well as oregano. Oregano isn't particularly companion-ish to peppers, but I've got half a dozen buckets of tomatoes absolutely spilling over with basil and I can't possibly eat it all, and I've got relatively less oregano by comparison.

On reflection, I should've planted tarragon there instead, it's a more expensive herb and I use it a lot with fish, eggs, and Greek dishes. In any case, you can't see it in this picture anyway, but it's since started coming out in its dozens.

There's also a mother bucket where I planted every single pepper after the mice first ravaged it. That's in the foreground of the second pic; further away is the last bucket I had planted out before the Great Rodent Army besieged my works. The last pepper in that is another survivor; it had no discernible leaves left, just a stalk. I ended up replanting some basil from a tomato pot in this one; it's growing even better than the other pots. I replanted it because it was in the way of a tomato wanting to grow upwards, a technique I'll explain presently.

The tomato is a vine from the nightshade family. As a vine, its stalks are coated with tiny hairs that, upon contact with fertile soil, will immediately turn into roots. Now, the size of a harvest off of any given plant is determined by its size, and its size is determined in part by the size and complexity of its root structure. The more the roots can develop, the more it can serve as a base for the rapid growth of the rest of the plant, which can then play host to massive and bountiful tomatoes. So I encourage root growth by planting tomato seedlings in a half-filled bucket. Then as the leaves grow up and out, I pluck the bottom-most until the plant has grown a couple inches above the current surface.

Then I fill in the bucket a little more, being sure to surround the central plot of soil with ash around the edge so that there's an abundance of nitrogen just out of easy root's reach for the plant, meaning it's rewarded with a boost of growth for stretching those roots out a little further. (Nitrogen helps leaf and stalk growth, not fruit growth, but you can't have the latter without the former and despite liking acidity overall, tomatoes go nuts for ash. And, as you might imagine, without a modern kitchen, I have a lot of spare ash on hand.)

In this first picture, you can see a bucket where the process is completed enough for the companion planting stage on the left. The soil has reached the top of the bucket, so I put down the onions and scatter the basil and water it all in. On the right side is my worst-performing tomato plant; the basil is growing bigger than it. So I moved it inside the indoor shelf greenhouse to give it the best possible conditions to grow. Since this picture was taken, it's assumed more realistic proportions for a tomato at this time of year, and I expect a decent crop from it by the time it's all done. You can see I've mulched the bottom of it with some wood chips to keep the plant's roots from being undone by watering, because being so young and small it is still underneath the rest of the bucket. (Its being outpaced by the basil is why I decided not to companion plant until the tomato's so old from now on.)

In the second picture, you can see two tomato buckets in an outside shelf greenhouse. I leave them with the flap open so they don't get sunbeat, but strapped to the rest of the structure so they don't get windbeat. They are workhorses, and pretty unremarkable. There's another two just like this that I didn't bother to photograph. And then in the third picture, you can see the beginnings of the final stretch. I've mounded up dirt in the center for a couple extra tomato roots to form, and used longer wood chips to wall it all in. I've attached twine to the bucket handles, for the vines to grow up, and begun training them to do so. Since this picture was taken, the one on the right has put out a couple yellow flowers, and the basil in both got a good harvesting to fill out some egg sandwiches. Don't worry - they'll bounce back stronger than ever. Basil loves a good rolling harvest, and like many herbs thrives with it.

Next up is the huckleberries. For something I planted on a lark and expected nothing of, they are coming up viciously. A common game every morning is for me to stoop over to water it, and while I'm down there I count how many separate stalks of huckleberry are living today. Some smaller ones will sometimes die off and then grow back later. But since these two pictures were taken, every single major stalk has grown up above the lid of its bucket.

Huckleberries are native to the West everywhere from Idaho where it's the state fruit, to Mexico, where the particular variety I'm growing, chichiquelite huckleberries, originates, because it doesn't need the delicate dance of frost days to grow. I also happened to learn the other day that they evolved to be an understory plant for redwoods, yet more proof that the whole West was one big redwood forest, once upon a time, and could be made so again.

What else... here's the mustard leaf before I left. Two of those pots are mostly dead now, dried up from lack of water when I was in Denver. But even they have new growth in them, and the other four are still chooching along just fine. Not just fine; they're crowding each other for the sunlight. I sense more salads in my future.

In the seed starters you can see a row of eggplants that finally developed at long last. It's not in the pic yet, but several sunflowers will similarly start after this pic is taken. Why sunflowers? It is a secret tool that will help us later.

Here's the top shelf of that greenhouse. I think I need to plant out some melons, what do you think? I tried putting kiwanos (this African jelly melon, I hadn't heard of it either and now I've got seven of them) outside, so they would vine out and cover my stone chimney. Mice ate it, so I no longer have eight. I've also got a lot of watermelon, cantaloupe, and honeydew.

In the back of this shelf, you can see pots of sage, oregano, fennel, garlic chives, thyme, and rosemary. Everything but the thyme and rosemary is doing great; I may replant those pots with something else.

And here's the thing I'm proudest of this update: a modified three sisters. Maize doesn't grow well in five gallon pots, so I swapped it out of the three sisters in favor of sunflowers, which do. The three sisters works as follows: maize (or sunflowers) give the beans something to grow up, the beans fix nitrogen in the soil to feed the other two, and whatever squash or melon you please is at the bottom to shade out any weeds.

To commemorate our immortal science, the first such three sisters bucket I planted out has scarlet emperor beans, a red sunflower, and a watermelon. Sensing a theme here?

And the last couple pictures I have to share aren't anything particularly new. Blueberries are doing well, blackberries are doing well, strawberries are doing well. So here's a photo compilation to end this update, proving it: