May Lotito

PiI harvested lots of Japanese indigo seeds so this year I just grow the lazy way. Cleared a patch and broadcasted some seeds in early summer. When the seedlings were 5 to 6 inches tall, I pull the really crowded ones out and transplanted to get more bigger plants. With warmth and rain they are all growing fast. Leaves are dark green and about 2 leaves away before inflorescence. I can see some blue color in a couple leaves chewed by grasshoppers. Time for the first harvest this weekend!

Thom Bri wrote: One goal of this garden is to test if production gradually drops off if corn is planted year after year using the old Indian methods.

The black soil of corn belt is the most fertile soil in the world and the three-sister method makes balanced use of soil minerals. There are C3 vs C4 plants, nitrogen fixer vs non-fixer and different root structures. Their nutritional needs are complementary so it will take you quite awhile to run short.  In my personal experience, brassicas sowed in Mid summer can be an early indicator if soil fertility drops. Daikon radish with deep tap root is more sensitive than arugula with a more fibrous root system.  The seedlings would germinate normally but fail to past first true leaf stage. If you want to give it a test, just broadcast some seeeds under the canopy of squashes in the first week of August.

How are the flax fibers doing? Are you growing flax again this year? I got my bushy flax problem fixed through soil amendments mentioned in this post. They all flower on the very top, even though plants were flattened by gusty winds multiple times. Usable length is a little over 2 ft.

My milkweed is spreading faster than I like. The stalks come up at a regular interval of 4 ft from each other, as far as 8 to 10 ft from the original site. Since there is no monarch butterfly around this time of the year, I decided to remove some of them. The barks are quite strong and I can just peel long streaks of the barks off the woody stems. They are now in a tub for retting. I will see how the fibers come out. I tried the dry stalks before but they were too rotten and brittle.

We received 2" of rain two days ago and today I stumbled into these giant clusters of mushrooms near an old oak stump. Black-staining polypore?

I mainly added two secondary macronutrients: calcium and sulfur, and two micronutrients: boron and molybdenum to my one acre. A total of 500 lbs ag lime, 280 lbs gypsum, 25 lbs borax and 1 lb sodium molybdate. I plan on ordering one more ton of lime this fall. It was based on my soil and weather conditions and history of harvests/mineral removal so it may not apply to others.

I started the garden in a grassy area presumably cleared from the upland oak/black walnut forest. Soil is acidic and low in most things. So after adding lots of organic matter, things were thriving in the first few years, growing food seemed easy. I mistakenly assumed fertility would stay high that way with regular addition and recycling of organic matter but the system started to get less and less effective.

I did some modeling and it fits if one or more trace elements are depleting faster than others. First I suspected boron, because most OM I got was grass based and monocots have low boron content (<10ppm in dry weight). Vegetables I grow are largely dicots that need 10x more boron (10-100ppm). Squash in particular, has a really high toxicity threshold (1000 ppm). So when I grew lots of squashes, they had been accumulating boron in the leaves. Those leaves decompose quickly at the end of the season, but my weather is too cold to grow dicot covercrops to recycle the boron but not cold enough to retain it in ground. Over time the ratio drops to a point it is limiting plant growth and can't be corrected from organic input alone.

Similarly, my soil has low molybdenum in the first place, being highly leached and acidic. Local trees all have very high tannin to help them retain and recycle Mo. BTW, Mo is the least abundant essential element (1 to a million to nitrogen), and the only micronutrient that availability is reduced when pH drops and the only one that can be mobilized to the seeds. So after lots of harvests and removing clippings, Mo became so low at one point clovers were gone and beans and brassicas looked sickly with poor quality seeds. Perennials including fruit trees started a slow death as well. The more nitrogen added, organic or not, just made things worse. I did a small quantitative rescue test and the Mo needed was equivalent to a 50# bag of alfalfa pellet (3ppm Mo DW) per 10 sq ft. Again, not feasible in large scale.

I guess for most people with decent soil, adding mature derived from legumes leaves or seeds would be sufficient. I am just having a too low base line to start with. I wish I had those minerals added to the soil before gardening but luckily it's never too late. After I amended the soil, legume, cool season broadleaf and deep-rooted weeds reappeared in my yard, earth worms returned and moles areated the ground. I then just followed the usual organic practices of chop and drop, composting, inoculating biochar with weed tea etc and things are back to normal.

Hi Joao, I didn't paint. I figured just let some weaker twigs thin out so it won't be too bushy. I added some ag lime and gypsum to increase soil calcium level, as the best figs are grown in calcareous Mediterranean soil. I scattered some wood ash around as well. Hopefully the wood will be stronger and more resistant to cold stress. The fig bush woke up early and started putting out lots of figlets. The thickest 3yr old branch is now over one inch in diameter.  I meant to remove some of the smaller twigs but they all started looking similar and suddenly exploded in growth.

In the last several years I wasn't able to grow kabocha like I used to and switched to the easier butternut squashes. Then the quality of butternut started to decline too: pest issues, slow maturity, lots of splitting, aborted fruits, hollow squashes etc. At first I wondered "why? I was able to grow lots of squashes" then I thought " BECAUSE I grew LOTS of squashes!" I suspected some nutrients have been depleted faster than others causing an imbalance. Due to repeated failures, for one of my favorite kabocha variety, I was down to one tiny fist size fruit struggled to reach maturity last year and the supplier no long sells the seeds. After a year of slowly adding minerals back, I tried again and it works! Seedlings are strong and healthy and they start setting fruits a few days ago. It is still a couple months away from harvest but I am just so excited and want to share now.

I tried different beans in the polyculture with corns.
1. Climbing indeterminate kidney beans + tall corns planted the same time in Mid April. More yard long beans planted later on.
2. Determinate edamame with short early corns.
3. Chickpeas as ground cover for late planted corns in hot weather.
They all work out fine except for short corns+ climbing beans. I just harvested some ears for sweet corns as the plants are swallowed by the vines.

I soak some chickpeas in water and puree with a blender, add small amount of sea salt, vt B12 and animal food grade DE/bentonite powder until it's pasty. I let it dry out further until I can mold it with a PVC pipe and push the plug out with a syringe plunger. Sun dry and they can be stored long term.