Randy Wier

The new radish seedlings are growing well.

I had flowers on my cucumbers for about more than a week when I went out to the plant to see I could get a cucumber for dinner.  Even though it was bushy and green and blooming there were no cucumbers.  I made the decision to prune the vine to just a couple of stems and accept the lost time of growing leaves.  In about a week, I now have many cucumbers growing

Back for a quick update.

What started out as a dry season has turned to a wet season.  The strawberry bed has some holes where runners died over the winter.  I have added radishes to the holes.  I am also trying to capture strawberry runners in flats of potting soil.  I hope by doing this that I am able to transplant the new strawberries more successfully.

One of my sea buckthorns has taken off in it's third year, I pruned it away from the saskatoon.  I put the cuttings in a rooting bed and put the rest of the trimmings under the mulch in the berry bed.

The days are warm and long.  We had rain on May 22 along with some showers since then.  The carrots and swiss chard is up.  still no sign of the onion seeds I put down.

The lawn is growing like mad.  2 inches this past week.

The cucumber looks sad.  I think it is cold, so I put some blood meal down to try and perk it up.

The lovage went to seed last fall, now there are lovage seedlings in the strawberry beds.

I have attached a picture of the lettuce that sprouted this spring.  They seem to have attracted some birds lately.  The tips of the lettuce are gone.

I planted my tomato and cucumbers last night.   I bought them at a local greenhouse as I was out of town in late winter and couldn't start my own.  The varieties of tomato are champion and sungold. The cucumber is a straight eight.  

The tomatoes are indeterminate so I am using a trellis that is a 2x4 suspended above the bed, with ropes extending into the soil.  At the soil end I tie on a toggle such as a nail or a piece of pipe.  This gets buried underneath the plant, so the plant grows overtop and doesn't pull the stake out as it grows.

Angela Wilcox wrote:Randy, thank you for uploading the photos. Your grow beds look great! How amazing about your lettuce. That’s so cool.

Good thinking on covering your pea sprouts from the birds. James Prigioni, a permaculture gardener on YouTube keeps his peas covered the whole season because of bird pressure. Look at 3:38 on the timeline.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CEPVoVgDIYE

Thanks for sharing this.  He has quite a shade house.  I might need to consider this for my garden.

Last August I planted lettuce in my garden when it was hot and dry.  Even with watering, I didn't get any lettuce plants.

This spring, I have lettuce plants growing!  I guess this shows that seeds are willing to wait until conditions look good.

I didn't take any pictures of them yet.  I will try and remember tonight.

Here are a couple of pictures of the garden.  Peas were planted on May 2.  I have had trouble in the past with birds eating all the peas out of the ground, so I have covered the bed with fabric.  The peas have sprouted underneath and are about an inch tall right now.

Hello,

I am going to record my gardening efforts in this thread.  My garden is raised beds in a small backyard each 3'x12'.  I also have a bed of berry bushes 3'x40' containing haskaps, saskatoons, and sea buckthorn.

My intention is to plant regularly all the way to mid August.  I also intend to frost seed some plants in the fall.

Last fall I gathered leaves and put them on my garden beds.  This year the soil underneath was soft and crumbly.  Other years the soil is hard after the winter freeze, so I am counting this as a win.

Many of the strawberry runners did not take last fall, and they are dry and crumbly.

When you compost, you are trying to convert raw plant carbons to stable humus, To do this you need to encourage microbes to eat the raw carbon and excrete stable carbon after digestion.  These microbes are made of protein and you need nitrogen to make proteins.

With this information we can start to understand the reason for the standard recommendation of 30 parts brown(carbon) to one part green(nitrogen).  You need to have sufficient nitrogen to support a robust population of microbes to produce warmth and eat(decompose) your raw plant carbons in a reasonable time frame.

If the amount of nitrogen is too high the population of microbes will grow so large that the oxygen diffusing into the pile is insufficient for air breathing microbes and non-air breathing microbes take over.  This is bad because non-air breathing microbes off-gas methane and Sulphur compounds which are smelly.  In addition Sulphur is an essential mineral for plants and it needs to remain in the compost.

So you can see that carbon is the primary ingredient in compost and the speed and final volume of the compost is determined by controlling the amount of nitrogen to control the population of microbes in your pile.

Wild Alberta Rose Seed.
The seeds have been stratified and cleaned.
100 seeds for $10

PM me if interested