Greenstorm's Journal

Today I harvested some seeds from chimayo peppers (sweet, very early, a little spicy) and Aji Lucento (fairly spicy, very juicy, it's a pubescens, also the earliest of my pubescens, less spicy as it ripens).

Alright, so I'm going to have 6000-7000 square feet of garden at Cor Viriditas this summer. The bed is roughly triangular. It's going to take an extended three-sisters planting (corn, squash, beans) with plants I've known to grow well under widely-spaced corn (tomatoes, tomatillos) shade-tolerating greens (lettuce, chard, mache, magenta spreen, shungiku, brassicas, chicories) and some pollinator attractors (calendula, borage, fennel, cilantro). I'm saving back seed from most of this, so if it's a complete failure I can try again next year.

Let's sort out how much seed I need. Generally I'll plant 1-2 seeds per plan desired; because it's a chaos garden I expect germination gaps to be filled in by whatever is close by,

I've collected some short season corns and some PNW corns for this mix: gaspe is my favourite, saskatoon white, saskatchewan rainbow, oaxacan green dent, early riser, new york red, carol deppe's magic manna and cascade ruby gold, lavender parching, painted mountain from six or eight different places, a couple bits from seed trades. My plan is to make three groups: dent, flint, and flour and plant them at each corner of the triangular bed, with sunflowers in-between. There will absolutely be cross-pollination between types but perhaps a little minimized. Within each group the corn plants will be spaced fairly widely to allow undergrowth.

What this means is roughly 1500 square feet each of flour, dent, and flint corn for a total of 4500 square feet of corn. Call it 3 square feet per plant and I'm looking at 500-1000 seeds of each type. The rest of my corn will go in the freezer.

Squash will be almost all maxima, with a corner of pepo out of curiosity (I'm playing with hull-less pumpkins for the animals and trying out a few bush delicatas). Again they're short season, including the buttercup and red kuri that actually ripened last year (hopefully with some cross-pollination), potimarron, north georgia candy roaster (this makes fabulous pickles from the unripe fruits), sundream (super cool resistance/short season), nanticoke, lofthouse mix, lower salmon river, blue hubbard (I love large squashes I can keep in the cool room and chop chunks off as I need them, I'd like to steer in the direction of large), gold nugget (I think the shortest season squash? grows well among corn), a few more kabocha types. They'll be primarily planted into the corn patches, seeds mixed as evenly as possible. Give each squash plant 50 square feet over the 4500 square feet of corn garden and that's 90-180 squash seeds for the garden; the rest go in the freezer.

My landmate is going to start some tomatillos, promiscuous tomatoes, and pepper grexes I've sent her. We should be able to pop those starts in when we seed the bed. I'll have 6 shelves x 3 flats each x 50 cells = 900 plant capacity for starts. 200 will go to peppers, 50 to tomatillos (I have a sweet ground-cherry-tasting one I saved seed for last year), and much of the rest to tomatoes (I sent on my "promiscuous A" good-tasting mix, my orange/red bicolour promiscuous, I think another promiscuous one, and then a bunch of largely self-supporting favourites and open-flower-architecture named cultivars: Brad, Silvery Fir Tree, KARMA purple and KARMA MF, Minsk Early, Uralskiy Ranniy, Mikado Black, Maya & Sion, Grocery store green, I think KARMA miracle and a couple others?). So call it 400 tomato plants? They'll be in amongst the corn, and at the edges of the corn. They'll be smallish when they go in but since everything else is being direct seeded that's likely ok, they'll grow enough that some will not be overtaken and it's those vigorous ones I want to save seed from.

Beans are primarily dry bush, they'll be mixed in the center with the sunflowers, peppers will be to the south side of the sunflowers. There's roughly 6000 - 4500 = 1500 square feet of this moat. Call it 800 square feet of sunflowers at 4 square feet each, that's 400 sunflower seeds if planted 2 in each hole (I don't fully trust some of my older seed, though I suppose I could start these indoors too and just put out 200 plants). Beans are 1/square foot, 200 square feet. I'll put a dozen or two melon plants on the south side of the sunflowers in a patch with the peppers. I'll have 200 pepper plants in total, roughly (100 hot grex, 100 sweet grex) that don't really get their own space but instead go in amongst the center.

Aforementioned leafy greens and some roots (beet and turnip grexes, fall radishes, salsify) will be scattered throughout for imediate weed suppression, creating a seed bed, and immediate harvest throughout the spring/early summer.

This is the most hands-off gardening I've ever done and I think it'll be educational as to the new property. It's been awhile since I worked with light as a limiting factor. I expect plenty of things to be shaded out; the seed from what remains will be good for this kind of mixed underplanting. In year 2 I'll move this mix to rotational pig fields, using the saved seed, to help supplement my hog feed through fall and winter.

Evolutionary breeding, which includes landrace breeding, is another thing I'm into in a big way this year. In the beginning it requires a fair bit of space and curation for little return: I really try (and enjoy) to get a breadth of genetics that somewhat lines up with each aspect of what I want, and then all of that goes into a space at a density where it's likely to interbreed. Most of those plants will fail to produce a crop, or to produce seed. It's therefore taken a lot of land and research to get not a great crop. Of course some work is also removed: I did only the most casual weeding last year on my tomatoes, squash, and corn for example (and actually the squash in the weeds were the ones that set seed).

In subsequent years only the plants that can tolerate the climate and treatment set fruit and pass on their genes. This philosophy of gardening means that instead of committing to starting early transplants, amending soil just so, creating and maintaining a greenhouse and maybe little wall'o'water or hoop houses, trellising or staking or caging or Florida weaving (I still love Florida weaves) I just... don't. And the plants eventually learn to do ok.

I can still absolutely do the kinds of work I want: if I liked watering every evening I could keep doing that, it would be fine. But tasks I don't like - I am not a weed-free gardener, for example, and I find staking the number of tomatoes I like growing to just not ever get done - can go away. That work can vanish and as long as there's still a wide enough set of genes in the populations for selection to function and I'm being thoughtful about what selection pressures are occurring, gardening gets easier every year.

We are having another cold spike, -23C last night is supposed to be the worst of it. We'll see.

Meantime inside so many of the seeds I planted are coming up. First Moment then Fat Frog tomato are showing flower clusters; they were planted on Dec 25 so this is 59 days, I expect the flowers will be open by day 65. That seems very standard. There seems to be a little community around breeding micro tomatoes on the totally tomatoes forum; I don't have time to think about that too much right now but I'll likely revisit next winter.

Meantime artichokes are putted up, a bunch of my saved peppers and tomatoes - doe hill, pepperoncini, favourite panamorous toms, the zesty green one, sweet cheriette, some of the perennial onions, the dahlias, etc. It's almost time to set up my real production seed starting for peppers around March 1st, then it will be tomatoes April 1st. Hopefully my pepper seeds arrive by that time!

The matchbox peppers on the windowsill are covered in baby peppers and flowers and flower buds. I can't believe how many peppers those things want to produce! I did fertilize them, maybe that was what did it. There are so many flowers I've lost which ones I crossed with hungarian black, so I'm going to have to do that cross again. I marked the cross on the hungarian plant ok, but the matchbox plants are so delicate I'm uncertain how to mark them, maybe by tying a thread around?

I still have not threshed all the barley and wheat. I think I need rubber gloves to do it.

Mom is up for a couple days and yesterday was a holiday, so we rearranged (arranged?) my basement so I can put the production transplants down there. I added two more big shelves and for the first time I feel like I'm starting to have a handle on this space. It basically means lining every wall with shelves, and with whatever size of shelf will fit (short shelves under curved walls, tall shelves against straight walls) but it is finally beginning to be functional.

Next step is a castor type device for my pottery wheel so it can scoot away and out, and then line the back of the downstairs main room closet with wine rack probably.

Creating happiness is, in fact, a super valid goal for shaping ecosystems. Just make sure that whatever work it takes to shape the system that way pays off. If it leaves you too stressed to enjoy the system, well. But if it makes you happy? Go for it.

(This post brought to you by "I think I'm going to grow a lot of hot peppers and ensure an overwinter warm spot for muscovies this year")

Building something garden-y into my life every day is good for me. Even if it's just topping up the reservoirs on my aerogardens, some sort of involvement keeps me feeling a little more connected and even-keeled.

Today I overhauled an aerogarden; it was the lettuce one, and the lettuce was bolting. I cut back the overgrown plants, pulled them out of the unit and then out of their baskets; they'll go to the geese. I disassembled the little pump inside the unit to remove all the roots wound through it, wiped and rinsed everything, refilled it, and reseeded new sponges with some cimmarron and australian yellow lettuce and trieste sweet chicory, plus a cutting from my hungarian black pepper plant. I also left one of the original lettuces, cut way back and with the roots cut way back, just to see if it bolts immediately again or what it does.

My tomato aerogarden has sprouted several seeds in each cup so I need to pull a couple of the extras out. It's hard to kill them so I may try putting a couple of the babies in soil.

I need to cut back the aerogarden basil really hard, the sweet basil I can just dry but the thai basil I'm not sure what to do with. I looked up some salads, there seem to be some good cold meat/lime/chili/thai basil ones that look appealing.

Speaking of hydroponics, I'm also thinking about setting up some kratky (basically set-and-forget little-equipment) hydroponics for greens but I haven't made the move yet. I don't love the idea of buying rockwool and netpots for it (everything else can be bits of recycled things) so I'm looking into alternatives.

On the soil end my peppers are doing well, all except the capsicum praetermissum which sprouted germinated but didn't emerge when moved to soil. Most of them have their first or second true leaf, and they got watered with the aerogarden reservoir hydroponic solution which should be good for them. Habaneros are up, 100% germination on my yellow habs -- I got them as part of a blind seed trade so I'm not sure what I'll do with them all but they seem happy. The microdwarf tomatoes are also turning into lovely sturdy plants, and the sweet baby jade are slowly taking up space.

I put together a couple soil pots of cilantro, since the cilantro did poorly when I tried it in the aerogarden. My understanding is, it isn't much of a cut-and-come-again crop so I'll probably be cutting them once, then discarding.

In the meantime the pepper crosses I did dropped their fruits, so I need to try again.

Still need to clear out all the shelves for starting transplants; I also need to figure out how many starts I'll grow, so how many I'll keep and how many I'll sell or donate.

Outside it's been super warm which means everything is ice with not-quite-standing water over it. The snow keeps melting on my roof and dripping down past the window. I could probably start greens in a sealed greenhouse if I had one, and maybe maybe they'd make it through the cold yet to come.

I probably need to chew on whether there's a realistic way for me to afford a proper sealed non-cloth-popup greenhouse, like the ones at https://plantagreenhouses.ca/ . Now that I'm moving my tomato production out of the greenhouse and into the field it's feeling like something that size would be worth playing in, even if it's not a 20' x 50' high tunnel. With the double walls I could even deep-bed animals in there until Feb, then use composting heat to do an early crop of greens. A really heat-efficient geodesic dome or clay-backed greenhouse will still have to wait, but I can probably figure out a happy medium there. Besides, the lean-to greenhouse is slowly falling in on itself as the shed collapses, so it's not so much in the running anymore.

I should probably budget out some options around re-covering the first greenhouse (needs to be done this year or next), dealing with the wood tent (needs re-covering probably this year) which could involve re-covering it as a woodshed or making it into a greenhouse and figuring out a new woodshed, getting a new greenhouse, and knocking down the falling-in shed or redoing its foundation and potentially doing a new lean-to greenhouse against it if it's salvaged.

Ok, not to get drawn too far into the future here: seedlings are growing, it's lovely. Next action is cutting back basil and starting the sage and rosemary seed and maybe thyme seed. Starting a pot of parsley probably wouldn't hurt either.

I have two kinds of hot peppers growing indoors, rescued from my deck at the end of the year: matchbox and black hungarian. As the light has returned and I've increased their water they've started blooming. I did a very impromptu cross-pollination between them yesterday, no anther removal, and will try emasculating some flowers and doing a proper cross next time. If I grow the F1 out this summer, next winter I can have a sea of F2s to play with.

Some of my fancy peppers are coming up, or at least germinating on their paper towels and heat mats and being transferred to pots.

Plus I found the pepper seed store Semillas La Palma, which is a lot of fun. A lot of peppers aren't great in my climate, but when I branch into baccatums and high-elevation ones I can find some. I love the idea of hunting down some and trying them here. I also like heat but not super intense heat, and the fact that there are a ton of "seasoning" or "dulce" peppers in their collection, with no heat, is nice too. I need to winnow down through their offerings to find what works.

The sun is completely returning. The sky was light before I got out of bed this morning. It's been warm during the day a lot, my freezers are plugged back in and I moved the frozen food on my deck into the freezers.

Plus, Black Chunk, who I thought miscarried during the cold, gave me six lovely little piglets. They're born in a warm spell! I locked her in her chosen birthing shed with the piglets and they were all fine this morning. They'll need to be castrated but hey.

In concert with this the cooler at the grocery store broke down and I brought home 40 dairy crates of milk and yoghurt for the pigs. I'm feeding it out roughly four crates a day. There were a couple crates of tiny squeeze bottles of yogurt that will go directly in the garbage, but the pigs will get gallons and gallons of it. It's a great supplement for them right now.

Meanwhile I'm doing the standard juggling to try and figure out where to put my plant shelves with lights, where to put my geese for spring pair-off(wading out to the empty greenhouse involves thigh-deep snow and too many things under the snow to snowblow my way over, ditto one of the a-frames). At some point I'll get to what to plant and where it will go, that will be even more juggling! But it's the fun kind.

400 accessions and counting. Started Sweet Baby Jade tomato seeds. Should start my non-annuum peppers but I need to look up which ones need how many individuals to pollinate.

You know what's fun?

Thinking of crossing my matchbox chilis (OSSI pledged) that are growing on my windowsill and are basically my favourite hot pepper plant with C. flexuosum, which is hella cold-tolerant and is also 24n though of course it is an interspecific cross. I wonder if it will work?

I wonder how matchbox and doe hill would do, that should be an easy cross?

Doe hill and flexuosum?

Dammit.