Click on a thumbnail picture below to see the full size version. 14 Entries. Wednesday, January 1 View Page Hi and welcome to 2025... An anti-goal for this year: To care about someone else's goal rather than set my own goal. That being said... if I didnt try to do my best then I wouldn't be me. I have to say... I was thrilled to post good numbers for the tomato competition last year, and I enjoyed the challenge of trying to beat Rick for the GPC's "tomato goty" award. What a thrill and an honor. Sorry Rick!!! I believe I can do better...   Wednesday, January 1 View Page Recognize this plant? Yes these are perennials, and this one is really happy.   Wednesday, January 1 View Page Apparently this primrose already bloomed and I missed it. My bad, I wasnt out looking for any flowers in December. This plant has been in this spot for 10+ years! In the right spot, they can be VERY perennial. A good spot is somewhere that gets low angle sun in the winter and has little other competition. This one is in the heavy needle-fall area under a large conifer. The spruce needles are a natural slug repellent, otherwise it would have been destroyed by slugs long ago.   Wednesday, January 1 View Page So enough about the primroses and the nonexistent winter. Did I mention the non-existent winter? There I did. So getting right back into tomatoes now: I spread this mulch and sprinkled about a gallon of fermented honey syrup over top of it I also added a pound or two of "fish bone meal" which isnt just fish bone meal its actually mixed with alfalfa and other goodies. So really its a balanced blended product. I will probably add more of it later. I apologize if this is lengthy and tedious but I'm trying to record what I'm doing (at least until I get too busy to do so). Bone meal does a great job of supplying what my soil lacks so I cant go wrong with it. But where I think I could go wrong would be to add too much nitrogen relative to everything else. Lots of brown compost here (pine needles, dead chopped grass, leaves, wood shavings). Lots of worms. But the reason for posting is that I remembered something: last years tomatoes actually followed, or were planted within, an early crop of potatoes. And previously I had assumed this was bad and that it would hurt my results but how do I know? What if it helped? If maybe the soil myco was well established because of the potatoes and all the potato myco gave the tomatoes a boost? The main reason I say this is because the biggest tomatoes came from the spots where the most potatoes were. This could be a coincidence but I'm also willing to consider that its not a coincidence. Maybe its worth the overlapping disease and insect pressure to prep. the area with potatoes ahead of the tomatoes. The flipside would be that they do hurt the tomatoes so I could have grown even bigger tomatoes if I hadnt put the potaoes in. This is also a very legit possibility. Maybe both are true, that the potatoes help inoculate the soil with helpful biology but they also steal nutrients. So... have the potatoes innoculate the soil, but dont let them steal any nutrients? (Or replace the nutrients by adding the extra bit of bone meal after the potatoes get dug out.) I'm thinking this could work! I'm thinking its a good plan.   Thursday, January 2 View Page Awhile back I grew two pumpkins on the same plant and I noticed a large difference in seed size. I attributed this to 1) the second pumpkin being set later in the year (hence a temperature difference) and 2) the second pumpkin sharing resources with another pumpkin for its whole existence whereas the first pumpkin did not have to share resources for most of its life (so maybe there were nutritional differences). If you want to see my original post about it: http://bigpumpkins.com/Diary/DiaryViewOne.asp?eid=342695 So that was interesting. But then this year I had a field pumpkin where two were set at the same time so that would eliminate most of the temperature difference (unless one got more sun than the other) and most of the nutritional difference. But I still suspected the seed sizes between the two pumpkins might be different. Why would the seed sizes be different? First, here are the seeds from two field pumpkins set at the same time on the same plant. Can you see that that ones on the right are larger? (I will theorize why in the next diary entry).   Thursday, January 2 View Page I know its hard to see visually but the seeds on the right are bigger and they weigh a lot more (around 30% more). Now I cant rule everything out, but the thickness of both pumpkins was the same, and the location on the plant was similar both about the same distance from the roots. Two things to consider: The smaller seeds were the pumpkin on a sidevine, whereas the larger pumpkin was the one on the mainvine. But like I said, the thickness of the pumpkins was the same and the pumpkin on the sidevine actually weighed a bit more because it was a bigger flower to begin with. And thats the key to the difference in seed size. How so? Well, the pumpkin on the side vine had about twice as many stigmas, and stigmas correspond to ovaries, and ovaries correspond to... ovums. Eggs. Seeds. The ovums (word of the day) in the pumpkins with the smaller seeds were competing with twice as many fellow ovums. The pollination rate was near perfect (hardly any duds in either pumpkin). So pollination rate wasnt a factor in the final seed count, only the number of "ovums". The seed count of the pumpkin with smaller seeds was twice that of the other pumpkin, (about 900?) and it produced more total weight of seeds even though each seed weighed less. And thats why each seed weighed less. Anyhow, to sum it up, seed size is once again not determined entirely by genetics. One of the factors determining seed size seems to be how many siblings did it have. Anyways, sorry for the dissertation on seed size. Its interesting but not really unexpected since the same thing happens in humans, for example, with more babies in a womb resulting in smaller sized babies. It probably has to do with nutrient flow because even if a mom ate more she couldnt give birth to octuplets weighing 8-10 lbs each. The limit to embryo growth is probably a nutrient restriction at the placenta or maybe there is no nutrient restriction maybe its all just the size if the womb. This is where my knowledge totally ends, I dont even know what question to ask next. So... onto the next question. When will my curiosity ever finally pay for itself? Now thats a good question.   Saturday, January 4 View Page This is whats left from one of last year's late pollination attempts. I finally tried to get the seeds out. It was a cross using Dan Sutherlands genetics (whatever he sent to the seed exchange). The pollination was done in September or October. So it violated my "pollinate before August 15th to get viable" seeds rule. I should have heated the greenhouse somehow. The late pollinations would have worked if I could have pushed the temp in the greenhouse up to 70-80 instead of being stuck down at 30-50. I have plenty of tomato seeds to plant but it was still disappointing that I didnt get the late season controlled crosses to succeed. In hindsight the best thing might have been to bring the whole project indoors.   Sunday, January 5 View Page Graphing the master gardener results (not sure which year, just some data I have access to) forms a curve (below). I would call this a "results distribution curve". I am not a math expert but while this isnt really a bell curve, it does form bell shapes when you mirror these curves to theirself (above, below). And I think the probability-based principle is the same. Every individual gpc category forms these curves:   Sunday, January 5 View Page Maybe other people dont think this way, but I find myself asking the question 'where do I want to improve'. I like the process of sober self reassessments, sometimes. This is where I figure I rank in the gpc categories. (The orange is both pumpkins and field pumpkins). I could still improve my tomato growing a little bit... or I could improve my watermelon or squash growing by a whole lot. Its kind of an interesting question, "do I want to improve at what I'm already good at?" Or "do I want to improve at something I'm really not good at." Maybe both... I think if a grower focuses on where they are strongest AND where they are weakest, it will lead to the most personal development. It does take more resources to burn the candle at both ends. Should I try a watermelon or cantelope, as these are the things I'm worst at? Hmm.   Sunday, January 5 View Page Rain-mudgeddon is over. Its been super wet. Decent forecast ahead... I picked up a couple hundred more pounds of coffee grounds mostly thanks to Starbucks plus the one local drive thru stand that actually separates their grounds from their trash. I dont think coffee grounds are the perfect fertilizer for every plant but they might grow me some better corn or something. I will try them with potatoes I think potatoes would do ok but theyd probably prefer alfalfa meal or bone meal. Tough love ahead maybe, because coffee grounds are free.   Tuesday, January 7 View Page I feel like Ive been posting too much, but I added some ammonium sulfate, elemental sulfer, dolomite lime and epsoma brand garden fertilizer to the 200 sq ft potato/ tomato patch. I didn't measure exactly, but maybe about a pound of each except the elemental sulfer only 1/2 lb or so. Hopefully I didn't add a full pound of ammonium sulfate because I do believe excess nitrogen could ruin my efforts. But with the way its been raining, there shouldnt be any excess fertilizer anywhere. Plus theres still so much brown material to break down. I could do a soil test, but I think things will be ok. Hopium (it comes first before Hydrogen and Helium) levels need to drop before I take a look at all the other elements. A chrmistry side note: elemtal sulfer plus dolomite would equal gypsum if they were able to re-combine. I'm not sure how much they can or cannot recombine when sprinkled and thrown around in a scattershot manner. The chemicals can recombine however they want, I'm not the solubility police.   Tuesday, January 7 View Page 150 sq ft hugelkultur? I'm going to share some thoughts and ideas on this because although I dismissed this idea a long time ago, (and Ive never seen anyone else post anything showing it can lead to better than average results) I'm now thinking about it again. Buckle in. I think there are two reasons hugelkultur doesnt give fantastic results and its a waste of time and effort: First, it doesn't introduce any nutrients that the soil doesnt already have. If you bury a fish under a corn plant, it gives nitrogen in the form of amino acids and also minerals from the ocean (or maybe its a freshwater fish, then it might only provide nitrogen). But putting a locally grown log under a plant only provides the minerals that the local soil already has. Second, I have found that air gaps and roots are not compatible. I dont know why this is, maybe it has to do with soil pests or water and nutrient movement or something or the roots themselves dont know where to spread when they (incorrectly) sense they are near the soil surface. The roots of most plants really just dont like all those big gaps. Layering wood like this just creates a lot of volume of space that the roots wont use very effectively. And last of all its like putting (really big) wood chips in the soil which for most soils is a no-no. Walnuts mixed into brownies might be good... but wood chips mixed into garden soil just isnt good, for various reasons, even without any airgaps. Contrary to the idea that soil should have air in it, air gaps of this size really only makes the situation worse. But hold on, even with all that being said, I might fiddle with throwing some cottonwood in the ground. Why? Well, first its so worthless as firewood. Its like a big wet sponge and even after drying it for ages, it has no significant heat value or burn time. 2nd, maybe it could have benefits, if it could be done in a way that eliminated all the drawbacks (including excessive effort). So, yeah. I am thinking about trying my own version of hugelculture just to see if I can tease any little net benefit out of it. So many people have tried and failed to get it to really work. But what if this old german tradition really used to work? Maybe we're just not doing it right... Clearly we are not doing it right. Well, I was going to post my own ideas on it in more detail but thats a long enough post. Just the intro here. I guess later on, if what I try works, then I'll explain more about what I did and why it actually worked. This is too lengthy already, sheesh.   Wednesday, January 8 View Page "I am not optimistic about growing a 9.5 lb tomato..." this is almost exactly what I said in 2020: http://bigpumpkins.com/Diary/DiaryViewOne.asp?eid=321271 Added a bag of starbucks coffee to the potato/tomato patch. About 10 lbs. That plus everything else should give the baseline fertility and nitrogen I want. I was hesitant to add much nitrogen before, but the rain has just been too much. It removes too many nutrients. If I want good results I've got to add them back. Not every nutrient gets washed out equally. I'll have to check my notes or do some testing eventually, but probably boron and nitrogen are two of the ones that disappear. I think ammonium might be the most soluble ion, if not nitrate.   Wednesday, January 8 View Page Nevermind about the cottonwood. https://www.highcountryliving.net/cottonwood-juglone-and-tomatoes/ It says squash can do ok, and this does not surprise me... because they can share the same riverbank habitat in the wild. It might be time to do some real life comparison tests. But I will need some other tree species. This is going to be fun. And I promise it wont be completely stupid. A small bit of intelligence will arise from the muck, just like it did 1 billion years ago....