Click on a thumbnail picture below to see the full size version. 29 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....   Friday, January 17 View Page Seeds sent! The remaining stragglers... If they dont make it let me know. I have a couple sets in reserve & I can try again.   Monday, January 20 View Page Excuse me for lazily using my foot for scale. Soil test tube #1. Gotta pull out three more of these tubs and carefully fill them all with dirt in a "core sample" manner to test my current garden situation. The tube is 32" tall and about 8" wide. I think I can nearly exactly recreate my soil profile and then see the roots develop, and see the plant develop, and see how they may or may not do better with the various changes that I could make. The soil has done fairly well for me in the past, I've twice grown 2200 + lbs of pumpkins in 800 sq ft or so... But it does feel like my "12 inch depth" soil is maxed out. Ive worked it a bit deeper near the "crown" roots but its not Travis-deep yet... I believe in the advantages of no-till but I could rework the soil and then re build the soil health. I more or less know what I'm doing at this point, to where I think could heal the soil after damaging it. I do believe the soil biology has to be ready and that it has to want to grow a big pumpkin. The pumpkin plant can do half the work, but the soil biology does the other half. If the soil biology was badly disrupted then the results would only be half of what they ought to be... Or I'd have to work twice as hard to still get a good result. I guess what I want to test is, would it grow a healthier happier more robust plant to rework the soil (with an excavator). I can broadfork the top 6-8" and this is probably fine for tomatoes but if I wanted a Travis sized pumpkin, I might want to dig down 32" ??? Right now the roots can only go down 12-18" generally speaking... which is probably ok if I'm using drip tape and irrigating daily. Hmm. I can push some really nice growth... But to grow a true monster...? Hmm. This is where my knowledge ends and I dont know the answer.   Monday, January 20 View Page Vine efficiency diagram. There is a certain set distance that phloem can travel in 24 hours. I believe it flows at about 3 ft per hour? Vines probably contribute to the pumpkins based on math. Vine theory mathematics: Adding 6 feet of vine adds 2 hours to the travel time of the phloem and would reduce the contribution of this portion of the plant by at least 2 hours/ 24 hour day = 8.3%. In reality though I bet the phloem effectively flows slower near the vine tips than near the pumpkin. It might flow a 3 ft per hour at the pumpkin but the farther you get from the pumpkin, the slower it might travel. At 3 x 24 = 72 feet the phloem basically could not reach the pumpkin within a 24 hour period even at the fastest flow speed. But here my guess (yes guess) would be that the effective phloem flow speed also goes to zero (linearly?) approaching the periphery of the plant. If its a linear decrease in the speed as you go out outward then the effective distance that a peripheral part of the plant can contribute gets cut in half. Thus, 72/2= 36 feet. This also means that adding six feet of "average distance" vine would add 6/36 x 24= 4 hours of time to the total time to reach the pumpkin and reduce the "phloem delivery" efficiency by 16.6 % aka pumpkin size. Im seeing some beautiful math here that shows why the vines and roots grow at a steady rather than exponential rate (its all based on phloem speed) and the max growth speed of a plant must be an equation of total nutrients needed to grow the plant distance x/ phloem rate = time to grow distance x You cant change the phloem "density" because the plant self regulates (it won't clog its own arteries with excess sugar, its designed to regulate its blood sugar up to a max threshold just as we humans are supposed to be self regulating for things like sugar and sodium, bad things happen when there is no self regulation mechanism). The flow speed might change based on temperature, and the transport efficiency out of the leaves might change based on phosphorus, and ions like magnesium can be recycled faster depending on the plants transpiration rate. But I digress. So I think phloem speed is a proven concept, it might be slightly enhanced by sufficient potassium, other electrolytes, temperature, source/sink osmotic gradients, and certainly the availability of water. Get the right design, the right calcium levels, and then thing can go kaboom: Excess energy, potassium, and roots, and stress free availability of water (nutrient feeding roots separate from tap roots for water possibly) should = explosive growth.   Monday, January 20 View Page One of these ramblings that no one needs to read its garbage but I'll post it anyways. You can always find something useful at the dump, or at least I can. Some of my tomato GOTY stuff was yes actually salvaged from the dump, at least my repurposed "plastic fence" shade netting was lol. Anyhow, my diary is becoming a landfill. Here's a fresh pile of verbal waste! Pick out something useful at the "verbal dump" then let the rest of it produce methane for the next 150 years :( Fully tripping here, but the shape of a tree is determined almost purely by the math of its phloem. And the location of the largest possible fruit for a pumpkin plant should be, too. There's a few other factors (chemical signaling aka plant hormones and vine size and having no chemical or physical disruptions to the flow of phloem, aka no lack of nutrients and perfect delivery efficiency aka perfect weather and root health). Well this is a bunch of drivel at this point but I think that its like that "Rain Man" or "Goodwill Hunting" or "A Beatiful Mind" thing where there's math all around us if we could just see it. There's a formula that makes it makes it all make sense. I'm not terribly far from it. The "Vine layout calculator." It could be an app, it could do a design assessment just like any other engineering software, and AI could calculate the absolute best layout. But the truth is its too simple to even need AI. Just look at the nearest well fertilized tree. Copy nature. Natural intelligence, no need for AI. The problem with fruit trees as a model is they are designed to put most of their resources down through their trunk into their roots. The fruit on a tree is almost inconsequential, it uses the resources from only the nearest few leaf nodes of the branch that its on, it doesnt garner resources from the entire tree. But the roots mostly do garner the trees entire resources. Hence, every vine emanating from the pumpkin should look like a natural tree. If it doesn't, its probably inefficient. I've modeled natural stuff mathematically before (I came up with a mathematical model for the ratio of male to female flowers... it was a bit complex but it was beautiful and it worked.) Anyhow, I always thought that the pattern of a tree was just structural but it cant be... plants dont understand engineering... they do understand phloem though. The phloem plus some innate growth patterns (the exact expression of which is caused by chemisty of the genetics plus the environment) is what causes the structure. Vines dont have to have to make a strength investment or perennial investment into the roots. A pumpkin plant can truly maximize a fruit. Its ingenious. But how can we help it maximize itself even more.   Monday, January 20 View Page Better methods are allowing us to select better genetics. It might be tempting to say that the better genetics are leading the way, that we are causing the gentics to improve. But it goes both ways, the better gentics helps identify better methods, and then the better methods helps identify better genetics. Its a dance, but neither is really leading the other. They are more like circling each other. A breakout would occur when someone put together better genetics and better methods. We had this kind of a breakout with Willemijns long standing world record 2624.6... and now finally the genetics and methods have caught up to that, and we're probably ready for a new breakout, where the right combination of methods and genetics will again line up. The genetics and the methods are already out there, they just haven't lined up yet... 3k genetics just needs to land in the patch of someone with 3k growing methods and it will happen. Odds are low, but all things with low odds happen eventually. Progress is inevitable. Could I obtain a seed with 3k potential (or do I already have one in my seed collection)? Yes. Could I renovate my patch, my methods, my knowledge to the point that 3k would be possible? Id be happy with 2k, so why bother with trying for 3k? I guess as Mallory would say, "because its there...?" I'm in agreement with George Mallory. You could get all the same happiness from climbing a shorter mountain. There's no logical reason to try for the tallest mountain. You dont need Red Bull to sponsor you or whatever. Thats not even a factor... No amount of money or fame is worth all the pain. You just do it because its there. Yes? No? Maybe? Well Mallory was a bit of a loose nut and in the end Hillary did things because simply because he could. To simply do what you are capable of, is a much less dreamy approach than Mallory's "because its there". His allure-based approach to climbing Mt. Everest was not totally successful. What kind of person will grow the first 3k pumpkin? A Mallory or a Hillary?   Monday, January 20 View Page These are my 30 year old cactuses. Well one is 30+ years old the rest are 20-25. They reproduce. There used to be just one... the original one still there and it still looks youthful enough... and its becoming a grandparent now, evidently. These things make me happy and they are no work at all. They even kinda look like plump little squashes.   Tuesday, January 21 View Page 70 lbs per day is the goal this year. Just throwing it out there. Not sure the genetics I'll be using will do that much but oh well. Thats still the goal. Ambitious, yes, but I can't set it any lower. That's the target.   Tuesday, January 21 View Page I think this is analagous to how the phloem spreads into the pumpkin. I dont think its linear... it may move inward rather slowly starting at the periphery of the plant but then it would speed up near the pumpkin. When the sun goes down the gradient shifts upward and the phloem probably still moves towards the pumpkin, but slower. Pumpkins grown on a scale might be showing the slowing of the phloem movement/the 24 hour variation as the leaves load sugars into the plant. The size of the plant will reflect the amount of sugars being loaded into the plant, and the need of the roots will be met, and the growth rate of the pumpkin... Does any of this really matter? Well yes because if the curve was an equation (which it is) then the math could figure out where the grower is just spinning their wheels because if the phloem being generated is so far away that it cant travel to the pumpkin within 24 hours, and the leaves then reload the plant with more phloem the next day, then that part of the plant is extraneous. Its doing next to nothing. But could that extra bit of plant be helping if it was positioned closer to the pumpkin? Well, maybe.   Thursday, January 23 View Page "Defensible space" is good, surviveable space is better. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=a4JpOdS9ffI Some good points in this video. When the shurbs and trees dont burn, only the houses burn, then you cant blame nature. The blame is on this: when you create a "defensible" space you still need the defenders. With the way the government is incompetent, with evacuation orders, and with cuts to power and water availability... there won't be any defenders. Why create a defensible space to then not defend it? Whats really needed is a surviveable space. Which means these houses would survive even with nobody defending them. Anybody can look at this picture and realize that nature isnt to blame for these fires. The landscaping looks green, and the trees clearly were not the source of the heat. Defensible spaces is great, but this is no longer a "blame nature" sort of problem. Its the start of winter! How can excess heat from nature be a causative a factor in these fires. Dryness maybe... but heat, no. And every house is going to be fundamentally mostly dry. So, I guess this could happen anywhere. Well, watch the video, its better than anything I have to say.   Thursday, January 23 View Page And on a more positive note how about these log gizmos for starting a fire. Its clever. One log becomes the hearth and the kindling. Its its own little rocket stove ready to go. On youtube it would be called a swedish torch or one log fire.   Thursday, January 23 View Page First dandelions of the new year... I saw two today despite temps dropping to 21 degrees the previous nights.   Thursday, January 23 View Page Well, things can burn in the winter.   Thursday, January 23 View Page Some fires were natural owing to the dry grass, but this here was probably started by a laser microwave satellite. Say what? I dont know the truth. Oh wait yeah I do, in case, it was just me playing with matches.   Thursday, January 23 View Page Growing a giant pumpkin helps with fire prevention because when you're not burning the excess carbon off you're gathering up more of it up? As Forrest Gump would say, "We all do things that, well, just don't make no sense." I add more carbon to the patch because I think it will balance the excess nitrogen, then I add more nitrogen to help balance the excess carbon, then I add more... wait, am I just going in circles here?   Saturday, January 25 View Page I dont have an exact plan for 2025, I'm going with the flow, but I'm considering doing a full size plant, probably a squash, and a 150 sq ft plant, probably the 1296.3 Nicolas. How about a field kin, a marrow, some tomatoes... and just like that, I've got a full hand of cards. I thinking about an early orange pumpkin for the fair in August. Maybe that would be the winner of a standoff between the 1448 Bongers and 1293.5 Cleveland. That'll do. So I do have a plan. And I cant change it... Its set. For better or worse thats the plan. The 150 sq ft plant/ 150 breeding project will be in my BlossomDown diary... The other stuff will all be piled in here.