Today was a day spent on the hill, taming the jungle and expanding the garden. In our last update, we shared planting lettuce and plans for the hill, for maintenance and expansion. Today I planted that lettuce, as well as some other plants into unplanted terraces. John rebuilt the rocket stove, something I'll probably share tomorrow in a separate article. Lots of weeding, watering and dirt moving made this a pretty productive day at our Anarchapulco Permaculture Farm.
This is a section of hill we intend to turn into terraces for a Three Sisters Garden, featuring corn, beans and squash.
This is a particularly overgrown area that surrounds our septic tank, to be chopped down to the ground, for the most part. The dogs are fond of this area for bathroom purposes, although not recently due to the overgrown jungle in the way.
Wild Squash loves boulders, so much so it decided to try and eat my house.
As you can see from the photos above, the jungle is a force to be reckoned with. Yesterday, the banana tree shown on the edge of the photo above was completely covered in morning glory vines. You couldn't see the baby banana trees at the bottom, as they too had been swallowed by the jungle. Some careful cutting and pulling cleared the banana tree area, leaving me with a big wad of vines to compost. Part of the cutting we did today was just general jungle taming, wheras the largest area John cut for me is intended for new terraces, to be built within a day or so. The corn I planted in the last update has sprouted, and is technically ready to transplant. The beans and potatoes may have molded, as we got a day of freak, constant rain.
My former tomato plants have pitched most of their foliage, partially in a fight with curly top virus, something spread by aphids. Most of my tomato plants have had it at this point, although all of them seem to be recovering. I didn't do much treatment other than pruning off the badly effected areas. Usually this time of year, my garden is dying back and the weather is turning cold. Adjusting to moving from a hot wet season to a warm dry season has been interesting. The foliage seems to be dying, but I've kept the plants watered, which has kept them alive. I've pruned all the dead foliage off of my tomato plants, leaving them looking pretty bare. I've also added compost tea. They seem to have appreciated my efforts, as they're shooting off new healthy bits of vegetative growth, seemingly void of the virus that plagued the rest of the plant.
This is that area intended for the Three Sisters terraces, freshly chopped back by John.
The photo above shows the area I showed further up covered in wild squash, hell bent on eating the house and my garden hose. I pulled it all off, pretty much in one sheet and put it in a pile. I did my best to pull the plants out by the roots, and I'd say I did a pretty good job. Taming the jungle involves a combination of clever machete use and just using gloved hands, to pull the material into one area.
The pile shown above is all the material pulled off my house. It's much denser than it appears and is pretty heavy. We intend to put this into a 21 day compost pile, possibly tomorrow. John and I have been doing research on composting and compost teas lately, as well as soil science in general to improve our farming output.
I sheet mulched and half ass "finished" this terrace for planting. John raised some criticisms and today we worked on fixing it, as I had a goal to plant all of our lettuce seedlings into it by the end of the day. The important thing with planting lettuce how we do, is to get it planted before the first true leaves come out. You just gently pull the seedling from the soil by it's cotyledons(the first little leaves you see on any plant, the ones contained within the seed) and plant it up to those little leaves, so they're just showing out of the ground.
This is the terrace, sheet mulching removed and now with more soil.
This is the terrace, now hexagonally planted with lettuce, which I'll explain below.
The little green seedlings you see in the picture above are the start of lettuce heads. We transplanted three varieties today: a red romaine Cimmaron, oakleaf and buttercrunch lettuce. To prepare the terrace correctly, I had to add a lot more dirt to make it so it now longer was a bowl, which would cause a terrace blowout. The idea is to have the dirt as flush as possible, making a flat, decently level surface. I added some organic matter from the hillside, the stuff that's been rotting all season. I also added peat moss and old soil, with a little general organic fertilizer. I mixed this all around thoroughly. Add lots of water across the surface and this terrace became ready to plant.
This is a simple diagram explaining hexagonal planting, which probably explains it better than I do below.
I mentioned that I hexagonally planted the lettuce, which is the best way we've found to grow lettuce. It's something we learned in a gardening book a few years back, it allows you to plant more food in a much smaller space. It also makes it so you don't have to mulch, as properly placed hexagonally planted plants will cover all of the dirt, making a sort of living mulch. You generally water these beds less and get much more food for the same amount of area than conventional methods. Basically, we planted lettuce every three inches or so in a row across the edge of the terrace. When started the next row, you off set it, so its below and in the middle of the two above it. This slight offsetting make it so you can fit more plants in, achieving complete covering and full use of the potential of the area you plant.
This terrace is a path more than a garden, but we've always had plants planted in the edge. The roots help to stabilize the path, important because we've had issues with this terrace in the past. I had cherry tomatoes here for a long time, but I allowed them to get swallowed by wild bean and morning glory. Today I discovered they were dead and decided to pull them all out and replant. The stick shown was competely covered in vine, the whole area was a mess really.
Here I used to have some red cypress vines, which are pretty little vines that never grew very well in the States. We always suspected they would do better in the tropics and they did, although I let the plant die back after it went to seed. There's a seedling in this bed, and I'll just let that go. I planted a black beauty eggplant in here, as well as an unidentified chile.
I planted one of our new beefsteak style Rutger's Tomatoes in my old Moon and Stars Melon terrace. I'll probably trellis it with a teepee within a few days, just to give it the best chance for success that I can.
We had a productive day here on our hill, but we are no where near caught up. There's still terraces to be prepared and planted, more seeds to be planted, more jungle to tame. The nice thing about the mounting list of work is that we are never bored here. 6 year ago, I lived a fairly boring life. I had no interests or hobbies, the thing I filled my time with was crappy fiction books. I was always bored, with nothing to do. Now my list things to do is long, and while that can be stressful, it's motivating. At least I've got something worthwhile and fun to do with my time, that's more than many can say.