Green Pea Experiment: Initial Results and Ultimately, a Failure

All of the peas in the toilet paper rolls had a long,
vigorous root coming out the bottom.

Back in January, I thought I'd get a head start on my green peas by starting them indoors.  And I decided to try starting them in two types of biodegradable containers to see what worked best.

The peas started in the peat pots germinated at a much better rate than the ones in in the toilet paper rolls, but by the time I was ready to set them out in the garden, the toilet paper roll peas were much larger, and had a much better developed root system.  I think if I had kept them watered when they were trying to germinate, the toilet paper rolls  might have been the clear winner between the two containers.  I was satisfied enough with them that I've been saving the rolls again for another try with something.

Because I've been battling rabbits for a while now, I  decided to cover the peas every night.  I cut the bottom out of a bunch of saved milk jugs, strung them together on a string that I tied to the cattle panel, and every night I went out and set a jug over every plant.

It seemed like a good idea, and it did keep the rabbits away from the peas.  But unfortunately, when we had the ice storm in February, I thought I should leave the jugs in place to protect the peas from the ice.  They were protected from the ice, but because I didn't take them off when the sun came back out, the milk jugs acted like little "ovens" and the peas were severely damaged by the heat from the sun!  When I finally took them back off, the plants looked like they were deathly sick...pale yellow and burned looking.  

Sure enough, within a week they were all pretty much gone.

Covering the peas during the winter storm seemed like a good idea...it might have been if I had removed the jugs when the sun came back out.

I planted a bunch of old seed (and I mean OLD, OLD) but none of them came up.  So I bought another packet of seeds from the feed store in town and tried again.  Most of them came up, but because I wasn't covering them at night anymore, I think I have exactly five of about 30 plants left.  The rabbits have apparently had themselves a nice little feast.

I just don't think it's in the cards for me to have any peas again this year.   Maybe I will try again this fall.

Composting and battling the "What-ifs"

When RAF first helped me fill my first bins with cow manure last winter, I didn't really have a clue what I was doing.  I had never composted on that scale before, and had never done any "hot" composting.  I just saw the method on videos by Charles Dowding and Huw Richards and thought it looked like an easy way to make lots of compost...something I saw as a must-have if I wanted to switch to no-till gardening.

Besides having no experience in hot composting, I also didn't have a soil thermometer at the time I decided to set up the first bin..  But I ordered one on Amazon, and it arrived about a week after my second bin was filled.  I was absolutely shocked when I took the temperature of the pile...it was almost 160° F!

Being the type of person I am (if I don't have something real to worry about, I make something up), that temperature reading stuck in my head and that night I tossed and turned all night long, worrying - or battling the "what-ifs" as my Mama calls it.  

What if the bin catches on fire?  

Is it heating up even more right now? 

Is it dry enough that the fire would get out and burn down the shop?  

How would I put it out?   

How hot is it right now?  

Do I need to go check it right now?

I wonder how hot it is right now.... 

I think the frost would keep the fire from spreading.

Will the frost keep the fire from spreading? 

Luckily, common sense won out and I didn't get up at 2 am to go check the temperature of the bin!  When I did check it the next morning, it was still the same temperature.  And after asking The Google about it several different ways, I felt a bit better, because it sounded like the pile would have to get up to around 200° F before it was at any risk of spontaneous combustion.  

Really, 160° F is too hot for a compost pile.  That means the bacterial action has gotten so intense that the bacteria are generating so much heat that they are creating conditions they can no longer tolerate, and are actually killing themselves.  But while the quality of my compost might be degraded by that temperature, my small bin wasn't going to catch fire.

And as the articles I read predicted, the temperature pretty quickly dropped to around 140° F and it stayed right there for the next few days.

At that point, the bin started cooling much more quickly and finally fell to around 90° F.  

Time to turn the pile.

I learned a lot during that first turn.  First, I learned that I hadn't set up my bins correctly.  I had filled bin #1 with manure (the one at the far left as I faced the bins) and then I filled bin #2.

So when I got ready to turn the piles, I had to move the material from bin #1 into bin #3.  That meant  carrying every shovel full of manure six feet to the south, to the empty bin.  

Rather than do that, I decided to put the manure into my cart - but that still meant loading it into the cart, pushing the cart over to the empty bin, then unloading it.  Wow...I didn't realize I had put so much poo in there!  It took probably a good hour and a half of work to move the pile!  

At first, I was able to empty the cart by just tilting it up and dumping it, but as I moved more and more of the manure, I had to tie the front pallet up to keep everything from spilling out into the yard.  That meant every shovel-full had to be lifted into the cart, and every shove-full had to be lifted out of the cart and over the pallet.  It was quite a workout, to say the least.

Notice I said "shovel-full."  That was mistake number two.  While the frozen cow patties were easy to scoop up off the ground with a flat shovel, scooping the patties out of the bin with a shovel (technically a spade) was extremely difficult!  The patties were turned every which way, so when I tried to put the shovel in, I would invariably hit a patty  that was turned at a different angle, or hit a layer of leaves.  It would have been so much easier to turn with a manure fork (which I subsequently bought!).

Patties...that was mistake number three.  Because the cow patties were frozen when I scooped them up off the ground, I just dumped them into the bin as they were.  I didn't make time to try to break them up into smaller pieces to expose more surface area for the bacteria to work on.  That meant that active decomposition was really only happening on the outside of the patties.  When I turned the pile that first time, I tried my best to break them up into smaller chunks.

And the leaves...that was mistake number four.  Not only did the leaves form a surprisingly solid layer that was difficult to penetrate with a shovel, apparently it was also difficult for the bacteria to penetrate.  At the first turn, I couldn't tell that the leaves had broken down any at all.  They just looked like wet, matted leaves.  Mental note to self:  if you use leaves in the compost bin, try to shred them first!

Finally, mistake number five.  I had piled some sticks and small tree branches at the bottom of the bin, thinking in my naïve mind that they'd break down.  They will, but not that fast.  So as I got near the bottom of the bin, I began to hit sticks that were intertwined and weighted down by the manure on top of them.  I pulled some out, and tried to get as much manure off the top of them as I could, but I finally just gave up and left the last bit of manure in the bottom of the bin.   The lesson?  If you put stuff like that in your bin, cut, chop, or break it into small pieces!

As I dug down into the center of the pile, the leaves and manure looked like they had been covered with a thin coating of ashes.  It again made me worry the the bin had been about to catch on fire!  Asking The Google about it didn't turn up much, but there was one page on Houzz.com that had quite a bit of good discussion, along with some funny comments about the gray ashy substance.   

But there was also a comment about a man who died after breathing fungal spores from compost.

I looked it up, and that did, in fact, happen.  

The 47-year-old welder from Buckinghamshire, who has not been named, died in intensive care a week after being engulfed by "clouds of dust" when he opened bags of rotting plant material that had been left to fester, in a case reported in the Lancet.

Source: TheGuardian.com; accessed April 17, 2022

So there it was...more ammunition for "the what-ifs."  That night, I couldn't stop thinking about the gray powdery stuff, and tried recreating the day's events in my head to see if I might have breathed in any of it.  I finally exhausted myself with worry, and decided that first, I probably didn't breathe in anything because the wind was blowing pretty hard from my back as I was working; second, if I did breathe in anything, it was probably only a very minor amount; and third, if I did, it was too late to worry about it anyway.  

I've turned the two bins three times now, and while I did try wearing one of my N95 masks at one point, I eventually gave up on that because it was a pretty warm, sunny day, and I decided I might be more likely to die of suffocation than from breathing in fungal spores.  

After the third turn, the temperature in the bins never did go up above ambient, and there were quite a few beetles, earthworms, and other assorted critters down in the compost.  Oh...and fire ants.  I was quite annoyed to find that the fire ants had made themselves at home down near the bottom of the bin, but I don't know what I can do about that.  I just went ahead and turned them over into the new bin.  I sincerely hope lots of them got trapped in the now disorganized pile and died!   

It was also interesting to me on the last turn how the material in the bins looked different and actually smelled like a forest floor...it had a nice "earthy" smell instead of a raw cow manure smell.  I know there is still quite a bit of undecomposed material in the pile, but I think at this point, I'll just leave them be and see what happens. 

Compost bin after a turn.  Lots of undecomposed leaves on the top, but overall, it was starting to look pretty nice after only two turns.

I couldn't resist trying some of the compost now though, even though it's probably still pretty "hot."  

In Charles Dowding's "no dig" gardening approach, he puts down some type of barrier to block weeds, tops that barrier with compost, and then plants directly into the compost.  

I didn't have enough "finished" compost to do that, but I did try an experiment with three of my broccoli plants.  I put cardboard down on the ground, then piled some of my not-quite-finished cow manure compost in a mound on top of that.  I then took three small cardboard shipping boxes, filled them with finished compost from my old "passive" compost bin, settled them down into the center of the composted cow manure pile, put a broccoli plant in each box, then covered the cow manure and compost-filled box with straw.  So far I can't tell that it has hurt those three plants, and they might actually look better than the others that were just planted right into the ground. 

And since celery is also supposed to like really rich soil, and since I've never grown celery before and really don't know what I'm doing, I decided to do another test.  I had 12 celery plants...I put six of them in the ground in the garden, but the other six I planted in my middle compost bin.

Celery in the compost bin.  I hope the compost isn't still too "hot" for the plants to survive there.

Now...the "what-ifs" have already started in on me about the celery in the compost bin, but I'm going to ignore them.  I'll just be sure to wash the celery really well in case there's any Escherichia coli contamination on them!

April 2022 Gardening Journal

Friday, April 1, 2022

We had a freeze last night.  I didn't think to cover the asparagus and it looks like it took a pretty good hit.  The spears that had come up are all bent over and they look frozen.  

It seems impossible that March is already over.  March...I had so many things I was looking forward to planting and now the month is just gone.  I did get some things planted, and I do have a few plants growing in pots, but it just seems like the month "went missing" or something. 

My beautiful raised rows have been invaded by fire ants.  They have also invaded the compost bins.

The Enterprise apple tree and the Gala apple tree that I bought from Stark Brother's nursery are putting out leaves.  I don't know if they'd have taken the frost last night, but they got covered up with some old sheets just in case and they seemed fine this morning.

The American Hazelnut trees I ordered from Arbor Day Foundation came last week.  I got them planted out in the back yard. 

Bought 20 10' t-posts at the Co-Op for the new "deer fence," along with two rolls of 2"x4" horse fence from Atwoods.  Hope to be able to start setting posts in the ground this weekend.  We'll do a little on this project at a time, just working as we can. 

Rangemaster "Horse Fence" from Atwoods.  The openings are 2" x 4" and it looks and feels like a good quality wire.  This 200' roll was $309.99.

 

Sunday, April 17, 2022

Happy Easter!  

April is flying by, just like March.  I can hardly believe we're already halfway through the month.  It kind of makes me sad, because April is one of my favorite months of the year.  All the plants start to "wake back up" from their winter dormancy, and the summer birds and insects start to trickle back in.  The cow pasture is a brilliant emerald green, although lots of the green is from meadow buttercups (those yellow flowers, the generic name we give to them).  But it's still pretty.

It always amazes me how fast the chickweed grows.  It seems like one day the flowerbed is brown and lifeless, and overnight it's covered with chickweed a foot high.  But I don't mind the chickweed.  I can go through with my hands and rip it out of the flowerbed with very little effort...and it makes a great addition to the compost bin.

Chickweed spreading into the flowerbed.

It's really been a busy month if I stop to think about it.  As each day goes by, it seems like I'm making absolutely no progress at all in the garden, but looking back now, I see lots of small things that I've done that altogether add up.

We've had quite a few days where the forecast called for severe storms.  

An "edge" of a thunderstorm approaching from the west on the morning of March 30.  This storm just brought us some gusty wind and heavy rain.  Thankfully, no damage.

There have actually been tornadoes to our west and to our east, but we've so far been lucky and not taken any type of storm damage.

This screen capture from Monday, April 11 shows an area of rotation approaching Scranton.  I heard from my dad that a tornado did touch down briefly at Scranton, and did some damage.  This one eventually went south and east of us over Knoxville.  A friend of my younger sister who lives in Knoxville said they could hear the storm roaring as it went by.  Thankfully, it didn't cause any damage in that area.

An earlier storm had moved along that almost exact path, only the first storm did produce a tornado that moved through parts of Pope County, and stayed on the ground for quite a while.

So with the threat of hail, I have put off transplanting things into the garden.  The tomatoes and onions were starting to look especially stressed, so even though we still have the possibility of severe weather in the forecast, they got set out in the garden late this week.

The other weather threat has been the cold.  We've had one night where there was a pretty solid freeze (low temperature that night was 27° F according to my little sister).  While I did cover up the apple trees and the little raised bed, I forgot about the asparagus, and it took a pretty severe hit.  

The second night of cold wasn't quite so bad...just a light frost.  I don't think it would have hurt things, but I went ahead and covered the apple trees and lettuce beds that night as well.  Again, the asparagus took a little hit, but nothing nearly so serious as the first freeze.

We've had lots of cloudy days though, but not an overwhelming amount of rain.  I think we're actually below normal on rainfall for the month.  I have managed to get my water barrels all full again.

Fire ants...oh how I hate them.  There was a large nest of them at the base of the old pecan tree and I never did anything with them for fear of hurting the tree.  They actually hurt the tree, building their nest up under the bark on the south side.  But by not taking aggressive action against them, I think they built tunnels out horizontally, into my compost bins to the east, and into my raised rows to the west.  So far, I've discovered them in the first foot or so of every row in that part of the garden.  I've been pouring boiling water on them and that seems to knock them back for a bit.  The question will be if that caused them to move somewhere else, or if they'll repopulate the area after I get things planted in it.  If they do, the plants may have to be sacrificed.  I would hate that, but I have learned the hard way that you can't give those devils an inch or they'll take a mile!

The vetch took off growing like crazy in mid-March and I started cutting it down to prevent it from going to seed in the garden.  I have all but a row and a half cut...that row and a half HAVE to be cut this week, or I'm afraid I'll have waited too late.

Vetch/winter rye is being cut down and left on the row as a mulch.

Here's what I can remember that I've transplanted or planted in the garden up to this point:

Carrots; Bibb lettuce; Cherry Belle radish; Early Texas Grano onion; Sugar Snap peas; Detroit Red beets; Tendercrisp celery; Early Jersey Wakefield cabbage; Commin dill; Cilantro; Calendula; Petunia; Broccoli; Brussels Sprouts; American Flag Leeks; Empress of India nasturtium; Cherokee Purple tomato; sweet basil; German chamomile; and Borage.

Cherokee Purple tomatoes, with sweet basil interplanted throughout the row.  The plants have cages around them now to protect them from the rabbits, but will be tied up to the cattle panel when they get tall eough.

The flowerbeds have had several things planted, including snapdragons; larkspur; calendula; petunia; zinnia; sunflower; verbenia; purple prairie clover; wild bergamot; and other assorted flower seeds that my mom gave to me in an envelope last fall.

RAF and I did make more progress on our very big gardening project yesterday.  We now have the  stretch of fence along the south part of the yard (almost) put up.  It's not perfect, but then nothing I am involved in is ever perfect.  If it keeps Mo and Lola in and keeps the deer; rabbits; cows; other dogs and groundhog (and Mr. Groundhog is back, by the way) out, then it's a win.

The new fence.  We left the existing barbed wire fence and posts up (the shorter orange posts), but added new 10' posts between each short post, and put up 2" x 4" horse fence on the outside over the barbed wire.

I'm not positive we got it stretched tight enough, and I'm not at all happy at how we got it fastened around the pipe fence at the corners, but it seems pretty solid.  And while I wish it could have been straight all across the top, we just went ahead and followed the dips in the yard so that the wire comes into contact with the ground all the way across.  We might could have bent it at the high points, but that would have meant bending the majority of the wire past the shop and I just didn't think we could do that.  It was a much harder job than it should have been, mainly because we didn't have much of a clue about what we were doing, but in the end, we were able to get it fasted to the posts most of the way across and we got three wires wrapped around the post on the west end to hold it.  We'll need to put tension back on it to finish, and I have lots of fence clips to install and tighten, but I'm not at all unhappy with our progress yesterday.

I plan to pick up the two wooden posts needed for the H-brace at the north end of the west fence this week, and once we have those concreted in, we'll be ready to stretch that wire.  I think it will go better for us because we learned some lessons on this first installation.  

Tuesday, April 26, 2022

Tomorrow is a big garden day!

 

Wednesday, April 27, 2022

They're here!  My order from Nourse Farms was delivered today, with 25 Galletta strawberry plants and three blueberry plants!

The order came with a nice little instruction book and a packet of Agri-gel.  The plants were well wrapped, but I wish they had put some crumpled up newspaper in the box.  One of the blueberry plants had the end broken off.  I don't think it will hurt it though.  

I put all 25 strawberry plants in the section of the raised bed that RAF helped me finish.  It has Ocean Forest® potting soil from Fox Farm on top of the clay.  I hope that works out.   I know they're really too close together (they're spaced only about 1' apart), but hopefully I can move some of the runners next spring after I get the back part of the raised bed finished up.