I’ve had vegetables waiting for me. Mostly lettuce. It’s been outside for weeks. I will occasionally go pick some when I needed it, but not that much. Finally I realized I just needed to pick a bunch and bring it inside. That way I would be more likely to use it. And it is nice and crisp in the morning, rather than in the evening when it can get a bit wilted. Maybe we should be eating salads for breakfast–that’s when they would be the most fresh and taste the best from the garden.

I also had my first harvest of garlic scapes and made a pesto with them. It was very strong, and I got thinking about the allician content of the scapes. I’m guessing (based on taste and smell) it would be pretty high. I’ve also been noticing that a little bit of dirt usually comes in with the harvest and often persists even after washing. I’ve kind of thought that this is actually a good thing, and that exposure to dirt can actually help us be more healthy. (You can google this.)

Anyway, that is my health-related advice from observation in the garden today. It has no scientific backing, but I haven’t been sick, other than colds, for a very long time. I thinking eating from my own garden has a lot to do with that.

I’m suspicious of organic weed killers. It seems to me that they are either very ineffective, or actually pretty toxic. (Vinegar at high conversations is nasty stuff.)

I saw this organic weed killer, and just ignored it at first. Someone else later recommended it, so I went ahead and bought the recipe and gave it a go.

Two hours later, here were my weeds. The brown is were I applied the weed killer. I was surprised at how quickly it work.

The weeds continued to turn brown and die back. Here’s my thoughts on what I think is going on. This suffocates the plants, plugging up the stomata, preventing the plant from transpiring or getting air. It worked better when the plants were in full sun.

There are limitations to this: it had to be applied pretty thickly to be effective, and just isn’t practical for large areas. It also works as a contact herbicides, so it isn’t going down into the roots like a traditional systemic herbicides like roundup. The bindweed it “killed” grew back in a couple weeks.

I think I mostly prefer chickens, cover cropping, sheet mulching and hand wedding to this method, but it has its place.

I wish this was a nice how-to post about how to have a good irrigation system. But it’s not. The biggest problem and workload in the garden is the irrigation right now. If anything is going to get watered, I have to do it. And I’m not doing so hot. Lots of things are drying up. The rainy month of May has turned into a normal hot, dry June. And the plants aren’t loving it.

Part of the reason the irrigation is so off is we have a weekly old-school water turn. I would like to irrigate just off of the water turn. Some places flood fairly well. The swales aren’t too bad. What remains are a bunch of areas that I’ve currently been watering with milk jugs turned into drip emitters. It actually doesn’t work that bad, but I just have too much to water. Over an hour twice a week of hand watering is not pleasant.

I still have no idea what I’m going to do everywhere…but if I don’t figure it out, I’m not going to have a great garden. I think the first (and easiest) step is to just go put some more mulch on everything. I’ve even got a big pile of straw that needs to be used.

Picture updates:


This is my inter-planted spring crop. Doing okay, I’ve had tons of lettuce out of there, as much as I’ve wanted. I could have been picking more. There are a few beets and carrots that look good in there…nothing has germinated in my straw bale gardens, so I think I will be planting something new there.

I watched this video about planting potatoes…and thought I would go for it. It was easy and turned out successfully (well, judging by the plants, but I assume I’ll get potatoes as well). I just threw the potatoes on the ground and buried with straw. I didn’t dig in the soil at all. They are interplanted with some onions.

The herb spiral looks great…only wish I would have actually planned out the herbs better instead of just filling it with what I had.

Swale mounds are planted up with veggies. Hard to tell in this picture. Some are doing well, some need more water. Next time, I would have planted everything close to the water line–the tops of the mounds get pretty dry. I seeded some things in. They weren’t marked, which was a mistake, because I haven’t been able to watch them to make sure they didn’t get buried in mulch and they were watered well. I don’t know if I will ever seed straight into a chop-and-drop cover crop again, but if I did, it would need to be marked!

Everything is going alright in the garden. I’ve realized I’m experimenting a lot (about everything is non-traditional) and really learning a lot from doing so. But I should have done some of the garden normal too. Then I could compare to my experiments, and also so if the experiments fail (which is fine, learning comes as much from failure as success), I would still have some produce to eat.

You know if nothing works out this year, at least I have learned a ton!