[ 1. Washed-up cucumber root networks by the base of a five-foot cucumber plant and 2. the visible top-soil root networks nowhere near the host cucumber plant ]

In short, robust plant species such as cucumber will absolutely suck the soil dry of key nutrients including nitrogen, phosphor and potassium aka kalium, underlining the importance of NPK fertilizers in professional farming. The soil will generally not produce a second crop after producing the fruit and the seeds, which is exactly why these species tend to be single-year aka annual species as there is not enough nutrients left for the second year.

My advice about dealing with the nutrient depletion is to, at least in non-professional extent, to change the soil for the second crop cycle instead of buying expensive fertilizers. The expression “dirt cheap” is not a coincidence and as long as you have time and effort available to take out and dump the nutrient-depleted oil soil somewhere proper (e.g. a compost pile) , you can take advantage of the dirt cheap sod and dirt and get the replacement soil. Even I could get a 40-liter i.e. 1.5 cubic feet, 35-pounder fresh soil bag for just a couple of bucks.

Do not buy the grossly overpriced market stuff. Stores with major garden departments and storage for soil usually sell it for a proper price. Some hardware stores and hypermarkets tend to have discount campaigns, during which the soil is finally properly priced. A couple dollars for a massive bag is the price point you are looking for. The alternative is to buy some animal dung for cheap to enhance the old dirt for the same effect, though it tends to be more expensive than buying new cheap soil.

As you can see, the plants like cucumber and bean build soil-saturating root networks. It has thicker higher-tier branches and narrower hair branches down to just root hair for taking in the nutrients. What this produces in practice is a massive nutrient siphon effect every time you provide even token watering to the soil patch as the water flows nutrients towards roots.

Modern potato and maize aka corn varieties are so demanding about their nutrients that they practically require fertilizing for extra nutrients as they they tend to grow too fast for their lack-luster root growth to not have complications such as death. On the other hand, if they survive and manage to establish proper root-saturation, they will absolutely suck the soil dry of especially green-parts-vital kalium and also the root-important nitrogen.

[1. Shine Zone: citrus basil, 2. Burn Zone: watermelons, 3. Bright Zone: tomato and carrots, 4. Dead Zone: tomato striving while radish is dying, 5. Dead Zone: tons of dead radish in fresh, non-dry soil far away from 12′ away from the window]

Sunlight is the king importance to plants. Fast-growing plants such as radish die even in relatively well-lit, indirect light zones dubbed Dead Zones, though slower ones such as tomato and herbs survive in it and Streptocarpus strives best in it. Bright zones introduce stunted growth in farmed crop species and shine zone either burns ( sharp, saw-tooth-leafed species e.g. watermelon) the leaves or makes them grow much bigger if they can take the shine in. In practice, the window sill area for viable growth is very limited and any space not regularly bathed in shine is not worth the effort.

In practice, outside everything place not shadowed by trees is Shine Zone, inside the closest 2′ from the window is Shine / Burn Zone, the next 2 to 3 ‘ are Bright Zone and 5’+ is Dead Zone as per my experiment data.

[ That Leafy the Hutt is mostly composed of cucumber, watermelon and tomato. The thick foliage is four to five feet tall. ]

A random fact: cucumber flowers have fats in them. They could probably be used as a makeshift bread spread.

[ From left to right: cucumber, watermelon and green bean flowers (pods?). I also had a magenta radish flower for a day before caterpillars completely ate it. ]

It seems that the more punishment the plant takes, the earlier the flowering phase will be. Some sources claim that this is a universal tendency with flowering plants. My radish and watermelon sure have taken plenty of damage.

[Those thick stalks in the foreground are potato sprouts. They are surrounded by marigold sprouts. The background boxes show mostly tomato sprouts and some caterpillar-riddled radish.]

In short, I have a well-isolated place that stays in 25+ C / 77+ F even when the outside is about 15 degrees less. On an especially cold days, a ton of the air moisture compresses into water drops and causes cotton clothes to grow a ton of mold overnight. The dryness of the cloth does not matter. This is because cotton is a self-decomposing substance that is constantly breaking down and those broken off, tiny organic particles trigger the feeding mechanism of the mold spores. This why wool clothes are untouched by the phenomena, mostly because they can absorb and contain a huge volume of moisture without becoming surface-moist, making them too dry for spores. Polyester and other non-organic things do not grow mold, period.

All this despite having the heaters off or as low heat as possible. I have nicknamed the place Greenhouse for obvious reasons. It is a very interesting place to live in. There are some ventilation pipes in a closet room and a bathroom, though they do not do much heat-wise. Most of the gas exchange clearly happens through the sides of the front door. If you really are stupid enough to want to keep frail cotton materials around, you need to open your ventilation holes enough so that the air moisture and the heat stays low.

Off-topic: Seriously, buy wool clothes if you can. As a rare clothes power-user, cotton, especially denim cotton, barely lasts months in regular use. I got some expensive-tier Calvin Klein jeans for free and they started to broke down i.e. make huge holes in record time i.e. three months. $0.20, 80% polyester sock cloth is indestructible in comparison. Its cotton part might break away, though the polyester frame will last for years if needed to. F**k cotton. It is worthless. I only use cotton clothes that I find for free. You would be surprised how much jeans and shoes people dump into the condominium trash sites on a regular basis.

I need to get rid of this thing. It is developing super fast. All this growth probably happened in less than 24 hours. I need to go dump this thing outside before it spores up the air. I have enough of that stuff already. This is probably a remnant of the tiny amount forest soil I collected many months ago and stuffed corners with. Now I have to go dump it outside and get some Brassicaceae seeds (radish-turnip-rutabaga). A couple of those larvae have been eating my tomato plants. The good news is that I have destroyed almost 90% of the seeding adults. The idea of using caterpillars for pruning was extremely bad.

In short, plant as if you would into a soil patch outside i.e. let the plant be in the middle, surrounded by plenty of non-planted space for the plant cluster to conquer with leaves and to get wild and lavish.

Spreading seeds equally is not usually a good idea. Foliage cover kills efficient growth and the sprouts at the edges ALWAYS become the cover and effectively stagnate the growth. You cannot just plant one seed for maximum growth as it might randomly die of root rot two or even five weeks in, utterly destroying your progress and wasting your plantation box usage. The compromise is to plant a thick, limited cluster of seeds in the very center of the planting spot and let it grow. This also simplifies watering a lot and lets the center parts root the whole soil volume most effectively without edge plant roots blocking the strongest plants from growing faster.

I have killed a lot of caterpillars. The average size of an encountered larvae has shrank noticeably and the foliage damage rate has been reduced. A thickly planted bench is nigh impossible to hunt ‘pillars at. As a consequence of clearing the the radish plants, the casualty rate could be 70%. I will be replanting some turnips and radish very soon. For some strange reason, my big-seeded French Breakfast radish plantation is untouched. If it gets infested, I will be moving it around a bit and culling the green-strings to the MAX with my Super Deadly Pincer Crush special moves. My fingers are so stained with pheromone-concentrated worm fluids that flies tend to be attracted to them even after washing them several times.

The looper larvae cannot tell the difference between radish, rutabaga and radish, so they are all equally targeted by them. This means I can get the small-seeded four-digit turnip or rutabaga seed bag for less than a dollar and be good. I am going to check out some the couple stores that have those things. I am also going to get a handful of potatoes to seed some of the exterminated Brassicaceae i.e. cabbage-like species’ plant boxes.

These fruiting species flowers are much simpler than the ones of the decorative flowering plants. I have my Streptocarpus aka cape primrose with yellow flowers and those fluffy flower leaves are not as interesting. That is a worthless opinion, so do not make any important decisions based on it.

I know the coerced self-pollinating trick with a brush, so the flowering part will not last long. The entertaining part comes right after the brief flowering part is over. My surviving cucumbers are a thickly planted mess and I expect a couple branches to snap once the fruit-bearing starts. Sure, the fruit grow mostly on the ground. Let us just say that right underneath the big cucumbers are the young tomato plants. Something is going to get crushed no matter what. I am going to document the destruction. The specific cucumber variety ( Rhensk druv ) makes short cucumbers, which limits the massive destruction potential somewhat.

[Potatoes (left) grow multiple sprouts ENDLESSLY from a single tuber, hence there is no “killing the main branch” with them and they are very difficult to kill even in bad climate. Also, they constantly grow side tubers with their extra nutrients.]

Frankly, I do not care if the cucumbers live or die at this point. They are too much work to be fun to mess with. Regardless, they seem to be striving and two biggest ones are already developing flowers. I might as well go all red with my lighting shading to slightly accelerate flowering/fruiting.

I am going to collect some stinging nettle for tea consumption. The public wastelands  are ripe with that stuff already.

I am going to plant some potato and stiff herbs (e.g. chives) into the fungus-exterminated spinach and radish boxes. They are completely overtaken by fungi, so I need something with good roots. Especially common basil seems to be particularly fragile and extermination-prone, which is why I will never plant it again (until I change my mind or I get some salvageable seeds for free, of course). I will not stoop down to plant dill, though, as that stuff spreads like a Stage 4 cancer and gets even wilder when pruned. I am going to pick up some new seeds when I buy some groceries today. That will start Batch 6 plantations. For the record, most of the recent, surprise exterminations are from Batch 4.

I have thin-boxed into some plantation expansions. I still need to move my tras– raw materials around to free up a couple m2s. I need to leave room and supplies to facilitate the eventual transplantation of the thin boxes. Otherwise the plants will stagnate in growth after just a couple of weeks. The lack of depth is the killer in terms of root growth and the synergizing nutrient collection.

I am sure I have fungus growth related seedling fatalities. From my soil observations, there is two ways things are made to die.

1) Physical obstructing by hyphae fungus root networks and

2) moisture withholding .

The soil with a lot of fungus hyphae can feel moist because the hydrophobic hyphae hairs trap water droplets to the very top parts of the soil, just bellow the surface and above the roots of even most short-rooted plants. This will greatly benefit the fungi that will rapidly dry-compress and die once the moisture levels drop to the usual levels. Seedling root deaths are most common around patches of mushrooms, the above-surface for-reproduction parts of fungi. Seedlings are extremely weak to having their roots and soil moisture blocked as they usually have only a couple of root branches to rely on.

To avoid fungi and other root-related seedling casualties, it is best to grow the seedlings in special, limited size soil box. From my experience, small boxes of at most 4.0″ / 10 cm usually are almost void of mushrooms. I have no perfect data on why this happens, though it is most likely the result of thin boxes drying up very fast and often, making it challenging to for a moisture-reliant fungi to successfully maintain rapid fungus growth in.

Fungi are very useful at turning a low-grade box of compost soil into a high-grade one and most likely die soon after the box runs out of decomposable matter. They also attract fungus-eating bugs, most commonly scuttle flies. Some of the flies are leaf miners, though far away from fungus-infested soil boxes, there are little organic gas emissions to attract them. In other words, there are a lot of perks in small-box planting, especially when new seeds are involved.

P.S. Simply watering more is enough to offset fungi’s water-withholding effect.

A marigold seed looks like a piece of a tree branch. It has one straw-like end and one black sheath with a straw tip. Most seeds that are not fruit-shelled have parts specifically tailored for flying to maximize the spread of the species. I call them flying seeds. Most likely the straws improve the catching of air vortexes and the sheath increases spinning, making the seed more likely to catch vortexes of significant momentum.

In short, when a soaring plant positions towards a low-angle sunlight source, it bends towards it and grows, often resulting the main branch snapping and the sprout effectively dying. So if you plant anything like that more than a couple meters away from a window, expect heavy casualties. It is best to put these plants close to the windows and let the less vertical plants without a suicide risk man the background. Outside, none of this matters as sunlight is omnidirectional and these plants grow directly upwards as they should.

I now need to replant stuff into the vacated watermelon boxes. I am thinking of thyme, marigold, potato, turnip and radish. They will be companion-planted like no tomorrow. I want to try that. Also, I also heard that planting thyme and marigold attract very beneficial bugs.

Even indoors plants get infested by leaf-eating bugs. It is inevitable. The best you can do is to plant fast-growing, leafy plants that do not really mind getting eaten. Radish is a great decoy plant as it has a ton of redundant branches with multiple leaves it can lose. As it gets eaten, its leaf profile gets reduced making bugs target less-eaten plants, giving the original one time to regrow its leaves. In practice, a single week in direct sunshine is enough to turn a small sprout into a big-leafed one. Radish is not a very tall plant and goes horizontal after only 10″, making it a great decoy plant for anything besides young tomatoes.

Tomatoes grow so slowly that they get easily shadowed even by severely-eaten radishes, leading to extremely slow growth. Frankly, tomatoes are not worth the trouble and tailoring your plantation around them is most likely going to hamper your results and maintenance efficiency.

I planted more turnips to help desalinate Destruction Box and alpine strawberries to token advance my plantation extra-structuring plan. I staked hundreds of cucumbers and tomatoes to the point of almost running out of stakes. The few remaining old cucumbers ( Rhensk druv ) are heavily assaulted by Downy mildew. A couple of the cucumber leaves look half-rotten despite the plant still being green. I considered cutting the leaves and throwing them into compost, though considering that I never did anything linked to introducing that fungus to the plant, it is most likely in the air and the dirt and it would be too late to do anything about it at this point. I decided to compromise on and cut off the dead parts on the grounds that letting the rot spread is the only active damage right now. I do not need to worry about cutting damage as the leaves are already fully vulnerable at this point.

I do not know if my “leaf surgery” with common scissors is any good, though I am going to record the eventual results later.

Besides the water-hungry corn, I most likely need to cut the shroom growth a bit. That sulfur-like coloring is a fully mature spore pod colony, which will blow out a cloud of spores from even a slightest touch, including water droplets. To keep things manageable and tidy, I need to limit the watering to these plants. I will keep giving the experiment box water because it is more about bacteria than shrooms anyway. I already have enough mature ones to safely assume that the remaining non-infested boxes will get their saphrotrophs via air anyway. The good thing about having a lot of shrooms is that they in many ways slow down the dehydration of the soil, making me less obligated to water them, e.g. by blocking sunlight with the spore pods and catching water droplets with the hyphae aka fungus root hairs. I can take things lazily for a couple days at least,  only watering where the surface soil gets sand dry.

A bonus picture: an all-yellow corn sprout.

I have no idea why it is like that. Maybe it is a mutation. My best guess is that it has root issues and is late at producing the green chlorophyll.

The first, brown one came from the high-to-medium-tier soil sacks and the white one came most likely from the low-tier soil. The latter is most likely a simpler mold species. The presence of manure content in its premises is also a home for ‘actinomycetales’ quasi-fungi bacteria type that gradually takes over the manure decomposition by excreting fungi- and bactericides. I do not have to really care what they are as they focused solely on the dead organic waste, meaning they will not have any effect on anything living and antioxidant-rich. Even better, they create conditions most favorable for harmless bacteria, making it even more difficult for harmful pathogen spores to find a place to grow at. Most likely those spores get trapped by the moist, sticky substances the soil devourers create.

Most of my shrooms center around the moist newspaper wrappings. Those things absolutely love the dead wood aka PAPER products. I might throw them some extra papers to munch on if feel like it. That would contribute positively to the nutrient content of their inhabiting soil boxes. Again, fungi cannot harm living cells. Even the rare parasitic ones steal some nutrients without killing the plants. The only problem with molds is that tomato leaf mold is a significant pest that I should not do anything about. I do not feel like pesticiding edibles or salting my plants to death, again.

If the shrooms become a problem to the plants, I can always plant new things such as cheap tubers ( especially turnips ) that the pests do not like at all and that grow well even in salted ground. Herbs ( e.g. dill ) with unique, small leaf types seem to be especially untouched by leaf eaters in general.

I have not watered the plant in over 10 hours, yet it still maintains those big water droplets. It is very clear that corn tends to drain a ton of water from the ground to suck in the nutrients needed for its monstrous growth. The water is mostly a particle transfer media. I need to start watering this thing more so that it can do its thing. The guides instruct doing so mostly based on its alleged small roots. I have no other such high-intensity water-emitting plants.

I planted some crushed anise seeds. The herbs seem to grow fast and my anise reserve is abundant, so I might as well put some of it into a good use. Anise makes an excellent bread spice even in tiny quantities (for being an aromatic spice).

In other news, 50% of my strawberry boxes have sprouts now. Corn is growing like a super thick weed. I now have two distinct compost mushroom varieties: a brown shroom one and one that likes making white foam, most likely a species of some industrial grade compost mold. The amount of staking work required very soon by cumber and tomato sprouts is mind-crushing.

I

My phone camera ( 2MPx) sucks at capturing small details. The sprout is about 3 mm , twin-seed-leafed one. It is nothing special, just extremely tiny much like other small-seed plants such as tomato. The earlier one indeed was a run-away herb seed. The alpine strawberry took about a week in very warm climate to sprout. I might plant more of it as it is a very small plant and I can fit it in a lot of spaces.

1. Corn grows pretty slow for a big seed plant. The corn sprout is quite unique in that has a single seed leaf ( i.e. the branch ) much like weed species such as chives. It is funny if know how toughly-built and leafy the mature corn gets.
2. I swear these bush beans almost grow in darkness. Those massive double-spear leaves were not there last night. These things grow so fast because the big seed nutrients are mainly used for rapid root growing. The roots are much longer than the above-surface plant itself. If I had to guess, the green-to-root ratio is either 2:1 or 3:1. That is how legumes manage to grow fast. For comparison, tomato has 1:5 or less.

New cucumbers have sprouted. I might have a singular strawberry sprout, though it seems too much like a misplaced basil sprout for me to confirm it. The turnip seeds I placed into the cucumber box for soil-improvement purposes have sprouted.

The lesson of the day: if unsure, get the bush varieties of plants. The vine varieties are a lot of work. Sometimes the installed support structures end up constricting the branches and damaging the plant. As a clever, lazy compromise solution, you can use bush plants for support. Simply plant a couple bush beans near the cucumbers and watermelon for them to latch on to. I suggest employing this only during the seed placement phase and placing the beans etc. in the center of the box that usually ends up shadowed and shadowed anyway. I might test this strategy out with my destroyed cucumber+turnip box. That box soil, although slightly salted, still remains the biggest soil deposit I have ( by a margin of 20% ) and I am not going to give it up. The “bush support” is one of the many reasons for why bramble is valuable for transforming poor grasslands into lavish woodlands. The main reason is that they are tough and not seasonal, producing new biomass and flowering very frequently to greatly accelerate the soil enrichment process.

This is my new bush bean box. I am trying to plant semi-sparsely to see how thick I can pack plants before they fall behind in growth. The seed bag claims crops in 75 days (normally 60 – 65), so the pods should ripen by late July.

With the window still freed, I laid my strawberries alpine there. They have extreneky tiny seeds, so their root formation will most likely take weeks. I guess it will mature in July and become cropping frequently.

Now I need to wait a lot and eventually transplant my tomato cluster boxes into sparse boxes. It might require moving the stuff I have lying around to make the space, which would be an all-round upgrade.

New cucumber, watermelon, rutabaga, black radish, turnip and citrus basil sprouts detected. There are still about a dozen non-sprouted boxes such as corn’s. Just a week later, the look of the farm will be completely different. For example, bush beans might have reached their mature height already. In two weeks there might be a jungle.

P.S. One of the bean sprouts snapped. I frankensteined it together with a lot of box tape and a stake piece for support. It is probably dead, though it would be funny if it kept growing. Maybe it will sprout a new branch inside itself and play ghost.

I planted some alpine strawberry and turnips. That will be it for using new seeds for now. The full scale of my farm is slowly becoming clear to me. I need to come up with a much better plant box placement plan once my tomatoes and other major ones sprout. Currently my average plant age is most likely about a week because of the recent big additions and only 60 % of them have sprouted so far.

I felt up the radish to find some payload i.e. tubers. I might have found one, though they are small and half an inch underground, making monitoring them challenging. To give everyone a chance, I am now going to eat the topmost big leaves. A radish plant multi-branches from the magenta-colored land root, making a loss of an entire branch full of leaves meaningless, especially if those leaves are most likely shadowed and effectively inertified by the adjacent radish if not the leaves of the other branches of the same plant.

So I have started eating some of my plants. Herbs (dill, basil, spinach, chives) are completely ready and over-crowded, so eating them is gainful on every single level. Taste-wise, the greatly more flavorful fresh-picked vs. the dried-up store brand. Spinach and dill have fresh flavors not found in the dried variety. If I was a master chief, most of my spices would be fresh. In fact I would not necessarily even need spices as the fresh ingredients would have tons of flavors on their own.

I tasted plenty of radish leaves. It has a cabbage-like basic low-flavor, with either a grassy [ the young, small ones ] or acidic cabbage branch taste [ the older, bigger leaves ] . I recommend eat-pruning the leaves before they reach the full 1.0″ width as the acid makes the taste less palatable. Prune semi-early, in other words. 0.5″ wide ones were still pretty good.

My bush beans are growing amazingly fast. That is the benefit of being a big-seeded plant. I know understand why they are recommended in most survival farming guides. Get this: in just about 4.0 days, I already have four-inch bean stalks. At this rate they will reach their mature height [ 2.0′ ] in a week. The story Jack and the Beanstalk was clearly inspired by the amazing growth rate of these things. They are an annual species that is fully harvest-ready in 60 days and withers after the harvest.

Pictures (left-first): 1. the replanted cucumber box, 2. the remains of the old cucumber box, 3. & 4. the sprouting French beans

The watering of the salted cucumber box ended up causing a spill to neighboring boxes and utterly destroying the integrity of the original box. I ended up having to transplant cucumbers to a fresh box and changing a whole lot of newspaper water-guards. Oh well, seeds are only about 50 cents a pack, so  a few dying cucumber plants makes no significant difference. Those things were already pruning-ripe long time ago. Now I also know that cucumber roots pretty small, about a cube of 20% of the plant height as a root soil cube length. The soil itself is much more valuable than the plants.

I am pretty much an accidental / disastrous / violent, low-maintenance pruner. Eventually I end up doing something that kills the weaker plants with bad roots, leaving more assets for the remaining strong ones most capable of cropping in the long term.

I decided to cut down on the watering of big, fully sprouted boxes. It turns out that the bigger the container, the more extra moisture it can bank (because of the low surface-to-depth ratio), so I need to water those things less than the small ones, no matter how much more roots they have. Once again, it is all about sunlight that synergizes vapor loss, thus the short boxes lose proportionally more vapor from soil heating. The plant itself does not suck much water from the box, causing the increased water banking in taller boxes. I am going to employ the finger test and only fully water the ones with significant dryness.

My French / bush / string / green beans are growing super fast. I am going to transplant them in a couple of days. I am most interesting in the yet-to-be-sprouted alpine strawberries right now.

I just figured out that I should consider the idea of building leftover boxes out of the prune-bound, under-grown plants. The idea of mixing plants is interesting.

My first radishes are starting to reach ripe diameters. I am going to look into them. They do not seem to plop above ground when they near harvest-readiness, so some excavation is required. I do not want over-mature ones. If I wanted to grow something terrible like that, I would have planted beetroot instead.

Only a couple grams of salt and six hours, and my  cucumber is almost completely drained of water because of salt-induced reverse osmosis in the roots. It looks slightly better than originally as I flushed the soil with a lot of water. I think one or two bigger ones recovered in a quarter hour or I misremember.

Salt is the fastest way to dry plants to death. Unless you are preparing weeds in an isolated container with a water and salt, do not use it. I would not use salt even as a drying hastener as the decomposing microbes are greatly hindered (if not killed by reverse osmosis) by it.

Whatever you decide to use, it should never incorporate common salt aka sodium chloride. If you make a mistake, do not panic, keep in mind that it is all about a short-term water loss and that you can greatly alleviate it with copious amounts of irrigation.

Update: Four hours later, it is still bad. I have extensively flushed the roots, added new soil for them and overall dilute the salt in the top soil. I even tried to flush the leaves too, though that is probably useless when the problem is not photosynthesis-related. Fortunately, the bottom of the soil box is finally starting to get moist, which means the salt can finally move down the box without getting stuck by a dry part and further flushing attempts will be much more effective. I am going to add a ton of extra newspapers there so that I can flush even more salt.

Some of the small under-grown cucumbers most likely will not survive the ordeal. Big ones have enough root redundancy, enabling them to drain more water than they lose. Well, I am not going to lose much here. I did learn that the stuffed square formation is not very useful with cucumber as it will form one “leaf wall” line of plants that grow big, leaving the rest stunted and useless. It would be most optimal to get some line-shaped, thin plantation boxes for them so that the rest of the container is not effectively worthless.

I did not learn about pruning here. Hand-planting is still king in terms of avoiding waste and making easily-manageable plant formations. Instead I learned about positioning/placements and shaping, which I will utilize in further hand-planting efforts. This has only reinforced my idea that designing the seed place positions and controlling sparseness and avoiding planting to-be-shadowed positions is a top priority, especially in cropping. Badly or pointlessly placed seeds usually only produce a small seedling and no crops, essentially a nutrient-consuming weed. Farm crops, not weeds, muh bois.

I expect that the plant stems refill with water in two hours after being liberated from the water-sucking salts, as per my earlier experience with flowering plants. The next development will be in about 8.0 hours. I am going to post an update about it.

There are about 30 big boxes of soil, which is 1200 liters and 510 kg of soil of various kinds.

As seen as the white dots in the 4th picture, the bush beans have sprouted. I am going to get them big boxes once they mature a bit more.

Now I need to get some extra boxes, maybe one batch of soil if feel like it, some mulch to make “tea” fertilizer out of and red tissue paper for my bulbs to increase the flower power of my planties.

Now, it is time to enjoy my spiced cocoa drink. I will post a my recipe, solid coffee compatible and with extra energy content, no less.

According to some NASA studies, plants react to light identified by green, blue and red colors. Green is reflected, though somehow important. Blue stimulates the pre-flowering growth phases and red allegedly boost the flowering and crop-building phases.

Most light bulbs are of yellow color that lights up bright walls and that plants ignore. Heavy-duty lights usually employ both blue and red. You could simulate red-blue-green light by loosely taping thin, red & blue tissue paper pieces over the light bulb to produce violet light.

I found a useful page about the effects of the three lights. In short, green simulates shade and discourages plant height growth. Green = bad. Red light promotes plant growth the most, though it promotes flowering parts growth.  Blue light promotes vegetative growth such as leaves and roots. If you only have one paper, using blue is the safest as it boosts resource gathering parts, effectively reinforcing the plant. Get purple tissue paper if you can. https://blog.1000bulbs.com/home/when-to-use-green-grow-lights

Update: for your sanity, please do not use all-red coloring filter. You cannot see anything dark with it. Blue is pretty bright, soft and useful, so you should probably always use half-blue filters to stay on the practical side.

I previously mentioned that you should not pay premium for specific seeds. The point is that there is no seed scarcity, there is only specific, overcharging vendors. As a rule of thumb, online vendors charge the most regardless of the inventory situation as a big chunk of them are dropshippers i.e. middlemen taking their cut at your expense. Buy locally and you are more likely to get discount opportunities when the brick-and-mortar stores decide to refresh their old inventory and heavily discount everything.

Whew, so many words just to recap. You can and should pay a little extra for the seeds if they are of the variety that make farming much more practical, rewarding or easy in your setting. For example, a crop-motivated tomato farmer would enjoy a high-cropping Moneymaker variety of six feet height. A person living in a cramped apartment wanting to farm its first tomato with ease might prefer something like Margot that only grows three feet tall. Lazy builders might want to get bush type tomatoes instead of the most crop-heavy cordon type i.e. branch-splitting ones that require both branch pruning and extra supporting for optimal results. Worry not, they will crop even without care, just slightly less and a little later.

It is often not possible to figure out the traits of the specific variety while you are at the store, so it is a good idea to research the most common varieties before entering, if you care. I personally would gamble and take any seeds as long as the price is reasonable. Considering the minuscule portion of growing costs with the seeds, it is not worth fuzzing over too much. What you should do is to check out what stores sell cheap seeds and get everything that you like. Just do not pressure yourself into farming them all at once. Take your time and farm only the things you really want to gain experience about. You can have some spare containers, seeds and soil in stock for the times you feel like doing a bit more farming work than your seedlings require.

I initially tried to get rid of my seed stock of a carrot and two tomatoes, though none of that was what I truly wanted to farm. Radish and turnips, that is what I wanted to farm. Doing the superfluous extra stuff such as planting carrots, does not further my interests and makes things less fun to do. Though once you know what you do not particularly like, you can do them quite enjoyable with the fitting zero expectations by not investing yourself into their fate. Common farmed tuber plants can usually take care of themselves as long as they get some water every now and then. I am surprised about how well my carrots are doing despite my total lack of care about them. Their split leaves are pretty big already.

Offtopic Q&A: How do I know when to harvest tubers that grow their main root underground? Simple — the tuber will surface for some physics-related reasons and it is usually ready when the colour and the tuber size matches the variety description. With tomatoes, some guides recommend harvesting slightly before it completely ripens. The reason is that the old fruit often gets more watery, less aromatic and more acidic as it starts to prepare itself for being dropped from the plant and rotting on the ground. If the harvestable payload stops growing,  it is half-ready. Expect deviations if your plant root or a majority of its leaves get heavily damaged. Weakened plants produce little to no payload.

BTW, my experiment box seems to have some fungi-like webbing in one above-surface part. Last time that happened with the tomato box, a ton of little mushrooms spawned in just three days. The radish there are growing pretty well and most of them have already sprouted, with the seed leaves dominantly yellow.

I am soon going to get the last batch of soil required to plant my non-reserved seed stock. I have reorganized my space a bit to make room in the sun shine zone for the plant boxes. Most importantly, once I am done with planting, I am going to take some pictures and count how much soil and plant boxes I have deployed. The numbers are going to be moderately silly. I can always resume planting the reserve seeds and deploy even more stuff. It will be late (I like the results of precise hand-planting  with line-like plant formation and non-clumped plants, an issue that killed a couple of my cucumbers early.

It is going to be late when I am done. Locally, it will be the next day. After all, those alpine strawberry seeds take forever to plant evenly. I am a bit worn-out already, so it will be a slow slog for me with a lot of willpower exercise.

As a side note, I dropped a bunch of rutabaga seeds and ended up half-salad-boxing them into the plantation. I am going to start eating the extra “salad leaves” in case the box gets insanely crowded. For some reason, rutabaga seeds are completely identical with (black) radish and turnip seeds, it is the same brown 2 – 3 mm grain of seed all around. I have a good reason to consider those four species related. I do not care what the official taxonomy states, that thing gets changed and royally re-arranged every couple of years.

My maple-leafy cucumbers have at least three types of fungi, bacteria and bugs eating it. I am pretty sure I have powdery mildew and a translucent microbe cultures of the downy mildew. That is the fungi / mold. I probably have bacteria further extending the damage of the mildew-damaged leaf tissue as bacteria spores are everywhere. Thirdly, I have small carved lines and holes in the leaves, which is a mechanical damage of animal origin, most likely small fly species.

Firstly, my radish hosts a ton of small flies. They can eat those as they that “leaf salad” is overly abundant. The cucumber, however, grows very slowly in comparison to the damage rate and the seeds are much more expensive and rare, meaning that a single healthy cucumber leaf is much more valuable than a whole radish plant. The targetting of cucumber is most likely the leaf size and the strong cucumber aroma that the bugs are attracted to.

I have started de-pesting my cucumber.

My guess is that the bottom-quality soil I have been buying recently en masse, is the source of the spores and stuff. I can manage it. I will monitor my tomato plants very closely for pests, as the slow growth rate makes tomato extremely vulnerable to leaf-destroyers in addition to various tomato-specific diseases such as tomato mozaic virus.

Update: I ended up doing more damage to the plants than the pest ever could. Here is a link for info about desalting the soil: https://www.gardeningknowhow.com/garden-how-to/soil-fertilizers/reversing-soil-salinity.htm In short, keep pouring more water to drain the salt and add salt-free new soil on top.

I came across a handy gardening thread about making diluted fertilizer with just a water bucket, water, dead plant matter and about two weeks of water-stewing time. Here’s the source:

https://permies.com/t/26359/Liquid-fertilizer-weeds-true

There is tons of good info there. E.g. roots yield K, leaves N and fruits P nutrients.

I am going to try this one out. I will put a lot of porous papers to absorb most of the gas emissions. I want to see if I can liquefy the omnipresent, normally worthless leaf mulch. I just need to get myself a cheap bucket.

I noticed that I already have multiple types of insects hanging around my plants. I have had tiny common flies for a while, though now I see a slightly more complex ones have arrived and like hanging out at my leafy radish boxes. From my past experience, there is something in the plants that those insects like, such as the abundant shadowing and cover.

In other news, my experiment-worm-fungi-feces-box has already a couple of radish sprouts. BTW, worms cannot digest live plants (as they contain a lot of antioxidants the worm bacteria cannot deal with). I could safely dump a dozen earth worms and only the dead and permanently shriveled up plants would get eaten.

I do not get the stigma with feces as if you grow over-the-ground plants such as chives, there is no contact with that stuff if it is put at the bottom of the soil box. So if there is no plausible contamination chance (as irrigation water only flows downwards), there is only dumb fear. I checked info about cat feces and the fools could not decide if it was decomposable. Ammonium, salts or not, it will break down, proven by the fact that the outside world is not slowly filling with cat manure. Some experts are some nutbags claiming to know everything and not giving a damn if their ideas fook you over.

Trust yourself. Whatever info you need, can be independently manufactured.

Here are the planted seeds and their varieties in case you want to compare. This is also a list for me to keep track of what exactly I have planted and about when. Planting year is 2019, month-day notation. I am going to try to keep this list up to date.

• Carrots (long) , Berlikumer 2 (Afghanistan) , 04-08
• Radish , Saxa & Riesenbutter , 04-14 & 05-08
  
• Cucumber , Rhensk Druv & Hokus & Beth Alpha , 04-15
• Beefsteak tomato , Marmande (heirloom , irregular & big fruit shapes ) , 04-15 & 05-01
• Watermelon , Sugar baby, various times including 04-15 and 05-13
• Spinach , Spazaroet , 04-16 & 05-14
  
• Chives , a non-named variety, 04-16
• Basil, non-named , 04-16
• Dill , Pikant , 04-16
• Vine tomatoes , Moneymaker ( crop-heavy , possibly heirloom ) , 04-30
• Bush bean ,  Prelude , 05-12
• Alpine strawberry , Rügen (heirloom) , 05-12
• Citrus basil , no-name , 05-14
• Black radish , Big Round , 05-14

Random notes:

1. I found non-planted spinach seeds when I examined the seed bag for this list. They were shortly planted.
2. The alpine strawberry is famous for making crops many times per year. It is a very important source plant for developing multi-cropping big strawberries. There are already variants. Some farmer commented that it was a very future-viable industry-wise, though he preferred the taste of the best annual croppers.

Spare seeds with unplantably / leaf-salad-y big seed stockpiles:

• turnip , Goldana , 1600
• rutabaga , Wilhelmsburger , 900
• radish , French Breakfast & Saxa , 800

I planted two new seed bags: bush beans and one of the countless garden strawberry varieties.

Bush beans have never germinated under my care. I have a similar experience with fava bean. Then again, I also used to be really stupid, so that experience does not count. Never Give Up!

The garden strawberry had packet had the usual case of A WAY TOO MANY SEEDS. The problem is that I do not waste any seeds and ended up wasting many hours hand-planting those sand-grain-sized seeds. I lost count of how many containers I ended up making for those things. I had to plant the last third super densely because I ran out of containers. If I had planted them as instructed, the floor space would have ran out half-way through.

For tomorrow, I need to get some the wheelbarrow and new soil as I am almost out of brown. As countless of new tomato sprouts [ without exaggerating: HUNDREDS ] soon need supports, that is a lot of stuff left to do. Still, I should do some planting to take advantage of the upcoming, at least a week long all-sunny week starting in 24 hours. I need to plant the herbs. Missing that sunshine payload would be a great loss in ultimate crops.

Here is my inventory of available seed bags:

• 1 beefsteak tomato
• 1 black radish
• 1 citrus basil
• 3 cucumber
• 1 garden strawberry
• 2 radish
• 1 rutabaga
• 1 spinach
• 1 sugar corn
• 1 turnip
• 1 watermelon

That is 14 seed bags. May the time lords have mercy on my soul. For reference, I have already sown 15 bags. Considering that most of these bags have hundreds of seeds, things are going to get insane. I do not even want to think about what to do with the super tall corn.

My plan general goal is simple: the seasonal day light maximum is only a month away and I most likely should capitalize on the copious amounts of indirect sunlight. I have seen my seedlings grow half an inch in a couple hours of indirect pre-sun-rise lighting. That is the orchid growth plan i.e. the original strategy for bottom-level plants that get dried-n-fried in direct sunlight. Focusing on the limited high-intensity shine spots is not adequate with an extensive plantation such as mine. Hence planting my seeds pronto and properly watering the few shine zone plants is the optimal plan.

2019-05-12 Planted: bush beans, “month” / forest / garden strawberry.

I watched some gardening videos detailing outright garden construction and I figured out that what I do is a minuscule part of gardening.  In practice, the lion’s share of professional gardening is about maintaining aesthetics and making things look clean and nice. My stuff i.e. producing crops is a foot note of the tone “some people do that.” What I do is growing and farming. I have a keen interest in engineering and industrial business, so of course looks are not a priority of mine.

The obsession with looks is why most garden facades are filled with boring decorative flowers or hedges. To me, that is a wasted farming tile. I am going to hold on to the gardening title because no one understands “plant growing” and real industrial farmers would not gain any information from my tiny scale growing to consider “farming”, not to mention the confusion with the other forms of farming such as cattle and dairy.

In practice, I am an amateur greens producer. Not a pro, just for fun. The power of the sunlight and the idea of all-year indoor farming fascinates me. I practically have a greenhouse apartment with 25 – 26 temperature most of the time while I am present, so not doing anything with that heat would be a terrible waste. I am in it for the info, not for looks. Locally, the occupation of gardener has been borderline dead for at least 20 years and I am not stupid enough to do hope the impossible. In fact I would probably turn down any offers for gardening positions as the salary has always been awful. It is a low skill work, after all. Plant farming is much more demanding and economically relevant than that.

Now you know the underlying vanity of gardening. It is okay to have a pet orchid, though if you have a full garden full of counter-productive stuff like that, the problem is you. People gravitate towards the dumb things. The familiarity attracts, I guess.

I completed my transplanting work and compiling the experiment box.

When taking out the radish soil blocks, I noticed that a lot of the roots were stuck in the cardboard bottom or the attached hardened soil. So roots managed to pierce the bottom. The main observation is that transplanting becomes much harder [ read: requires ripping roots off the container ] if you let the roots grow too much. My idea about the soil depth limiting the growth seems likely.

The harder yoghurt carton seems much less attachable and thus a very good container type for the upcoming new plantations. I will mark the plantations up until 21st as Batch 4 and plant everything I can. I plan to use all of my cartons and jars for that purpose. If I can get more dirt, I can partially skip straight to end game soil-boxing instead of those temporary options. I have so many cucumber seed bags left.

More craziness later. I have much seeds I would like to get planted while it is still May. Damn I like concrete work. I probably should temp plant those herb seeds as they do not root as much or require urgent care.

New plantations: 2019-05-11 radish (experiment box + temporary plants), transplanting

I fitted half a dozen radish boxes with thin soil into a big soil box. The result is quite a mess.

In my hands, the soil BLOCKS were almost bone dry. It turns out shine of a sun dries up the soil in record speed and the thinness of soil worsens this effect. I need to water the shine zone plants multiple times per day from now on. Even the cloudy days the water reserves dry up quite fast. The obligation for watering is the biggest drawback of household style farming. If you manage do that one job, the rest is pretty easy. The heat, the CO2 and the window-moderated sun shine tend to be taken care of for the plants farmed inside.

I figured out that ketchup bottles make excellent watering devices. I will now get back to my planting efforts. I need to repopulate the prime window plank space.

I bought a 10-buck loading platform that worked fine inside, though started to break off wheels against the pavement, especially against the off-road type pavement curbs. I managed to still transport my almost 200 l of soil. The power of air-filled rubber tires become really apparent today as the ceramic asphalt WILL grind your tires until the screws come out, no matter how many or how deep you put them. Even clothesline-grade ropes get sanded cut against the pavement.

I concluded that I definitely should buy a 30-buck wheelbarrow that incorporates the vital rubber air tire technology. Even if I did not need it now, by the time I need to get rid of the four-digit liter count dirt I end up needing one anyway. If I get the wheelbarrow tomorrow, I might try my luck with another batch of soil. Today, I need to focus planting and transplanting.

In other news, I noticed a new batch-1 watermelon seedling. It has been a month already. I really ravaged the seeds with my awful priming attempts, or just buried them too deep or it ended up upside down. The tallest watermelon is now over 25 cm / 10″ and needs a stake extension soon. My newest batch-3 tomatoes have sprouted except for one box that only has one tiny seedling visible ATM.

I have been wondering how to use-recycle my jam jar collection [ strawberry jam OWNS, I am hungry, BTW ]. I decided to use them as special seedling cultivation capsules with low seed counts. I am going to put some newspaper in so that I can easily pull the dirt out for transplanting later. I have over a dozen of those things. I will try to not use any soaring, big plants as they outgrow the jar space too fast for my lazy liking. For those things, I had better use the beer and oat flake boxes instead.

I need to document my plantations a bit better. It gets difficult to remember everything beyond dozen plantations. So far, it is simple. Batches 1 (early)  & 2 (mid-late) happened in April and B3 in early May. B4 is likely to occur in a couple of days (mid). My point is that it is very difficult to tell the species of young seedlings in the special jars, so I need to improve my documenting game greatly. I am going to utilize writable tape more.

With the germination jars (GJs), I plan to expand to new species. Strawberry is a definite pick. Black radish and rutabaga interest me. I definitely want to try citrus basil that I recently recovered. Most importantly, I want to be able to sprout some bush beans. Those things are really difficult to sprout as they like playing dead and my previous two attempts were not fruitful.

Saving a couple ailing radish boxes is on the top of my mind. The soil in their box has been moist condensed so thin (about an inch) that they probably have nutrient-collecting issues and might die soon if not assisted. Fortunately, most radish are doing okay with just the stunted growth thing. If they grew normally, they probably would have grown some root tubers by now for me to taste. If the transplantation reinvigorates the radish, I have to do the same to the other radish too, which would sap most of my soil reserves. Oh well, there we go back to why I need the f-ing wheelbarrow.

In short, I discovered that my almost two foot tall cucumbers have developed tendrils, signaling that they are vine cucumbers. The vine variety explains why my cumbers are a WAY taller than the 12″ i.e. 30 cm that some site claimed. I even watched some dude’s garden video with something like five foot cucumbers. Another site humourously stated that vine cucumber is great for a plant fence i.e. for blocking light and vision. On a positive site, the fast generation of foliage i.e. biomass makes them great at producing big crops. That is the power of maximum sunlight.

Currently, my main focus is on constructing soil carts. I am 80% done with it — I have only have to sand the wheels and to install them with some screws. As a Crossout veteran, of course I made the maximum amount of 16 wheels for it. Do not let the details fool you, the design is extremely crude. Well, if it works at all, I will be happy and get to make some massive soil purchases and a ton of planting and transplanting action will ensue. The cart is my main focus ATM. I will post a picture of it once I have ready. It is a pretty decent piece of basic woodworkmanship that you can not buy from a store. I am pushing that project as I suspect that the soil combo price discount sale will expire in a couple of weeks. My idea is that these shops are most likely discounting their old soil sacks in order to make space for newer ones.

My second batch of watermelon is doing great and has already reached a support-requiring phase. The second tomato batch is on schedule, though as usual, half the seeds are slower growers than others. The joke here is that both these batches were not primed at all, yet they grew much better than the previous ones that were handled with extensive care. I am never going to bother with priming i.e. preliminary seed-watering anymore.

Strangely, some of my carrots have met TERMINAL difficulties. The deep-soil tomato box originally overtaken with carrots, is now almost completely void of anything besides corner mushrooms (maybe they like the cardboard moisture that collects in the corners) and tomatoes. In much, much worse places such as the overcrowded radish boxes, the carrots are still okay. It makes little sense why the carrots died in the deep box. My only cryptic clue is the note on the seed packet: “does not like water-pocketing soil.” I might have over-watered based on the shroom growth. Man, carrots are some finicky bunch. I am glad as I have three packets of low-maintenance radish seeds that I would rather play with.

Oh yeah, there is one seed bag of mine I would like to address. Sweet corn. Farmed indoors. If you do not know how ridiculous that is: it is ridiculous. Corn grows 7′ i.e. 210 cm tall. If it grew two feet taller, it would touch my standard-height ceiling. Imagine how much soil that would require. Do not forget that corn plants are comparable to giant sunflowers i.e. very wide. For comparison, it takes slightly more space than my beefsteak tomatoes and tomatoes are quite wide already. An extra note is that corn is very P(hosphate) intensive, so it might not do so well with the discount garden soil with very limited P. I will give it the usual big banana box treatment and see how it does. The bag says it takes four months from planting to harvest, which is only slightly faster than tomato i.e. the slowest thing I have.

When I get the new soil, the first thing I want to do is to plant the spinach and the rest of the left-over stuff such as radish bags. After that, I am going to transplant the thin-soil plantations to give the old radish a chance to grow the crops at some point. I still have some free sun shine space left. I have a ton of weird stuff such as rutabaga, strawberry and black radish I want to try. Oh, you do not know what black radish is? Based on the picture, it looks like rutabaga with beet colouring and radish in the name. Here is a picture of this over-sized thing.

Little growth is better than no growth. Despite the massive plan growth boost of a day under direct sunlight, cloudy days with only indirect/filtered sunlight grows plants too. I realized that not planting because of lacking surface area for direct sunlighting would mean ZERO growth instead of SOME growth. You only need some growth to produce crops if you have no time limit as you will eventually have your stuff ripe anyway.

I decided to plant my tomato seeds as soon as possible and to not wait Sunday or, on principle, an extra second. By hauling those soil bags, I discovered the mental prowess of exerting and developing my willpower. Essentially, how you feel is a much less strong emotional force than what you will yourself into doing. Your emotions cannot resist you while you remain an active doer. Once you start slowing down and get passive, they become capable of ripping your nuts off if you let them. In practice, doing is always better than not. Postponing when you have the spare time and energy required is plain foolish.

I will get to planting the ‘matoes ASAP regardless of my extensive fatigued state [ your snot turns water clear when that happens ]. It means planting six to ten boxes with space-intensive tomato seeds. That is going to double my big box plantations. I need to purchase more BBQ sticks aka stakes for the plants I am almost out of the first 100. I am going to inspect the possibilities of planting the remaining seed bags and how much extra soil that would require. Finishing that could easily take another dozen soil bags. Fortunately, a local hypermarket relatively close to me started selling their affordable bags today.

*multiple hours of planting tomatoes pass*

The remaining tomatoes took SIX boxes to plant. One box has about 40 seeds, with the last one super-packed. The bag says “80 seeds.” The full bag had at three times that amount in total. Germans really super pack their seeds. Geez. That was just the beefsteak tomatoes. Only one German vine tomato pack left. In other words, I probably need five more soil sacks for that one alone. In the absolute best case, I would be able to fix my primary bicycle and get some boxes and enough tomato soil tomorrow. The new soil source is much closer to me, so it is realistic.

As a sidenote, the original tomato box has now caramel-coloured [ light brown ] mushrooms growing from its two corners, probably because of me using forest soil as a corner-stuffer. Hopefully it will boost decomposing of useless organic matter into soluble nutrients for the plants. It is probably Xeromphalina campanella , a super common mulch-rotter in the woods. It is clearly one of those inedible, non-toxic ones.  [ The local poisonous ones are quite tall and often solitary, usually of red, white or black colour. Most common shrooms are inedible at worst. ] I might benefit from spreading it to my other boxes. Maybe I’ll crush a spore pod into my next radish box and see if it does any better because of it. Oh yeah, the previous white mold was actually hyphae of this shroom. Shrooms are the mold of the dirt.

I have been repeating “plant growth is 100% about sunlight” stuff for a while. That because I see that difference first-hand, every day when I water my plants. It is hard to miss things like a two inch / 5.0 cm, tiny cucumber seedling shadowed by its nearly 30 cm peers in the same plant box.

Explaining quota reached. Here you have some evidence photo. The left box has the bushy radish box that has been on a prime window-side sunlight-harvesting position. The puny right one has been on the floor and gets only a couple hours of direct sunlight on an all-sunny day.

[ The heavily sunlighted radish patch towers over its less fortunate brother. ]

All-sunny is a term I used for a cloudless weather dominated by burn-feeling i.e. very intense sunlight. Even slow-growing plants grow like crazy i.e. multiple centimeters on those days.

Lessons learned: it is a good idea to spin the plant boxes and rotate the prime sunlighting positions to keep the farm growth balanced. Two big benefits: 1) you can harvest the everything at once (and avoid rotten goods) and 2) you free up the farming space for the next planting species. Species varying is vital if you went to get everything out of your soil as different plants drain nutrients from different soil depths. After all, soil is the most expensive part of farming, even with household farming.

Random observations:

1) cucumbers are super tall already and might need transplanting assistance in the future to avoid shadowing/shading i.e. sunlight blocking.

2) I noticed some dropped radish leaves from my second-tier radish patches. They tasted really good. My respect for the species rose greatly. You can practically eat the whole plant, no joke.

3) I am working on procuring banana boxes to prop up my plants for maximized sunlight collecting. I feel my prime window-side positions are not properly utilized. It might take me weeks with my current pace to get all the boxes I need.

4) I did plant a bag of watermelon into two boxes. I was too busy getting cheap soil to not focus posting about it. I learned from the cucumbers that giving watermelons i.e. soaring plants more space is important. I planted them mostly to take advantage of the rare sunny day and the soil heating that those slow melons tend require before they stop sleeping and activate to grow.

5) My next plan is to plant my remaining beefsteak tomatoes. I have another tomato bag of the vine tomato variety that I definitely want to plant at some point semi-soon. I am going to need at least half a dozen bags of soil and

6) I discovered the main differences between the sod and the dirt style soils. 1) Sod as a land-fertilizer has a lot of more phosphate in it, which is essential for growing corn. 2) Sod tends to be dry and sparse whereas dirt tends to suck in a lot of moisture and gets heavy and dense. Based on those facts, I would definitely prefer sod over dirt.

Unfortunately sod-type soil varieties tend to be significantly more expensive but not prohibitively so. The difference is often bellow 30%, which is reasonable. Corn, soybeans and sunflowers seemed to be the big phosphate hogs if I read some absorption chart correctly. Based on the numbers, most garden plants do not strictly require much P. This is the chart source: factsheet28.pdf

I noticed that my tomatoes have a lot of fine hairs even on the green parts. I read that tomato does this so that if it ever gets buried, it can simply start sprouting new roots out of the now-bellow-the-surface branches. It is like an anti-burying defense.

I noticed that if I plant soil and seeds into a banana cardboard box quite fresh out of use, it will eventually fill any closed space with banana smell. Luckily that smell is one of the uplifting ones. Another uplifting one is popcorn. Some companies use that smell to try to make their workers feel more productive.

I have acquired new bought soil and for-reuse cardboard boxes for a gard– FARMING expansion. I want to plant my remaining tomatoes and radishes and to give some of my previous plants bigger places to grow. For instance, spinach and basil boxes are already one constant carpet of green with no soil left visible.

I want to prop out my plant boxes with banana boxes to improve and simplify the limited, direct sunlight extraction. I think I need about 10 more sacks of soil and a couple dozens of extra boxes to accomplish that. Those things are would take almost a week acquire with a dedicated effort.

I think my video game beating hobby is on hold for now. I want to get my box and soil munitions done and gathered by the next all-sunny day that is fittingly next  Sunday to get it done once and for all. For the next four days before Sunday, the temperature and the cloudiness will be terrible for plant growth. It is barely over the freezing point of water. Happy May Day, I guess. 😀

In short, buy only cheap seeds. Do not buy expensive seeds unless you are after some the minute differences between e.g. different carrot variants. The seed itself is a very minor factor in plant growth on almost every level. For example, if you want tasty fruit, invest in the soil quality instead.

The seed quality today is pretty good from European standpoint. German stuff is always decent, though even the backwater local brands have high germination rates. From my experience with various species and seed brands, the soil dictates the fate of the seed while the seed only controls the growth rate. From my indoor growing experience, almost every single one of the seeds will grow eventually. Even the growth is largely dictated by the amount sunlight, leaving nothing up for the seed.

Most local hypermarkets ( i.e. the biggest grocery stores ) seem to mostly sell the more pricey stuff such as Nelson brand seeds. Those things are 9.0 times as expensive as the cheapest 40 cent seed bags. Do not get fooled by size of the seed bag and focus on the grams. The massive “premium” seed bags of Nelson had 50% LESS seed mass [ read: less seeds ] than the cheaper and the lower price tier bag of the same general plant species. This is yet another housewife bilking scheme and no one should buy those seeds. I am pretty sure not even professional farmers buy the “premium” stuff. Instead they probably get the stuff they can get in huge multi-kilogram bags.

Do not get roped in to paying  extra for stuff that ultimately is very insignificant to the plant growth. Even if you are going for e.g. heirloom seeds, keep in mind that those seeds are super sensitive to gardening mistakes such as too-little-sunlight and generally are not worth the extra effort.

I recovered plenty of cheap BBQ sticks and did some local soil surveying. Apparently the local soil sources usually are at forest places with few roads or buildings. I did discover mulch such as half-rotten leaves pretty much everywhere. Mulch is useful for long-term renewing and thickening of soil and short-term de-weeding, for example to make thin, clearly marked paths cross the outdoor soil patches for irrigation purposes. Mulch is much safer to use than the usual plant-growth-busting sand and clay path work. I am going to visit the deep forest places of my location to gain insight about the local soil quality. For instance, to gain insight about the local weed species that tend to seed the most fertile i.e. thick-soiled places.

I set up the supporting sticks for my cucumber, watermelon and tomato. This should cut down on the branch-bending damage that I noticed on the most bent seedlings. Here you have some overall pictures. I bunched up most cucumbers and a couple watermelons to simplify the sheer amount of careful work needed. Most of the harmful bending is because the vital sunlight comes from one specific direction, to which the seedlings try to orient their leaves towards. For comparison, in sparse farming conditions the seedlings tend to grow straight upwards.

In short, some of my cucumbers are having difficulty staying erect because of the combined effects of 1) top soil flushing away only to condense bellow the root level, 2) almost non-existent vertical root growth and 3) the non-erect main branch pulling up the roots with gravity. Needless to say, it is time to give the plants some barbecue sticks and strings for support and adding some top soil to properly re-bury the roots. I will be getting some extra soil and sticks shortly.

A thing to learn: the sparse, dry soil straight from the bag compresses down about an inch / a couple centimeters in continuous irrigation. So when they advice you to bury the seeds an inch deep, add that extra one inch and bury them two inches deep. The easiest way to do this is to throw the seeds onto the soil once you have about two inches left to plant. It is also safe to slightly over-stuff the soil box for that inch as it will eventually recede. That first receding topmost inch of soil is completely useless for rooting. Always bury things deep.

It is a first all-sunny day in a wave aka a heatwave in a long while. Consequently I had to mess with a decorative flowering plant (yellow Streptocarpus) that royally dries up in just a couple of hours under direct sunlight and requires frequent watering under such conditions. It is all because of the kind of leaves it has. Even its waxed i.e. extra water-retentive leaves bleed moisture like no tomorrow. That is I get for messing with plants not developed for farming conditions. The ability to sustain sunlight and to turn it into accelerated biomass growth without drying to death in just two days is a typical trait of any economically significant farming species. My guess that the priorities with decorative plants is fast growth to the pretty flowering phase and a high retail value.

The different structural leaf types I have discovered so far are:

1. cotyledons aka the initial seed leaves [ often flat and symmetric ],
2. true leaves aka late leaves [ the fuzzy, hairy, non-flat leaves ]
3. flowers [ yes, they are specialized leaves ],
4. flowering plant leaves [ extremely noticeable veins ] and
5. single-leaf plants [ e.g. chives and grasses ].

It seems that true leaves are the ones tasked with photosynthesis i.e. plant growth. I took some photos of my plants. I noticed two main styles of true leaves based on the vertical growth rate of the plant.

1. Soaring plants keep the seed leaves on top and sprout most extra leaves below them, most likely for support. This thin growth style maximizes the sunlight gathering by shadowing the bushier species and often promotes fruit growth. The fact that most major fruit producers are either trees or sparse bushes supports this idea. Examples: tomato and cucumber.
2. Grounded plants grow their extra leaves to reach above the cotyledons as the plants are not generally very tall. The plants grow more horizontally and tend to form short, thick, self-supporting bushes. The thick structure limits the sunlight i.e. the biggest growth bottle-neck and consequently the fruit or berries are generally quite small. Additionally, the most covered plants either do not grow fruit at all or the growth is stunted. The additional strategy I have noticed is the tendency to produce a big number of grass-like, very thin true leaves for support and to reach the surface often blocked by other horizontal species or even soaring plants. In practice, tallest carrot plant I have grew under the shadow of radishes. Ultimately, there is a structural cap to how high the horizontals can get. Examples: carrot, chives, radish.

Leaf photos:

1. A cactus-plant Sempervivum [ super waxy leaves, no sunlight issues ]
2. A flowering plant Streptocarpus [ might req. a big pot for moisture storage ]
3. Carrot with the “rabbit-ears” cotyledons
4. Basil w/ spade-shaped seed leaves and sideways-sprouting true leaves
5. Chives w/ the grass-like structure and the dark seed tip
6. Spinach w/ split cotyledons
7. Radish w/ the fuzzy true leaves and the peach-shaped seed leaves
8. Watermelon w/ late and tiny true leaves
9. Cucumbers w/ small true leaves
10. Tomato w/ twin-triangle cotyledons

The non-photo-ed basil is a thick patch of 2.0″ / 5.0 cm tall grass. It looked extremely boring. I mostly wrote this thing to document the unique shape of tomato seed leaves.

Bluntly put, I noticed half a dozen of triangle-shaped twin-cotyledon seedlings in a positions I recall planting the tomato seeds at. I assume the lack of seed priming in wet conditions produces very slow initial growth in the more complex plants such as bushes and trees. It is going to become a bit crowded in the tomato box.

According to a page ( https://www.hunker.com/12000223/sunlight-vs-artificial-light-in-plant-growth ) , most electric lights produce mostly the wave lengths of light such as green and yellow that plant leaves absorb the least. Hence the green and yellow-tending default colours of leaves — those are the colours that the leaves reflect back without absorbing them into sugar-creating processes. Needless to say, my pet radish box with the least sunlight exposition looks the worst. I would need special blue or red lights to simulate sunlight. I have proceeded to subject the ailing radishes to much more sunlight.

I have some white mold. That is the product of using porous, soft oat flake boxes and compost sod with a ton of stuff for the mold to decompose. It is most likely the usual household mold mostly associated with expired foodstuff. It does not infest anything that is not already rotting. My guess is that its mold spores are activated by moisture and decomposition gases such as CO2 and methane. Currently the white mold is mostly interested in decomposing the cardboard boxes.

Oh yeah. I have concluded that the CO2 headache currently only happens in the immediate proximity of a large sod source. This lends a lot of credibility to my hypothesis of the local biomass containing most of the CO2 soon after it is released in the air.

I transplanted the water melon seedlings today. Have some pictures.

1. The radish boxes.
2. Dill
3. Spinach
4. Chives with a carrot cluster in the middle
5. Radish with a carrot cluster (it is the original seed priming packet i.e. tons of seeds there)
6. Watermelon
7. Tomato (probably failed, overtaken by carrots)
8. Cucumber
9. My by-the-window setup
10. Overview of most radish boxes
11. My pet radish box [ an experiment to see if extra lighting makes a difference  in growth ]

I do not expect to there to be anything post-worthy about the plants for at least a couple weeks it takes the first radishes to start maturing. That would be around May 7th 2019. Even then, it will not be much more than some radishes getting cut up. Rest assured, I will be using up this sod/soil down to the last nutrient molecule. There is no need to get excited as that most likely involves a lot of boring radishes getting planted. There really is not much to do in gardening outside the planting and the harvest. I bet a lot of farmers grow dairy just to have something to do on a daily basis.

Currently, I have non-sprouted tomato and sprouted cucumber in their end-game boxes. I got some soil for them, with a bag to spare for the water melons (currently only two seedlings are visible). I am going to get some barbecue sticks and craft supports from them when needed for tomato and cucumber.

Gardening gets stagnant really fast. It is first some work (depending on how well you plan it, not much if done smartly), later it is all about watering and trying to forget about it. I am not going to plant anything new soon. The sod carrots i.e. my de facto weeds are doing a good job planting themselves on their own. There are not many boxes without some renegade carrots growing in there. I find them hilarious.

A key observation is that cucumber seedlings already have the scent of cucumber fruit. They also build roots very fast. The underground growth rate reflects the above-ground biomass growth rate.

I finally got a big enough a box to plant a couple tomato seeds in. That thing ate about 40 l of my soil. Now my growing seedlings get to absorb all that CO2 it is going to produce. To be fair, CO2 has not been felt ever since the radish leaves turned green. Those things must be eating it like no tomorrow. I have spare big boxes, though not enough soil to plant anything onto them. I am going to take a short break from planting for now. At some point I am going to get some extra soil for some tomato plantin’ action.

Now every plantation that matters has surfaced on schedule. The cucumber and the spinach cotyledons aka the first leaves are quite pointy. Planning to sparse-plant some tomatoes later. The major issue with them is that they require a lot of space, e.g. those feet-wide pots or equivalent for each seedling and one seed bag has 80 of them. Currently I have utilities for the whole 0 of them in stock. I need to find some big boxes before proceeding with the plantation.

Update: I scooped up the remaining sod and used it to transplant 100 radish seedlings. Now all the sod carrots are liberated.

Only dill, chives and the patient cucumber have not sprouted at this point. Melons do not count as they are my fruit soup fun project. Radishes growing like crazy as usual. I decided to stop transplanting them after another 150 today and concluded that it is much more practical time-wise to buy and plant new bags instead. Those dill seeds are flimsy as hell. Those weeds and weed-likes must have a very miserable germination stage with a huge chunk of seeds either progressing very slow or outright dying before they even reach the seedling stage that normally takes a week. After that milestone, they usually grow like a major nuisance. 😀 Well, at least basil made it. Spinach too.

A newbie tip: DO NOT START WITH HERBS — they grow like ass and might still die even in greenhouse conditions. You need to learn with something that visibly adapts to your stupid mistakes and grows fast enough for you to not lose interest. Try radishes. If you want to start with a slightly more challenging radishes that still grow fast, try to get the bigger Daikon radishes. Radishes are of very little maintenance. You can always try potato . Just plant those unpeeled, muddy potatoes into a very deep (two feet / 0.50 m — no exaggerating) flower pot and you’ll have a nice plantation with little work.

8.0 hours later I come to check out the plants before having some lunch [I know, the eating times 🙂 ], there are more new sprouts and a new mound on top of my the plantation. After two seconds of digging, I start getting thematic mold infestation flashbacks.

Later I found out that there were 500 to 1000 sprouts there. Each of those tiny clusters has about two dozens of them. I transplanted about 250 of them in three hours until I had to take a breather and there seemed to still be more than half of them left. That is quite a lot for a radish seed bag sold for 60 cents. Maybe they really liked my fertilizer-level soil or the above-average CO2 concentration in the air. I am going to continue transplanting later. Like usual, I have plenty of more stupid experiment ideas to try out. E.g. taking a couple seedlings to a smaller box and having it near my spaces, potentially eating away the local CO2 and taking advantage of the almost-constant lighting. I will never leave lights on for some plants, though can be use the same ones I use.

That is all about radishes. I dug a bit into chives, basil and cucumber soil. Chives will sprout in a day or two, cucumber has recently started growing some root and basil… it is a borderline weed, yet it was only slightly further ahead of cucumber. That thing is going to cause me trouble.

Key observations: DO NOT COMPRESS THE SOIL IN THE SLIGHTEST. Otherwise the sprouts will not be able to penetrate it and you just made your later work more difficult for yourself.

P.S. Almost forgot. I found a lot very small roots that belonged to carrots. I transplanted about 50 of them to see if I can summon anything out of them. They looked healthy to me, though hanging inside a dark, cool bag might not be the favorite past-time of orange things. They are most likely going to be popping up every now and then on my plantations.

Briefly: the unintended greenhouse conditions will continue at full force for least five days AND I remembered that high CO2 is actually good for making the crops bigger.

A brief synopsis of so far, I have a lot of CO2-generating sod [a lot of sod, not the generation as it is basic compost stuff]. Currently, the sod bags are the minor CO2 sources while the half a dozen plant boxes are the majority. My only green plants ATM are of the slow-growing type or past their primary growth phases and thus they cannot contain the extra CO2 very much. It takes a couple more days before the plantations surface and start collecting the CO2 to create leaves, flowers and fruit. I feel tempted to plant water melons as they are famously very fast in terms building biomass ( read: containing CO2 ), though they probably require an extra deep box full of sod.

A key observation: if you want to incite plant growth, you probably want to have a liter or two surface-wet outdoor-grade sod to up the general CO2 concentration near the plants. It is claimed to increase plant growth significantly and greenhouses employ it for that and the heat-preservation reasons. Just do not put them near where you “live” without significantly lowering the sod volume. You can start with half a liter, that is probably on the safer side, and increase the amount gradually as your plants multiply. If the sod grows inert in that use, turn it around a bit and rewater it. Most likely it will not run out off CO2 stockpiles during 6.0 or 12 months, so do not add more outdoor sod without a good reason.

P.S. I decided to try priming one of the melon seed bags to hasten the process a bit and to make sure they sprout up pronto. I will have an extra thinly layered sod box that I am going extend later. I will pre-cut the bottom off and tape it back to make its extension easy when the seedlings mature.

Once I started drying the moist topmost sod thinly layered on newspapers, the amount of emissions went down radically. I no longer feel mildly crushed by the headache. I tripled the drying efforts. Currently the only place where the emissions get straining are right next to the source sod. I could hasten the process by planting my deep-rooting seeds, though things are pretty good right now.

I planted these species since the last time: radish, spinach and cucumber.

I have concluded that the fumes from the sod is most likely CO2 based on the fact that I can temporarily get rid of the headache by deep-breathing a couple of times. Wrapping a T-shirt over my mouth to serve as a makeshift filter greatly reduces the rate of CO2 accumulation.

On to the business. I planted dill and basil to take advantage of the moist soil and to speed up its drying. I cut a flake box vertically in half and put about a liter of sod into each of them. I planned to plant some radishes on a full two-liter cut-open box later.

The carrot seeds are currently randomly mixed with the soil in the bags. I might get some surprise carrots growing on my plantations.

After a couple of days, the carrot sod started to emit either dirt dust micro-particles or unidentified decomposition fumes, causing moderate-strength headache and coughing. Based on the fact that the coughing fits did not coincide with the headache, both the dust (=the coughing factor) and decomposition fumes were involved. I repacked the sod into the original sod bags and put it in the bathroom (with a ventilation) taped shut.

Two things to consider about indoor gardening: 1) get dirt/sod made specifically for indoor use, and 2) deploy at most 0.5 times the sod liters per your apartment m2’s. Mine was 1.8 i.e. a way too much. I’ll deploy new seeds little by little once the sod dries a little and stops fuming.

As you can see, I taped together some spare oat flake boxes to produce a makeshift flower bench. It might fall apart if water it too much, so I am most likely going to water it super conservatively and eventually reinforce it. As you can see, it is two feet i.e. 61 cm wide. It became rounder than I expected when I added the soil. My 90 liter sod can fill it up to the very minimum of 12 inches i.e. about 31 cm that long carrots require.

There is multiple layers of newspapers  in the bottom separated by a plastic barrier made from plastic bags to make sure the water does not not simply flow through the papers before getting soaked in. The only thing I explicitly paid for in this pot is the duct tape keeping it together. Most major retail stores do not even sell two feet wide pots, 1.5 at most. The paper spots are from the priming bag. I could not separate all of the seeds, so I decided to save effort and plant the whole thing in small pieces.

I just needed to hack this quickly together as I have preparations for formal appointments that I need to make in time.

A side note: I noticed that the soil bags alone would make so-so growing benches on their own, especially for the less sensitive ones such as the above-the-ground crop species. I have already plans for those emptied soil bags. They are made of pretty good, stretchy plastic. I could recycle as half-ready growth beds. I have a ton of new seeds that need places to grow on.

I have primed i.e. kept in water a packet full of long carrot seeds. If I was to follow the instructions accurately, I would need to accommodate whole 10m2 room for just the carrots. The product is sold by a German style chain, so I know they are not kidding around. I calculated that I would need 3000 liters of garden soil for it. The main problem with the big soil mass is that it would make moisture damage very likely if the it simply started to let the irrigation water through. The carrots in particular require very soft soil, making it even more likely. Irrigating the topmost one-inch layer as the guides instruct involves a lot of water.

Whenever you face high risk for low gain, half-ass the risky part and focus on getting the gains as lazily as possible while avoiding the risk factor. That is what I live by. In practice, I am going to get the 80 l of gardening soil from store and that is it. The guides underline that my “long” type carrots need 10 to 15 ” depth, so I am going to give it to them, all the 38.1 cm. That leaves me with an about 0.48 m x 0.48 m area. I will plant the seeds on that and once it eventually gets crowded, I’ll pull out the extra seedlings and transplant them onto another 0.5 m x 0.5 m soil cube. They’ll be weakened by the process, though most likely good enough for seed production. I will counter the moisture hazard with the pile of old newspapers and plastic garbage I have lying around. 😀

Now for some carrot info: carrot is a biennial species, meaning it will make seeds in the spring of the second year and die (horribly). It is theoretically possible to buy fresh carrots from a store, plant them and get some ripe seeds out of them some time later. Like most root vegetables, a carrot will start growing stems and leaves when exposed to moisture and light. As long as it can maintain plant growth functions, it will keep producing antioxidants and resist rotting. Even a dug-up and exposed carrot will turn green and start photosynthesizing, which is why carrot-growers need to pile on more dirt on it when it nears its maturation point to keep it orange and non-bitter.

Off-topic notes: If you think carrot is weird, just wait until I get to potato. That one is a perennial aka multi-year species that spreads like a fungus and is very difficult to kill. Note: ‘sweet potato’ is a different species aka batata that coincidentally tastes like a sour carrot. A protip: always replace batata in recipes with the much cheaper carrot. I am planning to get some potatoes for seeding purposes. The potato is its seed. Also some water melon for similar purposes. I considered orange, though I do not have interest for growing stuff that most likely will never bear fruit despite all the effort.