From my experience with green beans in deep containers, the plants getting most of the lighting will root-outcompete the ones outside intense lighting, especially when artificial lighting is involved. The outcome will always be complete root-suffocation and death of the less-lighted plants. It will always come down to just one plant surviving.

The easiest solution is to have plants in separate solo containers so that they cannot dominate one other. Using the cell-divided containers is recommended if you really need to multi-plant. Have some plastic or metal sheets or bags blocking the competing plants to keep the growing soil tiles separated if have nothing else.

The deeper the container, the quicker the death escalation. E.g. one foot i.e. 0.30 m container will have tons of death though a 4″ one (0.10 m) will have only some death, with the container borders limiting the root expansion and general growth.

If you want to to fill the vacant-looking spots, pick low-maintenance herbs and flowers that both will not get suffocated and do not hinder the main plant. One deep-plant with tons of surface plants is an okay setup.

It really sucks when you grow a plant for months, only it to be suffocated and and withered by a much less productive plant that you planted much later. At least with beans, the victorious plants can capitalize on the nitrogen pockets built by the dead ones.

In short, it is most preferable to plant sparsely and over-light singular plants than planting many and having no guarantee of anything growing at a steady pace.

Herbs, flowers and other simple non-fruiting plants can be planted densely and still be quite easy to light adequately. Anything from small bean plants is already creating constant shadowing and over-growing issues that require extremely sparse planting to be avoided. It is understandably tempting to plant a ton of small-looking plants such as radish and turnip that remain quite small for a long time. Ultimately, they those plants will become a major and a recurring problem later down the line.

The compromise with planting “big” plants yet wanting to not “waste” the space between the sprouts, is to plant small flowers and herbs in the space between them. E.g. chives and dill are very unlikely to cause any shadowing issues. You can also consume those herbs and use them as spices if they somehow manage to overgrow, making the situation a win-win in any case.

A ton of my plants stopped growing for a week or two a couple weeks ago. My radishes stopped making leaves and my potato died. Once I added some super dense grass solution tea, the surviving ones started growing and leafing again. Also, the cabbage loopers came back, which is strange. I guess they are attracted by the smell of a GROWING plant (read: not a nutrition-starved one). The radish box was massive, proving how even the largest growing pot can get depleted.

The fertilization should continue for the entire growth cycle to make sure the land is maximally utilized. That is probably why experienced farmers/gardeners use animal feces as they release nutrition for a long time, reducing the need for weekly fertilizing. You can collect random green or dried up plant trash such as grass trims and solve them in a bucket of water, though you need to get fresh and new plant waste every few weeks or so, depending on how much grass you stuff into the bucket at once.

Legumes such as green beans seem to grow well even without massive fertilizing, probably because of the nitrogen-releasing bacteria pockets on their roots. They basically produce their own nitrogen, so they show much less nitrogen-deficiency-related symptoms such as the stopped growth. The ground tends to get really low on plant-useful nitrogen after just one batch of major cropping plant cycle. After the demanding ones such as maize/corn or potato, you should outright replace the soil. There is little use in fertilizing soil like that, that can barely grow grass.

After switching to more frequent watering and fresher fertilizer tea, the tomato plant growth has been stellar. It could also mean that I am over-supplying nitrogen, though let us ignore that. One of the branches grew at least half a foot in just a couple of days, breaking its under-supported  stem. The big observation here is that tomato is particularly slow at growing, so this is nothing normal. I am going to expand the enhanced watering to other plants besides tomatoes and cucumbers too.

Also, I am going to stockpile grass and grassy plants to be used for fertilizing. I basically need more two-gallon buckets, bigger ones if I can find some. I need to dunk the grass straight into a water-filled container to not have to deal with the undesired bugs that live in it, most specifically ticks that can become a major nuisance. Spiders and beetles can do whatever they want if they escape drowning. I saw one flower spider bungee-roping and eating some aphid while on a tomato plant.

It would be helpful to downsize the farm for the winter and some fertilizing might help accomplish just that. My gist is the desire to thoroughly depleting the soil nutrients before I dump it. I have been somewhat successful with beans, though they seem to start slow-growing in the late-cropping stage when their gigantic root networks start hitting one other or the limits of the container, leading to gradual withering or a growth stop. I have a good reason to try out fertilizing them to see if that will either restart the fast development or at least wither them faster and relieve the soil for the surviving bean plants.

My overall soil depletion plan (based on zero research) is this: beans / peas + something basic to eat the nitrogen pockets left by beans + finish the soil wreck with some herbs and flowers. Some guide advised to plant tomatoes into nitrogen-rich soil. I might do that with the ex-bean plantations. I do have some ‘matoes in undersized boxes suitable for that. Into the initial tomato plantation soils, I could put some beans + herbs and peppers to finish them off as they are most likely low on nitrogen in the wake of hungry tomatoes.

Basically, I need to fertilize and irrigate more and more often and to produce more fertilizing tea. I’ll get some extra buckets, a big, thickly-news-papered box to store the excessive dunked-and-debugged fertilizer feed for drying. Personally, I go insanely consumeristic on things I have a lot of, so with that being nutritious fertilizer, plants are going to like it a lot.

Expect some tomato documentary with photos semi-soon. I have a feeling I will have enough time (and boredom) to pull that off. To be honest, there is this one huge mess of a leafy bush of tomato-cucumber-watermelon that I really want to create an insightful narrative about. Currently is purely bizarre and monstrous. It is impossible to keep the other two out of the shots because of how much of a fused abomination it is. There are at least a cubic meter of space semi-full of living plant matter and easily hundreds of leaves. Complex things like that are quite intriquing. Even simple things such as watering and ripping out dried up leaves from blocking the lighting, become tricky with the size.

I will work something out and try some more casual fertilizing.

P.S. ‘Tea’ or ‘stew’ is a watery plant-part solution made of water and dead/dying plants in an OPEN container. In comparison, ‘tar’ or some other thicker substance is created with an air-sealed container.

The tar is more dense, though it is probably more dangerous to handle and accidentally inhale as the botulinum bacteria likes low-oxygen watery places like air-tight closed containers. That is why you do not generally eat expired tins of foodstuff, as that might be your last meal. The botulinum toxin is lethal. That is why I do not even bother with anything beyond teas.

Also, the non-aired fertilizing creates horrendous odors and definitely should not be done indoors — the smell might never come off. Just a little tip. You can get the nutrients by tea-ing, it will just take a few weeks longer. After a few weeks, the tea is so low on nutrients that it needs fresh organic matter or mincing to maintain its fertilizing ability of giving off nutrients.

[ 1. I tried multi-directional AND lower-plane ground level lighting, the growth seems to have increased in general and some of the long-obsoleted lowest leaves dried up and died, though only the ones that the plants clearly did not want to develop further.

 2. The initial leaves of the green bean (bush-variety) became super wide and dark green after being exposed to direct low-wattage, high Ra valued aka sun-like light and the subsequent leaves were much smaller and the plant height dwarf-like. Good lighting = more compact and healthier plants.

3. Alpine strawberries finally got super leafy by the window sill. They have been producing quite a lot of big berries. All of them taste like wild strawberries, which is to be expected from a variant of wild strawberry. I have not managed to get any of the berry seeds to sprout. Lightly dirt-covered, open seed or berry-flesh-covered, nothing so far. The small seed ones are almost difficult. Do not trust the germination percentages with them. E.g. less than 10 % of my 85% germination rate strawberries sprouted. It is probably soil-related. My blackish clay soil is not ideal, unlike the sandy one. Then again, I do tend to overestimate the passing of short time spans. The cultivation time of alpine strawberry is especially long, at 14 to 21 days. ]

Not much posting recently. I am studying the lighting magic to get some evidence-backed experience about how to best utilize lighting. After all, light is the most important variable to take care in space and soil abundant situations. I am considering buying even more lights to test out some multiple-lights-per-plant-box solutions. I have a six-foot-tall tomato around, after all.

Another thing I want to understand is how to reliably grow turnips. Turnips are the suicidal, almost identical brothers of radishes. Their problem is the lower initial sturdiness — weak rooting, weak stems and the tendency to fall and get eaten by the ground i.e. to decompose. I have lost a handful of big plant boxes full of those plants to the falling down.

In short, I am applying cell / matrix growing now with the turnip sprouts. Most likely the issue is lighting related as it is almost impossible to properly light at most inch tall (small-seeded) sprouts as it is very difficult to reliably get the light that low. The falling is caused by over-extending towards the light. Now my method is to grow a couple, really strong turnip sprouts for transplanting under ideal lighting and soil conditions.

Mostly I am waiting for my oldest plants to start flowering and the other end-of-life-cycle stuff. The cucumbers are doing that just fine, though could be fruit-growing faster, maybe I should water them more. The tomatoes are damn impossible cases. There are a lot of articles about non-blooming tomatoes. The suggestions involve the temperature, the soil, the root condition, the usual guess work. Someone suggested shaking the stem lightly. That is quite funny. The most credible idea is to up the fertilizers, probably the  K(alium) ones. I guess I am going to harvest some wild grass and flowering plants for some really thick tomato fertilizer. Another good idea: MORE WATER.

The soil is not a major issue when the plants are still growing while not showing any withering signs besides some out-of-the-light lower leaves. Similarly, as demonstrated by the growth of cucumbers, the flowering is not about water as much as kalium (K) aka potassium. Maybe the big plants like to stock up stuff before they go all out flowering, as demonstrated by one of my radishes with an inch-thick surface-root and not a single flower.

After killing a lot of my cucumbers with a tiny amount of table salt, I am not going to touch salts or even sulfates when it comes to gardening. Some suggestions involve “too much nitrogen (N) in the soil” and not enough light.

As my tomatoes are overpacked, I will go with the add-fertilizer route. Since I want more flowering, I need to liquidize some flower trash for them. I sure-as-hell am NOT going to purchase commercial stuff such as granite dust, hardwood ashes or banana peels just to throw them at my plants. WikiHow and the others suck at making original suggestions not fronted by some obvious fertilizer vendors.

Radish grow a tall flowering stalk branches with soft flowering spikes. Radish is dominantly biannual, so this usually happens in the second spring (in spacious conditions) or in autumn (in restricted conditions, e.g. flower pots). Once the flowering phase starts, the leaf growth stops and no amount of sunlight can counteract that effect. That is because the flowering is mostly sustained by depleting the land root and the tuber of the plant. The goal of the plant is to absorb all of the nutrients from that specific spot and to use them to propagate and spread the species to other, non-depleted spots. Radish is a fast root-grower, only second to to big-seeded beans that can fill a 2′ pot in a week. My guess is that once the root advancement is blocked, the plant turns into an annual species. The annualized plants are most likely much smaller than the biannual ones.

A typical alpine strawberry: long, pointy and much bigger than a wild strawberry, about 50% bigger at least. Probably even bigger when planted outside. This one absorbs almost any amount of shine without leaf burn and grows accordingly. Under so-so conditions, it grows in from seed to fruiting in three months.

Plants, of which leaves get stuck against moist soil, tend to get their dirt leaves decomposed and/or eaten. It does not matter if the plant is living or not, the dirt-touching part simply disappear over time. I suspect that scuttle flies eat them. They usually pose no threat against most plants because they seem to lack the enzymes to break down the plant-oil-coated and acidic leaves. They do eat small leaf stuff such as stem hairs, though not much.

If you want to avoid young sprout leaves from getting eaten by dirt, straighten them a bit. The taffy-like moist soil tends be sticky enough to catch them for good. The plants usually spring up back to their upright positions once the taffy adhesion is gone.

It is often a good idea to gently straighten stiff-stemmed fallen plants. Soft sprout stems such as tomato’s are likely to snap if you try to do that.

[ 1. The future bowling ball is growing at the base of the now-withering melon flower. 2. A white strawberry with some red scales is growing beneath the shadow of the leaves. ]

[ 1. The radish land root trunk, very tree-like and rock-hard, 2. green bean seeds from perished plants { they only have single fully-developed seeds because of genetic survival selection for most healthy offspring production } , 3. a late stage, flowering radish starts creating these grabby barbs from both the stem AND LEAVES, yes, leaf barbs, it is super original , 4. some full bloom radish flowers and 5. those very thin, pointy cucumber leaves near the flower bases are a late-stage-only structures, as usually the leaves are more box-like and wide, like maple leaves. ]

I was dead wrong about covering the bulbs with colored paper. That covering pretty much eliminates all the productivity offered by that lamp plant-growth-wise. Just use bare bulbs and remember to slightly increase the water of the enlightened plants as they need more water-borne nutrients to sustain themselves when they grow more. Also, the proximity of the bulb can dry up the soil a bit. I recommend buying a floor lamp or two as they are not limited by the amount of ceiling lamp sockets and you can place them closer to the plants’ height level on the floor.

I have been dealing with bush beans, a self-supporting variety and many other species from potato to tomato. Every single one besides weeds  and weed-like light flowerers, tend fall and never up. Or, they get dragged down by another supposedly self-supporting and thus stiff plant and the whole plantation goes down. Actually, I’ll post a picture of my bush bean travesty to make the point.

This is especially important in dense and big plantation farming as you cannot take care every single one individually and the plant knots involved in the takedowns get very big and complex. If you try to help fallen down plants afterwards, branch snapping fatalities are guaranteed. Oh yeah.

My recommendation is to at at least some supports such as these simple 1-penny BBQ wood sticks and loosely bind a plant every 10 cm or so. That is token supporting. If you really care, support stick every single plant you do not want risk losing, though you will lose some of them any. Keep the binding string loose to avoid damaging the branch or tensing it up to the snapping point.

With at least some supported plants acting as sentinels for others, one falling plant gets supported by the sentinel chain and actually can become supported itself as its own fall is stopped. That is massive improvement from the everybody-dies scenario. Even pressure-free watering droplets can tilt a non-tree-like plant half the way towards complete fall-down.

Support everything that matters. The sticks cost only a penny, i.e. the cheapest part of home plant farming. You can only lose by skipping it. A pack of 100 barbecue sticks costs only 70 cents here and I can even tape shorter or torn ones together to form as long support sticks as I want. Also, unlike the wooden cross-supports, thin sticks have practically shadowing effect, making  them pretty much issue-free and your number one way to support things. Also, remember to use string. Some times you can support big plants by tying them to big object high up even without support sticks.

What ever you do, never forget supporting your plants, pre-emptively.

[ Purple radish flowers. The side flower leaves have been destroyed by the double-teaming efforts of cabbage loopers and a violent gardener-wannabe. Loopers prefer fresh, young radish sprouts, hence the flower petals get targeted. ]

[ Potatoes do not usually grow much taller than a couple feet outside and under light-abundant conditions. Here is an example of what potato does when reaching for additional sunlight. It looks more like vine bean than its usual bush of multi-sprouts when it reaches out a length close to four feet long like that. ]

[ The small yellow one is a common full bloom flower of this weed and the big blown-up pine-cone-looking thing is the dried up seeding flower. ]

Steps:

1. Skip past commercial grow light products that have next to nothing separating them from your every day room lights. Use what cheap bulbs you you have for common room lighting and opt for the maximum energy-efficient LED lights whenever you can, though use up your old ones unless they are those super inefficient 40 W or 60 W tiny bulbs.
2. Get some floor lamps and place them in the middle or above of the plantation. Try to shade it as little as you can with the shader while not leaving it so open that you get regular eye flash irritation just from accidentally looking at its general direction.
3. Ceiling lamps, floor lambs, wall lambs, scaffold lambs — use what ever you can to get the light to your light-starved plants. Keep in mind that small 14W LEDs have very small effective radius, so you should get more of them rather than few bigger ones. Big ones are vastly less effective because of the heat dissipation of the LED technology as far as I know.
4. Keep it cheap. 8h of extra light per day is enough, as plants sleep about 8h and your extra light is probably wasted electricity. Do not expect miracles as sunlight is much more intense and higher quality for the plants than the artificial light. Know your limits and cut corners when it seems reasonable.
5. Different plants have different light requirements. Light is the biggest single life element for plants, so do not expect understand it completely just from a couple bullet points and experiments on a limited number of species. Stay humble and keep collecting experience.

[ Before and After pictures of cucumber rot ]

[ 1. Alpine strawberry and 2. cucumber ]

[ 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.