AMKuska's 2021 Garden

AMKuska

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Well, a new year and a new garden.

I'm trying a lot of new things this year (as always) and I'm particularly excited about this year as a growing season. I found powdery mildew resistent pumpkins, zukes, cucumbers and melons. We'll see how they turn out. My daughter helped me plant the cabbage and the broccoli tonight. We'll do more tomorrow. The grow tent is a bit crowded this year. I experimented with blueberry clippings from my neighbors bush. They're leafing out now, but no roots yet.

Onions are growing from seed and I started them earlier this month because they take so long.
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This year I'm going to be changing up how I handle the garden. I won't be tilling. I'll be using some of my own compost this year, as well as the purchased stuff. I'll be mulching to try and limit powdery mildew. I'm excited for the new year, and spending time with my beautiful kids in the garden.

Will this be the year we finally grow our own pumpkins?
 
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Alasgun

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We’re limited till folks here but this year intend to go more in that direction including seeding oats as a cover crop in and around the larger stuff.
powdery mildew is a problem up here as well and we’ve found that using (easily made at home) lacto bacillus serum as a foliar spray helps a lot. I also use a saylacilic acid solution to successfully keep pathogens at bay on the tomatoes and will be giving it a try this year on the mildews.
our seed grown onions are just starting to emerge as well! Once those thin hairy whips get 4 or so inches tall you can trim them back some and it will encourage them to put on girth. Between now and early May when they get set out i’ll trim mine 2-3 times. The trimmings have a good flavor and always find they’re way into something!

I’ve not been successful with blueberries yet.

it’s a good time of year for gardeners!
 

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baymule

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How do you make your own lacto bacillus and sayliclac spray? Milk and aspirin? Recipe please?
 

Alasgun

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@baymule, i’ve attached an article regarding making your own lacto. I use this stuff as a foliar feed for certain house plants and in the greenhouse too. when using it as a foliar feed, i spray it on in the evening, and have used it daily at times. When you use it that way you’ll notice the plants really like the stuff.
i’ve used it in the greenhouse sporadically to curb bit’s of powdery mildew before it gets out of hand. I use it as a digesting agent when rotting down a barrel of salmon carcasses (fish hydroslate) and i use the left over cheezy part in my compost and i usually dump a 1/2 gallon down the septic a couple times a year.

This year i intend to try it outside on the squash in the raised beds which have powdery mold issues from time to time. Generally it’s not bad enough that i care but it would be good to know!
look the article over and ask questions if you like, i can tell you what’s relevant to and what you can skip if you decide to make a batch, it’s really simple.
maybe we could start a thread for these kind’s of things, if anyone would be interested. This and fermented plant extract are both hot items in our setup.
dont be put off when you discover the writer is a weed grower, i’ve learned quite a few things from that community😎

i’ll pull up the salicylic (aspirin) article and get it on here somewhere in the next couple days. It’s essentially a plant hormone that functions as an early warning to the plant that it‘s being attacked and encourages that plant to produce this same hormone in defense. @Dirtmechanic chimed in one time when i was discussing this else where and i can tell by his response, he’s got a much greater understanding of how it works. If, you can pronounce all the words in his sentences!!

 
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AMKuska

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@baymule thank you so much for asking, I was going to ask the same thing. I've tried so many different things to fight powdery mildew, but I've only gotten a single cucumber in 4 years of trying, the mildew is so bad. I'm excited about this lacto spray and I'm definitely going to try it.

@Alasgun I'd love to have a full discussion on it. This is a very interesting topic.
 

baymule

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@Alasgun I enjoyed the article, don't mind that it is by a weed grower. Since weed is such a big money crop, those guys get real serious about growing the best they can.

I read the comments too and this one said skip all the home made stuff and buy calf and goat kid probiotics and add to the milk. Makes sense to me! LOL

BitcoinBud on February 4, 2017 at 10:57 am
Lacto serum is great stuff to have around the home and garden. I have been using bokashi composting for my kitchen scraps for years. As well as in the kitchen and garden to supress molds and mildew. I have used it on my vegetable garden for years. I have just recently started growing my own cannabis and plan to use it there as well to prevent and or treat powdery mildew. Have you ever heard of the old milk treatment for powdery mildew …..ding,ding,ding,ding, yup thats right you have been treating with lactobacillus and didn’t even know it.
Another quick way to get started is by skipping step one and adding probiotics directly to your milk. Just visit your local farm supply store and ask for calve or kid (baby goat) probiotics. Read the lable these are nearly all lactobacillus. Including enterococcus faecium, lactobacillus acidophilus, lactobacillus casei & lactobaillus plantarum.
Animals such as cattle, goats, sheep & horses are what is known as ruminates. They feed on rough foliage such as grasses. The animals themselves cannot process this biomass into usable energy. They rely on the microbes aka the different strains of lactobacillus residing in their “gut” or ruminate system to break this plant material down into nutrients that they can use.
It just so happens that these are the same microbes that are found in the soil.
So we as gardeners can colonize and use these micro digesters to our benefit to make organic fertilizers and mold/mildew treatments.
And by using the probiotic products from the farm supply, you know exactly what strains you are inoculating into your serum instead of relying on chance that you will get what you are looking for.
Sorry for the long winded explanation. But as a new grower I rarely find a significant way to contribute, but this just happens to be something I know a little bit about from growing up on the farm.
 

Alasgun

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if you read another dozen lacto articles, you’ll discover another dozen opinions. I choose this one because it was an easy one for folks to follow and has good pictures. Some of the articles are highly technical and contained way too much extraneous material.
noticing you picked up on the commenter pointing you to simply using a probiotic, ill add this. Read some more and you’ll see where they talk about how the rice wash gathers all bacteria from the environment and because your growing the serum in milk, most of what develops will be the right strain. There’s roughly a dozen of the acidophilus, biffidophilus,teradactal-ophilus’es etc 😳in most probiotics.
we take a probiotic everyday and always have it on hand so it was natural to give that a try. To date i’ve grown the serum by the recipe using rice wash water and using rice wash water in combination with a probiotic but never using the probiotic by it’s self. Id be interested in how that works.
i can tell you i’ve never had a failure and get more or less the same results every time. What will affect the outcome is the type of milk you use. If your after a large amount of the left over cheezy stuff to feed livestock, use whole milk. If your after the yellow whey, use 2%.
i’ve also never added the mollasses or brown sugar to extend non refrigerated storage as i always have a use for the batch when i make it and have found it keeps several months in a fridge just fine.
i’d encourage anyone to give this a try and follow up with your experiences, that’s how we all learn.

i’ve added the afore mentioned salicylic acid (aspirin) articles over on my One Alaskan’s greenhouse thread so as to not run away with @AMKuska‘s thread! Thanks for letting me interject these little tidbits😊
 
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AMKuska

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@Alasgun thanks again for the aspirin information. I'm going to try it! Regarding the lacto, my hesitation comes from the fact that I suspect there's something off in my garden's bacteria or possibly nematode biome. Every year my neigbors are all growing huge winter squash, zucchini, and pumpkins in their gardens.

We have the same growing conditions, the same weather (obviously), and I've used the same fertilizer as they have. My tomatoes do great, my beans are wildly out of control, but I can't get anything in the curcubid family to grow at all. I even use a drip system to avoid getting too much water on the leaves.

Powdery mildew is certainly the most visible problem I have, but many times the plants fail even without it. I recently started experimenting with an inoculated fertilizer someone recommended, and those particular plants do much better. Also plants grown in my greenhouse in sterilized soil do just fine--but they don't do fine if they're taken outside on warm days and put back in. So--fungus? Nematodes? Bacteria? I suspect something along those lines.

If I make a lacto spray capturing wild bacteria, I wonder if the odds are good I'll capture something nefarious, given the problems in my garden.
 

AMKuska

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Today I had enough egg shells to grind for a calcium supplement for the garden. We bake them and then keep them in this jar until there's enough to make it worth grinding them.
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After its powdered it looks like this
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I can mix it into the chicken food as a calcium supplement, or mix it into the garden. It's got quite a few purposes. :) I've also used it as a calcium supplement for dogs in the past.
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Here's my starchy rice water in progress @Alasgun ! I'm excited to see if it helps.
 

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