AMKuska's 2021 Garden

AMKuska

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One of the budding tomatoes!
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AMKuska

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Things are going well in the garden today. Potted up 11 plants that needed it, put the onions out to harden off, and collected rocks for drainage for my future gardens. We start working on them tomorrow!
 

AMKuska

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Oh, @Alasgun that lactobacillus spray is amazing!! My first batch unfortunately molded, so I tossed it out to try again. I tossed it in the composter since you mentioned you used it to digest salmon carcasses. OMG! My compost is already half-rotted in just a couple days of using it! Talk about efficient! I'm going to throw some in with every batch to keep the compost happy.

Can't wait to see what it does for plants and soil health. Also, I just watched "Kiss the Ground" which is on Netflix. It talked about how important bacteria is to soil health, so I'm definitely going to treat my soil to see if it helps.
 

Alasgun

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@AMKuska, thanks for the feedback. Typically you toss “something foreign” out on one of these forums and it flops!

i learned about it initially, from a fellow in Viet-Nam! On a forum!
my interest at that time was in using it as a foliar feed source and before too long i believe the plants were actually looking for me each evening when i’d give them they’re nightly tonic😳 the growth rate and plant quality certainly agreed with that.

keep playing with it, i’ve not found anything I DONT LIKE about it yet.

beyond Lacto bacillus im also a huge fan of fermented plant extract and my favorite is Aerated Compost Tea! All equally easy to make and each one an all-star in they’re own right!
 

ninnymary

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Here is my hardening off starts schedule. Hope it helps. If I rush it my starts get sunburned.

Day 1 2 hours in shade

Day 2 3-4 hours in shade

Day 3 5-6 hours in partial sun

Day 4 7-8 hours in partial sun

Day 5 7-8 hours in partial sun

Day 6 All day sun

Day 7 - All day sun

Mary
 

AMKuska

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@AMKuska, thanks for the feedback. Typically you toss “something foreign” out on one of these forums and it flops!

i learned about it initially, from a fellow in Viet-Nam! On a forum!
my interest at that time was in using it as a foliar feed source and before too long i believe the plants were actually looking for me each evening when i’d give them they’re nightly tonic😳 the growth rate and plant quality certainly agreed with that.

keep playing with it, i’ve not found anything I DONT LIKE about it yet.

beyond Lacto bacillus im also a huge fan of fermented plant extract and my favorite is Aerated Compost Tea! All equally easy to make and each one an all-star in they’re own right!

I'm interested in this also! My composter has a feature that allows me to collect compost tea in the base, however I have no idea how I would "Aerate" it.

I'm really excited about all the big changes coming to my garden. My garden is going to look like an Amazon jungle this year if half of it works haha
 

Alasgun

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@AMKuska let me back up a bit and apologize to you for my assuming nature? I guess i naturally assume folks understand things they really don’t. Gardening organically, in this case. You’ve made two statements in your last two post that cause me to think this.


”Can't wait to see what it does for plants and soil health. Also, I just watched "Kiss the Ground" which is on Netflix. It talked about how important bacteria is to soil health, so I'm definitely going to treat my soil to see if it helps.”
And
“I'm really excited about all the big changes coming to my garden. My garden is going to look like an Amazon jungle this year if half of it works haha”.

An awful lot of why any jungle looks like a jungle is because it’s not been screwed with and the soil health is good. Good includes a healthy “micro-herd”, which is how they refer to the bazillion, trillion, quadrillion microbes 😳 living in a cubic ft of healthy soil. Man comes along dumping every scientific concoction they can dream up on the ground to ”improve” growing conditions and what they’ve actually done is to kill most of the microbes making the soil dependent of further “fertilizer applications. Think of this like someone who has undergone chemotherapy!

When The Creator set all this up years ago, He didn’t have Miracle grow! He did however, understand the symbiotic relationship between the microbes and the plants.

Organic gardening is not a lot but somewhat slower than conventional methods but in the end you have produce that your comfortable eating!
However, it’s a big tent and a little research on your part will help you if you’re interested in a walk on the wild side!

Jeff Lowenfells book “Teaming with Microbes”,is a good read and although he’s dealing with Aerated compost tea you’ll gain a lot of understanding about how the various microbes function in differing situations. Organic covers a lot of ground these days so weigh the opinions of “the experts” and don’t jump on everything you read.
Compost tea is a good example. There are at least a hundred different methods and each will yield something useful, maybe! A bag of compost in a bucket of water will yield a dark tea that probably stinks a little and may or may not have much benefit on plants because all you've done is Soak off some nutrients from the rotting matter and apply them to the garden. Manure tea would be a better option for a soaking method if thats what you want.

Microbes come in numerous configurations, all useful for certain purposes but not all useful for the same purposes! In Aerated compost tea you are collecting and breeding aerobic (require O2) microbes, cut of the air flow to your solution and it becomes anaerobic (doesn’t require O2) pretty quickly. I wont go into a long winded dissertation on how to make aerated tea here, it’s very easy and you would see tremendous results from your first batch. It’s easier to put together than the LAB’s you just made!

one last tidbit then i’ll leave your head to swirl, i’ve previously mentioned these three things that i refer to as old standby’s.
In L.A.B’s you are growing anaerobic microbes, in compost tea, aerobic microbes and in fermented plant extract, facultative microbes. Each have there place and each are quite easy to generate and use.

Learning how the microbes function is the foundation, build a good one and anything you build up from that will be just fine!
thanks for bearing with me.
 

AMKuska

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Went to help my husband build the raised garden bed and got pushed out of the way.

They sawed, hammered and toted boards about the whole day. It's finished now, pics in the morning.
 

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