Click on a thumbnail picture below to see the full size version. 56 Entries. Wednesday, January 1 View Page Hi and welcome to 2025... An anti-goal for this year: To care about someone else's goal rather than set my own goal. That being said... if I didnt try to do my best then I wouldn't be me. I have to say... I was thrilled to post good numbers for the tomato competition last year, and I enjoyed the challenge of trying to beat Rick for the GPC's "tomato goty" award. What a thrill and an honor. Sorry Rick!!! I believe I can do better...   Wednesday, January 1 View Page Recognize this plant? Yes these are perennials, and this one is really happy.   Wednesday, January 1 View Page Apparently this primrose already bloomed and I missed it. My bad, I wasnt out looking for any flowers in December. This plant has been in this spot for 10+ years! In the right spot, they can be VERY perennial. A good spot is somewhere that gets low angle sun in the winter and has little other competition. This one is in the heavy needle-fall area under a large conifer. The spruce needles are a natural slug repellent, otherwise it would have been destroyed by slugs long ago.   Wednesday, January 1 View Page So enough about the primroses and the nonexistent winter. Did I mention the non-existent winter? There I did. So getting right back into tomatoes now: I spread this mulch and sprinkled about a gallon of fermented honey syrup over top of it I also added a pound or two of "fish bone meal" which isnt just fish bone meal its actually mixed with alfalfa and other goodies. So really its a balanced blended product. I will probably add more of it later. I apologize if this is lengthy and tedious but I'm trying to record what I'm doing (at least until I get too busy to do so). Bone meal does a great job of supplying what my soil lacks so I cant go wrong with it. But where I think I could go wrong would be to add too much nitrogen relative to everything else. Lots of brown compost here (pine needles, dead chopped grass, leaves, wood shavings). Lots of worms. But the reason for posting is that I remembered something: last years tomatoes actually followed, or were planted within, an early crop of potatoes. And previously I had assumed this was bad and that it would hurt my results but how do I know? What if it helped? If maybe the soil myco was well established because of the potatoes and all the potato myco gave the tomatoes a boost? The main reason I say this is because the biggest tomatoes came from the spots where the most potatoes were. This could be a coincidence but I'm also willing to consider that its not a coincidence. Maybe its worth the overlapping disease and insect pressure to prep. the area with potatoes ahead of the tomatoes. The flipside would be that they do hurt the tomatoes so I could have grown even bigger tomatoes if I hadnt put the potaoes in. This is also a very legit possibility. Maybe both are true, that the potatoes help inoculate the soil with helpful biology but they also steal nutrients. So... have the potatoes innoculate the soil, but dont let them steal any nutrients? (Or replace the nutrients by adding the extra bit of bone meal after the potatoes get dug out.) I'm thinking this could work! I'm thinking its a good plan.   Thursday, January 2 View Page Awhile back I grew two pumpkins on the same plant and I noticed a large difference in seed size. I attributed this to 1) the second pumpkin being set later in the year (hence a temperature difference) and 2) the second pumpkin sharing resources with another pumpkin for its whole existence whereas the first pumpkin did not have to share resources for most of its life (so maybe there were nutritional differences). If you want to see my original post about it: http://bigpumpkins.com/Diary/DiaryViewOne.asp?eid=342695 So that was interesting. But then this year I had a field pumpkin where two were set at the same time so that would eliminate most of the temperature difference (unless one got more sun than the other) and most of the nutritional difference. But I still suspected the seed sizes between the two pumpkins might be different. Why would the seed sizes be different? First, here are the seeds from two field pumpkins set at the same time on the same plant. Can you see that that ones on the right are larger? (I will theorize why in the next diary entry).   Thursday, January 2 View Page I know its hard to see visually but the seeds on the right are bigger and they weigh a lot more (around 30% more). Now I cant rule everything out, but the thickness of both pumpkins was the same, and the location on the plant was similar both about the same distance from the roots. Two things to consider: The smaller seeds were the pumpkin on a sidevine, whereas the larger pumpkin was the one on the mainvine. But like I said, the thickness of the pumpkins was the same and the pumpkin on the sidevine actually weighed a bit more because it was a bigger flower to begin with. And thats the key to the difference in seed size. How so? Well, the pumpkin on the side vine had about twice as many stigmas, and stigmas correspond to ovaries, and ovaries correspond to... ovums. Eggs. Seeds. The ovums (word of the day) in the pumpkins with the smaller seeds were competing with twice as many fellow ovums. The pollination rate was near perfect (hardly any duds in either pumpkin). So pollination rate wasnt a factor in the final seed count, only the number of "ovums". The seed count of the pumpkin with smaller seeds was twice that of the other pumpkin, (about 900?) and it produced more total weight of seeds even though each seed weighed less. And thats why each seed weighed less. Anyhow, to sum it up, seed size is once again not determined entirely by genetics. One of the factors determining seed size seems to be how many siblings did it have. Anyways, sorry for the dissertation on seed size. Its interesting but not really unexpected since the same thing happens in humans, for example, with more babies in a womb resulting in smaller sized babies. It probably has to do with nutrient flow because even if a mom ate more she couldnt give birth to octuplets weighing 8-10 lbs each. The limit to embryo growth is probably a nutrient restriction at the placenta or maybe there is no nutrient restriction maybe its all just the size if the womb. This is where my knowledge totally ends, I dont even know what question to ask next. So... onto the next question. When will my curiosity ever finally pay for itself? Now thats a good question.   Saturday, January 4 View Page This is whats left from one of last year's late pollination attempts. I finally tried to get the seeds out. It was a cross using Dan Sutherlands genetics (whatever he sent to the seed exchange). The pollination was done in September or October. So it violated my "pollinate before August 15th to get viable" seeds rule. I should have heated the greenhouse somehow. The late pollinations would have worked if I could have pushed the temp in the greenhouse up to 70-80 instead of being stuck down at 30-50. I have plenty of tomato seeds to plant but it was still disappointing that I didnt get the late season controlled crosses to succeed. In hindsight the best thing might have been to bring the whole project indoors.   Sunday, January 5 View Page Graphing the master gardener results (not sure which year, just some data I have access to) forms a curve (below). I would call this a "results distribution curve". I am not a math expert but while this isnt really a bell curve, it does form bell shapes when you mirror these curves to theirself (above, below). And I think the probability-based principle is the same. Every individual gpc category forms these curves:   Sunday, January 5 View Page Maybe other people dont think this way, but I find myself asking the question 'where do I want to improve'. I like the process of sober self reassessments, sometimes. This is where I figure I rank in the gpc categories. (The orange is both pumpkins and field pumpkins). I could still improve my tomato growing a little bit... or I could improve my watermelon or squash growing by a whole lot. Its kind of an interesting question, "do I want to improve at what I'm already good at?" Or "do I want to improve at something I'm really not good at." Maybe both... I think if a grower focuses on where they are strongest AND where they are weakest, it will lead to the most personal development. It does take more resources to burn the candle at both ends. Should I try a watermelon or cantelope, as these are the things I'm worst at? Hmm.   Sunday, January 5 View Page Rain-mudgeddon is over. Its been super wet. Decent forecast ahead... I picked up a couple hundred more pounds of coffee grounds mostly thanks to Starbucks plus the one local drive thru stand that actually separates their grounds from their trash. I dont think coffee grounds are the perfect fertilizer for every plant but they might grow me some better corn or something. I will try them with potatoes I think potatoes would do ok but theyd probably prefer alfalfa meal or bone meal. Tough love ahead maybe, because coffee grounds are free.   Tuesday, January 7 View Page I feel like Ive been posting too much, but I added some ammonium sulfate, elemental sulfer, dolomite lime and epsoma brand garden fertilizer to the 200 sq ft potato/ tomato patch. I didn't measure exactly, but maybe about a pound of each except the elemental sulfer only 1/2 lb or so. Hopefully I didn't add a full pound of ammonium sulfate because I do believe excess nitrogen could ruin my efforts. But with the way its been raining, there shouldnt be any excess fertilizer anywhere. Plus theres still so much brown material to break down. I could do a soil test, but I think things will be ok. Hopium (it comes first before Hydrogen and Helium) levels need to drop before I take a look at all the other elements. A chrmistry side note: elemtal sulfer plus dolomite would equal gypsum if they were able to re-combine. I'm not sure how much they can or cannot recombine when sprinkled and thrown around in a scattershot manner. The chemicals can recombine however they want, I'm not the solubility police.   Tuesday, January 7 View Page 150 sq ft hugelkultur? I'm going to share some thoughts and ideas on this because although I dismissed this idea a long time ago, (and Ive never seen anyone else post anything showing it can lead to better than average results) I'm now thinking about it again. Buckle in. I think there are two reasons hugelkultur doesnt give fantastic results and its a waste of time and effort: First, it doesn't introduce any nutrients that the soil doesnt already have. If you bury a fish under a corn plant, it gives nitrogen in the form of amino acids and also minerals from the ocean (or maybe its a freshwater fish, then it might only provide nitrogen). But putting a locally grown log under a plant only provides the minerals that the local soil already has. Second, I have found that air gaps and roots are not compatible. I dont know why this is, maybe it has to do with soil pests or water and nutrient movement or something or the roots themselves dont know where to spread when they (incorrectly) sense they are near the soil surface. The roots of most plants really just dont like all those big gaps. Layering wood like this just creates a lot of volume of space that the roots wont use very effectively. And last of all its like putting (really big) wood chips in the soil which for most soils is a no-no. Walnuts mixed into brownies might be good... but wood chips mixed into garden soil just isnt good, for various reasons, even without any airgaps. Contrary to the idea that soil should have air in it, air gaps of this size really only makes the situation worse. But hold on, even with all that being said, I might fiddle with throwing some cottonwood in the ground. Why? Well, first its so worthless as firewood. Its like a big wet sponge and even after drying it for ages, it has no significant heat value or burn time. 2nd, maybe it could have benefits, if it could be done in a way that eliminated all the drawbacks (including excessive effort). So, yeah. I am thinking about trying my own version of hugelculture just to see if I can tease any little net benefit out of it. So many people have tried and failed to get it to really work. But what if this old german tradition really used to work? Maybe we're just not doing it right... Clearly we are not doing it right. Well, I was going to post my own ideas on it in more detail but thats a long enough post. Just the intro here. I guess later on, if what I try works, then I'll explain more about what I did and why it actually worked. This is too lengthy already, sheesh.   Wednesday, January 8 View Page "I am not optimistic about growing a 9.5 lb tomato..." this is almost exactly what I said in 2020: http://bigpumpkins.com/Diary/DiaryViewOne.asp?eid=321271 Added a bag of starbucks coffee to the potato/tomato patch. About 10 lbs. That plus everything else should give the baseline fertility and nitrogen I want. I was hesitant to add much nitrogen before, but the rain has just been too much. It removes too many nutrients. If I want good results I've got to add them back. Not every nutrient gets washed out equally. I'll have to check my notes or do some testing eventually, but probably boron and nitrogen are two of the ones that disappear. I think ammonium might be the most soluble ion, if not nitrate.   Wednesday, January 8 View Page Nevermind about the cottonwood. https://www.highcountryliving.net/cottonwood-juglone-and-tomatoes/ It says squash can do ok, and this does not surprise me... because they can share the same riverbank habitat in the wild. It might be time to do some real life comparison tests. But I will need some other tree species. This is going to be fun. And I promise it wont be completely stupid. A small bit of intelligence will arise from the muck, just like it did 1 billion years ago....   Friday, January 17 View Page Seeds sent! The remaining stragglers... If they dont make it let me know. I have a couple sets in reserve & I can try again.   Monday, January 20 View Page Excuse me for lazily using my foot for scale. Soil test tube #1. Gotta pull out three more of these tubs and carefully fill them all with dirt in a "core sample" manner to test my current garden situation. The tube is 32" tall and about 8" wide. I think I can nearly exactly recreate my soil profile and then see the roots develop, and see the plant develop, and see how they may or may not do better with the various changes that I could make. The soil has done fairly well for me in the past, I've twice grown 2200 + lbs of pumpkins in 800 sq ft or so... But it does feel like my "12 inch depth" soil is maxed out. Ive worked it a bit deeper near the "crown" roots but its not Travis-deep yet... I believe in the advantages of no-till but I could rework the soil and then re build the soil health. I more or less know what I'm doing at this point, to where I think could heal the soil after damaging it. I do believe the soil biology has to be ready and that it has to want to grow a big pumpkin. The pumpkin plant can do half the work, but the soil biology does the other half. If the soil biology was badly disrupted then the results would only be half of what they ought to be... Or I'd have to work twice as hard to still get a good result. I guess what I want to test is, would it grow a healthier happier more robust plant to rework the soil (with an excavator). I can broadfork the top 6-8" and this is probably fine for tomatoes but if I wanted a Travis sized pumpkin, I might want to dig down 32" ??? Right now the roots can only go down 12-18" generally speaking... which is probably ok if I'm using drip tape and irrigating daily. Hmm. I can push some really nice growth... But to grow a true monster...? Hmm. This is where my knowledge ends and I dont know the answer.   Monday, January 20 View Page Vine efficiency diagram. There is a certain set distance that phloem can travel in 24 hours. I believe it flows at about 3 ft per hour? Vines probably contribute to the pumpkins based on math. Vine theory mathematics: Adding 6 feet of vine adds 2 hours to the travel time of the phloem and would reduce the contribution of this portion of the plant by at least 2 hours/ 24 hour day = 8.3%. In reality though I bet the phloem effectively flows slower near the vine tips than near the pumpkin. It might flow a 3 ft per hour at the pumpkin but the farther you get from the pumpkin, the slower it might travel. At 3 x 24 = 72 feet the phloem basically could not reach the pumpkin within a 24 hour period even at the fastest flow speed. But here my guess (yes guess) would be that the effective phloem flow speed also goes to zero (linearly?) approaching the periphery of the plant. If its a linear decrease in the speed as you go out outward then the effective distance that a peripheral part of the plant can contribute gets cut in half. Thus, 72/2= 36 feet. This also means that adding six feet of "average distance" vine would add 6/36 x 24= 4 hours of time to the total time to reach the pumpkin and reduce the "phloem delivery" efficiency by 16.6 % aka pumpkin size. Im seeing some beautiful math here that shows why the vines and roots grow at a steady rather than exponential rate (its all based on phloem speed) and the max growth speed of a plant must be an equation of total nutrients needed to grow the plant distance x/ phloem rate = time to grow distance x You cant change the phloem "density" because the plant self regulates (it won't clog its own arteries with excess sugar, its designed to regulate its blood sugar up to a max threshold just as we humans are supposed to be self regulating for things like sugar and sodium, bad things happen when there is no self regulation mechanism). The flow speed might change based on temperature, and the transport efficiency out of the leaves might change based on phosphorus, and ions like magnesium can be recycled faster depending on the plants transpiration rate. But I digress. So I think phloem speed is a proven concept, it might be slightly enhanced by sufficient potassium, other electrolytes, temperature, source/sink osmotic gradients, and certainly the availability of water. Get the right design, the right calcium levels, and then thing can go kaboom: Excess energy, potassium, and roots, and stress free availability of water (nutrient feeding roots separate from tap roots for water possibly) should = explosive growth.   Monday, January 20 View Page One of these ramblings that no one needs to read its garbage but I'll post it anyways. You can always find something useful at the dump, or at least I can. Some of my tomato GOTY stuff was yes actually salvaged from the dump, at least my repurposed "plastic fence" shade netting was lol. Anyhow, my diary is becoming a landfill. Here's a fresh pile of verbal waste! Pick out something useful at the "verbal dump" then let the rest of it produce methane for the next 150 years :( Fully tripping here, but the shape of a tree is determined almost purely by the math of its phloem. And the location of the largest possible fruit for a pumpkin plant should be, too. There's a few other factors (chemical signaling aka plant hormones and vine size and having no chemical or physical disruptions to the flow of phloem, aka no lack of nutrients and perfect delivery efficiency aka perfect weather and root health). Well this is a bunch of drivel at this point but I think that its like that "Rain Man" or "Goodwill Hunting" or "A Beatiful Mind" thing where there's math all around us if we could just see it. There's a formula that makes it makes it all make sense. I'm not terribly far from it. The "Vine layout calculator." It could be an app, it could do a design assessment just like any other engineering software, and AI could calculate the absolute best layout. But the truth is its too simple to even need AI. Just look at the nearest well fertilized tree. Copy nature. Natural intelligence, no need for AI. The problem with fruit trees as a model is they are designed to put most of their resources down through their trunk into their roots. The fruit on a tree is almost inconsequential, it uses the resources from only the nearest few leaf nodes of the branch that its on, it doesnt garner resources from the entire tree. But the roots mostly do garner the trees entire resources. Hence, every vine emanating from the pumpkin should look like a natural tree. If it doesn't, its probably inefficient. I've modeled natural stuff mathematically before (I came up with a mathematical model for the ratio of male to female flowers... it was a bit complex but it was beautiful and it worked.) Anyhow, I always thought that the pattern of a tree was just structural but it cant be... plants dont understand engineering... they do understand phloem though. The phloem plus some innate growth patterns (the exact expression of which is caused by chemisty of the genetics plus the environment) is what causes the structure. Vines dont have to have to make a strength investment or perennial investment into the roots. A pumpkin plant can truly maximize a fruit. Its ingenious. But how can we help it maximize itself even more.   Monday, January 20 View Page Better methods are allowing us to select better genetics. It might be tempting to say that the better genetics are leading the way, that we are causing the gentics to improve. But it goes both ways, the better gentics helps identify better methods, and then the better methods helps identify better genetics. Its a dance, but neither is really leading the other. They are more like circling each other. A breakout would occur when someone put together better genetics and better methods. We had this kind of a breakout with Willemijns long standing world record 2624.6... and now finally the genetics and methods have caught up to that, and we're probably ready for a new breakout, where the right combination of methods and genetics will again line up. The genetics and the methods are already out there, they just haven't lined up yet... 3k genetics just needs to land in the patch of someone with 3k growing methods and it will happen. Odds are low, but all things with low odds happen eventually. Progress is inevitable. Could I obtain a seed with 3k potential (or do I already have one in my seed collection)? Yes. Could I renovate my patch, my methods, my knowledge to the point that 3k would be possible? Id be happy with 2k, so why bother with trying for 3k? I guess as Mallory would say, "because its there...?" I'm in agreement with George Mallory. You could get all the same happiness from climbing a shorter mountain. There's no logical reason to try for the tallest mountain. You dont need Red Bull to sponsor you or whatever. Thats not even a factor... No amount of money or fame is worth all the pain. You just do it because its there. Yes? No? Maybe? Well Mallory was a bit of a loose nut and in the end Hillary did things because simply because he could. To simply do what you are capable of, is a much less dreamy approach than Mallory's "because its there". His allure-based approach to climbing Mt. Everest was not totally successful. What kind of person will grow the first 3k pumpkin? A Mallory or a Hillary?   Monday, January 20 View Page These are my 30 year old cactuses. Well one is 30+ years old the rest are 20-25. They reproduce. There used to be just one... the original one still there and it still looks youthful enough... and its becoming a grandparent now, evidently. These things make me happy and they are no work at all. They even kinda look like plump little squashes.   Tuesday, January 21 View Page 70 lbs per day is the goal this year. Just throwing it out there. Not sure the genetics I'll be using will do that much but oh well. Thats still the goal. Ambitious, yes, but I can't set it any lower. That's the target.   Tuesday, January 21 View Page I think this is analagous to how the phloem spreads into the pumpkin. I dont think its linear... it may move inward rather slowly starting at the periphery of the plant but then it would speed up near the pumpkin. When the sun goes down the gradient shifts upward and the phloem probably still moves towards the pumpkin, but slower. Pumpkins grown on a scale might be showing the slowing of the phloem movement/the 24 hour variation as the leaves load sugars into the plant. The size of the plant will reflect the amount of sugars being loaded into the plant, and the need of the roots will be met, and the growth rate of the pumpkin... Does any of this really matter? Well yes because if the curve was an equation (which it is) then the math could figure out where the grower is just spinning their wheels because if the phloem being generated is so far away that it cant travel to the pumpkin within 24 hours, and the leaves then reload the plant with more phloem the next day, then that part of the plant is extraneous. Its doing next to nothing. But could that extra bit of plant be helping if it was positioned closer to the pumpkin? Well, maybe.   Thursday, January 23 View Page "Defensible space" is good, surviveable space is better. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=a4JpOdS9ffI Some good points in this video. When the shurbs and trees dont burn, only the houses burn, then you cant blame nature. The blame is on this: when you create a "defensible" space you still need the defenders. With the way the government is incompetent, with evacuation orders, and with cuts to power and water availability... there won't be any defenders. Why create a defensible space to then not defend it? Whats really needed is a surviveable space. Which means these houses would survive even with nobody defending them. Anybody can look at this picture and realize that nature isnt to blame for these fires. The landscaping looks green, and the trees clearly were not the source of the heat. Defensible spaces is great, but this is no longer a "blame nature" sort of problem. Its the start of winter! How can excess heat from nature be a causative a factor in these fires. Dryness maybe... but heat, no. And every house is going to be fundamentally mostly dry. So, I guess this could happen anywhere. Well, watch the video, its better than anything I have to say.   Thursday, January 23 View Page And on a more positive note how about these log gizmos for starting a fire. Its clever. One log becomes the hearth and the kindling. Its its own little rocket stove ready to go. On youtube it would be called a swedish torch or one log fire.   Thursday, January 23 View Page First dandelions of the new year... I saw two today despite temps dropping to 21 degrees the previous nights.   Thursday, January 23 View Page Well, things can burn in the winter.   Thursday, January 23 View Page Some fires were natural owing to the dry grass, but this here was probably started by a laser microwave satellite. Say what? I dont know the truth. Oh wait yeah I do, in case, it was just me playing with matches.   Thursday, January 23 View Page Growing a giant pumpkin helps with fire prevention because when you're not burning the excess carbon off you're gathering up more of it up? As Forrest Gump would say, "We all do things that, well, just don't make no sense." I add more carbon to the patch because I think it will balance the excess nitrogen, then I add more nitrogen to help balance the excess carbon, then I add more... wait, am I just going in circles here?   Saturday, January 25 View Page I dont have an exact plan for 2025, I'm going with the flow, but I'm considering doing a full size plant, probably a squash, and a 150 sq ft plant, probably the 1296.3 Nicolas. How about a field kin, a marrow, some tomatoes... and just like that, I've got a full hand of cards. I thinking about an early orange pumpkin for the fair in August. Maybe that would be the winner of a standoff between the 1448 Bongers and 1293.5 Cleveland. That'll do. So I do have a plan. And I cant change it... Its set. For better or worse thats the plan. The 150 sq ft plant/ 150 breeding project will be in my BlossomDown diary... The other stuff will all be piled in here.   Monday, January 27 View Page I wanted to use promix as my control but this will have to do. I did some calculations to try to get a sense of how much fertilizer is in this potting mix. By my calculations, spreading a 4" layer of this potting mix over an acre would add 600 lbs of nitrogen. So its pretty rich stuff. (It says its .21% nitrogen.) I think that is right about what the competitive corn bushel growers would use, but dont quote me on that. I also got these little sample packs of Jacks fertilizer in the seed exchange and a sample of Holland's kick-a-poo fertilizer. I thought maybe I'd try these. I calculated out what adding one sample pack to the test tube would be equivalent to, and I would be adding the equivalent of 90 lbs of Jacks per 1,000 feet. So that seems a bit rich but really I think maybe its spot on. Well, it would be equivalent to 800 lbs per acre of nitrogen. Which is crazy high but we're trying for even more production than the high bushel corn growers, right? I'm saying that would be spread down through the soil profile to a depth of 2-3 feet though. So I dont think the EC would be off the charts. The ag sites say divide the lbs per acre by two to get the ppm. So that would be 400 ppm. Which is too much. But thats actually giving the rate per acre furrow slice which is 6.7". So if that much fertilizer is getting spread to a depth of, say, 32"... then the ppm gets divided by about 5 which = 80 ppm nitrogen. I dont know if this is correct, I'm just trying to figure this out as a layperson I'm not an agronomist (I should have been one?) But that seems perfectly ok, perfect really. So I can now set up four or five test tubes with different fertilizers and/or amendments and see how the plants perform. It might be a stupid experimant but Im already learning, just setting up the experiment is forcing me to think and learn, even though I may not learn much from the experiment itself.   Tuesday, January 28 View Page Test seeds plus... Plus three avocados. Seeing dirt in January is better than seeing no dirt at all, there's a slight chance they could get planted, or used for pollen...   Monday, February 3 View Page Snow mageddon begins... I wasnt sure winter would come this year. It has stopped by to say hello. Leaning Tower of Frosty...   Monday, February 3 View Page Test tubes... they each hold ~7 gallons. The one in the middle will be the miracle grow potting mix "control". The four others (two ea.) will be "core samples" of garden dirt taken from the 150 sq ft patch and maybe the tomato hut? The test seeds have germinated... just waiting on the kids to go to bed so I can be an up-at-midnight pumpkin tweeker, digging holes in my garden in the dead of winter. What am I doing? I know not?! It may be fun and educational to see the roots develop. I'm already starting to "see things differently." Both literally, and in my mind.   Wednesday, February 5 View Page I have realized a few things, one is that the the EC is probably very low at the start of the season because of all the rain. Another thing is that bringing all the poor mineral soil up and mixing all the nice fertile top soil down could be more detrimental than I was expecting. So I will do 3 tests of the soil profile "as is" and just one test of an extreme mixing of the soil profile, such as would happen if I rented machinery and deep dug the patch. I'm pleased with how the first "as is" test tube turned out. I used a post hole digger to remove the garden soil digging downward layer by layer. I placed it into the "test tube" and then, since after filling the tube directly from the hole in the garden the soil profile was upside down from its original state, I inverted the tube so the surface soil was back on top again... It was less work than expected and it turned our better than I expected. A video would be worth ten thousand words but I'm just not going to go that route yet. Last, I'm noticing ample pore space despite trying to compact the soil back to a "stand on it" soil density. I'm using a wood stick to try to apply about 10 lbs per square inch which I figure is about where it needs to be for the test to best mimick reality. The reality is I'm too lazy and cheap for walking boards. The huge amount of pore space I can see even after compressing it is interesting. I do have light textured sandy loam filled with pumice and underlain by pumice from some ancient eruption... overall its not easily compressed into concrete. I think I can walk on it and the plant roots will barely notice. I could be wrong.   Wednesday, February 5 View Page No roots here yet but the pore spaces for them are huge?! Maybe too big, even? Its weird to think that I have applied pressure equal to standing on this and there is still that much pore space? Eventually, water flow and worms would fill the gaps, but essentially, its crazy to think that this is how porous it could be even after walking on it? It looks even if all the gaps got filled with worm poop there would never be sufficient compaction here to stop a root??? Note: I began to second guess my soil compression efforts, so as a further test I applied my full body weight to the soil in the test tube by kneeling with my full weight on the end of a "shoe sized" log... Its not a very scientific method, but oh well. ...Theres weird quirks of cone vectors (the application of downward force) that I cant control. So this is unscientific, but dang, it sure is fun. This is the soil about 1 ft deep after "applying my full weight" to it. Really good? Really bad? Somewhere in between? Is anyone using a penetrometer to try to get their soil density/compaction "perfect"? One last note this soil has been fully rain saturated this winter so its at its field capacity. But its not in excess of field capacity... theres no "clay particles liquefying" issue here. Liquefaction is a separate issue. All of this would surely drive a normal person crazy! But its home sweet home to me. My dad was a geologist and he managed to mention pretty much everything. So for better or worse, all this stuff is already in my head. He wasnt an agronomist but its all the same ideas especially those relating to hydrology (he was a board certified hydrologist too)-- just in a different setting. Well, enough of the methodology. Let's just skip ahead to the results and conclusions...   Wednesday, February 5 View Page The (not) perfect germination of the 1677 Clayton's. It would have been perfect except I can see one tore off its own cotyledon. The root lengths were identical so prior to the cotyledon accident, all were of very similar strength. They would have been four perfect test subjects & now down to three. Oh well. I'll still plant the gimpy one. Or, I might plant some tomato seeds in one of the tubes instead...?   Wednesday, February 5 View Page Final setup. I added a myco product to the miracle grow (5) and "disturbed" soil (4) tubes. For the rest I will give the native myco the benefit of the doubt. Test tube (1) is from very near the exact spot where I grew the 9.5 and 7.69 lb tomatoes. Test tubes (2) and (4) are from the future 150 sq ft patch. Test tube (3) is from the main patch which grew the 1677 squashkin in 2023 and the 202 Clayton bushel gourd in 2024. I think I can already tell some differences in the soil nutrients and the growth potential of the different areas just from digging the soil for the test tubes. I may not learn much from this but at least it has caused me to do a lot of thinking and get a bit of exercise. The little 1677 sprouts had some excellent roots... it will be fun to see what they look like in a couple weeks!   Sunday, February 9 View Page Some roots have made it to the glass so I can now begin to observe them in their natural environment. Just some ideas here, this is not intended to help anyone, just gonna brainstorm some stuff here. First, one of the high yield corn growers I was listening to mentioned ripping the soil in a way that did not mix the rich top layer of soil down into the poorer mineral soil deeper down. He speculated that this might be wasteful/ inefficient. I guess because, if he wants the young plants to get a good start, then it might make sense to keep the best soil right where they are at rather than diluting it downwards? He was no longer in favor of moldboard plowing. But it seems to me that moldboard plowing doesnt really threaten that much soil mixing. I guess he figured the deeper ripping was worthwhile but the moldboard plowing just wasnt providing enough benefits. Other top corn growers are doing no till or a surface scratch or strip till?? Anyhow the light went on in my head and I thought, duh, I could leave the mineral soil and pumice down below and keep the organic soil at the surface but still loosen the whole soil profile a bit, and that might help. If I could just get really good at growing corn and potatoes... then everything else should be relatively easy. The irony is that corn and potatoes are notoriously easy to grow. To be clear, I'm not talking about growing them in a normal or average way, I'm talking about getting to the level of a fully optimized crop/yield. For pumpkins, I can get really good results if I just leave things alone. I could add some calcium, chelate it a bit with some humic stuff, and maybe throw in a bit of zinc, boron, copper, phosphorus. I could try cobalt selenium zinc nickel and more silicates, but I'd need a more expensive soil test before I monkeyed with those. My monkey brain is intimidated by all the extra research it would take to try to get these things perfectly "right". I went out on a limb and tried adding molybdenum the past couple years and I think this helped, albeit in a small way. Something to consider is, maybe the crop doesnt need much of a certain micronutrient, but maybe the soil biology does? When the government studied "what chemicals do plants need to grow" they may have done so in a sterile laboratory setting. Perhaps without UV light. Maybe in the real world, plants (and their symbiotic soil biology) need a different range of minerals than they do in a laboratory. A lot of our science is based on 50's or 60's research that wasn't very wise. It was the same era as lobotomies and male doctors telling women how to give birth. Anyhow, I think agronomists may have been obtuse and overbearing as well, in how they viewed and studied crop production. With maybe the exception of nuclear weapons, I think we ought to refigure all the conclusions of that "scientific" era?   Sunday, February 9 View Page Cont'd... Well, molybdenum is a whole 'nother discussion, but the point is, these odd little micros are yes tedious but not too terribly expensive (they are very expensive) but the quantities needed are so small that it ends up inexpensive. I'd guess I've used $1 worth of molybdenum... or something like that. Does it add pounds? Who knows. Does it improve the soil/plant health? Yeah, I do think so. I had some local gardeners ask why my red runner beans were so plump. I dont know... is it because I was insane enough to add 1 ppm of molybdenum to my row of beans??? I'm always caught off guard by these questions. And I never know the answers with any certainty. For everyone else its about a goal. Do I even have a goal? Sometimes, I do not care at all about the goal. Instead all I care about is the method. Does the goal need the method as the method needs the goal? I wish I could dump all the goals and just work on the methods. I guess I could. What good is it to work on a fast car if there's no racetrack or finish line... Still, I'd like to just work in the pit as part of the pit crew, and not actually have to go out and win the race. But... this isnt a team sport, generally. Not yet. So, eventually I must enter the race.   Sunday, February 9 View Page A couple roots visible in the potting mix control. It has the best roots, followed by the mixed mineral soil that contains the least organics. At first I thought this was random. Now I think there is insufficient oxygen. The rapid warm up plus saturated soil has caused anaerobic conditions. This is a good reminder that if a grower digs a pit for heating cables and adds organics and/or water in addition to the heat its probably easy to create an anaerobic or partially anaerobic zone for a period of time. I've had this problem myself. Its interesting to see this happening here in real time, to see the roots failing to develop as well as they should. If I had to guess, I would have guessed that the mixed soil tube would have suffered the worst effect, but there was a greater total quantity of partially decomposed organics in close proximity to the pumpkin sprout in the normal-soil-layering tubes. So the oxygen may in fact be more depleted in these less-mixed tubes. Precisely the opposite of what no-till is trying to achieve. Its not easy to draw direct conclusions, except that disturbances and inputs and changes to the soil should not create anaerobic conditions otherwise the roots will be hindered. And even if the oxygen returns, the soil microbes may be altered for a long time, and the soil ph could change too, and its unclear to me just how long these changes would last. They might last a long time.   Sunday, February 9 View Page Cont'd... The most obvious conclusion though is that the compaction of the soil could be an oxygen-to m-roots issue more than it is a physical "the roots cant penetrate through" issue. In the test tubes, the roots seem to be penetrating just fine through the soil, even where I placed my full body weight onto it mimicking a shoe. So far within my experiment, oxygen seems to be the probable limiting issue with foot traffic compaction, rather than root penetration.   Wednesday, February 12 View Page No snow down at the park. But there is snow at my house, just a mile away.   Wednesday, February 12 View Page A mole hill so big it has its own glacier. Nature is making mountains out of molehills...   Wednesday, February 12 View Page Miracle grow potting mix in the middle. It has a lot of forest byproduct in it aka bark fibre. Probably not the top choice for competitive growers but the roots are healthy enough. Its useful as something to compare my garden soil to. My garden soil is not perfect, either.   Thursday, February 13 View Page I would usually freeze-sterilize dirt from the garden, but for these soil tests I did not, and its interesting seeing the macro soil biology. There are many soil bugs mostly in the large patch sample. The soil in that spot is deeper and there is more food. We dont get cold enough here to kill the soil bugs, a few may perish over the winter but the clever ones have to burrow down only 4"-8" to find survivable/ livable temperatures. And that soil ended up on the test tubes so now there is an abundance of life, at least in the main patch test tube. I watched a few leggy wormy type critters communicating with each other. They were sharing a hole up against the glass. Communicating via their antennae. Maybe this hole is their bigpumpkins.com, a place where they talk about pumpkin roots with the other bugs. They're definitely talking about something. Anyhow, some of these soil bugs probably do eat roots, a few may even crawl up the plant and chew on the above ground portions at night. Its a whole food web that has all the interesting shapes and diversity of creatures that you'd find on an African savannah. And then there's an even smaller realm of microscopic creatures, busily living their lives in yet another level too small to see except with a microscope. Supposing I steam or h202 sterilized the soil and eliminated all of these hidden kingdoms of life... would that grow a bigger pumpkin? I dont know. Its impossible to keep the environment totally sterile due to mold spores and the odd creature here or there that survives or wanders in. The worms especially aid in the soil structure, and there are countless decomposting critters releasing CO2 and nutrients.   Thursday, February 13 View Page I thought my old phone's camera would not be good enough but it even shows the root hairs (bp might lower the resolution however). Saw quite a few worms today. I didnt add them on purpose, they were hitchhikers hidden in the dirt clods. I added some water with copper sulfate (less than a teaspoon per gallon) and they went a bit nuts like they were getting a mild electic shock from it. Just trying to learn a bit about the affect of different fertilizers on the plants. If there is a positive effect then I probably need more availability of that nutrient.   Saturday, February 15 View Page Its been two weeks since the seeds came up, 18 days total. The middle miracle grow test is bigger than my garden soil tests but it has showed some poor development in the newest leaves. I think its zinc, calcium or boron. The weird thing is, all the plants seem to share some leaf symptom where they arent as green as they should be, I think it could be manganese or sulfer or calcium. I believe the only thing all the different soils may have in common is being a bit too water saturated, and they were subject to an abrupt warm up which may have triggered all the bacteria to consume the sulfer, iron, etc rather quickly before the plants could get it. There will probably be a bacterial/fungal die off in a week or two and then whatever nutrient was in short supply will once again be available. Its not just nitrogen that can get locked up by the soil biology, I think sulfer, iron, and maybe one other thing (I forget, sorry) is in high demand from the soil microbes. Hitting the plants with small amounts of the right fertilizers ahead of time could alleviate this. I know early in the year growers favor things like calcium nitrate and gypsum and maybe blood meal / bone meal. Not all of these things make sense later in the season, but they could help push the plants through the lethargic part of springtime. I'm glad I'm doing this project its reminding me of the things I can do to get a better result, when spring finally does arrive...   Sunday, February 16 View Page 1st leaf has reached 9". The miracle grow is performing better than my garden soil which isnt too much of a surprise. But its only a little better than the soil from my "best" patch (the one on the left)... but oddly enough that plant also has the worst roots. I could dump these plants out and restart but I dont have too many of these 1677 seeds. In hindsight I should have used another seed. Oh well. I will try a couple more fertilizer tests on them, then maybe start over or figure out how to re-use these plants later.   Tuesday, February 18 View Page Roots nicely visible.   Wednesday, February 19 View Page There's probably three deficiencies here. Clockwise from lower left, I added calcium sulfate, balanced fertilizer, iron chelate, manganese, and magnesium sulfate. Will see which fertilizers they respond to, if any. I should probably add ammonium sulfate and/or calcium nitrate to the plants on the left. Or perhaps they are low in phosphorus... Maybe save these for the next round here in a few days.   Wednesday, February 19 View Page This is the one where I applied the finely ground calcium sulfate. Interesting that the worm channels helped to carry both the calcium sulfate and water down into the ground. You can see where the calcium sulfate settled during its brief transit downward. It effectively distributed the calcium sulfate into the root zone to a depth of about 6". This creates interesting ideas about the possible benefits of flood irrigation & worms, and getting insoluble things into the ground even without tillage.   Thursday, February 20 View Page I am coming up with answers to questions that I never even knew to ask. Like, what are these larger voids in the dirt that seem to be appearing? Well, during the day it will be a void... at night its filled with worms. There's 8+ worms here enjoying each others company, or some extra tasty bit of rot. Are they utilizing a void in the dirt that was already there or did they create this void themselves? Either is possible, and either way, theres a lot of worm activity going on... at night. During the day I see the voids they created (or made use of) the night before. I think these are red wrigglers, not standard earthworms. I have both kinds in the location where I grew the 1677 lber. The red wrigglers do speed the decomposition up a bit because they tend to be more surface dwelling and very hungry   Thursday, February 20 View Page Here I marked where I could see worms. The central worm "knot" has many worms. Its a bit surprising that this many survived the move into the test tube. I mostly used a post hole digger to grab the dirt, which isnt a worm friendly way to move dirt, but because there are probably 100+ worms in a volume this size (7 gallons), even if I chop 90% there could be a dozen or more suvivors. And even this seems to be enough to make real changes to the soil properties/drainage, which is interesting.   Thursday, February 20 View Page Another question in the back of my mind has been, do the worms get annoyed when the plant sends its roots through their tunnels? Well, first the worms are super active and they dont seem to mind the work of moving dirt around and making new tunnels. But second, I think maybe the roots will avoid empty cavities in the ground. Which seems counter intuitive but I think roots are designed to seek material of a certain density. They want to travel through dirt not air. They may avoid entering the worm tunnels or chambers for this reason. Now, this is a very relevant and basic question, but I bet few people know the answer. I bet most people who study plants and soils dont even know the answer. I have never heard this discussed, even though you cant really understand soil without knowing this.   Thursday, February 20 View Page Not much left of Frosty... Things feel ready to Grow! Is winter over?   Friday, February 21 View Page These plants were identical a few days ago. The one on the right got Jacks fertilizer plus extra manganese... plus extra calcium sulfate? The one on the left got chelated iron only. There isnt as much difference in the roots yet, but eventually the greater foliage will also create greater roots. It seems that iron wasn't the issue for the plant on the left, but probably acidity, lack of phosphorus and nitrogen (and maybe manganese and sulfer and calcium) were issues. It took a few days, but the turnaround is remarkable now.