October and November #17: Yearly Closure
So it happened again. Everything is dead. You might be wondering why there is no October update and why there is a November update when November is clearly not over yet.
It’s been a challenging season, to say the least. The amount of work I put in, objectively speaking, with mixed results, is taking a little bit of a toll on me. It’s mostly impostor syndrome dressed up as anger, with some minor frustration in combination with the inevitable end of the season that gives me the blues. That doesn’t mean stuff was not happening in October, it’s just that I didn’t feel like writing about it sooner. But now I do, and I can also use this as an opportunity to reflect on the season and the lessons I took from it. At least I hope I took some.
The squirrel is probably the cutest thing I have seen this fall.
In October, I had to visit London yet again to attend DEMUXED, a video-dev-oriented conference. I rarely talk about my job on the internet, except on LinkedIn, but we all know what kind of network LinkedIn is, right? The conference took place near the London Eye, so very deep in the city center. I am not exactly fond of city centers because I am very much a nature and outskirts guy, so spending any time cramped with hundreds of people on one street isn’t exactly my cup of tea. I used the spare time I had to explore the city center, because, even though I don’t like it, I think it is important to experience it at least once. And let me tell you, after one “experiencing” of Regent Street, I am not going to complain about Old Town Square in Prague for a while.
But don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed the conference very much, I just don’t want to talk about it here, since I’ll be covering it on the company blog. And I don’t want to repeat myself. Feel free to check it out there if you want to read more from me!
Enough blathering and ranting on about London, very original, right? Let’s get back to the death and depression concentrated in the garden.
the berry upgrade
In September, I got this idea. One of my apple trees sustained significant damage, as previously reported. But there is this other apple tree that’s slowly dying. It’s basically on life support, and this season was a decisive one for it. Unfortunately, the results speak for themselves. No apples, no new branches, or signs of recovery. Out it will go! But now I have to figure out what to do with the space. It’s a pretty preem spot with one caveat. It gets some nice sunshine only in the morning and early afternoon, and then it’s shaded by yet another walnut tree.
And this walnut tree is the main limiting factor for the stuff I can grow there. But I have some very old and barely fruiting blueberries just a few meters away. The soil is naturally acidic there, and I think some new blueberries could have a chance in that spot.
From my favorite plant shop, I ordered six shrubs of blueberries, each one a slightly different variety, not that I planned this, there was just a really good deal on them. Just to clarify one thing: I have nearly zero experience growing blueberries, and I have only a slight idea what I am doing.
I bought some mineral fertilizer because blueberries are really hungry for those micros, a bag of white peat, and collected a bunch of Thuja needles. This should make a nice, acidic soil mix, hopefully. I dug three pits: one large and two smaller. I originally planned to put three shrubs in one pit, but the spacing would be tight, and since I didn’t really know what I was doing, I decided to play it safe. I lined the pit with geotextile to prevent weeds and to prevent the acidic content from leaching out.
I used the power of the internet to search for an optimal mix, averaging multiple sources, and landed on a blend of the original soil, peat, leftover sand, and needles. Sprinkled with some Kristalon fertilizer for blueberries, and it should be good to go!
Well, let’s see in the spring. My hopes are high that they can fall deep.
the #4011 situation
We had a cold snap. In fact, we had multiple cold snaps. All of them ruined the beautiful banana leaves a little bit more. It’s inevitable, time to put my lovely banana plants to sleep. But not “to sleep” like the dog you had as a child, and your parents told you it went to the sunny meadows with other dogs. I plan to resurrect them in spring, which is something you can’t do with the dog.
I gifted one of my banana to my neighbor. It survived a little bit longer due to its proximity to heated building.
As with those blueberries, I have zero clue how to overwinter bananas. Luckily, bananas are quite the survivor. They can survive in their rhizome state down to −20°C. However, the pseudostem and all the beautiful green stuff die. I don’t expect the temperatures to drop that low, but I also want to try different ways of preserving the plants. As I teased last time, I decided to keep most of my plants outside and two plants inside. I cut all the leaves down and chopped the pseudostem in half, wrapped it in a thick layer of geotextile all around, and secured it with a canvas bag. But that’s still not all! As yet another layer of insulation, I covered everything with a thick coat of dry leaves.
The last pair of bananas I dug out from the soil, removed most of the soil, wrapped them in a geotextile, and put them into the bag. This neat package should keep them safe and dry from the harshest weather.
Did you know that banana plants are related to ginger? It's a herb! For a few more barely interesting facts about bananas go here:
Jakub Dušek
the last straw
With my bananas safely inside, there is just one more last harvest and plant cleanup. I decided to make my life easier this year, and I bought myself a new toy, a garden shredder! A very useful thing, let me say. I reduced all my tomato plants to a single bag of compostable waste. It’s kind of crazy to see how little plant matter there actually is.
There is just one flaw with the model I got: it clogs itself on very wet material. I figured out that it is better to shred a combination of wood and green plant material.
I shredded everything from tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers from the greenhouse, to branches and sticks from trees and raspberries. Speaking of cucumbers, I harvested the last tiny cucumbers from my hydroponic plants. I am pretty pleased with the results of this experiment. I will repeat it next year, but I have to research the varieties and pick some parthenocarpic ones. I expected better performance, but I should probably have picked an early hybrid. Lessons learned. Shred it goes!
Dead zucchini? Shred shred shred! Well, these could have gone directly to the compost pile, but since I have the shredder now, everything goes through it!
The root ball on the hydroponic zucchini is crazy.
But there is still stuff to harvest. I pulled the carrots out of my onion bed. They are on the smaller side, but the cold made them much sweeter than the spring carrots. There is a lesson to take from the onion and garlic bed, but about that later.
From the last bed, I pulled out the subpar fennel and finally pulled out all my beets. The fennel has a strong aniseed scent, but it tastes more like a leek or an onion. It’s a very weird combination of tastes. I’ve seen much bigger bulbs in the store, however, and I don’t think I will grow them again next year. But I will totally grow the beets. Huge bulbs and none of them is cracked!
And with the beets safely stored to soften before canning, I consider the season closed. There is just one more thing to do. To prep the beds for winter. I raked leaves from my cherry tree, because those are the best leaves, and made them into a nice blanket for all my beds. The cherry leaves will keep the microbiome beneath them alive even in deep frost! Even more now because I watered them with some compost starter. Ready for the garlic I will plant at the end of November.
the outdoor retrospective
I will repeat myself: a very challenging season it was. But now, with some distance from the events, I can think about some of my steps. Spoiler alert: this is a long section without any image. Feel free to skip.
First of all, I would like to address my mistakes. And yes, all of them are caused by my sheer incompetence. The greenhouse and cucumber fiasco is going to wake me up for some time to come. Soil acidity is basic knowledge, and I should have checked it at the beginning of the season. Heck, even last year in the fall. Another failure followed this incompetence: I was unable to identify the problem in time, and I stressed the plants to the point of no return. This set my plants back by more than a month. A month for plants like bell peppers is a long time. A long time for plants that were already stressed.
Even though I was happy with the harvest of my pickling cucumbers, the exceptionally wet July created excellent conditions for early fungal onset. I don’t really have substantial experience in battling fungal diseases, which makes it another area for me to research.
There are probably more mistakes I made this year. I probably did something wrong with my bananas, and I don’t know yet. And don’t get me started on my melons, as any other year, but I am not giving up. But I did a lot of things right. I did something very right with my hydroponic tomatoes because I never had such an excellent yield before. I managed to pick great varieties because I completely dodged the onset of all tomato diseases. I can’t say the same thing with the tomatoes in the soil, but even though they were much weaker, they still produced a nice amount of fruit.
I am very happy with how the zucchinis turned out, considering I planted them this late in the season, and I am particularly pleased with the hydroponic ones. Because they were sown so late in the season, there was really only enough time for one or two sets of fruit per plant, but that’s more than ok. And, as with hydroponic zucchinis, I am happy to see that I can grow cucumbers hydroponically, even though I had only two or three cucumbers from a single plant.
And there is one last thing I will try to do better next year. The succession planting in the allium beds. You see the garlic and onion take one bed each. Both of them are ready by the end of June or very early in July. And then? You only have sixty days, seventy at best, of pleasant, predictable weather with reasonably long days. In the spring, the weather and sun work in your favor. Days are getting longer and warmer. From July, the sun works in the opposite direction, and days get shorter; in September, the nights get colder and more unpredictable. This limits the plants you can grow, and most are leafy greens and root vegetables.
It’s time to flip the script! This year, I discovered some stray tomato seedlings in May, probably some old seeds had sprouted in the soil, and I was able to grow them and make them produce before the frost. This has sprung an idea in my mind. With increasingly longer, milder seasons, I can plan for a second round of tomatoes. I start my first round mid-March and transplant them mid-May. Suppose I start my second round at the beginning of May. In that case, the seedlings should be ready to transplant in early July and have another 60 days to produce fruit. It’s still on the edge, but I think it’s doable with some determined ones.
the winter situation
While the garden is dead, the HydroBROR is well and alive. I have replaced all the wooden walls. Literally all of them were swollen and full of mold to some extent. The mold was caused mostly by the high temperature and humidity inside. But that’s only a symptomatic solution; I have to fix the root cause. In my old setup, I had one inlet fan and no outlet, trying to create a positive-pressure chamber. It didn’t work; there simply wasn't enough air circulation and exchange to keep the climate stable.
Jakub Dušek
First, I needed an outlet vent. The grow light I use, the ViparSpectra P2000, generates heat that collects at the top. Easy enough, I just 3D printed a light-proof grill and cut out a vent in the top.
This takes care of the heat buildup and creates a little bit of draft, or chimney effect. The next thing on the upgrade list was the air circulation. The old fan was positioned right next to the left-most plant. This plant then blocked and disrupted airflow, and other plants didn’t get enough fresh air. To fix this, I created a duct that mounts to the fan and splits the airflow into three outlets to distribute the air more evenly. I actually have to print this duct twice. I tried using the old fan, the Noctua Redux-700, a 120mm ultra-low-noise fan, but it barely pushed any air. I tried to change it for the faster Redux-1300, and while it pushed way more air, it was also louder. I bit myself, bought one of the newest and shiniest 140mm models, the NF-A14x25 G2 LS-PWM, catchy name I know. This is a beast. Not only does it push hell-a-lot of air, even with the low-noise adapter, but it’s also quieter than the Redux-1300. It's important to mention that I have no education nor experience in air flow sciences. I just eyeballed most of it.
This takes care of the air exchange and distribution, but to circulate the air and create some internal airflow, I attached the Redux-700 next to the light. This evens out the temperature and moisture nicely and actually does what it was designed for.
And one last upgrade is the light control. The Mean-Well ELG-240 LED driver I use allows for multiple light intensity controls. The old manual controller used a voltage divider approach to dim the light, and I used a smart plug to turn it on and off. This is fine, but I didn’t like the fact that I have a somewhat smart driver and don’t use it properly. Initially, I thought I could build a smart dimmer using the instructions in the datasheet. But some smart people over at Shelly already solved my problem. The Shelly Dimmer 0/1−10V lets me turn the light on and off, dim it, create a schedule, and connect to the MQTT broker. In a tiny little package, I can fit next to the driver. There is a vague promise of Matter support in the future. Still, since the irrigation controller is configured through MQTT, it actually fits in the setup.
Shelly Europe
While I was upgrading the grow space, the grow objects were growing. I put six tomato plants, a combination of Micro-Tom and Venus, and one banana plant I brought home into the HydroBROR, and two more, together with the bell peppers, into the HydroLIXHULT.
About a two weeks later from the previous set.
To all my readers who kept reading all the way down here, I thank you for your patience. Overall, it was a good season, and I hope you were at least somewhat entertained by the content here. I will try to improve the reader’s experience over the next few months to kick-start the next season with a more engaging style. Until then, I will see you in one of my off-season posts and on social networks. Too-da-loo!
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