Gardeners in da house?
I've enjoyed the challenges of gardening in zone 5 -6 and zone 10 - 11, and am wondering about others' experience.
Climate change, with migrating pests/diseases and more erratic weather, are definitely noticeable trends.
While it's interesting to grow ornamentals and food crops that wouldn't ordinarily be available, it's also disturbing to find falling yields and utter collapses of formerly successful "easy" plants like basil and temperate climate tomato varieties.
There are limits on how much can be accomplished with purely "organic" controls - I've had to experiment with soil ecology (MycoStop for fungal infections, etc.). Allergenic plants are an increasing problem. There are brand new animal pests where I live as well - iguanas, pythons, and other hot-climate reptiles.
I'm curious about others' gardening results, and suggestions for improving adaptability.
My mom is the gardener at our house. I'm just her minion. I have been trained to do most everything, but it is not my passion. So I can hand pollinate and clone by air layering and mulch and whatnot. We live in an 11-13 zone, and I am in charge of the vanilla.
We're organic, so I creep out at various times and wreak havok on snails and slugs that are audacious enough to eat at the vines. It helps to yell, "DIE YOU INVERTEBRATE SCUM!" Makes them know their place and the neighbors stay away. ;)
I'm the product of multiple generations of farmers and gardeners - born with dirt under my feet. Don't knock minionhood when it means you're learning to grow things - I never appreciated my mother's tutelage until I had land of my own and a stressful job to take refuge from in coaxing food out of earth and rain.
After 10 years, I've just started to get used to seasons that are upside down from what I was accustomed to (moved from 45 N to 25 N). Vanilla, ginger, turmeric, hibiscus, guava, mangoes, and papayas, are lovely, but the inability to grow bulb flowers, Italian basil and pears is disappointing.
We're on mostly coral and get tropical rains, so everything is in raised beds with carefully structured soil. There are months which are too hot for most edible plants to grow, so the "organic" soil preparation is covering the beds with black plastic to try and cook out the weed seeds and pathogenic nematodes, fungi and bugs.
Even with diatomaceous earth, ladybugs, tobacco juice, insecticidal soap, Neem oil, and everything else, I'd swear I can ride the tomato hornworms to work.
Can you switch to 'staple' crops that grow in the hotter months? They may not be traditionally preferred but could provide you with sustenance if required? This blog was posted in r/permaculture recently and features some of the warm weather species with a couple of extra in the comments (Tannia, Kangkong) - https://tropicalselfsufficiency.wordpress.com/2018/06/30/rapid-resilient-food-systems/
And some tropical seeds from our local gardening company may give you some ideas - http://greenharvest.com.au/SeedOrganic/SeedsHotHumidAreas.html
Thank you for the information! I've had success growing hot-climate staples like cowpeas, Malabar spinach, chillies, Chinese/Thai basil and okra, but get better results overall if I can use the time to solarize the soil.
You would not believe the pests and plant diseases endemic here. Curcubits like squashes and pumpkins, that would ordinarily tolerate heat, succumb to aphids, sugar ants and fusarium wilt overnight. Yard-long beans get powdery mildew.
We can't grow anything due to animals. It's just hard in general which is why good (easy) farming is either in niche locations or a scorched earth policy.
Back when I lived in the northern States, we had problems with all sorts of critters - deer, rabbits, squirrels, raccoons... There are two slightly disgusting tricks that seemed to work well in keeping them at bay.
Get to your barber, hair salon, dog groomer and ask them to save you a grocery bag full of hair clippings. When you next go to mulch your garden, spread a fine layer of those predator-scented fibers under a thin layer of the mulch. It seems to be a lasting repellent - our community garden patch was safe for a season.
Coyote urine (or, in a pinch, urine of a carnivorous human). Coyote urine is expensive and has to be handled carefully because it's pungent. It will repel herbivores through a few cycles of rain.
As to iguanas, nothing (including chain-link) stops them once they learn a food location; I'm testing out aversive conditioning with buckets of ice water.
We have a multitude of different animals, ranging from a mix of marsupials; bandicoot, antechinus, possum, wallaby, kangaroo; feral deer and cows, and a huge array of bird life including the worst of them all, the brush turkey.
The general consensus that gardening needs to be full exclusion. Structures need to be built to prevent access to animals. Just makes it expensive and if they find a hole, bandicoots and possums search for them, they can do a massive amount of damage.
Gardening is hard, enjoying the menagerie is amazing.
Iguanas sound interesting. We get goannas but they tend to hunt chickens/ducks and eggs.
Those are some unique challenges! When I look at the economics of backyard gardening here, I have to acknowledge that it's a hobby, not a serious method of self-sustenance. In the best seasons, with a small kitchen garden (roughly 20 sq. meters of raised beds), I might grow about $800 - $1,000 market value of food in a year. Fresh-picked heirloom tomatoes and a broader palatte of foods than the grocery stores offer are the justifications.
It's a limited enough area to fence or enclose, but the cost and aesthetics aren't justifiable. The extremely heavy rains and porous soil already require constant composting, mulching and trace element amendments to sustain soil productivity.
It's vexing to watch a two-meter iguana munch it all up or trample and crap on what it doesn't eat.
They're an invasive species with no natural predators, mean-tempered and eager to bite if threatened. Hunting and trapping remain restricted to professionals, and so far, they're outbreeding all control attempts. [Theoretically, the meat tastes like chicken, but they also carry parasites...]
Endemic Muscovy ducks usually beat me to any fallen mangoes - again, not legal to hunt or trap, but they are sorely trying my patience and leading me to wonder whether it's worth poaching a mango-stuffed duck or two.
At least duck is traditionally-edible! Possums aren't renowned for edibility and they are protected. They'll get a mango in seconds.
There are parts of North America where opossum stew is on the menu. Can't say I've ever tried it, but we've supplanted most of their ordinary predators and may just have to take up the practice of hunting and foraging again to maintain ecological control.
Did I mention the palm rats? Those are another incredibly destructive local pest, not just for the fruit damage. They'll chew their way into attics and outdoor equipment, then eat electrical wiring insulation. There's nothing quite like a dead air-conditioning unit that kicks back on after repair with a decomposing rat somewhere inside.
When you gaze into the abyss of living harmoniously with nature, it gazes back at you to determine whether you might taste good..
https://erinandstepheninnewzealand.blogspot.com/2010/04/cooking-with-possum.html
The New Zealanders eat our possum whereas I've never heard mention of it here; invasive versus native.
We have normal rats and mice, Norway Rats I believe they are. The ye olde wooden ship rats.
I'm wondering if humans need to farm that they have to destroy the native wildlife around them to do it successfully. Covering 100% of your food needs seems like it requires significant hunting and destruction. Otherwise full exclusion over large areas.
We have four species of really nasty fruit flies here. I hates them my precious...
For the horn worms, have you picked them and fed them to your chickens? Or you can try that bacteria stuff.
Hornworms get picked off and tossed in the canal for whatever wants to dine on them. Most applied sprays wash away quickly - BT products are on the expensive side. Mostly, those things will eat their way though entire plants before anything can stop them.
As to fruit flies, the ones here will denude a half-kilo mango down to the bare pit in a few hours - I can only be grateful they're content with fruit flesh and haven't moved on to animal. I know some of them are invasive species, but the native varieties certainly haven't been displaced.
I have recently started enjoying gardening. Indoors, under lights and using aeroponics. Let's say I grow chilli peppers. I don't actually eat chilli peppers any more (I used to when I was younger) but some family and friends do so I grow for them.
What I find fun is the gardening. I have a raspberry pi and a whole stack of sensors and control devices so I can control and monitor all the systems - fans, heaters, lights and so on. I love tweaking nutrient mix, temperature, humidity and so on to see what effect it has, and the various means by which you can train chilli plants to get more chillies from them. I'm learning loads about plants, plus I get to play with the electronics<-->software interface which is loads of fun. Fiddling around with water pumps, sprayers and all that jazz is great fun too.
In the outside garden me and my wife grow a lot of herbs. Eating herbs. Over the last few years we've been collecting rare and old varieties which is quite fun. Dittander is my favourite so far - the leaves and flowers taste like horseradish, but slightly more subtle - almost like wasabi, although it's a LOT easier to grow. The main problem is stopping it growing..
That's amazing, and worthy of a thread in itself. If we move back to colder-climate territory, in a house with a basement or barn, indoor hydroponics/aeroponics will definitely be on my agenda. I'm jealous of your toys and can easily see myself getting obsessive over a setup like that.
However, for me, part of the purpose of a garden is sustained outdoor activity. This is an escape from time spent staring at screens, in meetings, or otherwise doing stressful things disengaged from nature.
I think dittander is also known as dittany, which I've definitely grown; it's lovely, subtly peppery herb. Have you also tried nasturtiums? They're both ornamental and edible, with a delicate radish bite to the flowers and leaves - it's also simple to save seeds.
It's been a while since I've had the space and suitable climate, but horseradish itself is easy to grow, if you don't mind a plant that easily covers a square meter or more of space to produce a kilo of edible root.
Again, I've got hot climate successes and failures for bulbs, herbs and spices; I miss French lavender, tarragon and tender basil. No luck with shallots and roses (which I've used for culinary purposes). Most of the other European culinary herbs do okay in pots, but the open collection includes a couple of gingers, lemongrass, garlic, cilantro/coriander, Chinese chives, shiso, and some other exotics. I've got jasmine and hibiscus flowers as well, which make interesting flavorings.
A word of caution (from painful experience) about herbs - don't ever, ever plow a field or turn a garden bed that's had comfrey in it - every minute speck of root will grow new plants.
I like the indoor, controlled nature of my greenhouse, but I can totally get the enforced outsideness of gardening. I have dogs which make me go outside and walk and not read email/take calls/etc, so I'm quite lucky on that front, but if not for dogs I might use gardening.
Nasturtiums are delicious! I'm a big fan. We planted some around runner beans a couple of years ago and the beans did badly but the nasturtiums took over the whole bed and we ate loads of them. My previous house had loads of horseradish well established and every couple of years I'd dig it up and jar a bunch of it. Fresh horseradish is something else. Worth wearing eye protection when processing it though.. I do keep trying to grow shiso but so far it hasn't worked out. This year has been hard though, it didn't rain here for the previous 2+ months and the temperature was mid-30s. Not at all normal for this part of the world, so none of the plants were ready for it - I was watering twice a day some days and still loads of stuff just died.
Fennel (herb not bulb) does the same as comfrey, but with seeds not roots. Grew one big one, once. The flowers and seeds were delicious, but it's still popping up years later. Even quite some distance away.
I neglected my beds for a couple of months and just dug the last of the fennel out in preparation for this year's solar coverings (I got a later start than desirable, but growing season here really doesn't start until October).
If the dropped seeds don't die, I'm going to be eating a great deal of baby fennel salad - not a terrible outcome for the "weed" pickings.
This is amazing! My long-term goal is to create an automated setup like yours, but that requires a bigger plot of land to actually put a greenhouse in. For... chili peppers and other things.
Do you have a background that lends itself to automation or are you self-taught? I have coding experience but only for statistical programs so I suspect there would be a bit of a steep learning curve for me.
I've got a decent amount of programming experience and I can wield a soldering iron and continuity tester pretty well but that's about it. I know how to use google though - "temperature sensor raspberry pi python" and "mains relay raspberry pi" and so on. :)
The programming, at it's core, isn't too tricky - look at a number, do a thing based on that number, rinse and repeat. The hardware interface is fairly easy too - there are some wires connected to some pins and some other wires connected to the mains and don't ever mix those two up and it'll be OK. It's one of those projects which all the individual parts are simple on their own but added together it's currently about 300 lines of python and a web page and two databases, some javascript and a couple of bash scripts. The main board looks like this, naked and all wired up and working, like this, so it's really not that complicated. You can add more sensors and controls fairly easily but that setup does lights, fan, heater, five temperature sensors and a humidity sensor.
My 'greenhouse' started indoors in a small 50x50cm cupboard - it's currently in a rather larger, custom built cupboard in my shed.
Hey Mat,
Do you perhaps have a blog in which you write about your gardening system and all that? It would be a fun read!
Hey OP, 3a (though apparently we moved to 4a thanks to climate change?) here. I do container gardening currently until I get the yard situation sorted out.
What I've noticed for my area is that the summers are getting more dry and hotter, and the winters have been super erratic too. Anything in the ground is getting its shit kicked in by constant freeze-thaw cycles that didn't really exist before, and our trees took a huge hit when it went from being firmly winter at -20c to suddenly spring at +10. With no transition time, a lot of them were very stressed and there was a lot of die off.
I haven't noticed any new pests here, but we have already had some introduced ones for awhile. Lily beetles were especially bad this year though.
I've been growing varieties of plants that push the edge of the growing zone I'm in and it seems to have been working out okay. I think maybe even 4a is understating it, because even years before we were officially moved to 4a I was having success with plants from outside that.
Otherwise, I've gone for a far less utility oriented crop this year and am trying new varieties to see what happens and how I like them, since I was getting bored with the same-old. I'm growing ghost peppers, micro tom tomatoes (which are now officially my favorite tomato, it grows like 6" tall and it can be a desk plant at work!), tiny tim tomatoes, and early cascade. I've kept a few of my standby sub-arctics too.
In my current locale, extreme weather comes with category ratings. We didn't lose anything major in the last round of storms, with the exception of a 2m tall ghost pepper plant. (Peppers are perennials here.)
Before we moved south, a solid zone 5a had become 6b, and there were major tree die-offs happening due to a couple of pests whose ranges had expanded due to shorter winters.
We are zone 3 transitioning into 4. Our growing season is longer now but soil moisture in the spring/early summer is a challenge sometimes as our precip is not as reliable as it once was. This summer we had two months of below-average rainfall and then 4" in one 24-hour period in early August. I think on the balance the longer growing season will increase productivity (we used to see first frost in late September, but it's been well into October recently) but the changing rainfall patters will be a challenge-- more irrigation will be required.
That's essentially what I'm hearing from friends and family still at 45 N. The frost-free season is longer, but snowfall/rainfall are less predictable and weather extremes are more extreme. We have winegrower acquaintances who tell us they're starting to plant hybrid Italian grape varieties in regions that used to be Rhone varieties only, because the high summer temperatures are higher and there's generally less rainfall.