Terrestrial Tidbits

Purpose

This page is to document my trials and tribulations with non-aquatic life, mainly plants but perhaps some info about vivariums if I ever get into that.

Garden

Prehistoric

My father, mother, and I had a garden as far back as I can remember. We used to have one when we lived in Mt Shasta, when we lived with my grandfather in Carlotta (including a greenhouse), and when we moved to Prescott we built one in the back yard. We spent a long time breaking up the old foundation that used to be in the garden, sifting the rocks with a homemade sifter made out of chicken wire, some thing diamond cage, and wood that we used from our torn apart deck (that was only rebuilt like 12 years later). We planted almost everything in the ground, and used those same deck pieces to make an area around the garden out of boar wire and wooden posts, and then used ground cloth to create shade coverings. We grew mainly tomatoes and peppers, but all kinds of stuff like beans, watermelons, potatoes, etc.

Year 0 (2018???) to Year 1 (2021)

A while after my father moved out, I decided to pick up gardening. My recollection brings this to about the time period of 2020 and COVID, but logically I believe I started the garden on my own before that as well. For this indiscriminantly long period of time which I will call Year 0, the garden absolutely popped off. I had more successful tomato and pepper plants than ever before. I was using a drip system on a timer, and it was great. Me and my father turned nearly all of the end of the year tomatoes into salsa, and donated the rest to the foodbank. We probably have 100lbs over the course of the whole year. One year, we had a grape tomato that exploded so hard that I spent maybe 2 hours harvesting from it before the final frost of the season. I grew 7 weed plants, 1 of which got me SO MUCH WEED. Me and my dad spent all day harvesting and trimming it. I named it Tom Sawyer OG, as the strain was unknown due to the dubious origins of the seed it came from.

I dont know of anything I did particularly right, but overall, I think the conditions were just perfect.

Year 2 (2022)

In Year 2, I started out to realize that almost all of the garden's dripline was finally broken from being out in the sun and weather, so I replaced it all with soaker hoses. Possibly issue number one, but we will not know until later. Additionally, I used the cheaper bulk mulch which I think was a mistake as it was very "organic" and likely didn't have a lot of the dirt-parts. My dad seemed to think this was the issue, but I wasn't sure. This was also the year that my dad passed away, so I can chock this year up to just being low effort. I did grow 6 spindly weed plants, but they didn't do much, and I saved them and let them grow all winter under growlights. We also learned this year that the backyard neighbor, which made his entire yard out of concrete, was using pesticides and herbicides, which could have possibly run off and fucked up my soil.

Year 3 (2023)

This year, in a knee-jerk reaction to how poorly the previous year worked out, I decided to rip out all of the soaker hoses and replace them with drip line. I also got a ton of soil from Prescott dirt that should have the good Prescott nutrients (which was a lot of fun because I loaded up the back of my pickup with almost a ton of dirt and unloaded it all by hand, it was the first real work that the Timber Tom Mobile had done since my father was in better shape back in the day). This seemed to help, because the garden worked far better this year than last, but was not even remotely close to years past. This year we also removed all of the now-rotting wood from the ground and replaced the whole garden outside fencing with two interconnected chainlink dog runs.

Year 4 (2024)

This year I am keeping the drip line and am going to properly dig up, till, mix, strain, and replace all of the soil with miraclegro mix like I did in years 0 and 1, as well as bring back the shade cloth over the top. Hopefully this combination, with the added change of watering slightly less (not sure if this is the problem or not) will solve these issues. I also have Cherry to help me, so that sounds like a lot of fun too.