Lulzgarden

A little spot where I hope to record the adventures of killing...I mean growing garden plants to nom.

[seedboy]

Little strawberry plants in a planter. I'm not a big fruit gardener, but they do look awfully spiffy in that hanging planter.

[fandom-mused-fandom-games]

1 note = 1 pixel for your fandom’s symbol (shown above) in an art piece I’m making

If you would like to see all of the fandoms, look through these posts

IF YOU DON’T SEE YOUR FANDOM, send me a message saying what fandoms I missed and I’ll add them

If you would like to know more about the project, read this post

FOLLOW ME TO KEEP UPDATED ON THE PROJECT/SEE THE FINISHED PROJECT

[fandom-mused-fandom-games]

1 note = 1 pixel for your fandom’s symbol (shown above) in an art piece I’m making

If you would like to see all of the fandoms, look through these posts

IF YOU DON’T SEE YOUR FANDOM, send me a message saying what fandoms I missed and I’ll add them

If you would like to know more about the project, read this post

FOLLOW ME TO KEEP UPDATED ON THE PROJECT/SEE THE FINISHED PROJECT

[seedboy]

Another fast heat growing plant, my potted green scallopinni squash. No, I do not know how to spell it.

[seedboy]

we've gotten a big heat wave over here in Ohio. Went from fifty degree weather to over ninety in just two days. The bad news is that it looks like there might be the beginning of another horrible drought again this year in the United states. If so, food prices are going to go up horrible, I feel bad for people who are not going to be able to afford healthy food. ;_;

The good news is that the heat has been wonderful for the plants in my garden. This pic is of my "On Deck" corn plants, from the insert to the main pic is just two DAYS of growth, heat loving plants grow much faster in high heat!

[seedboy]

I caught a rainbow trout. He was delicious and useful. His meat was eaten by me, my pet turtle got the head, and everything else was buried in the garden underneath a tomato plant for fertilizer. Man, what a useful animal.

[seedboy]

I don't think there is anyone in the world that hates the word "free" Unless perhaps you hate whales and the word "free" is connected to the word "Willy" I am getting off target, sorry.

Anyways, I would like to share with you some ways to boost your garden yield without spending a dime on manufactured fertilizer from the store. Store fertilizer has its merits (container gardening) but its expensive! So why not try some of these free goodies?

Eggshells: supply Phosphorus and calcium.

Make sure to crunch them up finely to aid in their absorption, then scatter them around your plants. Bonus: supposedly slugs hate to climb over sharp eggshells.

Coffee grinds: Supply all plant nutrients, being of course, ground up seeds designed to make a new plant.

Unless you are wired 24/7, you probably do not have a lot of these now. But if you ask really nicely around a coffee shop, you can get a ton of these for free! After all, they think its just garbage. Mix them in with your soil, but do not overload it, as coffee grinds can make your soul to acidic. Bonus: Earthworms love eating these, the little grind bits are just the right size for their mouths.

Bones: Supply calcium and phosphorous, and a little nitrogen if fresh.

All those hippie gardeners practically scream about putting these in compost heaps. And its true, slide these in a compost heap and you are going to have rodents faster then you can say "radical rats" And no, by bones I mean things like chicken and beef bones, not your neighbor's...what kind of person are you?

Anyways, after roasting up your favorite meat dish, take out the bones and throw em in a plastic bag, and then smash em apart with a hammer. This makes it easier for them to decompose and exposes the nitrogen filled marrow. Then bury them a foot deep in your garden bed, and place a large stone over the top for a few days to keep pets or critters digging them up. These are great fertilizer for things that grow on hills such as squash!

Fish Heads: supply nitrogen, phosphorous, calcium, and minor nutrients.

Fish heads of course also include things like fish guts, tails, bones, and all the fishy goodness left over from a fishing trip. Don't waste this plant goodness. Bury them a foot under with a rock over the top to rot a bit. These work great, after all, this is how Native Americans used to grow food!

Shrimp Shells: Supply Calcium and Nitrogen and many minerals

After a good crayfish boil or a party, save those little shrimp tails no one wants and bury them a foot deep in the garden like meat and bones. Bonus: Shrimp shells contain chitin, the same material nematodes have in their skin. Feeding your garden soil with shrimp shells lets fungi and bacteria that eat chitin multiply and thrive, which then move on and kill harmful nematodes!

Pet Mess: Supplies nitrogen and minerals.

Now, to make this clear, only certain pet....leavings...qualify as good fertilizer. Any kind of carnivore pet like a cat or a dog? Nope. Their  manure can have harmful parasites in it that can jump to humans. However, rodent pets make great fertilizer!

Bunnies, gerbils, hamsters, guini pigs are all usually kept on sawdust and fed grain and plant based diets, making their manure safe and full of plant nutrients. When you clean their cages, collect the bedding and bury it...for at least a month however before you plant anything over it.

The reason behind this is that the sawdust in the bedding actually absorbs nitrogen from the soil in order for fungi to digest it, before eventually digesting all the sawdust and leaving you with more nitrogen then before. Also, pet mess is still yicky, and I would not want to eat anything grown in uncomposted manure, no matter how cute that hamster looks.

Fish Water: Supplies Nitrogen.

For those that have fish tanks, or aquatic turtle tanks, or heck, are super villains with shark tanks, when you clean your fishy friends save the dirty tank water. Use this water to hydrate your garden plants. Make sure to not apply this to plants you are going to eat within a week (salmonella concerns after all) Bonus: Unlike a lot of organic garden fertilizers, the waste in fish water has already been partially decomposed by bacteria in the fish tank, making it  immediately available for plant use. Great for container plants!

Dead Animals: Supplies all nutrients.

These last two entries I write about only to be complete and to offer all options. I have not done either of these two, but in a survival situation, whether I lived and died on what I grew...

Anyways, any kind of dead animal offers the ultimate in nutrients for plants. After all, they are dead living things which formally used all the normal nutrients for life. And yes, you can get these for free everywhere you can find a road.

I suppose if you were really desperate you could travel down a highway and collect enough flattened animals to feed your garden for years. If you do this, make sure to let the place where you bury the animals mellow a bit and do not plant anything there right away to let the bacteria do their work at breaking down the animal.

Bonus: Your neighbors will never talk to you again?

????????????: Supplies Nitrogen, minor minerals.

What if you could get your hands on a fertilizer that worked as fast as chemical fertilizers, was completely organic, completely safe, completely legal, and was so widely available that literally every person on earth could obtain it?

Well, I am sorry to say that this wonder fertilizer exists, and its human urine.

One of the main components of urine is of course is urea, which is identical to the chemical farmers pay thousands of dollars for to spray on their corn. If you mix one part urine with nine parts water (to avoid leaf burn) you supposedly can make a wonderful liquid fertilizer. And technically, urine is even sterile and germ free.

But ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.

[seedboy]

Speaking of guavas, here is the new baby guava I got for this year! He is a little lemon guava. (my old one is a dwarf nana guava) I feel confident in keeping this guy alive, after all, my old guava is apparently a lot harder to take care of then this species, which can not only take temperatures down to 32 Degrees for short periods, but doesn't give a flying fig whether you over-water or under-water it!

[seedboy]

I don't grow just regular garden stuff like the usual tomatoes and crud. I like dabbling with tropical fruits too. Say hi to my guava plant. He's come a long way since he was a six inch little twig with one leaf on the top of it. Maybe I will get some fruit this year.

Note to myself, not ALL tropical fruit is suitable for growing in Ohio. The orange tree I got last year sat in its pot stunned for months, not growing at all, even with a plant lamp and a electric pot heater. Poor thing eventually just slumped over and died. ;_;

[seedboy]

Update on my tomato seedlings I been growing. A lot bigger, but a bit discolored. I blame the unseasonably damp, wet, dark weather we are having over here. Seriously, if this keeps up I am going to start investing in a mushroom garden.

[seedboy]

Why yes. this would be Godzilla trying to sneak off with a fifty foot pepper. Ya gotta love the goofy illustrations that companies put on their fertilizer products. After all, when it comes to artificial fertilizer, there is very little to distinguish product A from product B: they all all made the same way with the same ingredients.

Basically, through a method known as the Haber Bosch process, nitrogen from the atmosphere is turned into a solid form for use by plants by vast amounts of energy. Its estimated that about a third of the entire world population would not be here today without the massive amount of food we grow using the fertilizer created by this process!

Of course, you can't get something for nothing. Do to the fact that creating this fertilizer takes energy, its costly to produce, as oil and natural gas is needed for the process. Thus artificial fertilizer depends on low oil prices and natural gas prices to remain cheap to farmers. This also creates a interesting problem for the supposed "miracle" of biofuel: biofuel is supposed to free us from the use of expensive oil by turning corn into fuel, but that same corn needs to be grown with fertilizer MADE from oil!

Really astute readers may notice that the fertilizer I pictured actually has no nitrogen in it (hence the zero in its 0-50-30 title) When a fertilizer is made that contains either phosphorous or calcium, these materials are usually supplied by mined salts and minerals.

[seedboy]

Wonderful little bit of artwork I found online representing the company Monsanto. For those that have never heard of this company, look it up, its worth a read. For one thing, they are the company that invented the infamous "Agent Orange" that caused so many birth defects. Now they make herbicides, pesticides, and genetically altered plants.

You should worry about a company who's motto is "He who controls the food, controls the world" You should also worry about a company that claims its there to help farmers, but then spends most of its time suing and harassing farmers. For a short but sweet rundown of how this works...

Monsanto "makes" a crop that is genetically altered. They claim its their property now. Being a plant, this crop if grown by farmers tends to pollinate, ei, mate with other plants, even if not in the same field, as pollen is carried miles in the wind. Another farmer's non-Monsanto's crops are pollinated by this genetically altered crop. This farmer saves the seeds. When he grows them next year, Monsanto sues the farmer claiming that he "stole" the genetically altered parts of the plants, even though the farmer did nothing.

Even worse perhaps is that these strange genetically altered plants are ruining our native and age old crop species. In Mexico, farmers have cultured hundreds of unique and different types of corn. Now all these special vararities are being polluted by the genetic drift of Monsanto's frankinsteinian corn plants...which is fine with Monstanto, cause they can now claim that all these corn plants now belong to them, as they have "their" DNA in it.

Let's not forget that all these novel genetically altered plants might have dangerous reactions to human diets and that Monsanto pays off the USA government with campaign donations to avoid having to label foods containing their genetically altered food!

[seedboy]

Tilling

Tore up the ground today to prepare my garden bed for onion sets! I love onion sets. They can handle pretty much anything, even freezes.

I buried some goodies in the dirt for the plants to find. I have saved up bags of old dry bones, mussel and crab shells, and various fruit cores. They have all been plowed under the garden soil. Who needs a compost pile? ^0^ I let the worms do all the work for me.

Speaking of worms, there were plenty. I also found a few cutworms and Japanese beetle grubs in the soil. They were immediately fed to my pet geckos. I also found an absolute ton of slug eggs. For those not in the know, they are pretty easy to identify, they are the same size as caviar eggs, rubbery, and translucent. I smashed as many as I saw. I hope the tilling also exposed them to the drying air and/or buried the rest. Either way I am going to have to prepare for a slug onslaught this year!

[seedboy]

More useless pictures of useless animals! I think this dog is nearing twenty years old now. Sometimes, he moves! I have to roll him over at least twice a day to prevent him from decomposing. :3

[seedboy]

Got garden vermin like squirrels, chipmunks, or even deer or ground hogs? Get a dog. Although, you may want one slightly bigger then this yip yap.

[seedboy]

Guess who scored a bottle of fertilizer with a fifty percent off coupon? Still expensive, but according to the dilution directions on this baby, I will be still using this ten years from now.

Seaweed is supposed to be a wonder plant food. Not only is it supposed to contain nutrients and vitamins like normal fertilizers, seaweed is supposed to boost the immune system of plants using....ancient sea magic? No one has ever really explained to me just how spreading one liquified dead plant on another suddenly makes the live one grow better. All I know is that when I spray this stuff on my indoor guava bush, it began spreading out lots of new little shoots over the next week.

[seedboy]

I got my Cucurbitaceae family (squash, cucumber, pumpkin type plants) today. Cucurbitaceae are my favorite type of plants. They're like that overweight guy everyone seems to know who ends up at every party. He takes up room and eats all the chips and pizza, but he sure is fun to be around.

Cucurbitaceae plants like heat and sun, and grow at extreme speeds once they have some good sized leaves to fuel their growth. They grow so fast they may even take over other areas of the garden, but they produce a lot of fruit for your effort! Around my area, the only problems Cucurbitaceae plants face are vine borer grubs and powdery mildew.

Vine borers are little red wasp like moths that lay eggs on squash stems. The grubs that hatch from these eggs tunnel into the squash stem, usually killing the entire plant off. What a stupid bug, most insect pests prefer to leave their host alive to keep feeding on it. I figured out I can prevent borers from finding the base of my plants by wrapping tin foil around the stems.

Powdery mildew however, is a fungus, not a bug. It looks like a dusting of white confectionery sugar across leaves. It doesn't kill the plant, but it weakens it horribly, makes it look unsightly, and reduced yield. The normal method people recommend for this is to spray a solution of one tablespoon baking soda to one gallon of water on the leaves, which lowers the PH levels of the leaves so that the fungus cannot grow...this works...technically.

The problem is, how do you spray each individual leave, topside and bottomside on a huge pumpkin vine that may have over 800 individual leaves on it? And that is just one of many pumpkin and squash vines you have? Good luck with that. So by the end of summer, my Cucurbitaceae plants, even though they have produced fruit, are a shambling, rotting mess of powdery mildew.

Not this year! These three seed packs are the Cucurbitaceae family crops I am growing this year, and each has a genetic advantage against powdery mildew! The success straightneck squash  is RESISTANT to powdery mildew, which means it is very hard to infect with the spores and even if infected, the disease will grow so slowly that the plant will outgrow the disease. The Green Scallopini and the Owl's Eye pumpkin are both TOLERANT of powdery mildew, which means while they may get infected by it, they are not badly bothered by it and will fruit and grow as normal.

As you can see, I got these wonderful seeds from the company "High Mowing" I have never tried this seed company before, but I hope they have good quality seeds, cause I would love to order from them again. Not only did my order come in just two days regular shipping, they gave me a magnet and a garden book with it as well.

I hope you all plan to grow some Cucurbitaceae family plants yourself this year!