#subsistence ag

[on-my-way-to-the-woods]

My fall radishes are doing a lot better than my attempt this spring.  These guys are headed to be roasted in the oven with potato slices.  It really mellows out their heat so if you wind up with too hot radishes I highly recommend it.

Coat with melted butter, sprinkle seasonings, cook for 20 minutes at 425℉ (218 ℃), flip halfway through.

[ID: a hand holds nine freshly pulled radishes.  Eight are pink and white elongated radishes (French breakfast variety) and one is light purple and round (Easter egg variety)]

[on-my-way-to-the-woods]

[ID: 1. A colander full of lumpy, dirt covered tubers. 2. A hand holds an exceptionally large lumpy tuber, it’s about the same size as the hand] We harvested the sunchokes today.  3lbs 10oz (1.6kg) of tubers from 10 plants in rough conditions.  I'm honestly surprised we got even a single tuber, let alone this many. Our sunchoke plants survived:

Being mailed as starts.  A relative had too many, put the small starts in a bag in one of those USPS flat rate boxes and mailed them to us.  (We did lose a few here, it's not ideal for the plant)

Hot summers

Soil with basically no nutrition

Not being watered when life was hard

Tropical storm force winds (one sunchoke got a splint after snapping in half and , not only did it survive, but it produced the largest tuber we got)

Days of flooding (and many more days of wet soil because the clay we have did not drain well)

Caterpillar attacks

Ant swarms with aphids

Some weird crusty bug I still don't have an ID for

Not a single other plant has been low maintenance like these.  Everything else requires babying in this poor environment, but not the sunchokes.  I'm thoroughly convinced that if any plant grew wild on the moon, it would be these.

[on-my-way-to-the-woods]

I’ve always been interested in self-sufficiency-type skills.  I enjoy raising my own food and building things myself.  F’s also been interested those skills, but more as a hobby than a lifestyle.  Well, now she’s fully onboard the do-it-ourselves train.  What brought that change?  Well, a lot of stuff, but the straw that broke the camel’s back is potting soil.  After years of neglect, the soil here is terrible. If I’m not fertilizing my garden with rabbit manure every week or so the less established plants start dying out so we can’t just use the dirt from outside to start plants.  We’ve been buying potting soil, but that sucks.

Miracle-Gro is what was easily available around us so we went with that. We’re having major water retention problems and the fertilizer runs out quite quickly.  They have a nicer formula, but it’s just a better ratio of the same ingredients and they sell if for $3 more!  What’s worse, we got a fungus gnat infestation from their contaminated potting mix.  Sure, there’s probably a decent potting mix out there, but we’ve tried 3 brands so far and none meet our expectations.  Between spending years finding the right brand of potting soil and spending years getting the right balance of potting mix we create, I’d rather go with the latter.

Here’s our first attempt: 3 parts coir/peat 2 parts local compost 1 part vermiculite/perlite 1 part rabbit manure

Maybe it’ll go well, maybe it won’t, but dang it’s better than spending a lot of money just to import fungus gnats in a product that just makes my plants (and fiancée) sad.