Monthly Archives: July 2009

How to Grow King-Size Red Beets

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It pays to watch the soil moisture closely if you want large vegetables. I’ve had good results this year using my garden logging system. Actually my vegetables have gotten a little out of hand. I think the cat is a bit scared too ;-) :

I’ve been kind of obsessed with soil moisture now that my logging system is up and running. I’ve checked the log a couple of times a day, and when the moisture level was low I ran out and turned on the sprinkler. I hope the large size doesn’t affect the taste too much.

What I did was that I checked the soil moisture graph and when the level was below 30 % I would water the vegetables. Looking at the graph below it shows that I’ve turned on the sprinkler three times during a week (week 27), Tuesday at 09:00, Wednesday at 23:00 and Friday at 21:00:

This process screams for a computer controlled solution and I’m working on connecting a water pump to the logging system to make it a soil moisture control system instead. It would need a hysteresis, like for instance turning the water ON below 30 % and turning it OFF above 80 %.

Another thing I’m working on is replacing my 1-wire Ethernet cable with proper outdoor Ethernet cable. The existing system has worked without any problems for half a year, but I just want to make the whole system even more durable, since the whole point of building this is to free time and energy and instability problems and break-downs take up just that, time and energy.

Potato Comparison

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Is it true that if you remove all except one of the shoots on chitted potatoes you’ll get fewer but bigger potatoes? In the above picture the potatoes with many shoots are in the front and the ones with only shoot are in the back. The plants in the back are smaller with less foliage.

Well, in my case the yield from chitted mother potatoes with only one shoot was only 25 % compared to mother potatoes with many shoots:

And oh, the one shoots are smaller too. Bummer.

Shoots on Apple Trees

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I have five old apple trees in my backyard which are quite old. I would estimate the oldest to be about 25 years old, and it has a trunk diameter of 30 cm (12 inch):

The problem I have with these old trees is that they grow like crazy. They have really dug in through the years. I was told that the former owners of the property would cut away any shoots each year, but I had hoped that I could avoid this work, since I don’t like cutting trees.

Last year they just got too big for my backyard garden, so I cut the trees back to where they were used to be before I moved in. That left me with a lot of twigs but the garden looked nice again.

Then the trees start growing like crazy this spring, putting up 50 cm (20 inch) shoots (see the first picture) and worst of all – not a single flower or apple :-( So no apples on this years shoots.

They have used all their energy for growth and nothing for reproduction (apples). So I guess I’ll select about 10 shoots on each tree and cut away the rest to see if they’ll produce apples next year. Last year I picked 19 kg (42 pounds) for eating, and the birds got much more out of it.