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In about two weeks a new garden adventure will begin for me, as I’ll be moving to a new property together with my girlfriend and our two small kids. What’s new for me is that this time it’s a rented place compared to our current house, which I own myself. We had a brief talk with the landlord, and it turns out that the former renters were allowed to put up a greenhouse,  and we’re free to do what we want in the garden as long as it “appears cultivated” as he put it. I’m still a bit unsure about what I can and what I can’t do, but maybe it’s better to ask for forgiveness instead of permission in this case Of course I’ll leave any old trees alone, but I’m certainly planning on converting part of the lawn into vegetable beds. Whether I’m bringing in a truckload of concrete slabs to be used as paths between beds I’m not sure, but I guess most of what I would like to do in the garden can be cleaned up and removed in a matter of weeks. The ultimate garden dream is still to have my own land to play on. I’m looking forward to that.
I’m leaving five old wonderful apple trees behind, but luckily there are two old ones on the new property and according to the owner they produce loads of apples and they are free for us to use. I’m glad we bought a high quality juicer last year, perfect for apples too. The apple trees provide shade in the garden, but it also has an open space with lots of sun. To the south west there’s even a small stream running by, and across the stream there’s a field with grazing horses. Very nice scenery.
Unfortunately I’ll have to leave my 30 sq m (320 sq ft) garage behind and cram most of my stuff into a much smaller, unheated shed, in like only one fifth of the area. I’ll have to sell or give away some of it, but that’s okay, this was never meant to be a high tech operation anyway. I’m keeping the shredder though – that is just an awesome piece of equipment, a Bosch AXT 2500HP. I’ll post some pictures and videos of that beast later on. It has helped me produce great composting ready material, so I’m seriously considering moving my three compost heaps with me to the new location, if the content is not too gross. Gotta feed the soil, right?
Speaking of feeding the soil – sometimes I get carried away and just go on and on, talking about  soil and manure and homesteading, and somewhere along the road my girlfriend somehow convinced herself that rabbits running freely around the garden is a total win-win situation. When will I learn to shut the hell up? I’m not sure I agree entirely with that But at least neither one of us talks about chopping them up for meat like good old John Seymour did. That’s just too old school for us vegetarians. I’m sure the kids would love to play with them though. We just need to convince them that it’s NOT candy that’s scattered all over the lawn

My peach tree is starting to bend due to the weight of ripening peaches. They’re sucking up a lot of water in the process, which is good so they’ll get really juicy before harvest time. I guess I have to drill a hole in the wall to build a support for the tree. An old seat belt should do the trick for now. It will support the tree through a large surface and shouldn’t damage the stem. If only I was allowed to pick up this kind of stuff from the local recycling site, but nooo, we have to throw everything away so we can buy NEW stuff and keep the wheels turning. As you can tell I’m still worried about the planets ressources and what happens if or when they run out. And that’s why I keep growing food in my own frekkin front yard. Wonder when there will be a law against that too. Gotta keep the big wheels turning. Enjoy the frekkin pictures.

Here’s a guy who’s serious about collecting rain water for gardening purposes. There’s a really nice rural atmosphere to it Worth a watch:

This is a 43 pages eBook about making compost written by Rod Turner in 2005 titled “The Worlds Best Compost – The How & Why“. My own attempts at making compost have been a bit disappointing. Of course there’s some kind of break-down of organic material into humus, but I can ensure you it’s not world class. I was pleasantly surprised when I discovered that this is actually a book about biodynamics, which was not mentioned in the sales pitch. I paid $34.77 to download the eBook.

How to make the worlds best compost

According to Rod the best compost is a kind of material that resembles jelly. It contains fluid but the material feels dry when you touch it. Jelly also contains the good stuff too. This property must be the same in compost if you want it to be world class. Rod calls this type of compost colloidal humus compost, because it contains up to 75 % water plus all the nutrients. The high amount is needed by the plants in order to grow normally. The water provided to plants must be free of nutrients or it’ll mess up their system!

You need to build your compost pile in a single day. Therefore you have to collect the material in different piles throughout the months prior to building the pile. A key ingredient is fresh animal manure, in fact up 40% of the pile needs to be manure. Nitrogen rich materials, carbon rich materials and manure have to be really wet when you build your pile or else the composting process will not run properly. The three different types of materials need to be in close contact throughout the pile which is then covered with straw during its 3 to 6 months life. And it is literally life. All kinds of organisms and animals will come and go when needed to take part in the composting process. Add some biodynamic herbs and mojo and you got yourself world class compost.

What I LIKE about The Worlds Best Compost

* It uses a biodynamic approach to making compost. I’m fascinated by biodynamics because curiosity, respect and harmony are key aspects in this way of gardening.

* It’s easy to read although it contains a lot of information.

* It has lots of pictures and easy understandable illustrations (21 throughout the eBook).

* Straight to the point, no BS.

* Written by someone with 20 years of experience using the methods described (teaching it for 10 years).

* Interesting references to people and further reading.

* The reasons behind the different actions you need to take are explained too.

* Several bonus eBooks and videos included in the purchase: “Mysteries of Pruning Revealed”, “Professional Secrets to Stunning Azaleas” and “Wonder Plants and Plant Wonders”.

What I DON’T like about The Worlds Best Compost

* Not actually about the eBook, but the sales pitch page is just too much.

* The price is a bit high for a 43 pages eBook, but taking the bonuses into account it seems fair. They seem solid too.

* Some of the biodynamic mojo is included in the process without explanation. I would like to read a few critical thoughts about this whirling madness (you have to make some kind of soup if you want to be best in class).

Who should buy this eBook

You need more space to use the method described in this eBook than you would using traditional urban composting methods. You need space around the pile and space for storing the different materials before building the pile, so I think it’s best suited for people living in rural areas where you can raise your own cows and horses too. Of course you can transport the manure into your urban garden but it’s a lot more work. I think the book can be used by beginners as well as experienced gardeners. The only thing you need is a desire to provide the best growing conditions for you plants.

You can get the eBook here.

Photo by Squeezyboy.

Birds normally take cover during rain but not the blackbird. It’s running around out there in the garden getting wet, but it pays. A lot of earthworms are crawling to the surface as fast as they can, just to get eaten. Sad story. For the earthworm at least. But why on earth would they do that? It seems stupid.

Well is an earthworm stupid? At least it’s trying to survive. Earthworms have a problem with hard rain, which translates to water soaked soil. They have a soft moist skin through which they breathe oxygen from small air pockets in the surrounding soil. During rain these air pockets are filled with water and it gets hard for the worms to breathe. Therefore they are forced to take their chances and crawl to the surface in order to breathe.

Good news for the birds anyway.

Planting three tomato plants in one grow bag creates a mess, although the self-watering boxes are prepared for three plants having three internal tubes reaching down into the water.

When you’re dealing with cucumber plants it’s even too much with two plants in each grow bag:

One cucumber plant in each grow bag is a better solution.

Last year I did in fact only plant two tomato plants in each grow bag, with a good result. Here’s a picture from last year:

I’m building up my courage to try and grow tomatoes without the self-watering boxes and just grow them directly in the ground. I guess the boxes are not old school enough for me after all

The new potatoes are just about gone for the year and that leaves the soil bare. This is bad because rain will wash nutrients down into the ground, therefore it’s good to have something growing all the time. In the picture you’ll find six new rows of spinach ready to take over from the potatoes. This is known as successive planting, and spinach was something that would still grow according to my sowing calender. It doesn’t have to be edible plants, you can also plant something to be used as green manure. When your green manure dies later on you’ll have to compost it to enrich your soil making it possible to grower better vegetables later. By the way, raw spinach is very good with banana and water blended into a smoothie – yum!

I have this big 1000 litres tank that I collect rain water in, but I’m too lazy to actually carry the water in a 10 litres watering can out in the garden. That’s why I have installed a water pump in the tank to do the job.

I’ve spent a long time looking for a pump that was small enough to pass through the hole in the top of the tank since it had a nice screw-cap:

Unfortunately I didn’t find a pump that would fit so off with the cap. My friend Mr. Dremel helped me out:

Notice the colour of the rain water; this tank needs to be emptied soon I even noticed a couple of insects swimming around down there. Gross.

With the plastic perforated the remaining screw thread was cut away with a stanley knife:

This brand new Alko Rain 2500 rain water pump fits in the new hole in the water tank. I paid about 500 dkr. ($100) for this one.(230 V~, 350 W, H max 11 m, Q max 2.5 m3 / h, D 3 m.) The valve is just left fully open:

Yep, it fits and stands on the bottom. I’ve attached an extra string just in case:

I’ve put a wooden lid on top of the tank to keep small animals away so they won’t fall into the tank and drown:

Yes! It works. But I would estimate that it only delivers about 80-90 % of the pressure compared to tap water:

The rain water pump is connected to 42 metres (138 feet) of 0.5 inch hose so maybe that’s a bit too much for the pump. I’ll try to shorten the hose and see what happens.

When I turned off the pump I was surprised to see that the water kept coming out of the sprinkler:

This is due to the natural flow since the tank is placed a couple of meters higher that the sprinkler. It’s solved by disconnecting the sprinkler and using a connector with built-in stop valve.

The rain water pump system is working fairly well so the next step is connecting it to the soil moisture sensor system and build the automatic watering system I keep blabbering about

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.

A couple of weeks ago I thinned the fruits on my small peach tree according to my garden “bible”. This is done when the fruits are about the size of walnuts. The fruits are thinned to about 25 cm (10 inch) spacing or else the tree will have a hard time maturing all of them. I removed more than half of the fruits (which was not popular with my girlfriend ):

I also find thinning a bit sad but it’s often necessary in order to have normal size vegetables or fruits.

This is how the tree looks after the thinning:

Luckily there are still no signs of peach leaf curl. Now I’m just waiting for the rain to come. The soil below the peach tree is not well-drained, so when it’s dry for longer periods the soil is compact and any water applied on top just escapes on the surface.