Blogging is nice, because you can organize your thoughts and archive them. A #gardenjournal is the perfect avenue for this type of blogging site. I'd like to create an overview of my entire garden. This post is going to be on the longer side. [Holy manic episode Batman!] So, grab some coffee. Grab some popcorn and buckle up. I will try and keep it to one photograph per plant. First of all, I am trying to finish most of the heavy lifting, mostly because the weather is getting hotter. This month, I wanted to completely tear down the broken greenhouse that has given me so much trouble.
Everything in the garden areas are really starting to tie together. You do need a certain Feng Shui to have a functional garden with a bountiful harvest. You certainty can't have garbage piles. After all the ripped plastic and giant pine tree logs were removed: Things looked almost perfect. However, the cannabis garden still needs to be more level. The corner I just cleaned is like a small hill. A snake free hill! The garden is starting to feel more complete. Something symbolic about cleaning corners.
This month, I Did a lot heavy lifting, including hacking the pine logs into wood chips. Sometimes, yard word is HARD work. John Lennon impression I've got blisters on my fingers! My garden needs as much nutrients as possible and it could definitely use some wood hummus. I added a new hinge to the garden doorway and sanded it down for painting. If you are reading this, let me know what color to paint my garden door in the comments. Highest comment wins!
If I knew Quinoa was so beautiful, I would have grown it a long time ago!. There is a lot of variation in the plant, between pink and purple color and different shapes of stem, leaves and buds. I've been working hard thinning the crops. Quinoa seeds are small, so you have to sort of just throw them out and then you have to remove a lot of the plants because Quinoa grows big and tall! With Quinoa, the seeds are the crop: They are tiny, tasty beads of wheat.
Above is a bolting Lettuce head. A lot of the plants are going to seed already. Arugula seeds are almost ready: Chive onion seeds have been harvested and bagged. I love photographing bolting plants. Some of them take such strange shapes. Like the Radishes which had such beautiful flowers. There are some onions that are blooming incredible flowers [below]. According to research, it seems that onions only flower once every two years. But these ones bloomed in a single season.
The photos below can shows the vibe of my #cannabis garden: With the fencing and Juniper trees. All the cannabis plants have been identified as female at this point. It's been a tough year like I've stated previously. Broken greenhouse plastic ... lack of funds ... ordering clones late. But, this is one of the original plants from early spring and its HUGE. I should name this plant Bob Marley because it reminds me that everything is going to be alright. I don't have an indoor setup, but I took a few clones. I had to get rid of lower leaves. Stay tuned because I need to start a clone closet.
Below is a great view of the SCROG plant. Usually, I Scrog [Sea of Green] every single #cannabis plant: But this time I left some of the plant and some of the plants [above] I never even topped! Some people swear by the all natural method of just letting the plant go without stress training or topping and others swear by high stress methods like Sea of Green: so, it'll be interesting to do a side by side. Which method will get a bigger yield? They aren't clones, so it won't be 100% accurate.
Month of June summary: Overall the garden is looking awesome. There is still a ton of work to do though. I'm really hoping that the compost piles are ready soon because I 100% need more nitrogen and other nutrients ASAP. Some of the corn isn't doing well for example. And they need lots of food. One of the corn strains on the North side are doing better. Some of the beans are dead. It's like their is this goldilocks zone between the perfect watering cycle and nutrient setup that I'm not hitting yet. But, a lot of the crops are doing well. I'm adding pine chips over all the garden space as mulch.
If you look at the pictures of the #cannabis [above], you can see that the leaves are folded towards the middle, which is often called taco leaves. This is from overheating. I already added Kelp to the soil, which helps the plants during heatwaves. So, I did some more research and found that if you use mulch like straw or wood chips over the soil, it also helps against heat. Originally, I had pine chips outside my garden door to turn into wood hummus, but it turns out that if you spread wood chips over established plants, it won't effect the nutrients while the chips break down on the surface.
Until next month,
@Ferngully