Progress Report, April:

Garden is slowing way down.

Tomatoes are still growing but no longer ripening as fast. I'm needing to post a few observations because the climate is definitely having an effect and I want to sort out a better plan of attack for growing more food in 2023/24. The gardens as they stand now have only been in place since spring/summer 2020 and it takes a few years to dial things in and get new soil working properly.

Today's Twodays Haul:

The State Of Food Growing

The collecting basket's about as full as any other two days' worth of fruit, but far fewer are fully ripe. Summer days getting short, also cloudy because this place loves clouds and humidity. Less sunlight == less ripening. I've also been trimming away any new growing shoots wherever I could find them, and have been cutting out the odd vine that no longer has fruit and is drying off. 

Time to mention a thing: If you want the salad tomatoes for salad, grab them at the orange-with-a-bit-of-green stage and let them ripen in the warmth and light in the kitchen, they'll have a far tangier flavour. If you want to add them to tomato passata, sauce, or paste, get them at the stage of being red but just before softening. When they get that ripe the flavour is bland and sweet - perfect for sauces.

The pear-shaped tomatoes are paste tomatoes. Same thing applies, but also as they ripen the flesh to liquid ratio changes hence why they're called paste tomatoes. They also taste better if left to ripen and then turn into sauce etc.

There are a few green chilli peppers up there too - I've no idea what variety they were so I'll be (CAUTIOUSLY!!! - and yes, thereby hangs a tale, and its name is Rocoto chillies . . .) testing them soon for making a chilli sauce/relish/pickle/whatever. 

Timings And Re-timings:

The tomatoes, chillies, and basils were planted between Christmas and January. That was way too late I suspect. Weather's strange these days. So I'm going to have a bit of a tabulation here:

• Salad Tomatoes: Did the best this year but there's still kilos on the vine that will now have to become fried green tomatoes, green tomato relish, and green tomato chutney. I estimate that it's produced well north of 12kg to date and there's another 3kg of green left. 

• Paste Tomatoes: These didn't start to bud and ripen until much later, and there are several reasons for that. I'll probably have to add the several kilos it produced to the green tomato products.

• Rocoto Chilli: This one was also a bit sparse and unproductive but same reasons as the paste tomatoes. I know the issue and I'll get on top of it next year. Also, it peaked early with only a few fruit.

• Unknown Chilli: This one started late as chillis do and is now doing reasonably well, I also know the reasons for that.

• Basils: These could also have started a few weeks earlier and been way more productive, but that's also my mistake. The Greek basil has been a surprise runner in the field and I hope the plant will overwinter and run away again next year only far more so. 

Things are getting warm earlier so soils are ready to grow things but the days still have limited daylight. So the trick is going to be to figure out when's the best time to put plants in the ground so their roots will be nice and warm but not so early that photosynthesis lags behind and they grow spindly. Luckily most of the plants I want to grow have been bred to thrive in a variety of climates but I don't think any breeders thought seriously about how climate change was going to change how the plants need to behave in order to thrive.

There are seriously going to be so many crop failures because many agricultures are locked in stasis. Expect rice to get expensive because farms that have been expressly set up for rice are now outside of rice's climactic comfort zone, and the places that are now in those climate bands aren't anywhere near able to switch from the crops the used to grow there a decade ago to rice. Agile Farming is going to become a buzzword soon, mark my words.

I'm betting that I'll change my most successful crop varieties every few years here, and so preserving and keeping everything is going to be a thing if people want to enjoy a famine-free life. 

ODD THOUGHT OF THE DAY: 
What if all those ancient calendars were the shamans and priests of their eras' way of trying to figure out why the crops they'd been recommending to plant "on the full moon of the Coronation" didn't work so good any more, i.e. just frantic attempts to keep themselves looking infallible while changing climate patterns just overwhelmed and overthrew them? 

Mistakes Were Made: 

• I allowed the plants to be planted by a gardener and so they ended up in the wrong locations. 

• I also relied on garden-centre/Bunnings-type seedlings and they still start them way too late for today's climate so they're behind the 8-ball from the get-go.

• I didn't plan well enough for layout or anything and so I've mucked up a lot of opportunities this year. 

One of the biggest oversights was to not really really take account of the changing climate pattern. I've known it's happening for decades but I still have trouble shaking off the old "conventional wisdom" fallacy. It's a blind spot I share with almost everyone in agriculture: "Welp, this is how it was grampa's day and dad's day and while I was kid - except for that drought of '73 of course. Oh and the drought of '84, and that one in '95..." - and it's a blindside we all seem somehow still stuck with, just like those shamans and priests when they couldn't just go with what their senses were telling them. 

(And yes I will fight people on this - neolithic people that did farm, didn't just all know exactly when to put in a crop or how. Look at us today: Once upon a time in my life I could do lightning long maths in my head. Now, I can still do it if I can be bothered when there are calculators and sites that calculated out formulas for you instantly. When I want to know the recipe for khushari I grab my phone. In the same way, those hominids would let their shaman tell them when the right time was, how deep to plant, etc. Yes there were always some exceptional ones but we are and always have been economical with our brains.)

Another one was that I felt too unwell to go and site the plants myself, if I had, there'd have been a bit less competition for sunlight. The paste tomatoes were too close to and behind the salad toms (and partly this is because my beds aren't really deep or wide so space is at a premium and needs to be carefully managed) and the chillis also ended up behind the cherry (salad) tomato plant.

Feeling unwell meant that I didn't get the beds overwintered properly and so there wasn't much cover to begin with, and that meant that I couldn't get in some plants that I really wanted there to shelter the new season's summer crops.

And because of that lack of cover I had to keep the cat screens in place for way too long, and they got grown into by the plants, which restricted my access for pruning back and shaping. And that's played merry hell with my ability to harvest - and weed. It also contributed a lot to the runaway successful ability of one plant to overgrow and outcompete everything else. But I can't predict illness and so I guess the best I could do is what ended up happening.

This year is going to start around the time I started on the Not So Bastard Gate last year, i.e. around October/November but this year it'll be with warm sunny spots for seedling raising. Luckily I think I'll have a perfect spot - if the landlord's plans for the driveway don't muck it all up... If not, then I'm going to be kind of stonkered. ("Stonkered", in the sense of 2nd meaning, i.e. "foiled." Time to bring back some old expressions, I say!)

If the driveway spot becomes unavailable then I have two more choices, one behind the NSBG and one which is currently not available but would become so if landlords' Plan A goes into effect.

Team Ted Goals:

• Next year I need to plant out most seedlings about a month earlier. Given this was mostly December, that means way more work will need to start in November this year.

• In order to have seedlings to plant out, I'll need to start a lot of them in September and then thin them out to the best of the lot. 

• That means working out a sun-warm sheltered spot for the plants (see a few paragraphs back) and that's not going to be easy but I'll put my thinking cap on soon. If things here work out to plan I may have the perfect spot.

• When planting out, tomatoes will have to go at the back of the beds on the east side, front of the beds on the south side. The SE side is going to be tough to call.

• I don't think I'll bother with chillies next year because they were fine but they were a rescue, I'll now have enough there to supply us for a few years, and besides sriracha and so forth are cheap to buy.

• Much more basil will need to go in among the tomato rows and parsley too behind/under/among. Any spring peas or beans will need to be catty-corner to the tomatoes and have a wire trellis to keep them to themselves. 

• I also have plans for gherkin cucumbers and eggplant and that may make 2024 a bumper year for a 5.5m x 80cm total of garden beds. 

• Training tomato plants to an almost espalier pattern and really training peas and beans to their trellises might be a good thing too. 

Also, by next year I'll actually have the reticulation system working all the way around and dialled in for the plants. Programming is getting harder as my brain slows - it takes me weeks to get into "The Zone" where I retain the flow of a program and how to integrate a circuit with that code and then how to integrate that product into its real life environment, and every time I had a good Zone going, something came along to blow it up. Hope for better focus this winter.

Money: I had a survey company I worked with which paid around $20/mth to buy parts, and they did the dirty and ditched on us and reformed as another company which would now only pay me $5 for the same amount of work if I'm lucky, and that makes it just no longer worth the long hours I was putting in. So now I have no way to buy thing other than saving a few bucks from my pension here and there, and most of those bucks pay for web hosting, domain names, and minor fees, with now nothing left in the tank for the retic design nor any recycling gear. (Which will end up on Instructables and on my blog suite as a free design, just not as soon as I could have done them before...)

So a quick tap on Paypal, Ko-Fi, or Liberapay would always be appreciated.

I have my excuses - in the form of several surgeries, copious amounts of winter SADS because we've had a really stressful two and a half years what with new landlords, moving garden plots to allow them to split the block, having to somehow move six out of almost a dozen garden beds in the process, putting up with fences going up and a house being moved into the new division, demolition and new building going on across the road, half a dozen plan changes by the landlords that each required (as Deadpool would say) maximum effort in each case to just retain the things we had in place, and illnesses of various sorts and durations and caring for one another at times. 

Currently the "malaise du jour" is Influenza A, something I've had before - almost thirty years ago - and even back then it knocked my on my ass for five weeks. This time, my lovely wife has it also, and she is finding it much harder going than I am so I'm the de facto nurse. But enough for you to know that the drainer full of tomatoes at the top of this article cost me about 20 minutes afterwards of trying to stop sweating and feeling like I'd just had a steamroller run over me. Wife's pulled a few muscles just from coughing and is laid up with heat packs and hot lemon drinks and analgesics, getting old really sucks. 

For The Moment:

Before the weather turns wintery I'll have to put in broad beans, some other beans and peas, onions, garlic. I'll have to top up soil in some garden beds due to pulling up root balls and "cat activity." 

I have time to work out a trellis system for vining plants, and (as mentioned before) need to set up a spot for early seedling raising. Being a very humid coastal region I think conventional portable greenhouses are going to be a problem so I'll try and work on a 12V / 24V heated insulated platform, a fan, and some clear plastic to make the magic happen, and lots of small nursery pots. There's my next project for a rainy day - and luckily, from now on we'll have a lot of those. 

I'm also refining my systems for protecting plantings from the ravages of our felines, and our felines from my necessary use of at least some snail pellets. Snails have also been loving the warmer and wetter overall climate, and much as I hate chemicals, the beer traps didn't work as well and couldn't keep up, and most other "remedies" are actually "bullshit" and don't work. 

I'll start a calendar where I can start placing observations, experiments, and results. I'll look for a shareable calendar and link it from here. For now, this blog post is my memo to myself more than anything else, and I hope you too get something out of it.