plantyhamchuk:

V said I could use this section next to his Elderberry collection. The soil here is pretty good. This is one of our more cultivated beds. On one side is his Elderberries, on the other side is a Pear tree surrounded by strawberries and a few flowers.

Here I am, shoving more plants in! You can see it is already planted a bit. They were old freebies from work. They are healthy enough, just need some love (nutrients) and to be in the ground. The bed was mostly planted a few nights ago with freebie Tomatillos, one ‘Crimson Sweet’ watermelon, and some dubious looking peppers. I also planted a few red sunflowers and sprinkled some zinnia seeds, to help try to hide the plants from predators a bit.

Today we are planting mostly watermelons with cute little fruits already on the vines. I decided to shove in a few ‘moon and stars’ watermelons into this bed, assuming that there will be losses. Slayer the Groundhog loves to eat everything. The rest of the plants were shoved in the ground elsewhere.

Not only do I drag home mystery and needs-some-tlc plants, I also drag home fertilizers (we had some questionable stuff left over from the old landscaping dept). V is a fertilizer chemistry pro, so he cobbled something together. And apparently used his old drink thing! Anyway what came out of it looked terrifying. 

Add more water, this stuff is crazy concentrated.

Here’s where the Useful Technology comes in! 

Not bad. We messed around with it a little more. He’s measuring the EC - electroconductivity here, which works to measure the salt concentration (salt as in chemistry, not as in NaCl). We went with 1500, and later 1000. We try to keep it below 3000. There’s all sorts of stuff in here, though the only ingredient I can remember right now is kelp. Oh and some sort of chelated iron too.

We then carefully applied it with watering cans.

For anyone interested in making their own fertilizer I highly highly recommend getting yourself some measuring technology. Too often I run into even farmers who have no idea what is in the cow manure that they just had tilled into their farm. Ignoring their excessive tilling for a moment, the fact that they don’t know what was in their fertilizer can actually lead to long term growth issues in their plants. Plants need snacks, but they want specific types of snacks. Unique sometimes to each plant. That is dependent on soil pH as well. The basic science behind this stuff isn’t too hard to understand, but it’s important to learn. Otherwise you can do stuff like grow a ton of foliage but get very few fruits.

What I just described was plants getting too much nitrogen! The first thing on the list. And the plants in the very first picture I posted above have a significant (though correctable) lack of nitrogen. 

On the chart above, the first 3 things on the list are the same 3 numbers - in the same order - that you’ll see on fertilizer bags. 

The goal of most food forests is to have the nutrients to cycle through your system. And maybe one day we’ll get there? But for now, we’ll keep adding in nutrients and the organic material and the mycorrhizae to help create and feed those systems.