Scorching the Garden 2018 Part III
Follow along as we Scorch the Garden for our 2018 season. From seed to harvest, we document the growing of the peppers for our 2018 batch, available in December 2018. This is a big year for us and we want everyone to be a part of it, and this is part 3.
We love compost almost as mulch as the plants do. See what we did there?
For this set-up, we diverted over 150 pounds of cardboard from having to be shipped and processed. Instead, it’s directly being composted and feeding the earth. Within a month, it will just become part of the surface which will continue to block the weeds even after it seems to have disappeared.
Now we and add the much. We are going to cover all the compost and as much of the cardboard as we can. The raw woodchips act as a shield to help with airflow and protect the soil from heating up and drying out.
These buckets are much lighter, but there are a lot more of them. Pretty much 4 buckets for every sheet of cardboard we put down. After about 3 hours of walking up and down an uneven hill with heavy buckets awkwardly swaying, we are nearly done.
PRO TIP:
Wet mulch is heavy. Avoid carrying it. Go with the dry stuff.
We had a nice heavy rain and the barrel is full. The rain catching system worked out great. This is going to save a lot of time and energy (money) as we won’t have to lug around as much water.
Now i wish i would have installed a second one to catch the run-off. All those bottles on the ground represent what has to be hauled every time we water. We use two liter bottles because they are pretty portable, free, and it forces us to target where we put our water. Every drop counts and we would rather water the plants, not the walkways.
What you don’t see is the hardening off of the seedlings (this took place a few weeks ago) or planting of around 90 seedlings in under two hours. I guess we were too busy getting things into the ground before it rained to stop to document what we were doing.
Well, even though you don’t see it being done, trust us, the peppers got planted.
After the rain, things settled and we went back over and filled in the areas with mulch that needed it. We took the time to put cages on half of the plants. We would have done more, but we ran out of cages this year. Yes, it looks like a tornado went through and destroyed everything. The photograph isn’t doing it any justice. Everything is in place and honestly, it looks good.
All but a few of the the plants have taken to the transplant with no wilting. We had more plants than we had anticipated but it’s always sad to lose a plant.
A month and a half later, we applied another 20 lbs of compost and covered that with more mulch. It was a lot of heavy lifting, but about 1/3 less than the last time we did this. We had to be more careful with the plants being in the ground and all.
This is our idea of mid-season fertilizing. The old compost and mulch gets buried with another layer of mature compost and mulch. Completely safe and natural.
You can see how the cardboard has settled and the chips are keeping the soil in place.
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It takes more than one pepper to Scorch a Garden.
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Garden at a Glance 2018
