Scorching the Garden 2018 Part V
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 5.
The most work we have to do is keep the plants watered. It’s heavy lugging, especially when the handles on the buckets are only bare wire. When the plants are small, you could split a two litre between three of them. Towards the end of the season, each one gets a half gallon every 3-4 days.
One person can do it in about an hour and a half if they take their time. Weeding is best done now. Pulling the weed breaks up the soil a bit and will get filled up with water. It takes the better part of an hour to fill up nearly 100 two litre bottles. Next year, we will make use of a hose and a pump along with 3 rain barrels.
Now, this whole time, we’ve had our aromatic herbs, garlic and onions growing and haven’t said much about them. They really are the unsung heroes of our sauces. And of course, either out of habit or instinct, we grow several varieties of the same herbs. For example, we have Greek, Mexican, and Italian oregano, and 4 types of basil.
The herb garden is also where sunflowers and other pollinator drawing flowers grow. It’s very sad to see the bee population dwindle. So many people just don’t understand how serious a problem this is and how important it is for us to agree on:
#noPoisonousCrap
This is an example of what a little mindfulness, some planning, a huge preparation effort, and some light and constant maintenance can do for gardening and farming.
All this could be done on a VERY part-time basis, by one person with hand tools, spending about 65 hours over a 7 month period. Imagine what 5 people could do if they each had 40 hours a week and power equipment to devote to this.
We have taken days of work and reduced it to minutes. We have eliminated hundreds of dollars of poisonous sprays and polluting additives. We have renewed the land and created a haven for natural life. We diverted hundreds of pounds of one-time use post-consumer paper products from having to be shipped, processed, and shipped again and again and maybe again, to be processed. We have prevented tons of kitchen scraps and yard waste from ending up in landfills.
Our soil is healthier which makes our plants healthier which makes what we harvest healthier and more powerful than what you will find in most gardens.
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It takes more than one pepper to Scorch a Garden.
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Garden at a Glance 2018
