I’ve been relying on sites like this one and also this for my information rather than sending other gardeners on trips to Australia, New Zealand, and Jordan as of late. My wallet really has no patience for information being withheld for profit right now, and also this isn’t necessarily mission work in a backyard in Texas,

I will be adding videos for each zone as I finish them up. Hopefully they will be found valuable and create some dialogue. Zone 3 and 4 are about as mixed together as Zone 1 and 2 were. I am considering using some of the garden tour content in re-edits to show what was “wrong”. Wish me luck!

I will be working off this list. It’s going to change. Things will not be pretty. An item will receive strikethough once it is complete. Some time will be needed for replacing some drip lines that I mended throughout the season. There is lots more to do while it is cooling down.

.So, without further rambling:

Fall 2024 Plan

Wish me luck!

My Zone One has sucked this year and last. This is supposed to be the easy place. We’re supposed to just grab something a few steps from the door to enhance our breakfast. We’re supposed to be able to invite our friends’ kids to grab a snack when they stop by and get bored with the cool arcade cabinet I built a few years ago. (Yes, I saw a squirrel and chased it!)

Back to my point, I started with Zone 1 before I broke any ground in the yard. Some people may have remembered my little endeavor on MeWe called TechGardening, I actually have some early videos from back then. I hung some shoe bags from the wall. Dangling like tapestries, they were able to produce leafy things very well. There wasn’t a weed in sight and we had plenty of greens that winter. .I learned something very important in the process. Controlling your surface area will reduce your workload. After two summers of intense Texas heat, the shoe bags failed. I moved on to microgreens.

I am trying to slowly rebuild Zone 1. We need two more Greenstalks, since they are UV rated, unlike shoe bags. What I envision is a spinach tower, a lettuce tower, and a choy-komatsuna tower. The Spring and Summer plans haven’t fully materialized, but one tower definitely needs to be strawberries.

The herbs in Zone 2 can be moved over, making more room for potted trees there.

Now, to fix the economy…

August is just a break in releases. It doesn’t mean I am not working on AG. Currently, there’s some editing to do on new intro and outro clips. (ooooh, shiny!). Also, more directly related to the website, I am learning some AI methods for the clipart. I’m not considering fake plants or any other crap like that. What this site needs is a little polish. I’m focusing on the stuff that doesn’t really matter like horizontal bars and tiny fleur-de-lis. The goal is more assistance than complete takeover. We’ll see.

Things can get a little chaotic during Season changes, but it will eventually stabilize.

Thanks for sticking around!

As I understand this method, there are several tiers to this method of weeding and mulching (stacked functions). You have a pocket knife for small touch-ups. You have a rice knife/sickle for medium jobs. Machetes take care of the chopping. Scythes are for bulk cutting of plants (e.g. grasses and other leafy things).

We had a hurricane to contend with on Monday. This is the prefect time to bulk up on plant matter.

When you go to the grocery store and buy a weeks worth of food, you are preparing for a week. When you pressure can chicken to preserve it without electricity because storms down power lines often, you are preparing for more than a week.

My grandfather used to grow these yellow peppers we didn’t know the name of. I’m pretty sure they were Golden Marconi, but he got them from a friend who saved the seed. They were downright tasty. He wanted them in the winter and preserved them in jars. Did that make him a prepper in 1987?

Half of coastal Texas owns a generator. Is there an army of these weird people who will somehow discover their common bond and try to take over the world? The answer is no. We’re too busy coming up with creative ways to maintain our standard of living.

Someone asked me once, “Would you rather panic about the things occurring around you or be relieved when you are able to take care of yourself no matter what?”

This is not prepping. This is ensuring a stable and happy life. Everyone prepares. It is only a matter of how much they prepare.

I think both are achievable if done correctly. The conflict between these two details is order of operations, not choosing between them. We make the framework first Apocalypse Gardens’ initial design started out as two 4×8 beds running perpendicular to an existing pergola. It was symmetrical. It was boring, but it allowed for expansion later once the pandemic was in full swing.

We made them both hugel mounds, burying every stick we could find in the twin beds along with a few logs. This was exactly the structure our yard needed in order to be beautiful later.

In the second year, mushrooms sprang up everywhere in the beds. The fungus was eating the limbs and any remaining chips. Tomatoes that I had normally grown on an apartment patio could produce in the ground. I remember growing Better Boy and White Tomesol. Our hatch chilies performed amazingly. Malabar spinach climbed to the top of cattle panel trellises.

We had our proof of concept. We also started to notice the shortages we normally saw during hurricane season started to become more common than when there was a typhoon headed for us. It was time to expand. We added two more beds, running along the back fence.

Everything happened exactly as the videos we watched said it would. By the third year, the soil was teaming with life atop several feet of Texas black gumbo clay. Moisture wasn’t just running off the yard over the top of that slick clay. Three more beds were added in front of the other row, because of potatoes, beans, and lettuce.

Then came the wood chips. Instead of proceeding with a full Back to Eden implementation, I latched onto the solution of throwing the beautiful oak chips we received in the pathways between our beds. This soaked up the mud our beds were causing. Everything in Texas has a price tag, because capitalism, but I was more than happy to pay the $20 a load for Chip Drop. Our HOA decided the second load stayed on the driveway too long and wrote us up for “trash” on the drive. My wife says I’m no longer allowed to order them for this iteration.

My point is the beauty will come. Give the garden some structure. Consider your next move. Maybe, even plan a little. Form and function can coalesce for you as well.

The fire ants outnumber humans in my part of the country. It’s just a fact of life. I’m told it is a consequence of the burgeoning shipyards nearby. These ants are not from around here. I confess that sometimes I wonder if they are truly from our planet, possibly sneaking here by way of Johnson Space Center.

Recently, the constant battle with these creatures has carried over to compost production activities in Apocalypse Gardens. After leaving some sifted compost for a few days and noticing ants in my seedlings, I discovered tiny mounds being built in the contents of the wheelbarrow.

As mentioned in Episode 26, I needed to conduct some research this week. It seems the solution may be one I have used in the past for other pests: Diatomaceous Earth. I have a bag of this I can experiment with as a compost additive. The plan is to only use this for seedling soil to avoid spreading it all over the place. Although it isn’t a toxic substance, I have concerns about a dependency on outside inputs and also harming beneficials like the ladybugs. I actually saw a nymph of a ladybug today.

Anyway, updates will be arriving shortly. I’m going to begin some experiments with DE and see if I can prevent another incident like last year’s ant venom problem.

“Release early; release often” can be the strongest premise of both systems. In gardening, you have seasons that bring different focuses, different priorities, and different possibilities. With development, you have sprints. harboring different requirements, different levels of funding, and different focuses driven by needs.

These two extremely different processes simultaneously depend on root-cause analysis. “Why doesn’t this code produce the expected result?” “Why are my tomatoes getting yellow leaves?”

The situation that brought me to this “obviation” was the fact that I spent all day yesterday recording a build of a soil sifter, trying to keep it simple. I looked online this morning and decided I liked this one better.

I am going to continue to edit the video, but the 2.0 of this sifter is going to be amazing. 3.0 will be monumental. I will be the best darned soil sifter builder in the world by the time I am done and will enjoy every phase of the development process.

Welcome to agile gardening! Please join me in my quest for stuff to do.