Contact me: david@thedavidboyd.com
©2017.
I bought a Farmer's Almanac for 2017. It's the first time I've used one, which surprises me because there is so much useful knowledge in it. It has everything from daily sunrise and sunset times to weather predictions to astronomical events, gardening advice, recipes, and American folklore. I read about two pepper cultivars that Thomas Jefferson grew, and found a recipe for eggnog from George Washington. (It contains brandy, whiskey, rum, and sherry.) There was an article called "Froth of Our Fathers" that talked about the history of beer in the early days of the nation. Evidently, the colonial-era Americans drank primarily whiskey. The article also has another one of George Washington's recipes, this one for brewing beer. And President Barack Obama--now former President--commissioned the first beer ever brewed in the White House. Beer aficionados used the Freedom of Information Act to get the White House to release the recipe, named the White House Honey Brown Ale, and it's now effectively an open-source beer. I would like to try it myself when I get the time and space to do so. It's supposed to be really delicious.
Anybody that has seen my Instagram or Twitter recently has seen a few posts from a hydroponic garden in my garage.
The hydroponic garden is looking good. Added these Hale's Best Jumbo cantaloupe today. pic.twitter.com/fntFZhcZL5
— Rev. Deep Thought (@thedavidboyd) January 21, 2017
This hydroponic garden has been a source of great pleasure for me because I have been able to garden through the winter. Even when it has been 18ºF outside, my plants are unaffected. I really love gardening. I like working with my hands, for one reason; and it is also a creative exercise that taps into my scientific knowledge as well. Plus you get to see progress happen over the course of weeks as the plants pack on mass, and you get relatively lucid cause-effect relationships between garden conditions and outcome. For example, a vegetative-phase, nitrogen-heavy fertilizer treatment inevitably induces a growth spurt and darkening of the foliage for 1-3 days after feeding. Keeping your growth medium wet without allowing it to dry out between feedings is a sure-fire way to prevent root growth, and that's one of my chief mistakes. I have a tendency to overwater. Plant roots like oxygen, and water-logged grow medium doesn't let oxygen get to the roots.
Based on the number of flowers on the plants and the average mass of the tomatoes I have picked already, I expect to have about 1.75lb of yellow cherry tomatoes in about a month. That's not a high yield, but I think I can improve it by adding the symbiotic microbe treatment I gave the outdoor tomatoes, dialing up the bloom-phase nutrients and pH'ing the feed appropriately (something I have been lax on). Besides the yellow cherry tomatoes, I have Siberian kale, Vienna white kohlrabi, Louisiana Green Velvet okra, wild Allium, a dwarf horticultural bush bean, a sunflower, and Hale's Best Jumbo cantaloupes. The kale and kohlrabi I plan to cross-pollinate to make F1 kalerabi seeds. This is a vegetable that I have never seen or heard of, but I have hypothesized its existence many times since I found out that broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, kale, cabbage, and collards are all the same species: Brassica oleracea. They are cultivars of the wild-type Brassica oleracea, each having been selected for a different body part of the plant. So they interbreed freely, which has brought us crossed cultivars like broccolini, kalettes, and Romanesco broccoli. So I want to have a little fun with these two European cabbages I've got and see if I can make a new cultivar out of them.
Besides that, I recently got involved with an aquaponics project through a ministry in town. Two fellas from my old church made units from 55 gallon food barrels, and I got one filled up with Hydroton and started cycling it. Cycling is the first stage of aquaponics, where you put ammonia in it and run it so that it starts to cultivate nitrophilic bacteria. The Nitrosomonas oxidize ammonia to nitrite, then Nitrospira oxidizes nitrite to nitrate, which is a great plant food and does not harm fish. Once there are enough nitrophilic bacteria, you put in the fish. Today I put in the light and iceberg lettuce seeds, so fish will get added in a few weeks. It has been great learning about aquaponics. It is like organic hydroponics. Like hydro, it can be done anywhere with no regard for seasonality or weather if you do it indoors. Unlike hydro, the water is in a recirculating system that doesn't require the liquid gold nutrients in the reservoir to be changed every week. Hydro nutrients are really expensive, and they are not sustainably sourced. The fish in aquaponics give a neverending supply of carbon-based plant food. Plus, you get to eat the fish after they get big enough, and I like fresh fish.
A commonly cited figure is that aquaponics uses one-tenth the water of conventional farming, and that it can produce more food per unit area than soil-based growing. Aquaponics might be the future of food production. Conventional farming isn't going anywhere soon; but there are areas of the world that cannot grow their own food because of unfavorable soil and climate, and the rising cost of fertilizer, water, and land will favor more resource-efficient methods of growing food.