Urban Garden: Part 2 (Daikon)
After three waterings, followed by tilling as deep as it would go, I was able to scratch down a few inches and was pleases with what was revealed. It is darkish soil meaning there is organics present and it was large clods as it would have been with a lot of clay in it. I'm still not as deep as I would like to condition the soil, but it is a start. I grabbed a bag of daikon radish seed and sewed my first crop out behind my house along with some starter fertilizer for good measure. With a light raking, I have watered it every evening since because we are still in a severe drought of the worst magnitude and the package said radish seeds like continual moisture until germination. I'm not looking forward to my water bill next month.
Four days later, I saw radish seedlings popping up everywhere. Oh how it made my heart flutter! The idea of planting daikon radish is two fold. First they are a cover crop until next spring when we hopefully will till them up to add organic matter into the soil and plant something else there. Second, they grow upwards of a foot deep which will poke holes down into the clay layer below and introduce water and organics which will hopefully produce vegetables someday. I'm not optimistic that mine will grow that deep but just getting some sort of tuber that I can till up in the spring, and perhaps eat a few along the way, will be enough for my first attempt. Below is another picture exactly one week after planting.
The condition of the soil thus far has made me optimistic that perhaps we can plant our full garden here next spring. But we plan to do some sort of soil test first before making the determination.
Meanwhile, our farm garden is still producing though showing signs of finally slowing down. We made one trip through the tomato patch, at least until we ran out of buckets, with the thought of giving them away. However, I still ended up with two buckets after giving as much away as I could so I turned them into plain old tomato sauce. We still had about two dozen jars but it was dark in color and had an off taste to it. If I remember correctly, it took a lot of cooking down to get it into sauce form and it was scorched a bit, which I think is the reason for the dark color and taste. So with plenty of tomatoes and of the paste variety that make great sauce without a lot of cooking, I emptied out the old jars, washed them and filled them up with new stuff. Other than the occasional tomato for a BLT, I hope I am done with them for a few years.
I'm going to start canning pears this coming week from my trip down to visit the pear tree so I didn't need a lot of apples around but I still picked a basket of them anyway. They are ripe and ready and taste really great. I ate two while I was mowing around our gardens. Next week, assuming I'm caught up with pears, I hope to fill all those buckets with apples. Most we will try to give away but I'm going to keep a couple bushel myself to make some jelly and butter out of them. Then, hopefully I can put the canning stuff all back on its shelf in the basement for another year and move onto other projects.
You seem very knowledgeable about how to go about getting your land ready for a garden.
ReplyDeleteWell I did a fair amount of research though much of it seems quite contradictory on which way is the best. I just use this as a learning experience one way or another. If it works out well, I'll remember for next time. If it doesn't, I'll remember that as well for next time.
DeleteI was thinking that's a big patch of daikon, but now understand. It looks like a great garden spot. I have a lot of clay here, too, but have worked lots of organic stuff into it and the ground in my garden is becoming more black. It's been a good tomato year. Now, I'm left with lettuce, turnips, pie pumpkins, and winter squash
ReplyDeleteJeff Https://fromarockyhillside.com
Our squash was ate up by squash bugs this year. Our once a week visits are hard to stop them and though we lucked out previous years, we didn't this year. Another reason to garden closer to home. Someday, I would like to experiment more with a fall garden, perhaps when there are less of us at home and our garden can be much smaller.
DeleteI wondered what you were going to do with so many daikon radishes! I hope you do get to eat a few of them, even if the rest go back to the earth.
ReplyDeleteI've eaten a few micro greens from it already and they taste really good. If I had lettuce growing, I would toss some of them in my salad. I've thought about garnishing a burger with some of the greens this weekend.
DeleteSo much good stuff! We have a watermelon to cut and maybe another still in the patch. Our summer was just too hot to get much.
ReplyDeleteWe don't have the right type of soil for watermelons. We can grow them but they have always been small, stunted things and not a lot for the amount of vines.
DeleteTalking about burning things that you have to cook down, have you ever used a heat diffuser? I wouldn't be without one. I'd never cook rice or grits of Cream of Wheat without mine. You don't have to stand right by it and stir. Just get it to boiling, turn the heat down under the diffuser. I check once in awhile, because sometimes they do need some stirring, or maybe a little more water added. But it is one of the most helpful things I have in my kitchen. You can find them on Amazon. The only bad thing about them is they all have a wooden handle and eventually the heat causes the wood to crack and fall off. Once that happens, I just make sure and use a cooking mit or potholder to move the diffuser when it's hot, rather than buy a new one.
DeleteI have not heard of such a thing. I'll definitely check it out.
DeleteExcellent plan and it appears to be working well so far! I love all the fresh produce--wish I could be closer to get some!
ReplyDeleteI think all our friends are tired of us asking if they want some of our extras.
DeleteSometimes having too much of a good thing (i.e. tomatoes) can be a problem. But it is a far better problem than not having enough.
ReplyDeleteHave you thought of growing soy beans? They are known to leave good nutrients in the soil.
Soybeans grow by the tens of thousands of acres around us. They alternate planting corn with soybeans for the vary reason you mention. While they leave good nutrients in the soil, I'm looking for something to poke holes into the deeper soil layers to add water and nutrients there, hence why I went with daikon radishes.
DeleteI started my main garden about 20 years ago in a similar way. I struggled to till up the grass with a TroyBilt tiller, broadcast some blackeye peas as a cover crop, then in the fall I tilled it up again and planted some wheat. In the spring, I tilled a few times to incorporate the wheat residue and started planting a garden. The more I grew the better the garden seemed to get.
ReplyDeleteSlowly, over the years I added compost, manure, mulch, and some fertilizer once in a while. Every year I usually planted winter wheat in the fall, but I also planted big blocks of blackeye peas, pinto beans, black beans, bird seed mixes, sunflowers, turnips, vetch, oats, winter rye, buckwheat, sorghum sudangrass, millet, etc. and found that it all more or less works and there is nothing really special about any one type of cover crop.
Now, I mainly plant winter wheat as a cover crop over the whole garden in the fall. During the summer, I'll plant about a third of the garden to corn to get some biomass and because I like growing and experimenting with my "Indian" corn. I'd explain more about my corn growing, but this comment is getting overly long, so the quick summary is that I started with an ear of decorative "Indian" corn (not the best description of the variety) which I planted one year, then I picked all the resulting ears, shelled them all, and I separated all the various colors and replanted blocks of the same color to develop an all-blue variety, an all-red variety, etc. Over the years, I kept replanting and selecting traits while also growing biomass for the garden, which seems like a better, cheaper way to cover crop than just planting some mix of seeds.
Your garden experiments always fascinated me and I have thought of them often this past summer when we made the decision to start a new garden. I really need to spend a few evenings and read back through some of your old posts for bits of wisdom I have forgotten.
DeleteMy plan is to plant a lot of potatoes in the new plot next year along with a variety of other things just to experiment with how well things grow. I still have a lot of radish seed left so hopefully will seed use it up as a cover crop next fall. But I do like the thought using winter wheat as a fall cover crop. It will take me back to my youth on the farm where we used to grow a little bit of it every year.
That is very interesting about your Indian corn experiment. It has never occurred to me that separating kernels would result in a mono color. If you wish to expound upon it further in an email, I would love to hear more about it.
My Indian corn growing isn't that complicated, I just took a couple of ears that I found in some fall decorations and planted them in the garden. Then, I sorted out all the different colors and planted them again in blocks (four rows of blue about 10 foot long, then four rows of red about 10 foot long, etc.). When I harvested that planting, I choose the ears that were all a solid color to plant the next year, and the color was more or less stabilized. Now it seems that I can mix the seed up and the plants will usually produce solid colored ears based on the seed regardless of what plant is next to it. Supposedly corn breeding is harder than that, but I didn't know that when I started decades ago.
DeleteThe only other thing I've done is planting it in narrow rows (15"), hills (3-5 seeds about three feet apart), or broadcasting so that it forms a solid stand.
Now, I'm thinking about figuring out ways to eat it.
On the subject of potatoes, I started growing decent potatoes when I started tilling large amounts of leaves over the winter into the area I was planning to plant potatoes. An added bonus of the leaves was that earthworms started showing up in the garden from either the food source of the leaves or I was actually "transplanting" live worms or worm eggs with the leaves.
Well that is great news. My plan later this fall was to pile on as many dead mulched up leaves as I could stand to do onto the garden after the radishes stop growing from a killing frost and then till everything up in the spring.
DeleteYou get a lot of satisfaction growing this garden.
ReplyDeleteI hope so. I think I will really be happy when we have made the transition and things are growing well.
DeleteThe daikons are an excellent choice for a ground-breaker crop. Well worth the expense of the watering. And it sounds like your soil is pretty good, so it will only get better from here!
ReplyDeleteI've been pleasantly surprised with the soil thus far. As long as they continue to grow well, we may bump up our plans for our urban garden over the farm garden.
DeleteDaikon was a favorite for exactly the reasons you list of Masanobu Fukoka. If you have never read One Straw Revolution, I would highly recommend it.
ReplyDeleteI haven't but I'll have to look into it.
DeleteGosh... I didn't even know you could eat the leaves. I was wondering how you'd get even a small crop since it's already fall and I couldn't imagine there being enough time for the daikon to grow very big. I'm always so amazed at all you know.
ReplyDeleteI’ve learned you can eat the leaves of about any plant, especially when young and tender. As of earlier this week, the main root is already three inches deep. But we have a cold snap coming next week so growth will surely slow down.
DeleteYou have a good start toward a garden!
ReplyDelete