Anarchapulco Permaculture Farm, Garden Update 2: Taming the Jungle, Preparing for Winter, Expanding the Garden

in #garden8 years ago

Today was a day spent on the hill, taming the jungle and expanding the garden.  In our last update, we shared planting lettuce and plans for the hill, for maintenance and expansion.  Today I planted that lettuce, as well as some other plants into unplanted terraces.  John rebuilt the rocket stove, something I'll probably share tomorrow in a separate article. Lots of weeding, watering and dirt moving made this a pretty productive day at our Anarchapulco Permaculture Farm. 

This is a section of hill we intend to turn into terraces for a Three Sisters Garden, featuring corn, beans and squash. 

This is a particularly overgrown area that surrounds our septic tank, to be chopped down to the ground, for the most part. The dogs are fond of this area for bathroom purposes, although not recently due to the overgrown jungle in the way. 

Wild Squash loves boulders, so much so it decided to try and eat my house. 

As you can see from the photos above, the jungle is a force to be reckoned with.  Yesterday, the banana tree shown on the edge of the photo above was completely covered in morning glory vines. You couldn't see the baby banana trees at the bottom, as they too had been swallowed by the jungle.  Some careful cutting and pulling cleared the banana tree area, leaving me with a big wad of vines to compost. Part of the cutting we did today was just general jungle taming, wheras the largest area John cut for me is intended for new terraces, to be built within a day or so.  The corn I planted in the last update has sprouted, and is technically ready to transplant.  The beans and potatoes may have molded, as we got a day of freak, constant rain. 

My former tomato plants have pitched most of their foliage, partially in a fight with curly top virus, something spread by aphids. Most of my tomato plants have had it at this point, although all of them seem to be recovering.  I didn't do much treatment other than pruning off the badly effected areas. Usually this time of year, my garden is dying back and the weather is turning cold.  Adjusting to moving from a hot wet season to a warm dry season has been interesting. The foliage seems to be dying, but I've kept the plants watered, which has kept them alive.   I've pruned all the dead foliage off of my tomato plants, leaving them looking pretty bare.  I've also added compost tea.  They seem to have appreciated my efforts, as they're shooting off new healthy bits of vegetative growth, seemingly void of the virus that plagued the rest of the plant.  

This is that area intended for the Three Sisters terraces, freshly chopped back by John. 

The photo above shows the area I showed further up covered in wild squash, hell bent on eating the house and my garden hose.  I pulled it all off, pretty much in one sheet and put it in a pile.  I did my best to pull the plants out by the roots, and I'd say I did a pretty good job.  Taming the jungle involves a combination of clever machete use and just using gloved hands, to pull the material into one area. 

The pile shown above is all the material pulled off my house. It's much denser than it appears and is pretty heavy.  We intend to put this into a 21 day compost pile, possibly tomorrow.  John and I have been doing research on composting and compost teas lately, as well as soil science in general to improve our farming output. 

I sheet mulched and half ass "finished" this terrace for planting.  John raised some criticisms and today we worked on fixing it, as I had a goal to plant all of our lettuce seedlings into it by the end of the day.  The important thing with planting lettuce how we do, is to get it planted before the first true leaves come out.  You just gently pull the seedling from the soil by it's cotyledons(the first little leaves you see on any plant, the ones contained within the seed) and plant it up to those little leaves, so they're just showing out of the ground.  

This is the terrace, sheet mulching removed and now with more soil. 

This is the terrace, now hexagonally planted with lettuce, which I'll explain below.

The little green seedlings you see in the picture above are the start of lettuce heads.  We transplanted three varieties today: a red romaine Cimmaron, oakleaf and buttercrunch lettuce. To prepare the terrace correctly, I had to add a lot more dirt to make it so it now longer was a bowl, which would cause a terrace blowout.  The idea is to have the dirt as flush as possible, making a flat, decently level surface.  I added some organic matter from the hillside, the stuff that's been rotting all season.  I also added peat moss and old soil, with a little general organic fertilizer. I mixed this all around thoroughly.  Add lots of water across the surface and this terrace became ready to plant.

This is a simple diagram explaining hexagonal planting, which probably explains it better than I do below. 

I mentioned that I hexagonally planted the lettuce, which is the best way we've found to grow lettuce.  It's something we learned in a gardening book a few years back, it allows you to plant more food in a much smaller space.  It also makes it so you don't have to mulch, as properly placed hexagonally planted plants will cover all of the dirt, making a sort of living mulch.  You generally water these beds less and get much more food for the same amount of area than conventional methods. Basically, we planted lettuce every three inches or so in a row across the edge of the terrace.  When started the next row, you off set it, so its below and in the middle of the two above it.  This slight offsetting make it so you can fit more plants in, achieving complete covering and full use of the potential of the area you plant. 

This terrace is a path more than a garden, but we've always had plants planted in the edge.  The roots help to stabilize the path, important because we've had issues with this terrace in the past.  I had cherry tomatoes here for a long time, but I allowed them to get swallowed by wild bean and morning glory.  Today I discovered they were dead and decided to pull them all out and replant. The stick shown was competely covered in vine, the whole area was a mess really. 

Here I used to have some red cypress vines, which are pretty little vines that never grew very well in the States.  We always suspected they would do better in the tropics and they did, although I let the plant die back after it went to seed.  There's a seedling in this bed, and I'll just let that go.  I planted a black beauty eggplant in here, as well as an unidentified chile.  

I planted one of our new beefsteak style Rutger's Tomatoes in my old Moon and Stars Melon terrace.  I'll probably trellis it with a teepee within a few days, just to give it the best chance for success that I can. 

We had a productive day here on our hill, but we are no where near caught up. There's still terraces to be prepared and planted, more seeds to be planted, more jungle to tame.  The nice thing about the mounting list of work is that we are never bored here.  6 year ago, I lived a fairly boring life.  I had no interests or hobbies, the thing I filled my time with was crappy fiction books.  I was always bored, with nothing to do.  Now my list things to do is long, and while that can be stressful, it's motivating.  At least I've got something worthwhile and fun to do with my time, that's more than many can say. 

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Will you let your lettuces bolt and collect the seeds?

After harvesting them a few times, I will. If you leave the root base and just cut the head off, they tend to regrow. Some varieties are better for cut and come again, meaning you can harvest more than once. But all will regrow and flower after cut. We harvested some seeds off of plants earlier this year, I'll try starting some soon and share them. :)

I have also seen people pull leaves off their lettuces all season long.

What I was really wondering is... being in the states (of policestate-denial) you just go down to your local store and you buy more seeds. Every year, you just go pick out what varieties you want.
Being down where you are, I was wondering how things are different.

I had to tell a friend how to get lettuce seeds because she couldn't figure out where in the lettuce the seeds grow. And no one knows how to get carrot seed.
Thankfully I like my melons and peppers. Seeds are so easy to get and save ^_^

Seeds are sold here, but limited varieties, no heirloom. I brought varieties from the states, with this expectation in mind. I also collected some local seeds, essentially weeds, that I loved from home. I also had a donation of seeds that were brought from the states. I grew lettuce here with the intention of keeping the seeds, as I haven't seen many different varieties of things. There are lots of options, just not lots of varieties within. So like 3 kinds of tomatoes, cherry, roma and a beefsteak. One kind of carrot, one kind of onion...ect.

So my advice to any gardeners looking to expatriate to anywhere, BRING SEEDS. Don't assume there'll be lots of varieties because there aren't always.

That being said there doesn't seem to be a problem with ordering seeds here, even seeds and plants that are hard to import to the US.

I love your reports n your efforts. won't be long until you share your harvest

I appreciate that, it's what keeps us posting. I used writing this article as motivation to really get a lot done today, and it worked. :)

Untold riches.
naturally occuring building materials, soil and water.
what more do you need?

Indeed time and knowledge are our only limits. Upvoted some of your stuff and followed you.

thank you.
note: I tried "back to the land" in the eighties. I picked the WRONG land. High plains of texas, nothing but dirt and wind. No rocks or trees for building material...eveyrything had to be bought. No water...had to irrigate.
etc.

I envy you.
Good luck.

Ouch, can't even imagine especially because it wasn't until mid 80's the scientist started to document the soil food web. Without the systems that have been developed using biology homesteading something like that is a near impossible prospect. This knowledge was out there in broken form but you would be stepping outside the realm of "science" to employ them then. People think we are crazy today even though the evidence is pilling up that biology based systems are more productive and cheaper to run.

there was no internet then either.
Just the mother earth news and the whole earth catalog.

Will you be attending Anarchopulco 2017? I'm studying Permaculture now, love to meet up. I also took Curtis Stone's urban farming course and I went to Permaculture Voices conference :) I'm thinking about moving to Mexico! Maybe find a place with land to grow on.

We are unsure if we will be attending the conference itself but we will be at many of the partys and meetups. Contact us and let us know; we live in Acapulco so its about a 30-40 min drive from the conference location in Diamante

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