AP Garden Update

[Aaron]

Well it's been a couple weeks since I posted an update and a lot has been going on with my system! A LOT!!! With those many many changes, has come a lot of lessons! A LOT!!!

Let's start with the asparagus. I had no idea that asparagus goes through so many phases. The roots that I bought were only a couple years old and I didn't know that it takes them 2 to 3 years before you get asparagus that's edible. Needless to say, I won't be eating asparagus this year from my garden. But it is fun to watch this thing grow. Last time I posted pictures of it, I think the thing was around 14 inches tall. Now, the beast has hit my ceiling. And just when I thought it couldn't grow any taller, it curves and starts to grow sideways! It has started producing fern and flowers. Some of the flowers have even turned into berries (which I hear are poisonous). Note to self, save the berries for my enemies. J/K.

Here is a picture of the asparagus flowers:

 

On to the story of the strawberries. I think I posted something in the beginner's forum about how they just went limp and didn't look healthy at all. Well, they ended up just getting worse. I think someone mentioned some sort of root rot disease. I ended up pulling them out of the system and the roots were definitely not healthy looking at all. 

With the empty netted pot containing just the bed media, I decided to just toss a couple armenian yard long cucumber seeds in there. I heard that sometimes they will just start germinating on their own and start taking off. I was skeptical at first until:

Yeah, every single one of those seeds that I put in there germinated. This is just about 4 days from me tossing the seeds in there. Wow!!!

So I figured this is great. And I saw my lonely green bell pepper plant:

So today, I put a pablano pepper seed in there. Hopefully in a few days, he'll have a friend.

 

Moving on, yesterday I was thinking about that poor strawberry plant that died. So I went and explored a little at Lowes Hardware store. They didn't have many plants out yet since we are still in the frost danger but what they did have were great looking strawberry plants!!! So I tossed one of those in my cart. Then I found a great window sill planter and some lava rock. Yeah, you guessed it... An extension has been built! 

So, with all that extra empty grow bed area, I decided to see if more seeds can be grown directly in this system. In went some more seeds and that's what the next post will be about. Hopefully they will grow.  

 

Oh, the other lesson that I learned from all this so far... I thought my cycling was already finished or at least it had started. My nitrites were fairly low around 1 PPM and my nitrates were somewhat high around 8 - 10 PPM. Well, I was wrong. My nitrites are off the scale for me to measure with my current test kit and my nitrates have just started going up today as well. I'm thinking I will need a new test kit to really keep track of all these changes happening.

Anyway, until next time!