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Tuesday, March 20, 2018 Little Ketchup Grittyville, WA

Entry 32 of 290  
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“Cultural practices, which help maintain mycorrhizal fungi, include proper crop rotation, minimum tillage, and use of cover crops. Detrimental practices include flooding, burning, chemical fertilizers (manure is preferable), liming, systemic fungicides, and fallow fields.”

Well... maybe the fire thing wasn’t all good. I suspect they mean more extreme fire like a forest fire, though.

I wish I could test the currently available mycos products, each one on a different plant. But that’s the problem... each plant is so different it would be easy to come to the wrong conclusion. When I used no mycos last year, some plants were very healthy and some were not. So many variables, last year there were at least four I could identify: 1) moles are very bad 2) more fertilizer is sometimes good with maybe one exception 3) good genetics is good 4) more vine burying/more roots... would be... really good? (There were probably also a dozen factors I was completely unaware of.)

This year, even if I was totally certain about which additional products would help, maybe there are natural (& cheaper) alternatives??

I like that Joel had his roots examined by a lab. But it’s still frustrating that there is no certainty about many products and practices. The only real certainty is that... your average dirt will not grow a world record.

With so much variability within a seed and between seeds... short of using cloned hybrids how can I test to see what helps and what does not??

I trust the guys who have really devoted themselves to growing because I think “devoted intuition” can match or beat science but still I’m struggling to figure out how to learn more from my own experiences.

I guess, since I do have a good microscope, I’ll be looking at a lot of roots this year!!!

Last year I learned a lot about flowers... ps yes my ramblings would be excessive even for a 2k grower. I’d like to try for a big one but it would take my entire garden... Again. Another sanity test. I’m pissed about not having a regular garden though so sanity will probably actually win.
 



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