Documentation

I have a lot of plans, a lot of projects.... but I'm calling them "experiments", because there's no 'failure' in an experiment, just a proving or disproving of the hypothesis, results with unexpected variables, and future work to explain what the heck went awry. Of course, my lack of space and resources means I'm pretty much just experimenting with techniques on a few plants under very uncontrolled conditions, and the results really will be anecdotal. But I'd like to think that bringing some structure to my gardening obsession is good, that I'll learn a lot, and that in the end, it's all really "experience". Something gained and never lost.

This is the 2008 season's attempt to document my hypotheses, methods, and results wrt my gardening, plus just all the garden growth progress. The plan is to garden the heck out of every surface and space I can get my hands on. I have a community garden plot and space at my house, and a grow light setup... it's so exciting!

• H1: heirloom tomatoes will be less diseased and nematode-infested by being planted in my homemade upside-down tomato pots than in ground soil full of verticillium and fusarium wilt and nematodes to which the heirloom varieties are completely susceptible.
• H1.3:the rainbow cuteness of my homemade hand-painted upside-down pots will simply make for better tomatoes ;)
• (H1.5): if only I had enough space, I'd compare regular right-side-up yield to upside-down yield with same variety.
• H2: My homemade strawberry towers will be more evenly watered by my pipe-with-holes watering design than by a traditional top-watering approach. I like using the drill.
• H3: black plastic mulch will improve early growth by warming soil.
• H4:my tomatillos will fruit this year b/c I have two to pollinate each other.
• H5: Grafting!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Using tongue-graft approach usually for cucumbers, I can cut into 2/3 of stem and create double-headed two-variety tomato that produces both rootstock variety and scion variety tomatoes, maybe even a chimera.....oooh...