Vegetable garden: Experiments and notes

Copper barrier for snails

Snails and small conches are the worst pest I have right now in the garden. It is a serious problem because they kill the crops.

Also with the new padding system you have to be careful because it seems that they like it a lot and are going to reproduce a lot.

There are different methods, products and techniques to combat them. Today I come to tell one technique to prevent snails from climbing trees or tall-stemmed plants and ideas for improving and using it in more ways. It is a sweep to prevent them from going up to the plants.

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How to cultivate with mulching and without plowing

Every year I have the same problem with the garden. We prepare the land, we already plant after a few weeks weeds or adventitious grasses have taken over everything. Besides, I don't have any tractor and everything has to be worked with the hoe.

This year I am going to try to solve these two problems. I have tried to prepare the land by covering it with mulch and leaving it ready to cultivate without plowing. The first results, as you are going to see, have been promising.

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How to compost

I return to the topic of composting from some videos that I have seen of Charles Dowding which is based on the philosophy of No Dig, No Dig (which we will talk about in another article). Dowding only uses compost in its garden. Compost for everything. And it teaches you both to create it and to use it and as a plant and take care of your garden.

Compost recipes There are dozens, although all are based on the same principle but each one does it in their own way.

I have seen and read a lot of related content and there are people who try to speed it up as much as possible to make the process faster, others who add meat, even cooked food leftovers, but I just can't see that. Adding meat seems like a mistake for this type of aerobic decomposition, another thing is that you compost from urban solid waste, such as those collected in bins, but they are usually done with anaerobic processes and we are talking about something totally different.

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Cayenne

Cayenne, another variety of capsicum chinense It is one of the best known and most used spicy, possibly because although it has a high heat, it is tolerable for most people.

It has many common names: cayenne, cayenne pepper, red pepper, chili pepper.

It has 30.000 to 50.000 SHUs in the Scoville scale.

Moment It is the spicy that best suits the palate that we have at home. It offers an intense itch but without being overdone. Others like the habanero they are already going to scale and itch too much and caroline reaperThey are unthinkable for human consumption, hahaha.

This year I want try the jalapenos.

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Carolina Reaper or Carolina Reaper

El Carolina Reaper or Carolina Reaper was the hottest pepper in the world in 2013 with a value of 2 Scoville Units, although its normal range varies between 220 and 000 depending on the scoville scale. A real outrage that will make it inedible. Now there are other spicier varieties like Pepper X.

It is a variety of Capsicum chinense specifically the HP22BNH obtained by Ed Currie from the company Pucker Butt Pepper Company. It is a cross between the Habanero chili and the Naga Bhut Jolokia (which I was about to buy this year in a nursery)

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Scoville scale

The Scoville scale was devised by Willbur Scoville to measure how hot peppers are. Evaluates the amount of capsaicin, which is a substance present in plants of the genus Capsicum. He did it through an Organoleptic test where he tried to standardize and find a way to buy different products. Even despite the limitations as it is an organoleptic analysis where people's subjectivity and their sense of palate influence, it was an advance.

Today (since 1980) quantitative analysis methods such as High Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPCL) are used that directly measure the amount of Capsaicin. These methods return values in "units of pungency or hotness", that is, in one part of capsaicin per million of dried pepper powder. The resulting number of units is multiplied by x15 to convert to Scoville units. It would not be necessary to go to Scoville but it is still done out of deference to its discoverer and because it is a system already widely known.

The different varieties of a species can contain more or less Capsaicin, but even the cultivation methods and / or environmental factors can determine that a chili is more or less hot even if it belongs to the same variety.

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Habañero pepper

It is a variety of Capsicum chinense.

Within the habaneros there are also a large number of varieties

Seeds and germination

The seeds of chili peppers and peppers can take a long time to germinate, especially if the temperature is not adequate, but if we put it above 30 degrees we will get them to germinate between 7 and 14 days, the seeds germinate and the cotyledons appear.

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Capsicum chinense

Within the capsicum chinense we find different varieties of chili peppers. The best known are the Habañero pepper, cayenne, the ají panca and the ají limo. Here for the moment we are going to talk about the Habaneros who are the ones we are cultivating.

Sonalaceae family

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How to make a canteen out of a pumpkin

Since last summer I have drying one pumpkin (dipper gourd) , well I think it's dipper gourd. It is similar to pilgrim pumpkins, but with this much more elongated shape.

And the time has come to do something with it ;-)

Since I have only saved 1 I want to use it as one canteen to carry water. Its construction is very simple. We just have to empty it and scrape it off.

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How to make a homemade composter with pallets

How to make a composter or homemade composter with pallets

I have started to make compost and I have done a very simple homemade composter with pallets. I leave some photos and some small annotations so that you can see how I have done it and at the end of the article you will see another model made with pallets, imitating compost bins.

I use old pallets that I have been reusing from people or companies that were going to throw them away.

The size I have used are Euro pallets, so you already know the 1,20 × 0,8 m measurement so that the compost bin will have a base of 1m x 0,8m high.

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