So I had my honey bees die last year. Based on what I'd seen in my area and losses for the year, I felt that this year would be bad for bees in my area also. I plan to get back into bees possibly next year though. I do love doing bees.
Anyway... I thought well... actually I could use the bee boxes for potato boxes in gardening. And if I did so I could avoid having to dig up the potatoes. Plus it would let me peek into the boxes from underneath etc to see more about what was going on. Sort of like raised beds but with the boxes entirely on the ground and not on the beehive stands. So 6 weeks ago I planted them...and now they are growing. Also, in nature the best way to get rid of vermin or pests or unwanted plants or weeds is to use another organism to eat the undesired plant or animal. This was part of the reasoning behind why to use bee boxes; with the intention being that underground organisms, worms, etc would EAT whatever was in the bee boxes that was unwanted. (I believe this will provide new information on how to clean used bee boxes that may have chemical or other undesired pest residue besides just throwing away the boxes. This is also part of the experiment! I hope to report on this later.)
So here are some early results information and part of my observations...
I also PURPOSELY used old and really bad quality potatoes. Part of the experiment I wanted to know if decayed and old potatoes that looked poor could still sprout. The results are that YES THEY CAN SPROUT STILL! This gives others the chance to instead of throwing away what looks like a bad potato from the store in their store bought bag to instead cut off the bad part and then put it in the garden instead. (Hasn't this happened to all of us??) Plus, as the country continues to erode economically, this means store bought produce (if you can even get it...) will continue to lower in quality as devastation continues. This means people won't have the means to easily throw away food. They'll need to recycle what they can; thus, put the bad potatoes in the garden and try to sprout them.
Now a couple of additional observations;
1) Old or decayed potatoes do have a higher fail rate on sprouting. So you will have more fail. BUT failure Is NOT 100% certain. I observed slightly higher fail rates than normal potatoes. But it was still at least 50% sprouting after bad parts were cut off and then it was planted.
2) Potatoes cut in parts and then attempted to sprout also will have a higher fail rate than a whole potato. But its not a 0% chance sprout rate. (I still am guessing at the sprout rate on these.) Also areas with excessive ground water would have higher fail rates on sprouting these. But still not 0% and not 100% either. (I may come back to this with other experiments later to compare the 2 rates of sprout on cut in half or 1/4s potatoes compared to whole potatoes.) I am certain however that there IS a difference in fail rates between them. And this is why I've posted and commented before that these aren't advisable to do with cutting in 1/4s or 1/2s. Also the smaller the cutting size the failure rate goes up even more; such as with 1/8s and so on.
The potato box experiment is working so far. Also I didn't use pure soil in the boxes. Instead I did like 1/3 or 1/2 normal soil with the rest being wood shavings, sand, aged steer manure, and rice husk filler stuff (they sell bags of the rice husk leftovers in ag stores.) I also did variations thereof with some being part rice husk and part steer stuff. And some being sand and steer stuff. It seems to work fairly well.
Now for my questions;
We have such high clay soil in our area that before I did potato boxes I couldn't exactly dig up the potato plants and check how they were doing. But I didn't usually see a lot of tubers. It was hard to even get high rates of grown potatoes to # of potatoes being used as seed also.
But in the potato boxes, because I could dig in or peek from under, I observed that with the lighter material being used in the soil. Some potato plants were growing actual new potato tubers EVEN BEFORE a GREEN LEAF SPROUT had reached the surface! I was very surprised by this! I hoped to get feed back on this specifically? I hadn't before thought they could grow tubers BEFORE a leaf had reached the surface! Is this unusual? Or a signal that I could have very good growth? I hope someone might have insight on this.
Also, I'm willing to post more results later. My hope also in the exerpiment is that the lighter fluff mixed into the soil will let the plants expand and have higher than normal amounts of both tubers and more weight in grown potatoes at the end of the season.
Thank you.
Anyway... I thought well... actually I could use the bee boxes for potato boxes in gardening. And if I did so I could avoid having to dig up the potatoes. Plus it would let me peek into the boxes from underneath etc to see more about what was going on. Sort of like raised beds but with the boxes entirely on the ground and not on the beehive stands. So 6 weeks ago I planted them...and now they are growing. Also, in nature the best way to get rid of vermin or pests or unwanted plants or weeds is to use another organism to eat the undesired plant or animal. This was part of the reasoning behind why to use bee boxes; with the intention being that underground organisms, worms, etc would EAT whatever was in the bee boxes that was unwanted. (I believe this will provide new information on how to clean used bee boxes that may have chemical or other undesired pest residue besides just throwing away the boxes. This is also part of the experiment! I hope to report on this later.)
So here are some early results information and part of my observations...
I also PURPOSELY used old and really bad quality potatoes. Part of the experiment I wanted to know if decayed and old potatoes that looked poor could still sprout. The results are that YES THEY CAN SPROUT STILL! This gives others the chance to instead of throwing away what looks like a bad potato from the store in their store bought bag to instead cut off the bad part and then put it in the garden instead. (Hasn't this happened to all of us??) Plus, as the country continues to erode economically, this means store bought produce (if you can even get it...) will continue to lower in quality as devastation continues. This means people won't have the means to easily throw away food. They'll need to recycle what they can; thus, put the bad potatoes in the garden and try to sprout them.
Now a couple of additional observations;
1) Old or decayed potatoes do have a higher fail rate on sprouting. So you will have more fail. BUT failure Is NOT 100% certain. I observed slightly higher fail rates than normal potatoes. But it was still at least 50% sprouting after bad parts were cut off and then it was planted.
2) Potatoes cut in parts and then attempted to sprout also will have a higher fail rate than a whole potato. But its not a 0% chance sprout rate. (I still am guessing at the sprout rate on these.) Also areas with excessive ground water would have higher fail rates on sprouting these. But still not 0% and not 100% either. (I may come back to this with other experiments later to compare the 2 rates of sprout on cut in half or 1/4s potatoes compared to whole potatoes.) I am certain however that there IS a difference in fail rates between them. And this is why I've posted and commented before that these aren't advisable to do with cutting in 1/4s or 1/2s. Also the smaller the cutting size the failure rate goes up even more; such as with 1/8s and so on.
The potato box experiment is working so far. Also I didn't use pure soil in the boxes. Instead I did like 1/3 or 1/2 normal soil with the rest being wood shavings, sand, aged steer manure, and rice husk filler stuff (they sell bags of the rice husk leftovers in ag stores.) I also did variations thereof with some being part rice husk and part steer stuff. And some being sand and steer stuff. It seems to work fairly well.
Now for my questions;
We have such high clay soil in our area that before I did potato boxes I couldn't exactly dig up the potato plants and check how they were doing. But I didn't usually see a lot of tubers. It was hard to even get high rates of grown potatoes to # of potatoes being used as seed also.
But in the potato boxes, because I could dig in or peek from under, I observed that with the lighter material being used in the soil. Some potato plants were growing actual new potato tubers EVEN BEFORE a GREEN LEAF SPROUT had reached the surface! I was very surprised by this! I hoped to get feed back on this specifically? I hadn't before thought they could grow tubers BEFORE a leaf had reached the surface! Is this unusual? Or a signal that I could have very good growth? I hope someone might have insight on this.
Also, I'm willing to post more results later. My hope also in the exerpiment is that the lighter fluff mixed into the soil will let the plants expand and have higher than normal amounts of both tubers and more weight in grown potatoes at the end of the season.
Thank you.
I have found a few in my soil. Any I find are killed. Yeah, they can be a BIG problem.
The only good part about wire worms is that chickens LOVE them
and I look forward to hearing the results!
