A Fall Harvest Compares to WA

byBridges

208 followers

2 years ago

At the age of 14 I worked almost full time for a Nursery. From the time I got home from school until dark each day and all day Saturdays. During summer break from school I got lots of over-time (for the same 50 cents/hour wage) by not only helping with the nursery sales and tasks but doing landscaping work contracted by my employer. This job I kept up until I graduated from high school and joined the U.S. Navy. It was a second education for me and one that I really enjoyed doing at that age. To this day I enjoy gardening as a result of that training.

Many of the things I learned back in the 50"s I don't practice today, however. Back then it was the norm to spray pesticides and herbicides to control bugs and weeds. Over the years I have learned better and safer ways to grow the food, so my gardening has become truly organic. The food tastes so much better and I know is much healthier than what I raised in the past. This picture shows some of the recent harvest of some of the pumkins (just in time for halloween), spaghetti squash, and egg plant.

Gardening takes patience...and work...to get from seed to harvest. Here in the desert climate I even had to install a drip irrigation system (more education) to conserve water. The mulching keeps many of the weeds down and helps with the moisture retention, but there are still some weeds to pull and bugs to combat. The larger bugs can be picked off and stepped on. Smaller ones require making sprays they don't like from chili peppers and biodegradable soap, as well as planting marigolds and other flowers throughout the garden to discourage them. In the end, all the hard work pays off with delicious and healthy food. Earlier this year we got about 3 times the amount of grapes shown here, from just two vines in their second year of growth. Of course all summer we have had tons of zuchinni, tomatoes, green beans, etc.

The decomposition of mulch materials helps fertilize the garden, but the real success of our garden comes worm castings. As I complete my WA training, my first website I am developing is about our recent VermiTalk enterprise. The earthworms absolutely digest just about anything and turn it into the richest fertilizer, without the weed seeds from animal manures. The worms will even further digest animal manures and make better fertilizer out of them, especially when mixed with other "garbage" that you add to it.

My real desire, though, is to eventually do hydroponics, with water fertilized with Vermi Tea, This will eliminate most of the insect problems, so I am doing more reasearch on it. Then from there, I can advance to aquaponics and raise organic fish to fertilize the water and vegetables, which in turn filter the water so it is fresh going back to the fish. I saw that operation the last time we spent a year in the Philippines and want to develop it here for our climate zone.

At the point of acquaponics, the worms subsidize the fish for food, but the Vermi Tea is still needed to apply fertilized water to the fruit trees in spring and fall.

This is an example of lettuce being grown hydroponics on styrofoam floats.

So, what does all of this have to do with Wealthy Affiliates?? Well, the same patience and hard work is needed from the planting of the seeds (training) to the harvest (publishing). Unless you are of the millenial generation, you did not grow up on computers and in a digital world. It is a whole new language for us "older" folks, so patience really becomes a virtue and the training needs to be done in small bites so it can be digested well before taking the next bite. If it takes three to four months, however, to get the first web site up, I have to remind myself that it takes at least 90 days to get a harvest from any of my plantings except perhaps radishes. In the end the harvest, or payment in the case of WA, is well worth the time and effort put in.

An added benefit to WA vs gardening is that WA is more like the fruit tree than the vegetable. You don't have to keep starting from scratch and replanting the fruit tree every year. Just trim it some each year, fertilize it, and the harvest gets greater than the previous year. Financial goals should be long range but the educational goals and work applied daily.

For motivation don't look at the daily tasks but keep your eye on the harvest!

Archie Bess