An update on the garden situation…
I potted up the tomatoes and tomatillos. They were really stretching for light in the bathroom window and getting too big for their pots, in my opinion. Also their stems were all purple and I was afraid of phosphorus deficiency. So each one got the biggest pot I could give them, which are right now only little 6-8" pots, which is all I have the dirt for. I am just about out of dirt, and have not even begun to fill up the huge tomato pots. In fact, I mostly don’t even have any huge tomato pots. I have a few, but have not been able to bring myself to buy any more, not at 13 bucks each (at the Home Despot). But it was my birthday and my mom wants to spend some money on me. This weekend we have plans to go out to the cheap stores and look for big, cheap pots. Last night I scored a few good ones out of the trash, but not enough for my ambitions, which are growing daily…
…such as… I am thinking more about the little space in front of my porch, behind the hedges. I have always thought of that as a place that is totally shaded by the hedges, but the more I look the more I realize it actually gets a lot of light. I think I might try growing some squashes and sweet potatoes back there in big tubs (the dirt is terrible, full of paint chips, infested with black swallowwort, and who knows what else - I wouldn’t grow things to eat in the dirt there). My neighbor Deborah is a former farmer/part-time farmer, and she wants to buy some slips from Johnny’s that I can probably get in on. These would probably grow well there in a big enough tub. Sweet potatoes from the co-op have been really disappointing lately. They look so nice in the store but end up being white instead of orange inside. I have read that the white ones used to be the higher-class food than the orange ones. I want to find the orangest ones I can get.
Anyway, but back to the tomatoes. My thought is that plants should be potted up once their leaves are wider than the pot they are growing in, since that means the roots are probably starting to butt up against the pot as well. I want the roots to have all the room they want in the pot. But yesterday I was over at Tracy’s house (the coordinator for the Oakdale Garden), who showed me her seedling operation, under grow lights in her basement. Her tomatoes are all still in little 3" pots, but they are HUGE, more than a foot tall, while mine are still kind of runty. I would be scared that these plants would be horribly root-bound, but she does them like this every year and I know she always has really successful tomatoes. My strategy for the tomatoes is pretty labor-intensive. Right now they’re too big for the bathroom window (plus I want to give them more light), so they’re outside in the sun during the day. But it’s still too cold for them to stay out overnight, so I’ve been putting them out and bringing them in every day. That’s a lot of plants to move around, it takes me a bunch of trips to do it. Tracy also has a huge plant cart on wheels for this purpose, that she rolls in and out of her garage. Actually, tonight I think I will leave them out, it’s supposed to get down to 52 degrees, which should be OK for them (but kind of close, maybe I’ll bring them in).
I also potted up a lot of little basil seedlings.
My peas are looking like a big bust, second time around! Less than half the seeds I planted are coming up, I’m so bummed out! One of the little pea seedlings is also alarmingly yellow, even though it’s only a few inches away from a healthy looking green one, I wonder what’s going on there. I mulched just that one little seedling with some coffee grounds to see if that would help. I wonder if the sprouting problem is because I soaked them too long before planting them. Soaking overnight is the recommended procedure, but I actually left them soaking longer than that, maybe 2 days. If that’s the problem than I’m going to be similarly disappointed with my favas, because I did the same thing to them. aargh. I should call this blog "what not to do in the garden".
The broccoli looks better! My experiment was kind of poorly designed, but I did draw some conclusions: #1 is that they probably has a phosphorus deficiency, not a virus or fungus. I changed their soil (gave them a bath first) for the fungus and gave them some fertilizer for the deficiency, and all three remaining plants got better. But I would guess it was the fertilizer that made them better, not the bath. Because I surely did not get every little hunk of dirt out from between their roots, and probably any fungus or virus that was in the dirt or in or on the plant would have probably survived the bath. #2 is that my compost does seem to make plants grow better. The one growing in compost started out bigger, but is now much bigger than the other two. A better experimental design would have had one of the other two in the compost. Duh. #3 is that growing plants in straight compost is not as good as growing them in potting soil with peat moss or coir mixed in. The water is pouring right through the compost bucket, washing the good compost juice out the bottom. But the potting soil mix in the other two pots is holding on to a lot of water.
These plants probably look exactly the same as in the last photos, but they are actually very different looking in real life. The pots are much bigger, so they’re bigger plants even though they look the same size as before, in relation to the pots they’re in. And they are very healthy looking, with no sign of purpling like before. They are a beautiful blue-ish green.
The spinach I planted from the food project seedlings is doing well in the tub in the backyard, and the seeds I planted in there, the beets and pac choi, are starting to come up. Something has been digging in there, though, probably squirrels. I put an old screen door over the tub to keep them out. But it’s only a temporary solution, soon the plants will be too tall and I’ll have to think of something else.
I finally put in the bed for herbs in the front yard. I carved out a little place between the shadow of the front hedges and the drip line of an ornamental cherry tree, and planted sage, oregano, tarragon, and chives from plants, and some old evergreen hardy white bunching onions (aka scallions) from seeds (we’ll see how they’ll germinate). Most of the dirt I had went in there.
The onions I planted in the BUG garden look basically like they did the day I planted them - not bad, they’re standing up and everything, but they’re not taking off like I hoped they would. Fava beans have not come up yet. I planted them April 28 after too long of soaking and I’m afraid I ruined the seeds. Ditto for the Oaxacan green dent corn, which I planted in hills May 6. I haven’t planted the swedish brown beans yet, I’m waiting to install the soaker hose. My mom bought me some "earth staples" to use to put down the soaker hoses. I don’t think I can really put them down properly without them, they have been stored all crazy and are full of kinks. So I’m waiting for a package from Gardener’s Supply.
Haven’t done anything more in the Oakdale garden, although last night we had our annual gardener’s meeting and I signed up to be on the committee taking care of the maintenance and planning of the orchard. Water’s on! My garlic is still looking good, it’s the talk of the garden, and farmer Chris says they look good too. My fellow gardeners in both community gardens think I’m really weird for growing all these onions and garlic. They make jokes about me mono-cropping my garden.
I guess that’s about it. A lot of work to do in the next couple of weeks, and no time to do it, as per usual.
Worked a long time yesterday and today getting my beans in the ground. They don’t much like cold weather and don’t take much time to grow, so it’s better to wait until you’re sure it’s done being cold. That took a long time this year. Also, I just took a long time getting around to it. The BUG garden has swedish brown beans in addition to the favas I started a while ago (those are about 6" tall now). The Oakdale garden (pictured) has jacob’s cattle and edamame soybeans. I was also going to plant black garbanzos, but when I got out the package to plant them I found out you were supposed to plant them along with your peas in the early spring. After some contemplation I decided not to plant them again this year and now have an extra 10 sf in my garden to do something else with. hmmm. Maybe you can tell from this photo what a large earth moving project I did here - I built up the soil with a lot of compost and weeded a ton of Star of Bethlehem out of this bed, what a pain! You can also see my fussy square-foot gardening layout - I planted the beans 4 per square foot - about 34 sf of jacob’s cattle and 10 sf of edamame. BUG garden has 20 sf of swedish browns and 18 seeds of scarlet runners, who will hopefully start climbing up my Oaxacan green dent corn (now only a couple inches tall). You can also see my garlic in the back - it’s nearly up to my waist but hasn’t scaped yet. 
