Back from vacation

Most things have survived my trip down South.  Thanks roommates!  The two broccoli plants that got rootbound before getting into their big pots have now bolted big time!  I should have cut the little heads off before I left, maybe there would be some side shoots now.  One is also wilted nearly to death, I’ll pull it up and see if there are cabbage worms eating it.  The one standing broccoli plant that didn’t get mistreated too badly is HUGE, and actually making a nice little head of broccoli, tucked down inside its leaves where it should be.  It’s pretty small, though, and looks maybe about to flower?  I can’t tell.  Yellow beets in the pots with the broccoli are being munched to death by leaf miners.  I had taken all the red beets out because the miners went for those first and were leaving the yellow ones alone.  Now I think maybe I should have left the red ones in for the miners to eat, and maybe I would have some yellow beets.  There’s bok choi back there too, which is doing OK, but not nearly as good-looking as the stuff I get from the farm.  Hmmm.   The tomatoes on the porch roof look awesome!  So far not too much sign of wilts, although the bottom leaves of the brandywine were a little yellow and brown – I pulled them off.  I haven’t pinched any suckers, so these are very full-looking plants.  The blondkopfchen cherries are making so many flowers that down on the street I was afraid the leaves were yellow with tomato wilt!  But up close you just see they are just a crazy lot of baby tomatoes forming.  So many plants have still not made it into their big pots, and I might be kind of foolish to try and save them now.  I will still try for the eggplants, peppers, and basil, though.  Tomorrow, maybe tomorrow.  My poor peas are making a pathetic attempt at producing – I will get maybe a handful of snow peas and less of sugar snaps.  So sad, especially after spending hours on vacation down in Asheville picking the most delicious peas at my friend’s farm.  Next time I will plant a lot more peas in the row, the way everyone else seems to.  Maybe also give them more dirt than a flower box, and something proper to climb on. 

Back in the gardens, things are going mostly OK.  Black raspberries are out in full force, as are the sour cherries.  There are still some strawberries, although they’re mostly through.  I have bowls of all three to munch on here with me.  What with the solstice just passed, I remember farmer Chris telling me, as big as your onions get by the solstice, that’s how big they’re gonna be.  I hope that’s not exactly true, because mine are not that big yet. 

They look healthy, they just look like they need more time, the biggest one is  maybe a foot tall and most are still kind of scrawny.  He has also told me that the number of leaves an onion makes is the number of layers the bulb will have.  Mine have 5-8 leaves.  Not too convincing, but I don’t know how many they’re supposed to have.  Favas are starting to make beans – there are still aphids but they don’t seem to mind much.  My corn looks yellow and not too vigorous, maybe I should fertilize it.  Scarlet runner beans and swedish browns look pretty good!

Not so in the other garden!  At Oakdale, all my beans were completely wiped out by squirrels, the scoundrels!  I have exactly three jacob’s cattle bean plants growing, out of maybe 120 I planted.  Also a handful of soybeans, and maybe 2 turtle beans.  Aargh!  I have replanted the turtle beans and have more soybeans I could plant, but I’m out of the Jacob’s Cattle, which I was pretty excited about.  Garlic still looks good – this year I managed to cut the scapes in time so I thought everything was great, but the garlic doesn’t seem to be bulbing.  I can dig down three inches next to a plant and see a straight stem, no bulb.  I hope it’s just that they need more time, and not some kind of imbalance in the soil or something. 

OK, enough garden worry for one night.

Vacation instructions for roommates!

Hi roommates, welcome to my garden blog.  As you can see, no is reading it except you. 

Instructions for the two community gardens are basically that they need to be watered.  I try to water them deeply every other day.  Watering them deeply usually means standing there with the hose for 20 minutes or so.  You can dig down in the soil a couple of inches (not near the base of any plants so you don’t disturb any roots) to see how the water is penetrating.  Often when the top looks wet, the dirt is actually dry an inch or so down. 

Watering the BUG garden (on Lamartine St. at the corner of Hoffman) is easy because there’s a water spigot and a hose right there in the corner of the garden.  I’ve been using the green sprayer hose, not the soaker hoses.

Watering the Oakdale garden (on Oakdale Street near Green St. station) is a little trickier because you have to leave the garden and go around the corner to the backyard of the yellow house to turn on the hose, and then go back and turn it off again when you’re done watering.  This is a pain, but important to do, since the neighbor is being really nice to let us use the water and we don’t want to piss him off. 

I’ve had a problem with aphids on the fava beans in the BUG garden.  Keep an eye on them, and if you see any aphids, use the little sprayer bottle that’s there to spray them with soap.  I’ve been keeping it filled with water mixed with just a little soap out of the Dr. Bronner’s bottle in our downstairs bathroom.  Same with the other beans.

Around the house, the name of the game is also going to be keeping everything watered.  Don’t forget any pockets of plants: tomatoes outside the bathroom window – their soil should feel moist all the time, basically.  Same for broccoli in the backyard.  Although for both of these, also take a peek in their little undertrays.  If there’s water sitting in there, they probably don’t need to be watered any more.  The small plants in the window boxes on the porch and down below in front of the porch probably need the most water – in general, the smaller the container, the more frequently it will need water.  The herbs in the ground behind the hedges to the left as you come down the front steps don’t need as much water as everything else – once or twice a week watering is OK for them.  The plant in the big brown pot is peppermint – good for mojitos!  Use as much as you want, or the plant will take over the neighborhood!  The other herbs are not really ready for harvesting, except maybe the oregano (in the front).  Just cut a few inches off the end of each stem if you want to use some.  I’d leave the sage and tarragon alone for now.  The exception to the herb watering is the cilantro and parsley in containers – they will need watering every other day or so. 

Keep an eye out for bugs!  Like these:

These are black bean aphids, which live on the underside of leaves, and in the little armpits of the fava beans especially.  If you see them, spray them with soapy water. 

This is the colorado potato beetle – I’ve seen them on the tomatillos mostly, but look for them on the sweet potatoes (assuming I actually get around to planting the sweet potatoes).  If you see them or their eggs, smash them!  Look for them where you see holes in leaves or chomps taken out of them.  Their eggs will be on the underside of leaves and they look like this:

One more pest I’ve seen in the backyard are leaf miners.  These are little flies, whose babies get inside the flesh of leaves and eat little trails in them, or kind of hollow out leaves.  Sounds weird, but you’ll know what I mean if you see it. 

The most likely place you will see this is on the beets, that are living in the containers in the backyard with the broccoli.  On the beet leaves, the miners might not leave trails so much, as munch out a whole section of the leaf, and leave something like a giant blister.  Keep an eye out for these!  If you see just a leaf or two on a plant that has these, cut off the leaf and put in the in garbage, NOT the compost (or we’ll just have more of them next year!) If it looks like they’ve infested one particular plant enough that most of its leaves have these, then it will probably die and it’s better to pull up the whole plant and throw that away.  The goal is to catch them before they get that bad. 

One more thing I’m worried about is various wilts that could affect the tomatoes & eggplants.  One way to keep this from happening is to not splash soil onto the leaves of the tomatoes while you’re watering them, so water them gently and don’t splash!  Also, as they grow taller you can pull off their bottom leaves.  They’ll probably grow 5 feet tall or so, and at that point the whole bottom foot of the plant should have no leaves on it. 

The other thing I’m worried about is the tomatoes getting fusarium wilt, or verticillium wilt, which my tomatoes do pretty much every year.  It probably will happen eventually, but probably not before I get back.  It will start by looking like this:

And eventually will look like this:

And the plant will die.  My tomatoes always die this way.  There’s not much you can do except try to keep the plants healthy and evenly watered (don’t let them dry out, and don’t let them get waterlogged), water them in the morning, not at night, and don’t splash soil on the leaves when you water them. 

OK that’s about it.  Call me on my cell phone with questions.  Read my garden blog so far so you know what’s up with all these plants.  Don’t think you have to remember all this, the only thing you HAVE TO remember is to give everything water.  And don’t forget my kitty cat either. 

Love,
Stacey

who’s eating the spinach? and the broccoli?

I had some pretty nice looking spinach growing there for a while, but I waited a few too many days to harvest it, long enough to let some leaf miners move in.  By the time I went to harvest it, miners had destroyed a lot of the leaves.  I could see them crawling around inside the leaves, yuck.  I pulled up all the spinach, as well as the red beets which they were also eating (this is in the black pot on the left).  I sorted carefully through the spinach and salvaged the spinach that the miners hadn’t gotten into yet and fed it to my band. 

And what’s wrong with the broccoli?  The big plant, on the right, is the one that I planted into its big pot before it started heading, which I thought was a good thing.  Well, it’s still not heading, and this plant is really freaking out.  It’s actually twisting itself all around, flopping its leaves over, reaching all over the place.  One day I turned the pot around halfway and the next day its leaves were all twisted around.  So I figured it must not like that and turned it back the way it way.  Well, not this plant is all twisted and tortured looking. 

And those other two plants!  They don’t seem to be growing any bigger.  They’ve both got small heads on them which look like they might flower so I think I’ll cut them before I leave on vacation for two weeks.  The plants look like they’re getting ready to make side shoots.  But their lower leaves are also wilting even though they have plenty of water, a really bad sign, of either cabbage maggots eating their roots, or some kind of wilt.  Ugh.  Pests are appearing in my garden in roughly the order they’re listed in my gardening book.  I seem to have them all. 

who’s eating my beans?

Aphids, for one.  Black bean aphids are being farmed by some ants on my fava beans.  Here’s a photo:

You know, not like you can see or anything (my camera phone doesn’t have a zoom lens), but there are little black aphids all over these plants.  I’ve seen aphids before, but not black ones.  I looked them up on the interweb and found out they especially like beans, which makes sense.  I also found out that the females can have babies without mating, and that the babies are BORN ALREADY PREGNANT with new babies.  Wow! That’s some kind of evolutionary strategy.  There are lots of recommendations about how to deal with aphids.  As a first try, I’m spraying them with a solution of Dr. Brommer’s liquid soap, which I used kind of successfully on my brussels sprouts last year.  If that doesn’t work, I might move on to garlic and cayenne spray, or maybe invest in some lacewing larvae. 

Who else is eating my beans?  Some really mean little creatures, I don’t know who they are.  They are digging up bean seeds before they have a chance to sprout, and they are even chomping on the sprouts!  How frustrating and sad, to go to my garden and check on the beans, only to find them very recently chopped off, with their barely emerged leaves laying in the dirt, not even eaten!  Damn.  I don’t know what kind of beast is doing this, probably squirrels, maybe birds, maybe even rats.  And I don’t have a plan for dealing with it.  Right now I’m just hoping they leave some for me.  Beans in the Oakdale garden are getting eaten worse than those in the BUG garden, and all the beans I planted at Oakdale I have more of if I want to try again… 

In other news:

Irises and peonies are blooming.  Actually, they’re almost done doing
their thing. Here are some in my kitchen.  Next to them in the vase are my sweet potato slips, waiting patiently to get into some dirt.  Behind them, in the white pot, you can just make out a strangled little sweet potato slip that’s been waiting patiently since last spring!!

Lilies of the Valley are past.  Fruit is starting to come
out, like on this cherry tree in the BUG garden:

The first strawberries are ripening, I ate the first ones this week.  The garlic is scaping – I cut some scapes tonight.  Onions are still looking good like little troopers, but they have a long way to grow before the solstice, which is less than three weeks away.  Shallots are looking like champs, red onions less so.  Yellow onions somewhere in between.  In my backyard, spinach is getting huge, I’m ready to pull up all the plants and give the beets I interplanted with them a chance.  First cilantro is bolting and I haven’t even started the second batch!  Broccoli that stayed too long in too small a pot is making heads, they’re maybe an inch across now.  Broccoli that had enough room is not heading yet.  Ditto for tomatoes – the rootbound ones are making flowers, but the ones that got potted up in time are still concentrating on roots and leaves.  I have a LOT of plants to pot up, still.  Only the tomatoes have made it out on the roof yet.  And tonight is supposed to be below 50 degrees!  Fortunately I haven’t potted up the eggplants yet so they can come in for the night, but the tomatoes are on their own – their pots are too big to bring inside.  Let’s see…  Thyme has been flowering, I don’t know if I was supposed to let it, or pinch it back.  Chive flowers are on their way out.  I’ve kind of emotionally given up on the peas.  Remember I had one pea plant that was all yellow?  Well that one died, a long time ago when it was only 2 inches tall or something.  But now the one living next to where the yellow one was is also turning yellow.  Hmm.  I still have not trellised them.  I did, however, harvest a crop of purslane from the window boxes where the peas were supposed to be growing from.  The purslane gives a mucus-y feel to the salad, it’s actually kind of gross.  In the places where the peas were supposed to be growing I planted parsley instead.  Corn is looking OK – about 6-8 inches tall but slightly yellow, I wonder if I should give it some fertilizer or something.  A few scarlet runner beans are sprouting around them, which gives me hope I will have at least a few vines of those, if the beasts don’t eat them first, curse them.  My rooftop tomatoes look fantastic so far, but it won’t be too long before horrible things start happening to them, like fusarium wilt and black end rot.  Today I was at Whole Foods and they were selling tomatoes in 2 gallon buckets for 15 bucks!  Which is kind of crazy to pay for one little tomato plant, but really if you’re buying seedlings at this time of year, they should be in 2 gallon buckets.  My new roommate Tressa has been bringing home tons of seedlings from ReVision House, where she works, including the parsley and lots of Sun Gold cherry tomatoes!  My favorite!  I didn’t buy any seeds of those this year because I puritanically stuck to only open pollinated, and Sun Gold is a hybrid.  But it’s not like I’m going to save the seeds anyway, so it probably doesn’t matter.  The sungolds are nearly a foot tall and suffering badly in little two inch cell packs.  I don’t have the dirt or the pots to plant them in, not just yet.  I am wondering whether to pinch the flowers off of root-bound tomatoes until after they are in the ground and have enough room to do their thing.  Don’t know.