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. 

falling behind

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. 

Back at the homestead, I’ve got some plants starting to suffer a little.  Broccoli and tomatoes are waiting to get into their big pots (they’ve outgrown the little ones), and peppers, basil and eggplants are still in little pots, but not in as dire need just yet.  Lots of potting up plants to do.  Still haven’t planted annual herbs (cilantro, parsley), fall brassicas, or winter squashes.  Gave my basil plants their first pinching this morning. 

soaker hoses

It’s an experiment.  There were these soaker hoses lying around the garden, I thought I’d try ‘em out.  Only I haven’t been able to see how well they work because it’s been raining.  It’s also so been so cold I had to bring the tomatoes back inside for the last two days!  Tomorrow hopefully they go back out again.  They look awesome.

Here’s what the garden looks like with the soakers down – you can also see favas and maybe corn coming up…

And let’s pretend I meant for this photo to come out all blue like that…

Today I had to make a Home Despot run for work and while I was there I picked up 8 huge pots, hooray!  Thanks mom!  Now if only I had enough dirt.

broccoli looks better, tomatoes go outside, and new herb garden

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. 

garlic looks good, and community gardening musing

Last fall I planted 80 heads of garlic out of a pile I got from my farmer Chris Yoder at Vanguarden Farm.  I like his garlic because it’s got big cloves, not so much peeling.  Back in the fall I was feeling behind schedule when I didn’t have my garlic in the ground by early October like my neighbors up the street did.  I think I didn’t get mine in until almost the end of the month. But we had a really really warm winter, and their garlic sprouted and then got killed off by frost.  Mine survived – probably some combination of my late planting and the thick bed of mulch (just leaves) I laid down over it.  Actually, probably the most important factor was that this is a hardy hard-neck garlic meant for colder climates.  I think theirs was soft-neck braiding garlic.

Anyway, here’s what my garlic bed looks like today after I pulled back the mulch and added about 2 inches of compost where the mulch used to be.

Looks good, right!  Well, just so you don’t go thinking my whole garden looks like that…  Here’s the rest of the garden (this is the one at Oakdale St), with the garlic way in the back:

Yikes!  I didn’t do a very good job cleaning up last year.  Actually I didn’t do any cleaning up last year at all.  The stems of my mostly failed brussels sprouts crop are still there.  That stuff that looks like grass is a diabolical weed called Star of Bethlehem.  It actually kind of looks like baby garlic, with a soft little bulb underground and grass-like leaves.  I tried eating some, it doesn’t taste good.  Too bad, because I could practically live off of the stuff that’s growing in my garden.  It only grows 6 or 8 inches tall and makes very pretty little flowers, but as you can see it spreads like crazy.  Each bulb surrounds itself with a ring of little bulblets.  The bulbs can be a foot down in the soil and will still send up leaves and flowers.  If you just pull out the leaves and not the bulb this stuff just laughs at you.  I did that in one section just a few days ago and today there was more than 2 inches of new growth on those plants.  You have to dig out the whole plant, and often when you try to, you sever the leaves from the bulb, or when you pull the bulb out it just scatters its little bulblets around and laughs at you again.  This is a genius of a plant.  Actually, the garlic patch is also full of it, I have not been taking this stuff seriously enough in my garden the last couple of years.  I really should have combed through it before I planted the garlic, getting every last weed out.  Now all I can do in the garlic patch is pull at the leaves, since digging down to excavate the weedy bulbs would destroy my garlic patch.  That’s going to be pretty challenging.  I am not a great weeder. 

I am actually a pretty bad gardener all around, despite my enthusiasm for the subject.  Last year I also grew garlic, but I didn’t go cut the scapes off when I should have.  They got all tall and straight and woody before I finally cut them, the result being that I couldn’t eat the scapes, and I got really small heads of garlic.  This year I will do better, I swear.  How could I mistreat such a good-looking garlic patch?

The difference between my two community garden plots is also pretty apparent to me.  At the BUG garden, there is this ridiculous abundance.  We have a gigantic mound of compost.  I probably moved more compost in my garden plot at the BUG garden than the whole pile that was delivered to Oakdale.  My plot at BUG is nearly three times as big as Oakdale, and it gets full sun, where the Oakdale garden is shady for half the day.  My BUG garden plot, like all the many plots there, has its own little water spigot, which is an unbelievable luxury to me.  At the Oakdale garden, we use a hose off a neighbor’s house.  We have to walk around the block to turn the water on and off, and there’s only one hose, which you drag over to your plot to water.  Someone in the BUG garden even left behind a pile of soaker hoses, which I had been planning on buying from Gardener’s Supply (they’re a co-op).  They were just sitting around and I asked if I could use them and the answer was sure.  I was about to spend maybe 60 bucks on some of those!   The other day the Food Project was looking for a place to dump their extra spinach and cilantro seedlings and where did they go?  THE BUG GARDEN.  There are five trays of seedlings, hundreds of plants, plants people actually really want and like to eat, just for the taking.  The BUG garden has a clean and tidy tool shed stocked with multiples of lots of tools, while the Oakdale garden has a janky little shed with doors you can barely open, there are lots of tools in there, but most of them are not the ones you need.  We don’t even have a wheelbarrow, we borrow one from a neighbor, or move dirt around in 5-gallon buckets like I was doing today.  BUG garden has like 5 wheelbarrows and only one is broken.  Not to mention the social life over there. 

I have been thinking a lot about the difference between these two gardens and what makes it so.  Seems like the very biggest factor is scale.  The Oakdale garden has only 10 or so garden plots, and each one is small, so there are fewer gardeners, and each one has less work to do and spends less time there.  The BUG garden must have 30 or more plots, and most of them are pretty huge, so you have to spend a lot of time there taking care of it.  Most of the time in the Oakdale garden I am the only one there, while at BUG there’s always someone else, often many people.  There are also multiple places to hang out, and a play area for kids.  This is all about scale – all of this is only possible because it’s a bigger site with more room for more and bigger plots, and more gardeners paying dues ($25 per year at each site) to pay for things like 2 dumptruck loads of purchased compost!  Unthinkable! 

Argh, I feel so bad for shit-talking my community garden at Oakdale Street!  I really love it, it’s a magical place that I feel really connected to.  I got my plot there because one day, years ago, I was waking by with a friend, admiring the berry bushes and grapes.  Tracy, the garden coordinator, was there and offered to put my name on the waiting list.  I put my name down but she didn’t call me for two years!  I had moved out of the neighborhood (only some blocks away but not as near as before) but still wanted to be a part of this amazing garden.  I thought I was the luckiest person ever.  Now I feel terrible because the new garden has all the things I love about the Oakdale garden, just bigger, and with more of everything, and more space for everything.  It seems obvious that I should give up my plot there and let someone else have it.  But I also want to help make Oakdale a really awesome, well-functioning community garden too, and have a place to grow a lot of garlic, of course.

video about my roommate and my seedlings

Here’s a video of my roommate Nicky describing her efforts to comply with my “leave the bathroom shade open” request. The only sunny spot I have in the house is the bathroom window, where I’ve built shelves to (just barely) accomodate all my emerging seedlings. Problem is, this window is also right next to the toilet, so if you don’t want the neighbors to have a wide open view of you as you use the john, you have to close the shade, then remember to open it back up again when you’re done, so the plants can get some light. It’s an annoying thing I’m asking my roommates to do. They are really quite nice to accomodate this request, and most of the time the shade does get left open.

Here you can (just barely) see my tomatoes, basil, peppers, and eggplant. Nicky uploaded this on April 23. These plants were planted on March 23. Even with the shade open, they don’t really get enough light, and this is about as good as it gets for a window. It faces directly south and is bigger than a standard modern window. So the plants are all tall and leggy. But actually I’m not too worried about this, because most of these plants are things that I can plant deeper when I put them in bigger pots. They will root along the stem.

Below maybe you can also see my two big basil plants. These are overwintered from last year. I’ll have to mow them down soon because I need the pots they’re growing in for other things. They’re not really making many leaves anyway, they’re putting all their effort into making flowers, which I keep mercilessly pinching off.

a problem with the broccoli

One of my broccoli seedlings looks kind of bad:


A fuzzy photo, but maybe you can see.  The leaves have been turning purple and dying.  The stem of this plant turned purple, then rotted out at the base. 

The other three plants don’t look as bad as this one, but I can see their leaves are also starting to look sickly.  I have been trying to figure out what’s wrong, but I have only guesses right now. 

First guess is that this is some kind of fungus.  Apparently there are a lot of different funguses that broccoli can get.  And I did use some soil from last year that had sat around and got waterlogged, so it could be something kind of nasty grew in there.  I potted up the three better looking plants (the one above is too far gone to save) and did a little experiment.  Assuming there is some kind of fungus in the soil, I shook all the old dirt off the roots and rinsed them off.  The best looking plant I re-potted in my homemade compost, the theory being that the multitude of beneficial bacteria and microorganisms in there will outcompete the damaging fungus and the plant will get healthier.  The other two plants got potted up in some organic potting soil out of a bag that PK gave me, the theory being that it presumably has no funguses or bacteria in it, beneficial or otherwise.  Hopefully, one of these strategies will work and I will have some broccoli this year. 

After this I went back to the interweb and tried reading more about broccoli diseases.  And realized that the other thing that could be happening is some kind of mineral deficiency, namely phosphorus, which apparently turns the leaves and stems of plants purple.  So I broke out the ol’ fertilizer bucket.  I don’t usually use any kind of fertilizer on my plants, I have this romantic idea that my super duper compost has everything any plant could want.  I got this "natural" fertilizer from my farmer friend, so it must be OK.  I put some in the dirt with the potted up broccoli, and now we wait and see how they do. 

Today I also planted some new peas.  The ones I planted last month didn’t come up – either the seeds were too old, or the weather was too cold for too long.  The new ones are freshly-purchased this-year’s seeds that I soaked overnight, so I’m sure they will do great.  I just hope I get some peas out of them before it gets too hot for them, it’s a little late for planting peas.