Garden Klog

We're Changing the Site

Look for a design overhaul and relaunch of this Garden Klog, coming around Columbus Day. For now, I'm off to the Garden Writers Annual Symposium in Portland, OR!

Compost Tea and Early Blight

There was an interesting article in the Washington Post yesterday by Adrian Higgins about the wet season we are having -- after a multi-year drought, we have already gotten something like 30 inches of rain this year -- and its effect on the garden.

One of the most pronounced effects, which Higgins discusses in some detail, is the prevalence of foliage diseases and fruit rots in wet seasons. We've certainly seen that here:  our cultivated cherries had serious fruit rot problems due to the huge, tightly packed clusters of fruit (the smaller, less densely clustered wild sweet cherries along the driveway did not have this problem).

On the subject of foliage diseases he notes that the season for early blight on tomatoes is here and especially bad. I have spent many a year trying to solve the early blight problem, as it is present in virtually all the soils of the eastern US and even the organic sprays to control it are noxious:  Bordeaux Mix or some other formulation of copper and/or sulfur. My solution in the past has always been to get the plants up off the ground and use a deep mulch to prevent the spores of this fungus from infecting the plants in the first place. The spores land on a leaft where there is sufficient moisture, especially with a wound, and if the moisture stays around long enough they germinate; next rain (or irrigation) they spash to adjacent leaves and the disease moves up and across the plant. (For an excellent discussion of early blight, see this Cornell website.)

This year I tried something different, or additional, really. I have long foliar fed my plants with a combination of liquid seaweed and fish hydrolysate like Neptune's Harvest or Sea-Plus. But finally the technology has gotten really good for the manufacture of compost teas that have a wide range of "farmed" microbes in them. I'll have more to say about them at some point but for the moment the part that is of interest is their use to restrain early blight.

So for the past couple of months I have been spraying compost tea on my tomato plants after each rain based on the theory that if you establish a rich community of beneficial microbes on the foliage, it will be more difficult for the early blight spores to establish themselves. It seems to have worked like a charm.

If you look at the trellised plants -- where I also did my usual thing of removing all the lower foliage and mulching deeply -- you'll see there is almost no blight. Having that open under-canopy made it possible for me to get the spray head up under the plants and spray upward to coat exactly the foliage that would be first infected because of it proximity to the ground.

Look at the pictures of the determinate paste tomatoes, which, because of the cage that supports them could neither be pruned, not sprayed from underneath, and you'll see that the blight is much more prevalent. And since it spreads by splashing from leaf to leaf, those plants are goners eventually...usually the best one can hope for is to get off a crop before the plants are defoliated, and I think my chances are good on that with these Roma tomatoes.

The biggest problem I have is that because I was mixing the tea (which has no technical fertilizer value) with my usual foliar feed -- and it rained so often -- I am afraid I grossly overfed the plants before realizing a week or two ago that I better stop adding the fish-feed.

Those trellised heirloom indeterminates are a solid nine feet tall and have long since grown off the top of the teepees, fallen back, and then started up again. And while there is fruit, I am sure there is not as much as there will be once the fertility starts to settle down again (too fertile conditions promotes plant growth at the expense of early fruit).

The Roma tomatoes are just as bad/good in that a determinate variety like that shouldn't get to much more than 2-3 feet tall (hence the height of the cage, which is meant to support the fruit) but these are probably a solid five feet already and I haven't seen the terminal shoot yet!

Oh, well!  Live and Learn.  BTW, The two products I have been using are one called 1-2-3 Compost Tea and one called Bio-Balance. Both of them contain dozens of beneficial bacterial and fungal species. A friend in Vermont, Angie Higuera, has also been testing Bio-Balance as a cutlfower preservative and reports that his customers have been thrilled with its effect on the bouquets they buy.

Online Veggies!

Well, it is clear I am going to have way more vegetables than my extended families can eat, so I have to figure out what to do with them. I spoke to a couple of vendors at the farmers market (downtown, Sundays from April to December) to see if I could set up a card table or something, but it seems out they are not really interested in having any new vendors unless they are certified  organic.

Though I am - and always have been - organic there is no way I can afford to be certified just so I can set up a card table at the market. (Note: if you sell less than $5000 a year, then under the law you don't need to be certified, but that is different from the market committee requiring that you be certified.) In Burlington it was no problem: if there was room on a given Saturday, and you were a "member" of the market, then you could set up...though you might not get a great location. In fact that is what my son Sam and I did back in 2002 (see the photo to the left). It wasn't much of a stand, but it did give us another outlet and also gave us a way to see what people wanted....

I've been talking to some of the chefs in town (as I did in Burlington - we do have a few good restaurants) and there seems to be some interest from them but the problem there is that they need larger quantities on a consistent basis. Maybe next year I can do that but I wouldn't want to commit for this year.

There is also the community supported agriculture (CSA) model, in which customers "subscribe" to the garden, for their weekly support check receive a proportionate share of what's in the garden. But I don't really like take people's money up front or having to decide what to grow based on what some committee of customers decides...to me that is a different kind of CSA, closer to creeping socialist agriculture (<G>). I like to plant what I want and take my chances.

But while I was walking down to the market this morning a new idea hit me:  I'll put an entry up every week with what I have and let local readers order online. I love it! A totally online market garden...

It's going to take me a little while to figure out the details, but I don't think that matters much as it is going to be a couple of weeks yet before I have enough to start supplying anybody new...but if you are interested (and local) either post a comment (which will alert me) and I'll add  you to the mailing list I'll use to contact customers each week once I have some surplus. We'll figure out the best day(s) and where to do the transfer ($$ for food).

Or you can email me directly at Sheps Town Garden with your contact info and crops that you like.

I'm really looking forward to trying this out, so leave me a comment below!

Feast or Famine

Just a week or so ago I was complaining about the need for rain and scrambling around to find a tank to catch rainwater off the roof because the town water doesn't have any pressure up here on the hill. (I did find a 275 gal one for free, but can't pick it up until later in the week.)

Then the rains came -- forecast first as showers -- and they have just kept on coming. It did just sort of sprinkle on Friday and Saturday, with occasional sunshine...and even Sunday morning was pretty nice. We got almost an inch, total, which is just right, especially when it comes down slow enough to sink into parched ground rather than running off.

But then the storms that killed and flooded out so many south and west of here arrived, and over the course of Sunday night we picked up another 4-5 inches (check the glass -- my high tech gauge -- that I shot in the pre-dawn gloom) and it's still raining. On the radar it looks like a hurricane, and its center is just to the east of us, so it is picking water from the bay and dumping it right on Jefferson County, where I live. We're supposed to get at least another inch, if not two, and flood warnings are up all along the Potomac (including just east of Shepherdstown, where my brother's house is right down at the edge of the flood plain.

And cold? It was 41F this morning at dawn, and the forecast high for today is only 48F -- just one degree above the average LOW! I actually went and put the cloches back on the cucumbers and other tender plants to give them a little protection from the cold and wind.

One good thing, though:  even though the bark isn't down yet, the garden is sufficiently fiinished that all that rain doesn't make the paths muddy, and there is no water collecting anywhere! (Makes all that effort seem worth it....

First Harvest!

Cut salad greens for dinner tonight...which we really had to do so we could start hilling the first planting of potatoes! I don't know why the potatoes shot up so fast, but the greens were ready anyway, so we're off.

For comparision purposes, I looked back at the entry for March 10th, exactly two months ago, and was shocked to find that we hadn't even started clearing the spot at that point. Check it out at this link.

Peas Are Up!

If I was still gardening in Vermont, where the pea planting date was usually around April 15th, that headline would mean the peas had germinated and broken ground. But down here at the head of the Shenandoah Valley you've got a good shot at planting your peas by St. Patty's Day, so what I mean is that they have gotten tall enough that I have to put building a trellis at the front of the priority list even though the fence around the garden isn't completely done.

Since I am trying to use bamboo for everything I can, I tried to figure a way to rig a tall enough and wide enought trellis for Sugar Snaps -- which can reach 7-8 feet -- using just bamboo and twine, but also using the minimum amount. The height and maturity rate of peas is related to two interlocking traits: the internodal length (that is, the distance between each set of "branches" from which the flowers and then pods are borne) and the number of "vegetative" nodes that appear before the first flowering node. Sugar Snaps are very productive, but tall and relatively late because they have a long internodal length and don't usually flower before the ninth node, which is farther from the ground than the total height of some early, dwarf pea varieties!

The design I came up with looks pretty flimsy -- and I have no idea if it will be sufficient to withstand cross winds -- uses three uprights, and two very long diagonals, one along each side. On that, I construct a web of twine that creates a kind of six inch wide "cage" within which the peas grow, hopefully with the pods themselves splayed to the outside. If problems develope, I will modify it, but these things are always a work in progress -- especially when you change growing zones -- so I am prepared, and not overly concerned. It will be a learning process!

Before & After

I've been working on the garden almost exactly two months now. Yesterday I took a picture out the office window of the garden to send to a friend in Topton, PA who had visited my gardens there, which were quite similar in scope and design (see the photo page on my website for pics) and then later in the day I came across an almost identical photo taken right at the beginning. I thought it might be fun to put them side by side:

Looking at the two is somewhat satisfying, but also reminds me of how much work I have put into this project. When I say that I don't imply any kind of regret, or feeling of inefficiency or overdoing it; I have confidence that the upfront effort is going to pay off over the life of the garden (5-10 years if maintained well) in the way of vastly reduced labor to run it, in terms of weeding, watering, planting and picking. But it does take time, especially when your days are already full!

Nice Jugs

My back alley walk every morning has been plenty useful over the six weeks or so that I have been working on this garden, providing all kinds of materials from other people’s cast-offs. Recycle morning usually sends me down one block or another so I can pick up things that I especially need, like the one gallon plastic milk jugs that I use to protect new transplants from the vagaries of sun, wind and frost. After bamboo and boxes they are one of the most useful scavenged items I’ve found. They are self regulating due to the chimney effect, and when I’m not using them it is a snap to string them up, nested and hang a dozen or from a hook or a branch till they’re next needed. And the bottoms just back into the recycle bin.

Deer Tracks

Well they finally found us ... I was out in the garden yesterday putting in some new plants and found deer tracks beside the (24" tall) fence, and then, upon closer examination, in  the planting beds.

So I had to drop what I was doing and go to work on the fence. Unfortunately it was only a couple of hours till dark, and my jigsaw, which I had been using to cut the bamboo to length, gave up the ghost...after 20 years. The solution? I just screwed full lengths of the bamboo at the top bar height and left the overhangs, then hung the 100 ft piece of shade cloth I bought a couple weeks ago to protect my summer greens from the sun around the three sides facing away from the house (figuring they were less likely to enter from the house side).

The shade cloth is six feet, so it makes it from the top bar to the ground. The gaps just got blocked off partly with pallets we are going to use to make the compost piles on the back side, and by the simple expedient of twine closing off the space with strands dangling. All I need is to keep them out another day or so and I will have the fence finished...and any fragrant, moving change to the perimeter (like new baler twine fluttering in the wind) will keep them out till they become used to it. The whole game is psychological after all!

Weather Geography

Well,  the storms missed us for the most part – as they often seem to. I remember in Vermont how they often went by just to the northeast, over Weston or off to the southwest over Jamaica; we often ended up in a dry slot. Here – especially now that we have animated internet radar, I can see it is pretty much the same.

There is a difference, though: in Vermont, the weather came from the northwest, and the reason it would miss us is that the north end of the Taconic mountains was just to our northwest, and it seem to disturb the storms as they came through, bumping them off to one side or the other (region-wide rains weren’t affected that way, though narrow frontal passages can be).

View Larger Map  Click the larger map link to the left and close the labels to get a great overview!

Here the weather seems to come from the southwest, parallel to the coast and the direction of the Blue Ridge (which defines the western edge of the Piedmont – more on that aspect of the Mid-Atlantic at some point). Isolated storms and  narrow fronts seem to line up on the western edge of the Shenandoah Valley (which is the eastern edge of the Allegheny mountains) about 10-15 miles west of us and shunt off to the northeast without hitting us.

What’s more, coastal storms often seem to get guided off in the same direction by the Blue Ridge itself. This was most apparent last winter, when the snow / sleet / rain patterns set up in about the same way, making visible overhead the basic geography of the region: Tidewater, Piedmont, Shenandoah and the Allegheny mountains.