Garden Klog

Shepherdstown Community Gardening

If you would like to be involved in a community garden here in Shepherdstown, please add a comment to this posting with you contact information and brief statement of your interest, as in: I would like to help get it going; I would like to have a plot; I have a place to put it; I have a little money to kick in. etc., etc, and when a planning committee is formed we will get in touch and then keep you informed of our progress!

WAMU - Diane Rehm Show Covers Public Space Gardening

Good to hear this morning on WAMU (88.5 FM Washington) discussion of the utility of and further need for using public spaces to produce food...and the need for education kids about where (real) food really comes from.

This is one of the things I am hoping daughter Molly will work on when she gets back to the States. She has the background the skills, and she for one knows just how to reach kids.

Check out her guest Darrin Nordahl's new book from Island Press, "Public Produce." 

Growing Power

I'm up in Vermont for a week. Lori reports that things are fine back at the garden, and that she is getting the cages set up on the last of the tomatoes, and will then clear off the cabbage and broccoli bed (I suggested she do the pea bed as well).

The season up here is 3-4 weeks behind. I visited Angie Higuera's garden in Manchester yesterday, and his shell peas are just hitting their stride and he is ready for his second picking. The tomatoes in the high tunnels at Green Mountain College in Poultney look to be only about 7-10 days behind ours, which is a good little bump over the outdoor plantings.

Friday I'll be visiting the gardens up at the Intervale in Burlington (where I had my last Vermont garden) and I will be very curious to see where they are in relation to gardens here, since Burlington is a full zone warmer than Londonderry.

Anyway, in trying to catch up on my blog posts, I came across this NY Times piece about Will Allen's Growing Power Farm out in Wisconsin. It makes a pretty good read.

Late Blight?

The internet is abuzz with stories of a developing pandemic of Late Blight (Phytophthora infestans), which is disastrously fatal to tomatoes, potatoes and eggplants. This is the disease that caused the Irish potato famine, and is not to be messed with. 

A recent AP story on Yahoo quotes Meg McGrath, professor of plant pathology at Cornell University, as saying that Late Blight is "worse than the Bubonic Plague for plants."

Outbreaks have been identified in most of the eastern states, including West Virginia and Virginia, where most of the plants in our garden came from. I haven't seen many signs of infection anywhere in our garden except perhaps on the first fruits of the Early Girl tomato plants we bought over at the Southern States store, which sources most of its seedlings from the same supplier (Bonnies Plants) that the big box stores do.  The plants themselves (as well as the rest of the tomatoes) look very healthy, and are starting to set fruit like crazy. Fortunately for us -- unlike more northeastern states -- we have not had a lot of rain, which is the main way the blight spreads. Also, I have done one spraying of a compost tea which includes Bacillus subtilis, and beneficial competitor to the Late Blight fungus, and that may be helping as well

Nonetheless, we will be on the lookout for symptoms, and so should you, especially if you live in an area that has seen a lot of rain recently. Cornell has an excellent web primer on Late Blight, including photo identifications. Ohio State also has a nice fact sheet that will help you determine if your tomatoes, potatoes or eggplants are infected (peppers are less bothered). One key element to understand is that Phytophthora infestans cannot survive without live tissue to colonize, and so if you do identify symptoms you really should yank up the plants to prevent its spread. No spray, organic or synthetic, is going to stop it once symptoms are present. So just do it!

The Potato Experiment Video

Here is a video Jim Surkamp made wherein I explain the details of the potato experiment.

Our Potato Experiment

It must have been twenty years ago when I first heard of this idea:  you lay seed potatoes on the surface of cultivated soil, heap soil and / or compost over them, and then once the sprouts poke through, heap more soil.

As they continue to grow you build a boxed bed around them...up, up, up as high as you can go, and being potatoes they should continue to set spuds along the buried stem.

 

When I tried it then, I built the "box" out of cinderblocks, and, not having any excess soil, just filled the box with hay. Come August, when the tops died down, I tore down the block bed and found:  no potatoes! Failure! (But as with my fish-in-the-corn-hill five years earlier than that, I suspected some subtle failure to follow the right plan.)

So, we'll see...

The Ole Carrot - Radish Trick

One of my favorite time and space saving tricks (described in detail in my books) is one that I first learned fro my grandfather and then improved on. What he did was to mix a little sand in with carrot seed when he sowed it so that there would be good drainage and the seeds would not be so close together and thus easier to thin. I learned to skip the sand and use radishes instead, which had a couple of additional benefits. Check out the video to see:

Here is part two (we broke it up to decrease download time).

Our First Red Tomato!

What better way to celebrate the solstice than with ripe tomatoes? When we came up with our planting plan we put one teepee into Early Girl hybrid so that we could have a few early tomatoes while we were waiting for the longer season heirlooms to come in. It seems to have worked as this shot through the picket fence shows!

 

 

More Video on Early Tomatoes

Jim Surkamp was good enough to come back and shoot a second You Tube segment to follow up on how we are growing our tomatoes. We've actually got about four different ways that we are using...perpetually in search of the most efficient and most productive we can find. We'll try to keep this up throughout the season.

Here is a link to the video.

As always, we'd love to hear your comments and questions.

Today's Harvest

Well the garden is really starting to produce now!  I could have picked a lot more (including the first of the second crop of broccoli) but I am cooking only for myself, so...

Here is what I got:

• the last of the first crop of spring radishes from the carrot row
• one of the three remaining clumps of mache (corn salad)
• a floppy, shade stretched head of Red Sails lettuce
• the first of the purple kohlrabis
• the first of the Sugar Snap peas
• a couple of branches each of basil and parsley
• a small clump of chives

I almost took one of the baby zukes, but decided to leave them till I have enough for tempura. There are also plenty of spring onions to be thinned from the onion bed, some swiss chard, a few strawberries, and a whole lot of EJW cabbages that need to be pulled (even though the shade has kept them from heading like they ought to. Also, I noticed while picking that the cucumbers and the pole beans are just starting to flower.

Back Alley Tour A Big Success

Mary Stanley (one of the organizers of the Back Alley Garden Tour) stopped by the garden late Sunday afternoon to report that they had exceeded their goals for the fundraiser!  The tour raises money for the Shepherdstown Men's Club, housed in the War Memorial Building on German Street, site of many local events including art shows, the Friends of the Library book sale, and the monthly contra dances. We are proud to have been a part of their success, and to have introduced high yield urban food gardening to hundreds of visitors and local residents!