Novice Gardener Diaries

A slight change

2008-07-10T08:57:00.001-07:00

Since the happenings in my own garden are becoming less humorous as I start to take myself a little more seriously and (I hope) make fewer hilarious, glaring errors, I have decided to open up the purview of my blog a little bit. I realize I have already done this in some posts, but expect it more and more.

In light of that decision, here are some wise words that Hannah forwarded to me from our farmer, Allan (who grows our CSA shares).

"POTATOES: We had a thunder storm during harvest. Your spuds may have
been bagged WET. This means you need to IMMEDIATELY get them out of
the plastic bag and wash them and then let them dry in the air (or
then cook them!) If you don't, they will ROT really fast!

LETTUCE: We have had almost continually rain and little sunshine for
two weeks. This week's lettuce is showing the results of this. You'll
have to preen it for good leaves. All of our lettuce is for one week
of shares, this is what we have this week.

SHARE SHOULD BE

Potatoes
Salad Mix
Lettuce
Kohlrabi (that 'green vegetable' no one can identify!)
onions
garlic
cucumbers
squash
basil (pesto freezes very well, but you have to leave out the oil...or
is it the garlic? You better check!)"

For those of you readers in the mid-Atlantic region, I'd be remiss not to link you to his site: http://www.freshandlocalcsa.com/

I include this because I always find his missives interesting both because of the description of the delicious food we can expect and because I like knowing about the challenges they face from the weather, etc. to get this food grown. He also often includes recipes, which is pretty helpful.

I will point out that I was not one of the suckers who paid for purslane. I pull that tricky weed out of my garden in abundance for free. And when I do, I try to eat it instead of discarding it because I have read many places that its healthful goodness is epic. And it tastes pretty nice, too.

Mystery Cucumber

2008-07-10T07:43:00.000-07:00

I got my first cucumber!

Unfortunately, it was one of the standard old green kinds; my weirdo, heirloom lemon-shaped-and-colored cucumbers are still all in the flower stage. I titled this post "mystery cucumber" because the circumstances of this cucumber were a little mystifying to me. I was just tromping around my garden, trying to suppress the weeds growing up through my mulch by frowning at them, when I noticed a fully ripe, 8 inch long cucumber on one of my plants. That on its own wouldn't be weird, but then I looked around to see if there were any others, and there was nothing. A few flowers on this bush, no baby cucumbers yet...

Perhaps this particular bush was channeling all of its energy into this one cucumber. Maybe this is normal, I don't know. But I am now keeping a closer eye on all of my cucumber and squash plants, because who knows what other fruits have has escaped my notice during their entire childhood.

The other plants I think I am keeping better tabs on, though. My runner beans look quite nice climbing up their makeshift trellis-y thing and my tomato plants are staked, relatively happy looking, and flowering copiously. I also have a teeny tiny eggplant. I am worried, since it looks pretty ripe, that it is going to stay teeny tiny -- a product of a stunted plant, rather than just a fruit in its early stages. I started this plant indoors, and perhaps I did a poor job meeting its needs as I transplanted it. I hesitate to say that it's just an issue of soil fertility (although I readily admit that my soil is a serious work in progress) because the other plants in that area are doing much better. My pepper transplant is having the same tiny-ness issues in a different part of the garden, also surrounded by healthy looking plants. So for the time being I blame my poor skill at transplanting.

So I haven't actually gotten around to mulching...

2008-06-23T06:24:00.000-07:00

Well, so only a little mulching has happened, even though I said that would be my next update.

There has, however, been some theft. It's ok, though, because I was doing the thieving; It wasn't really that serious. In one of the weeded-over sections of the garden some mint has gone crazy, crazy. So I took a whole bunch of it after I got done planting a few more herbs and pulling some greens and the last of the peas.

Then I looked up recipes for mint (other than the recipes involving rum, which I already knew). I found many things, most of which sounded weird/unappealing. In the end, I settled on a mint granita recipe from epicurious.com, and it was really awesome.

Here it is, for those of you who won't click a link:

2 cups water 1 cup chopped fresh mint leaves 1/2 cup sugar 2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice

Garnish: fresh mint leaves

Bring water, mint, and sugar to a boil in a 1- to 2-quart saucepan, stirring until sugar is dissolved, then reduce heat and simmer, uncovered, 3 minutes. Add lemon juice and pour through a fine-mesh sieve, pressing hard on solids and discarding them, then cool.

Freeze mixture in a 1 1/2- to 2-quart shallow nonreactive metal container, stirring and crushing lumps with a fork every 30 minutes, until evenly frozen, 2 to 3 hours. Scrape with a fork to lighten texture, crushing any lumps. Spoon into glasses or bowls.

I recommend it.

I know, I know

2008-06-20T09:28:00.000-07:00

It's been forever; It's true.

I have a boatload of excuses, of course. There was the dispiriting uncertainty about whether I'd get my plot back. Then there was the assurance that I would have it. Then I planted some things and some other gardener who didn't want to double dig requested that the WHOLE PLACE (including my obviously double-dug and partly planted plot) be roto-tilled. Then that whole plant then have it roto-tilled adventure happened again.

But all of this was weeks ago. In the ensuing weeks, I have planted some herbs, some squash, cucumbers, tomatoes and beans and a section for lettuces, greens, spring onions and root vegetables. Some of the snap peas that I planted right up close to the edge (in the hopes that they'd out-compete the mint) escaped the double roto-till and produced for a few weeks as well. I've also gotten a bumper crop of mustard greens (figures -- Alli hates them). I used a few of them in this mustard greens and fontina cheese fritatta yesterday, which she managed to choke down (the addition of eggs, cheese and garlic-y things will fix nearly any food).

We've also gotten some Easter-egg radishes, which are cute and pastel. We like to food process them in with equal parts butter and spread it on French bread. That's tasty; try it. They came up really fast! In fact, with the intermittent rainstorms, everything has been shooting up. Particularly the weeds. Effin' weeds.

Over the winter I had a rather short lived worm farm, (did I mention that?). And while I managed to commit worm genocide after a couple of months, they did make a nice amount of worm castings, which I have used as an early fertilizer for some of my more nutrient-hungry plants. Someday I'll re-start that worm operation, but it was just so sad. I left for a weekend thinking they were fed and taken care of for a couple of days (I mean, they're worms, not a puppy) and came home and they had all fled their habitat: Into the dry, inhospitable cardboard box around it. This is the equivalent of thinking that it's a little warm on the beach and so you walk headfirst into the ocean and drown yourself. Again, though, they're worms, and therefor not known for their enlightened self interest.

I'll get back on posting, and return with some photos shortly. I promise to keep you all apprised of any particularly creative/stupid decisions I decide to make. We are also receiving a weekly CSA share (mentioned previously) now, and I'll let you know of interesting things we get from that. For starters, there were garlic scapes. So far we have both cooked them like green beans then served them with a lemon-vinaigrette, and blended them into a dip with white beans which ends up pea-colored. Hannah suggests using them in soups and with potatoes.

I will update you guys when I finally mulch.

getting antsy

2008-02-28T08:07:00.000-08:00

It's nearly time to start planting!!

In fact, I should have started a few things indoors already (eggplants, peppers). I'll get on that this weekend. I promise.

A little inspiration

2008-02-27T09:22:00.000-08:00

Here's a link to a youtube video about turning hyper-arid, perfectly flat and extremely salty land a few miles from the Dead Sea into a productive multi-crop orchard. These guys use permaculture principles which focus on mimicking the resiliency and productivity of natural systems but recreating them with species that are not only useful to the system but also edible or otherwise useful to humans.

An ideal permaculture system requires minimal upkeep and uses perennial and self-seeding plants to keep itself going even if left unattended for months or years at a time. Interesting stuff, and more on this later.

Compost!

2008-02-27T09:06:00.000-08:00

So I visited my dad in Phoenix, AZ last weekend. It was a ton of fun. There's been such a wet winter there that the landscape was so green it was nearly unrecognizable in places. We did a lot of fun things, but in my free moments I started a very pathetic beginning to a compost pile in my dad's back yard.

The main ingredient was the leaves that lay scattered all about below his tree. Alli and I raked them all to an auspicious location near the side fence and put them in a big old pile. I intended to have my brother help me pilfer some wooden loading pallets like you can find behind supermarkets to use for walls for the pile, but there was never time.

Alli and I were cooking a meal for many people on Sunday night and since we went to a farmer's market and found a ton of fresh vegetables there was a fair amount of vegetable scrap to throw on the pile (I just can't get others to share my taste for beet greens. Odd).

Since I doubt dad will produce copious amounts of vegetable waste to add to the pile, I was a little worried that the pile would be too leafy. On the other hand, he does drink a lot of coffee. And the coffee shop he frequents every day has a policy of giving away their coffee grounds to composters. My dad is a serious early bird, so I think he'll have no trouble taking advantage of this resource.

I sent him a link to City Farmer's photo-illustrated how to on composting since I didn't have time to really go through the process while I was there.

There's the link, if you want to give compost a try yourself. Drop me a line and I'll talk until I'm out of breath about all of the benefits.

I hope we all realize ...

2008-02-27T08:22:00.000-08:00

I haven't preached this point too much so far because I figured it went without saying, but permit me a (hopefully) short rant.

Nearly all of the the food that we buy -- and then eat -- relies on cheap gasoline, cheap trucking and other non-renewable resources that we're sucking down by the ten thousands of gallons. Go to a grocery store, even a high-cost organic one and look around. Everything there would be gone with something as simple as a three-day transit strike.

Does no one else find that terrifying? And on a less catastrophic scale, rising oil prices (which are and will continue to be an absolute reality) will by necessity equal rising food prices. Maybe you've got pounds and pounds of food stored up in your house, but my apartment, not so much. Maybe the trucking companies will come through for us before oil costs are prohibitively expensive and run their trucks on biodiesel, or something.

Personally, while I think these more optimistic scenarios could certainly play out, I'm not willing to bet my starvation on it. I don't think you should either, to be honest.

So some solutions, please, miss gloom'n'doom?

Well, the most obvious and most direct answer is to grow some of your own food, more each year (pick your damn figs, oranges and pecans, dad. Get some wrist and ankle weights and do it instead of a workout or two. And then call Alli and she'll walk you through cooking delicious things from them). Don't have enough space? Get creative, vertical space is space too.

You'd be surprised how productive a small amount of land (or a balcony, or a patio, or a rooftop) can be . There's an Urban farm in Chicago (note: short mid-western growing season) that can produce enough food for 2000 people on two acres. Well, that's an advanced aquaponics system with a lot of full time employees, but then you're probably not trying to feed 250 people from your 1/4th acre, either.

Another answer that doesn't involve you digging in the dirt is to join a CSA. Community supported agriculture has you pay up front for a "share" of the produce from a farm over the course of the season. There are usually several drop off points to pick up your share, or some CSAs deliver to your door. There's a searchable and pretty comprehensive list of CSAs at localharvest.org.

This answer helps the small farmers by giving them money to cover their overhead expenses, and gives you the best produce available. There are countless other advantages, like the accountability that exists when you meet and establish a relationship with your food producer and the support of a local food economy. Let's say that transit strike does materialize: your CSA share is safe. And the rising oil prices probably won't affect it too much, either, because small local farms running CSA's are typically organic, thus not needing petroleum based fertilizers and pesticides and the local nature of the food exempts it from rising shipping costs.

(I have skimmed over the obvious environmental implications of shipping all of that food long distances in refrigerated trucks and train cars because all 12 of my readers are very bright and have almost certainly made that connection on their own.)

Another link

2008-02-13T14:08:00.000-08:00

Yup, it's about urine.

Human urine as a safe, inexpensive fertilizer for food crops

That's the headline. It summarizes a study done by some Finish researchers.

Some interesting things

2008-02-13T09:45:00.000-08:00

Heya.

So here's a link to the website of a Canadian (of course; they're way ahead of us in innovative ag) couple who figured out a way to profit $52,000 on the sales of crops from less than an acre of farmed land. About half an acre, in fact. And they only own about a 5th of it. And the rest? Back yards in their neighborhood. In some cases they rent the space to farm from neighbors and usually pay for the space in produce and in others they're actually paid to farm other people's property. As people start to realize the nonsense of lawns, some families have seen this "SPIN Farming" (stands for Small Plot INtensive farming) as an alternative to landscaping costs.

Their profitability key is to use high value crops like salad mixes, micro-greens and specialty beets all of which can be harvested very young and spaced very tightly. So they get several harvests from a small space all of which are quite valuable; especially since they weigh and package them at home, charging per bunch instead of per pound.

Speaking of the evil of lawns: heard of edible estates? I'd link to its website, but it's sort of a disorganized mess. Basically this guy started this project to teach people how to use edible plants in a front-lawn-replacing landscape. If done correctly it reduces water need and certainly pesticide and herbicide need and also produces something useful, unlike lawns, which produce nothing but neighborhood homogeneity and cover thousands of square miles of America.

Speaking of the horticultural applications of pee...

2008-02-05T07:16:00.000-08:00

But not my pee this time. I'm talking about the rather intriguing idea of aquaponics.

Aquaculture is the practice of growing fish as a cash crop.
Hydroponics is the practice of growing plants in a medium other than soil using a nutrient solution to provide them with the elements they'd usually pull from the soil.

Each of these practices on its own produces a harmful by-product. In aquaculture it's all the fish sewage. In hydroponics the nutrient solution is often not completely utilized and it's an expensive sometimes chemically intensive input.

Aquaponics combines the two systems to mimic a more natural polyculture where the plants clean the water and the fish provide the nutrients. In a perfectly functioning aquaponics system the only inputs are fish food, water to top off from evaporation and a minimal amount of electricity to run the pumps that circulate the water from fish to plants and back. I've seen these run from solar cells housed above the unit.

Tilapia is a common fish grown in this setup, since they're tolerant of a lot of conditions and can be fed table scraps (but they're vegetarians. awww). It's sort of like worm composting, but with fish. Feed them your scraps, scraps avoid waste stream, fish make "waste" into plant nutrients, plants make it back into human nutrients. Cool. I love neat, clean, all tied up in a pretty package ideas like this.

I realize, of course, that a perfectly functioning system is by no means an easy feat. One home experimenter wrote that hobby aquaponics is a good way to become a serial fish-killer until you get it right. Still, this whole thing makes me want a yard/greenhouse/place to experiment/even a big balcony really badly. And it's making Alli nervous that we may someday be that crazy house on the block with all sorts of abandoned experiments and lengths of plastic tubing in the back yard.

It's not my fault; I was born with an inherent need to tinker with things.

Oh and here's a link to a video of a home-made aquaponics system.

Pee!?!?

2008-02-05T07:02:00.000-08:00

I figure my long gap between posts is merited, since it's winter, and all my garden was doing was decomposing the organic matter that I piled there. I took my straw mulch and put it in a pile, and added some leaves and some kitchen scraps and hoped for compost.

I knew that this was mostly an unrealistic hope, given the low outdoor temperatures and the low levels of nitrogen in the mix. Finally, I decided that the pile just had to have a nitrogen boost. I searched around all the forums and various other resources that I frequent before I resort to trial and error, and found many suggestions for adding nitrogen. Some were good suggestions, but expensive. Some required that I own a 50 gallon aquarium.

I settled on the easiest and cheapest nitrogen boost, one much touted in every forum I looked at, after I did some research on its safety. I'll give you a hint, it involved a wide mouthed empty plastic jar and we flushed the toilet way less frequently. Human urine, as it turns out, is very high in nitrogen.

I also recently found this gem, an article on organic container gardening adapted to the slums of Mexico City, which relies heavily on urine use. Very interesting.

Garden in late October

2007-11-02T11:59:00.000-07:00

Just after the first frost, I decided it was time to pull all of my lettuces. They were holding up quite well, but the weather is supposed to take a colder turn very soon. So on Monday Alli and her friend Tim and I pulled up all the arugula and mustard greens. I picked out the damaged leaves and we made a big salad for all four of us who ate dinner at home that night and still had a ton left over.

So it's been salad week, over here, and the only thing left in my garden is some beets, that feral mint and the decomposing hay mulch. The hay is much larger in quantity than the last time I noted it, because I bought a big bale of it when Alli, Brynne and I went to a farm selling pumpkins (and also cider, cheeses and hay, among other things). You should have seen Alli trying to wrestle that hay into the back of her perennially pristine car trunk. There's no better way to say "I love you."

Been a while

2007-11-02T11:47:00.000-07:00

So I have gone quite a while without an update. And quite a few things have happened since I last posted.

We finally got some much needed rain around here, which all came at once and preceded the first frost by only a few days. And it's still a very dry year.

Hannah and I went apple picking, oh ages ago now. My garden is one part of my general eating locally and seasonally efforts and I've decided to include a few others from time to time. So we went apple picking. We each bought an absurd quantity of apples (about 25 pounds?) and I also got a lot of winter squash. When you re trying to eat seasonal and local there are times of year where you just have to make your peace with apples and squash. We've been able to supplement these things with the greens, root vegetables and late tomatoes from my garden and our experiments in bread making.

If you were to look in my refrigerator and freezer for a while there (and also now) you'd find a plethora of squash and pumpkin soups and homemade apple sauce. Alli can cut up apples REALLY FAST as I learned while I was trying to peel them and keep up with her when we were loading our crock pot for the applesauce. It was a truly delicious applesauce but all those apples and apples products went surprisingly fast.

Sage

2007-10-05T12:42:00.000-07:00

So sage dries out FAST. I'll try to put a picture up, but it's already starting to look like the silver-gray dried bunches available at head shops and Native American museums. It's pretty cool.

Of course, it's also shedding onto the ground a little and that is crunchy underfoot and obnoxious, but oh well.

Speaking of making sauce

2007-10-04T07:01:00.000-07:00

Two of the plants in my garden that already looked like they were starting to feel the hurt from the cold weather were my basil and pineapple sage. The sage is now hanging to dry in front of a window, from the adjustment wire of our blinds. We'll use the dried sage as a cooking herb, or burn it to purify the house, or something. or maybe it will just hang out in a vase and look and smell pretty. Maybe I'll embed it into fancy homemade candles (this last option is unlikely). Regardless, we will find a use for it.

A good use for the basil was pretty obvious. We made pesto. The other pieces of the equation (olive oil, nuts, salt, garlic) already exist in our kitchen in quantity, so we just pulled all the basil leaves off the main stem, piled/poured everything into Baum's extremely cool blender and hit "liquefy".

It turned out quite well - as things loaded with garlic, olive oil and salt tend to do.

The season's winding down...

2007-10-04T06:24:00.000-07:00

So we are a mere two weeks or so from the projected first plant-killing frost. It seems tough to believe, since it's still often sweltering during the day. Not to mention the fact that I no longer have school in the fall to structure my time, so this year has lacked a normal sense of transition.

Well, with a plant killing frost coming up and my tomato plants still producing, my lettuces still still growing and my turnips still turniping, what am I going to do?

At my home we're transitioning from production mode to consumption mode, fast. Sick of arugula? Tough. Eat it.

I avoided space-consuming vine plats in my fall garden, like winter squashes and pumpkins, for various reasons and the result has been: lots of lettuce. And root vegetables. What am i going to do with all these radishes and turnips? The package was serious when it said radishes were easy to grow. They are running amok. The root vegetables, at least, will keep for a while. We'll have carrots, beets, turnips and radishes coming out of our ears for at least part of the winter.

No matter how many tomatoes become ripe, we manage to polish those off pretty quickly. There is the possibility, though, of having to pick a great deal of them all at once to outsmart the weather a little. In that case, I guess we'll make sauce and freeze it to have later.

I know what I said, but...

2007-09-27T17:35:00.001-07:00

So I know I promised that this wouldn't be one of those blogs where I was like "hey check out all my successes!"
And trust me, I did every idiot thing in my power to ensure that I had no successes.

But I just can't resist....
HEY CHECK OUT ALL THIS STUFF I GREW.

There's a misshapen radish, a tiny turnip that spit itself out of the dirt (I swear) while it was still all tiny, some various greens, carrots and a bunch of cherry tomatoes. The growing season is winding down, but I'm finally able to head out there a few times a week and bring in some seriously good stuff.

Mulching: finally happened

2007-09-18T11:06:00.000-07:00

So after a whole lot of talk, I finally mulched. Yeah, I know, I didn't think it would happen either.

I was able to procure two extremely compressed cubic feet of "salt hay substitute." Well since "sugar substitute" can mean "scary white powder more closely related to a micro-fleece sweater than actual sugar" and "butter substitute" can actually mean"yellow, salty motor oil" I took the time to check what exactly I was using instead of hay. Well, it's just hay and straw - the pieces less inclined to have a bunch of weed seeds hiding in them. That I can go for.

The two cubic feet ended up being a whole lot of mulch. I was able to easily cover the entire non-planted area of my garden - between plants and rows, edges, etc. Since I'm hoping that all this mulch will, in addition to mulching my existing plants, compost into soil-enriching humus (decomposed organic matter in dirt, not a tasty chickpea and tahini-based dip) I also found a micro-organism rich, all natural bio accelerator to kick start that decomposition process. Now, i have heard about the high temperatures that can be produced be decomposition processes, so I did not use the bio accelerator on parts of my garden where I have things planted. Yet.

I'll tell you where I did use it, though: on top of all the mint. So, long before my tenure in this community garden plot, someone planted mint (as my 4 regular readers know) and it just runs amok. I have kept pulling it out, with increasing ferocity and less worry that it will not be able to regenerate itself. This time I pulled out every scrap I could find, by the roots, covered the bare area in mulch and compost starter and stomped on it a few dozen times for good measure. I have no doubt that as I write this, 20 hours later, the mint is back and better than ever. I also have no doubt that I looked as if I had lost my mind, jumping up and down on a little corner or hay covered dirt.

I knew that I have waited far too long to apply mulch between my plants and I also know that I did a pretty poor job. But until I see the negative results of my efforts, I won't change my ways. I'm still that little kid who must put my own hand on the stove, despite everyone else's tales about stoves being HOT. For instance, my method for mulching between tomato plants, which are all overgrown and form quite a canopy, was to pile the mulch on the canopy and shake the branches around until it fell through. Genius, right?

Speaking of tomato plants, I have seen the stems and vines of tomato plants described as "delicate as childs' wrists" or something like that. Well, that is a nice image, but I must be doing something wrong (we knew that) because my tomato plants are WAY more delicate than the wrists of children. They are tiny. Like the wrists of ... some sort of diminutive marsupial. Or something.

Radishes

2007-09-10T08:14:00.000-07:00

Here's a picture of one of my radishes (stolen from Alli's blog about food - homegirl loves food).

There's a tomato thief.

2007-09-10T06:18:00.000-07:00

There's a tomato thief in our community. A shameless thief of tomatoes.

Seriously. I had noticed that sometimes I'd see a tomato about to be ripe enough to pick and then I'd come the next day to get it and it would be gone from my plants. I didn't know, though, how widespread the problem was.

My favorite garden plot neighbor, who has a large and extremely full and well tended plot nearby, confirmed my suspicions of deliberate foul play. She said that she and her husband (I think) had been noticing many missing tomatoes, especially from the more expensive heirloom plants that they had bought. This was particularly annoying because they had planned to save seeds from these started plants so they wouldn't have to reinvest in seedlings the next year.

A friend of theirs, who lives in their building, is also one of the community security guards and they mentioned the problem to him. Well, one evening while he was circulating through the grounds he saw the tomato thief in action, in his friends' plot.

First, he gave her the benefit of the doubt and tried to politely explain that the plots were not community property, that individual residents tend them and that if she wanted any produce from them she could either tend a plot herself (there are usually spaces available) or ask the growers.

Well, she was not ignorant of the community garden's rules of propriety. She did not come from another culture and have a different understanding of ownership. English is her first language and she is not starving or unable to purchase her own food. She just "wanted garden fresh tomatoes," because they are better. Simple as that. She wanted them, so she felt justified to take them, and she has continued to do so even after being caught.

A rant about weeds.

2007-09-04T10:30:00.000-07:00

We had a few days of almost continual rainfall week before last. This was very good, considering that the area was and is in drought conditions. Also, my plants loved it. The transplanted basil and sage loved it, the tomatoes looked good, the lettuces and radishes shot up (I even had one radish grow all the way up. It was picked. Take that, over achiever.) and my onions sprouted. I like.

But you know what else loved the rain? Weeds. Right before that rain would have been a great time to get my whole garden mulched, to try to prevent hostile takeover by sprouts, but, you know, hindsight is 20/20. So I did not get my whole garden mulched; there are still just a couple of areas with the ground covered.

On the other hand, the primary idea of mulch is to shade out the weeds, right? Well, the area under my tomato plants is complete shade, because they're all crowded and overgrown, but quite a few weeds still thrive in there. Despite my careful reach-in method of keeping those guys in check, I discovered something disquieting among my tomato plants. One of the weeds that just looked like a whippy little plant, struggling for life, was in fact whippy looking because it's a VINE. A vine which wrapped itself around a limb of one of my tomato plants and pulled it TO THE GROUND.

That made me mad. Like, mama-bear mad. And it reinforced my resolve to begin mulching. But on the other hand, I know the secret of weeds: I could mulch with bomb grade uranium, and all of my plants, my neighbors and also myself would die... but a few weeds would straggle out of the radioactive mess and they'd be pissed.

other forays into urban food production

2007-08-31T10:05:00.000-07:00

This whole idea of producing or at least increasing notable parts of my food supply has started to go a little bit past the stage of "hobby" for me. I think it's really fascinating. I have environmental and conservtionist leanings to begin with and upon learning more of the details of the tremendous wastefulness and pollution of the convetional food industry, I've tried to detach myself from it as much as I reasonably can. That amount increases as I get more creative. The running joke in college was that I chose to major in dirt and water, and since those are the two things which the status quo of agriculture most degrades (besides the livelihood of small farmers) it's a natural cause for me to latch on to.

But I'll leave the preaching for now - there may be a little during winter, when all my garden is doing is composting itself - to tell you about some of my other efforts and ideas. First, I am sewing up an old hemp skirt to make a "sprouting bag," which is essentially the same as a normal bag but for the fact that you use it to sprout bean, radishes, greens, whatever else. I am doing this because with a little water and a little time, you can about quadruple the amound of food afforded by beans and many other seeds. I already have a fair few seeds left over which I will not be using in the spring because I'm switchig to heirloom plants. As an added bonus, a 60 cent bag of dried beans can be turned into a great deal of bean sprouts for use in salads, stir fries, etc. That is cool, because even while my cheap instincts tell me to buy dried beans, they are pretty nasty.

Also, I purchased a small, inexpensive "mushroom kit" of a variety of (purportedly delicious) mushrooms which will grow from spores in a sterile substrate in my kitchen. Or my office, if Alli makes me move them. It will only yield for three or four months, but after that I can dump the well established spores into the composting material in my garden and they will occur randomly beneath my plants for the next several years. Actually, since I probably won't live here that long, they will occur under someone else's plants. And really freak them out.

I forgot to mention

2007-08-31T08:40:00.000-07:00

In the space cleared by removing the bean and cucumber plants I have planted some heirloom beets and that multi-colored chard, as well as some perrenial buching onions. So these little guys will survive the winter if I take care of them, and, theoretically, keep producing as long as I keep thinning out their bunches. That's pretty cool.

Time elapsed, and notes on mulch

2007-08-31T07:46:00.000-07:00

So, since my last post about the first tomato, we've had a few more tomatoes ripen and find themselves in salads, the carrots have been thinned sufficiently that those which I pull these days are edible sized, instead of comically tiny. The lettuces are doing quite well, especially the arugula and I've had a good time thinning those rows, because the thinnings taste awesome. Even at the tiny stages when most of the sprouts look the same, radishes look like lettuces, look like turnips look like mustard greens, they taste entirely different. It's really interesting. Between beet greens, lettuce and mustard thinnings, pea shoots, carrots, tomatoes and basil, we've had a couple of really decent meals out of this garden. Poorly drained, infertile, rocky soil and all.

Every time I get to bring stuff in, wash it off and eat it, it makes me happy. Stupid happy. Still, my dirt sucks; It's horrible, and I can tell that its affecting the growth rate, yield and overall happiness of my pants. I fret over them a whole lot for average to below average results. I don't want to fall into the expensive trap of ammending my garden with pre-made compost which my plants will rob of its nutrients, forcing me to buy it all over again. I definitely don't intend to use any sort of synthetic fertilizer, that's a bit scary for me.

So step 1: mulch. I used the grass that I chopped off at the edge of my plot to mulch between the pea plants, and i can already see some benefits. The soil around them stays wet longer than the exposed soil and weeds don't go quite as crazy, due to the lack of light. Now that my lettuce, radish, turnip, spinach and mustard green sprouts are a little sturdier I think I'll mulch around them, too. Probably with hay, because I've heard good things about it and huge amounts of it were scattered around my neighborhood during a sidewalk construction project. I think that I will borrow some of this, as it has served its civic purpose and it also has the added benefit of already being a little decomposed.

my hope is that, after frosts have knocked out sections of my garden i will fold the plant matter of these sections down, and cover the whole mess with a few inch thick layer of hay. Most of the hay and plant matter will all slowly decompose over the winter (I'll purchase worms and throw them in there if I have to), providing much needed organic matter. To improve drainage and make the soil a bit lighter so that if I plant root vegetables next year they won't struggle so much, I'm going to spend a few dollars on a bag or two of some kind of crushed volcanic rock. I'm also looking into soil-building forms of "biointensive gardening" (more on that later) which have their own methods which often don't call for mulch, but whatever I choose to do, better soil can't hurt.

Cha-Ching!

2007-08-21T08:33:00.000-07:00

Oh man. The very first tomato got ripe. And we ate it. It was awesome.

BFH's garden, in her own font.

2007-08-20T06:31:00.000-07:00

Here is the square foot garden that BFH and I constructed on her balcony. Looks good, eh? I think that is at least in part due to the fact that she has way better font skills.

In other news

2007-08-19T10:19:00.000-07:00

While I was pulling out the bean plants (actually I had help from just-moving-in roommate, Baumer, who has confessed to accessing this blog from her blackberry. What?), I also hacked the shit out of the grass and mint that was free-loading near the Western edge of the garden.

I did this on the assumption that since the mint ran rampant all of its own accord, shitty soil and all, if i cut it back to a couple of tiny sprigs, it would make a comeback on its own. The grass all came out, out of spite. I used the cuttings (those free of root matter or seeds) to mulch around the pea plants. Take that.

The freed up space has been used as the new home for a couple of basil transplants and an herb that smells a lot like pineapple which I came to own in a totally legitimate manner. Welcome to the family, herbs, please don't die. It would be an especially hard blow, since I've taken more care and improved the soil for every successive round of plants. The survivors of my earliest attempts are a hardy bunch. I salute them.

BFH's new home

2007-08-19T09:58:00.001-07:00

When this whole garden adventure started, Best Friend Hannah lived with us and so was often around to help me. She has since moved to a few miles away and the garden misses her. She misses the garden, too, and sometimes makes it over to visit. There is not a community garden plot at her new home, but she does have a balcony. So we got to talking how we could make use of this balcony (you know, besides for a hibachi).

There was some talk about the two of us setting up a simplified hydroponics setup. We'd be the only people our age delving into hydroponics for lettuce growing rather than weed. The problem there was that no matter how bootleg we made the system, it would be a little time consuming and labor intensive for a 2 foot by 4 foot growing area. Also, hydroponics relies on a nutrient heavy water solution to sustain the plants in a soil-free growing medium, and the chemical intensive nature of this gave us both pause.

Before we cut our losses, I found this guy, Mel Bartholemew, who originated "square foot gardening." You can read about it on his site, it's actually pretty interesting. It was also just the degree of simplicity for what BFH and I had in mind. I only had to shell out a few dollars for a plastic tub that had been used for underbed storage (yay craigslist) a few more for some compost-rich dirt and vermiculite (a volcanic rock used to keep the dirt porous) and we were set to go, since I already have many extra seeds.

The method allows intensive planting, re-use of the soil, (just add a little compost, which BFH is now making herself)and requires very little water compared to a conventional garden. There is only enough time left in the season for lettuce, greens, radishes, some herbs. But that's fine, it's a good experiment of the method. If it works out really well I might use some 2x4s to make a frame for part of my garden, next spring.

Beans: out.

2007-08-19T09:46:00.000-07:00

I did it. I pulled up my lackluster bean plants. This was not easy for me, because I am new to gardening and get unduly attached to my the little green leafy things that are in my care. But their season was done and the beans and cucumbers were hanging out together and being all contagious (of that god-forsaken powdery mildew. As a matter of fact, if the cucumbers don't buck up really soon, they're coming out too. I picked 6 cucumbers to see if they'd shift their energy back to plant maintenance once the fruit was gone. My hopes are not very high, though.

My plans for the space that was filled with beans and cucumbers entail more of the same from the fall garden, some Swiss Chard (regretfully, I cannot find seeds for this crazy Chard in my neighborhood and time is of the essence, so i shall not order them. Maybe next season) if I can find it, and some herb transplants, hopefully something a little cold tolerant. We still have just over 60 days to the first frost, so there's a number of things I could do. I plan to get BFH to accompany me in making these decisions and getting the necessary items. Even with all my vacillating on decisions and the costs of my ineptitude, this has been a pretty cheap hobby. I appreciate that.

Fall Garden. August 5th

2007-08-16T12:51:00.000-07:00

Get ready for another hand-drawn garden map. One of the lessons I learned by trial and error (but is there really another way?) was that I wil forget what I planted and where I put it, and when the seeds went in if I don't write these things down. You may have noticed that my other planting entrie said dates like "mid-June." Because I forgot when I planted things. This makes it hard to use the guides on the back of the seed packets that say things like "55-60 days until maturity." Oh, really, because I planted them... approximately... a while ago.

Well, I intend not to repeat that particular lack of common sense. So I wrote it down. i planted things on August 5th. I checked the average first frost for my neighborhood and calculated back to make sure I was planting things that would survive to adulthood. Or when i want to eat them, whichever comes first. I also asked Garden Center Man, and he approved of my seed choices, so i feel pretty good about them. One of the things I got to plant were these crazy purple heirloom radishes. They're from Germany, but I called and asked and they should be well suited to my climate. These seeds went in a little later, though (August 14). I also plan to follow the seed directions about successive plantings every two weeks for some varieties, which I did not adhere to before.

Here's my fall harvest plans. if I had gotten a normal time start most of these would have been planted in early spring first, and the re-planted for fall harvest. The two rows of peas are planted together like that, instead of one long row across so that the bushes can intertwine and support each other. Or so the story goes. Plants are adorable.

You may also notice the penciled-in lettuce and beets (take 2) in the summer section. Various thinnings, picking of beets and plant-dying mishaps left some usable space over there, so I plopped them in among the mature plants. I've heard it's good to have an adult influence. The purple radishes are also outside of my more conventional row system. There was some good dirt there, so i tossed them in, partly as an experiement about planting conditions and partly because I was excited about them.

But tomatoes!

2007-08-16T11:48:00.000-07:00

The last post was full of a lot of bad news, but that's not the entire truth of my garden.

The tomatoes, while behind because of when we planted them, are doing quite well. There are many of them, and some are even turning yellow and orange. Our cherry tomatoes, which we grew from seed have really shot up. They're growing up so fast. Getting reproductively mature, body odor, stuff like that.

I just feel bad for the ones who need braces; they get teased.

Slow Going

2007-08-16T11:32:00.000-07:00

So after the early good news of beans, things went downhill a little bit with my success rate. My cucumbers got some Powdery Mildew which I did not recognize in time, so they're suffering. There were a bunch of gherkin-sized little cucumbers hanging out, but you know what they say about not counting your 'cukes until they're in the fridge. Do they say that? Well they should because a bunch of mine died. I enacted a brutal anti-mildew campaign, and the cucumbers are doing better but any serious cucumber harvest maybe a lost cause at this point. Oh well.

Also, I suck at growing carrots. The package said "tolerant of mismanagement." I should have gone for the one that said "tolerant of some idiots" (in fact that is radishes: they suggest fast growing, fool proof radishes for elementary school kids, who we all know are some idiots). My particular brand of carrot mismanagement consisted of not thinning them, and not keeping the dirt loose enough. So basically they are stunted little runts, all crowded together and battling to push through the rock hard soil that my garden is full of. They grow to their environment like snakes and iguanas, I guess. I finally had the heart to pull about two thirds of them out, to give the bigger ones room to grow, but it was tough for me. Seemed a little East German. I also got some good advice from an elderly garden-neighbor, about using my tiny shovel (a spade!) to dig around the root vegetables (carrots and beets for me) to loosen the dirt up and let the water get down to them. i had been timid around them for fear of damaging them, but they really do look better since I've implemented this strategy.

Here's a tiny stunted carrot:

Here's some early progress of my beets:

My beans, who were such stars earlier are probably going to be pulled up this weekend. They're about done. Since we got such a late start, the season was pretty short for them. In their place I will probably put some candy striped beets or something else relatively fast growing. I will also do a better job keeping the soil less rocky and less packed in. I promise. I may even invest in some compost or something to augment my soil, keep working it over the winter and just battle to get this same plot for next spring. Between my own lack of knowledge, the poor soil and the drought we've been having it is not surprising that my plants haven't been running rampant with growth and health. So I'm trying to put the pieces in place for next season. For one thing I think I am going to plant mostly heirlooms suited to my area's conditions. There are lots of good reasons to do that. Powdery mildew resistance is definitely one. That made me real angry.

Fast forward again: Holy shit, beans!

2007-08-06T07:17:00.000-07:00

Weeding and watering and basic care of the little baby plants continued, and many of them got pretty big. I learned the hard way that you do indeed need to thin carrots and beets, as directed, or they remain tiny and carrots will wrap their roots (their carrots, if you will) around each other and get all curly and tangled. It's alarming.

With the notable exception of the mystery row, which is growing almost exclusively weeds, the plants all grew quite well. Little tiny pale green tomatoes, hard as rocks, appeared on the tomato plants which we transplanted, so they had a little head start.

Of the seed-started plants, though, the bush beans were the early performers. They were fast growing and leafy and made tiny little flowers that attracted a fair number of bees. They were only about a foot and a half high, so i wasn't expecting much in the way of beans from them, so I was surprised when one day I was weeding around their bases and saw a three inch long bean pod. Somehow the natal stages of this pod had escaped my notice and here it was, fully formed. Upon closer inspection there were a couple dozen large pods and many smaller ones scattered between the ten or so bean bushes crowded into their little row. I went and did a quick google search to figure out how to tell when beans are ready and how to pick them. A couple of generations ago this information would be as basic as tying your shoes.

So apparently all bean varieties have an immature but edible phase before the beans within the pod fully differentiate, and this is what string beans are. While I left many of the pods to fully mature, I picked some of the others, and we ate these early string beans with dinner.

Kick ass. My first legitimate vegetable yield.

Fast Forward: Seedlings!

2007-08-02T07:47:00.000-07:00

After several days of diligent, tired, pre-commute watering, the rows of dirt in our plot turned into rows of dirt with minuscule plants poking out at irregular intervals. After a couple of weeks, these were recognizable as considerable different from one another. The carrots had fluffy, though tiny, sprigs of green all along the length of a few central stems, the beans were wiry stalks with a single flat leaf at the top and the beets were oval shaped leaves, green and purply. Even our mostly buried tomato plants were beginning to look healthy.

As I had been advised, I put the organic fertilizer along the rows, a little distance from the plants (apparently this is called side-dressing). All of this was fascinating and great, but i definitely had the thought, "Man, plants grow SLOWLY."

This, however is not entirely true. The only plants that grow slowly are the ones that you WANT to grow, and that you carefully tend and fret over, and side-dress with organic matter. The other ones, the weeds, grow alarmingly fast. I once watched one grow a million feet tall in half an hour and climbed it and met a giant. But the giant tried to eat me, so I cut it down. True story; Wally Shawn is in a movie about it.

So once the plants matured a little, I could tell what they were from the pictures on the seed packets and I have drawn up a plan that shows the rough layout of my garden. Here it is.

Notice the row with a question mark. I may have planted the peppers there and it just didn't work out for them. Maybe I didn't plant the peppers at all. Who knows? In any case, we have no peppers and a mystery blank row. Well done, Liz, you suck.

Half the plot here is marked as weeds and dirt. That was true until recently. Now it is just dirt, because BFH and i weeded it. It was just as hellish as the first half. I have plans in the works for planting it with cool season vegetables but that's a story for another post.

Planting!

2007-08-02T07:17:00.000-07:00

That afternoon after Alli got off from work, we rode our bicycles over to the garden center that smoking neighbor had given me directions to. The lone guy in the store was very helpful and they had a mind boggling selection of seeds, ugly decorative terracotta pots and about 8,000 varieties of dirt in bags.

We ended up leaving with two varieties of carrot seeds, (they said "tolerant of mismanagement" on the packet, so I doubled up) beet seeds, pepper seeds, cucumber seeds, beans (should I call them bean seeds? They just looked like beans), cherry tomato seeds and three little straggling tomato plants. We also picked up a small bag of an organic mix to mix into the soil in small amounts and place a couple of inches away from the seedlings in about two weeks. We had a pretty amusing time trying to get out of there without the man helping us to our "car." He gave off the impression that he would not like it if we stuffed his babies into a backpack and rode home on our bikes. But that's exactly what we did, albeit sneakily.

We got home and I went back out to the garden and planted the tomato plants as I had been directed, in mounds, burying the bottom six inches, of stalk and a couple of leaves which Garden Man swore up and down would sprout roots. They each had a piddling three inches sticking above the dirt. I then planted the seeds in haphazard rows mostly ignoring the seed spacing directions on the package. One of the other pieces of advice that I ignored was writing down where I planted everything, thinking "this is not exactly a massive expanse of plants, and I'm definitely not an idiot," but I was wrong on the second point. There were some areas of great confusion until the plants were well and sprouted and recognizable.

In the weeding process, we discovered mint running rampant among the less interesting weeds, and we decided to leave a patch of it near one border, and just keep an eye on it so it didn't strangle the little seedling babies. After I was done planting I took some of the mint, and we went to a friend's house and made some mojitos and I felt rather smug.

That mint is from our garden. I had nothing to do with it. But enjoy anyway.

More Weeding.

2007-08-02T06:51:00.000-07:00

The Following morning, a Sunday, I woke up with a really shitty headache, which had a lot to do with Saturday night and made me want to wear my sunglasses indoors. But my sense of urgency to get the garden planted was still strong, so i headed back out there and even got BFH to accompany me for a while. Between the two of us we got the entire plot considerably thinned and about half of it ready to plant.

We also met another, much friendlier garden neighbor. A young woman who was dressed for some serious gardening got out of her car by the garden, lit up a cigarette and said something to the effect of

"So, you guys are going to plant some stuff?"
"Yeah, we plan to. Have any suggestions about what to grow since we got such a late start?"
"Hmm, welllllll... There's a little garden center just down Georgia Avenue, you should ask them. Their plants all look a little scrawny, but I bought some squash there last year and as soon as I got them off of Georgia, they were pretty happy."
"Well, thank you that's good to know."

After a little more conversation and getting directions to the garden center, she excused herself and walked over to her own plot where she hooked the hose into a rotating sprinkler which she had brought with her, lit another cigarette, sat down and started making phone calls. After about twenty minutes of this she said goodbye to us and got back into her car. And drove about 200 feet to her building.

Weeding.

2007-08-01T12:15:00.000-07:00

Best-Friend-Hannah (hereafter "BFH") and I set out to weed and plant our plot on the Saturday morning after it was given to us. I owned, more out of cheapness than ignorance, two spades and a tiny, functionally useless rake-like thing which I bought the day before at CVS. This day was when we had our first encounters with our garden plot neighbors. Only one of the plots next to us was planted, but it had enough lush, well tended vegetation for an acre. Most of it was even recognizable by its species, as opposed to the anonymous little green wisps of adjacent plots.

This person could be a very good resource, I hoped. Unfortunately, the gift of gardening seemed to come at the price, for her, of an inability to communicate with other humans. As BFH and I sweated in the ever increasing heat bent double and pulling rangy weeds she refused to respond to greetings or even make eye contact except to stare pointedly at me when my foot came too near one of the bricks she had installed as a walkway (read: barrier) between our two plots. In fact, the weedy overgrown mess on the other side of us was much more useful, as it served as a good place to unceremoniously hurl the weeds we pulled out. Just as plentiful as the weeds were rocks ranging from thumb to fist-sized. We considered hurling those into the vacant plot as well, but ours was so rocky that we thought maybe it had been the target of everyone who weeded before us. As BFH put it, "last one to start weeding's a rotten egg."

So instead we used them to build a rock-line at the edge of our plot so we didn't weed a single inch more than necessary. The plot is about six feet across and twenty feet long. It was much larger than I had expected. There were still considerable leftover rocks, so we built some divisions within the garden, too. It actually turned out quite attractive, but the fact remained that after a full 4 hours of work two thirds were not cleared and the other third was growing rocks.

Evidence

2007-08-01T11:11:00.000-07:00

In the back of my mind as I planned the planting of the garden plot, I was remembering some good evidence that my roommates and I do not have the greenest of thumbs. After it was discovered that a garden plot was not available, my inexplicable urge to tend growing plant-things got to me and I bought a very small container herb garden. Well, soon before our outdoor garden adventure began, all those little guys were extremely dead. And also covered in aphids. At one point, as they were being thrown away by my roommate, Alli (Best-Friend-Hannah theorizes that this is when her scorn for the whole gardening endeavor began) I used the top of the stem of the Thai pepper plant to fling the aphids at her face. She was 0% amused.

Was it too little sun? Too much water? Did someone pour rum in there? I still don't know. R.I.P. little herb garden buddies.

The Plan

2007-08-01T10:56:00.000-07:00

I got the phonecall alerting me of my brand new stewardship of a community garden plot while at work. I started google searching immediately. I found all sorts of isolated tidbits of advice and all sorts of "beginner how-to" type guides most of whiched assumed I had a roto-tiller. Or is that only a verb? "Roto-till the dirt before planting." OK, sure, while I'm at it I'll just buy 9,000 earth worms and let them loose. This was also a suggestion, and while I liked it much better because I know what that means, I did not have 9,000 earth worms lying around.

So I contented myself with looking up which plants could still succesfully be planted in late June, since the plot came open well after most people plant their gardens. I picked them from an ideal list, and drew out a plan arranging them so that the taller ones were in rows along the North edge (I read this somewhere). Well, of course the shape and orientation of the plot, once I saw it, and the seeds that were actually available changed my plan considerably.

Basically I ended up throwing out all of the suggestions that I carefully googled and tagged in my favorites folder. In the end I just roughly copied the plots of my community garden neighbors. But that comes later.

Mid June. False Alarm! Garden Not Cancelled.

2007-08-01T10:51:00.000-07:00

After the weeds were given over a month to establish extremely intricate root systems, attract a bunch of bees and develop very bad tempers, the Community Garden Powers That Be had my building manager call me and tell me there was a plot available.

"Hello?"
"Hi, is this Liz.?"
"Yes."
"Oh. Ok, well tell her that she should call me, because she has gotten off the waiting list for a garden plot."
"Oh, I have, that's awesome!"
"Ten."
"What?"
"You asked which plot. It's plot ten."
"Ummm... thank you."
"Make sure to tell her. Have a nice day."
"I'm Liz!"
Click.

My building manager is a little hard of hearing. In her defense, she also called me on my cell phone which at that time was 250 million years old, give or take. I borrowed it from a trilobite, right before they went extinct.

Early May 2007. False alarm! No Garden.

2007-08-01T10:49:00.000-07:00

The bare patch of dirt overlooked by my bathroom window went pretty fast. Although I applied as quickly as I possibly could, all the plots were spoken for. In a matter of days, most of the dirt was in neat cultivated rows. A few days after that there were teeny tiny little patches of green on those rows and mounds. The dirt that was not cultivated appeared to be doing even better. Apparently some gardeners were neglecting their parcels, and these were each an uninterrupted blanket of green at an ever increasing height. But no plot for me.

An Adventure Begins ...

2007-08-01T10:39:00.000-07:00

I spent the entirety of my four years in college in apartments or dorms, above the mostly paved expanse of downtown Washington, DC. Before that I grew up in Phoenix, AZ where you can fry an egg on the pavement in the summer and most plants either have to be heavily irrigated or have evolved tough skin and painful spines.

So naturally, I thought I was totally qualified to start a vegetable garden, with the help of my slightly more experienced best friend (her mom gardens) and my extremely citified roommates.

I still live in an apartment, but this one has some grounds, instead of just jutting abruptly out of the ground within a few hundred meters of sidewalk. We're just blocks outside of the DC city limits, but the change form downtown is dizzying. Within the grounds of the complex there are a couple of community garden plots. The place is commendably family oriented and you can often see parents, kids, twenty-somethings, all sorts of people out in the community gardens watering and weeding their little slice of cultivable ground. Some of them are on cell phones the entire time, but it's still a nice sight.

When my roommates and I arrived in late April, there were already notices in the community bulletin about applying for garden plots, and in a fit of ... something ... I applied. So, I guess this is a garden journal. But it is not a good place to look if you're after tips, smug stories of success, pictures of smiling middle aged people and their children eating heaping plates of fresh grown vegetables.

I'm 22; I work, I ride my bike a lot, I drink, I really want a Nintendo Wii and I pretty much act like a college student. I'm bumbling through this, and I don't know anything. This could be funny.