A Too Wet Garden

At the Plant a Row for the Hungry garden (PAR) this morning, we had planned to plant the sweet potatoes. The ground was pretty wet, though, like it had been last week, so we decided, after forking up the soil a bit to try to get some air into it, that we would wait yet another week (the slips have been ready to plant for three weeks now).

We looked around at other parts of the garden, and some are doing really well. The summer squashes look good, some of beans (both pole and bush) look good, too, but other beans still haven't come up, and there are holes in the lines of okra where seeds haven't seemed to germinate. The melons haven't all come up, either, and it's been long enough that it is a safe bet they aren't going to.

Even worse, the tomatoes looked miserable. They had looked almost as bad last week, but this week more are dead. We decided to dig one up to try to figure out what was wrong. We started by lifting off one tomato cage and pulling the leaf mulch back from the plant, and this is what we saw:





It turns out that most of the tomato plants were drowning. Luckily, one of our gardeners had her camera handy, and she took pictures so we could show the gardeners who hadn't been able to come to the garden (thanks Gloria!).

The PAR garden has a new irrigation system, installed on Earth Day (for free!), but it apparently is doing too good of a job. Since it is a new system, even though it is miles better than what we relied on before, it is going to take a while to get the watering schedule just right. Before we left, we readjusted it to water less often. If the garden is still wet next week, we will tweak it again.

After discovering that the tomatoes were trying to grow in a marsh, we went back and looked at all the blank spaces in the rows of plantings, where seedlings had not emerged, and it looks as though all the blank spaces are in little depressions in the garden that were wetter than surrounding areas. The seeds probably rotted in the ground.

In an effort to save the remaining tomato plants, we dug them up and I brought them home to plant in a wooden flat filled with Miracle Gro potting soil. Hopefully, they will all recover so we can replant them in a week or two.

Undercooked Lasagna

Joe is out of town with the camera, so there won’t be any pictures until he gets back. He’s taken a group of students to Belize for a Maymester course, so it seems likely that he might need the camera more than I do.

I have almost finished planting the summer vegetables. Part of the delay is just the life-in-general stuff that happens to everyone, but part of the delay is that the layered leaves and manure in the new garden beds that were created “lasagna style” aren’t as decomposed as I had hoped they would be by now.

However, I have planted in them anyway. Four tomato plants went in a few weeks ago, partly as a test and partly because they had outgrown their pots. I have to say that they looked pretty bad for a while, all pale and scrawny, but just in the last week they have greened up and are starting to grow. This seems like a positive development, so this weekend I set out more little plants in those two beds.

There were another dozen or so pepper plants in little pots that are now planted in the decaying leaves; four Sugar Nut melons are there, as are three Straight Nine cucumbers, three Malabar spinach, some flowers (China asters, nasturtiums, an extra sweet basil), and some bean seeds (Alabama black half runners).

After looking at the remaining space with the eye of someone who likes to have a LOT of plants in the garden, I have started some Dakota black popcorn, Cajun jewel okra, and Schoon’s Hardshell melons in little pots to go in, too. It will all fit. Really.

Elsewhere in the garden, I’ve cut the rest of the spring lettuce and crammed it into the fridge before it can bolt and turn bitter. The boy and I are eating salad twice a day, every day, until it is gone (or until Joe gets home to help eat it, whichever comes first). The peas are getting plump, so tonight’s salad had some barely cooked, freshly picked peas on it. I have a little asparagus in the fridge for one of tomorrow’s salads, but I will have to stop cutting the asparagus soon. Maybe now. In another week, there should be little beets.

One of the Chinese tomato plants has tiny green tomatoes on it. Most of the other tomato plants are flowering. One plant, the Olivette Jeaune, looked decidedly puny until just a few days ago. It is only slightly larger than when it was planted, but it has greened back up and looks healthier. It had been a sad shade of yellow. I hadn’t thought before that it was even possible for the color yellow to look sad, but there it was.

The zucchini are beginning to flower, but the first flowers to open have been female, which seems odd to me. Usually, the first flowers are male. These first flowers won’t make mature zucchinis for the kitchen because they haven’t been pollinated, but I am sure that I can figure out some way to add them to a salad.