The materials for our pole bean teepee were donated. We have been building one of these each year for awhile now; it's a fun way to grow the beans. The teepee was also a lot of fun to put together for the five or six gardeners who worked on it.
Showing posts with label Plant a Row for the Hungry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Plant a Row for the Hungry. Show all posts
Sunday, June 10, 2012
Plant a Row for the Hungry Finally Gets a Start!
The Plant-a-Row-for-the-Hungry project for which I am a volunteer has had a whole series of setbacks this spring, but we finally have plants and seeds in the ground. We are all so very happy to have the garden underway! I am guessing that the food pantry that we deliver to will be happy, too, when we are able to start bringing in some food.
We are still waiting for the deer fence, which is an essential element of large gardens around here. The fence materials are supposed to be delivered this week, and the construction completed late next week. Until then, all the beds are under sheets of lightweight row-cover. This is not the ideal material for use in the hot summertime; I think some plants already have had a little trouble with the "greenhouse effect," but we have had a large roll of this stuff in our supplies for years. Using it meant that we didn't have to go out and buy something else.
The materials for our pole bean teepee were donated. We have been building one of these each year for awhile now; it's a fun way to grow the beans. The teepee was also a lot of fun to put together for the five or six gardeners who worked on it.
One of the great features of our new location is the space filled with community garden beds right next to it. The community garden doesn't show up in either of these photos, but many of the gardeners have made a good start on getting their 5-by-12-foot beds planted. It is going to be a lot of fun to work right next to so many other veggie gardeners.
The materials for our pole bean teepee were donated. We have been building one of these each year for awhile now; it's a fun way to grow the beans. The teepee was also a lot of fun to put together for the five or six gardeners who worked on it.
Thursday, March 8, 2012
Busy Times
Even though it isn't quite spring, there has been plenty of garden-related activity in my life recently. Last Saturday, my friend Susan and I gave an "intro to veggie gardening" talk at Smith Gilbert Garden, and the Wednesday before that, my Plant-a-Row-for-the-Hungry (PAR) garden group had a planning meeting. Here at home, a tray of plant babies is looking happily green under some fluorescent lights; out in the garden the peas are poking up through the soil, and the little pale green cotyledons of some lettuces and the strappy, darker cotyledons of the spinach also are visible.
Saturday's talk seemed to go well. A wonderfully large group of gardeners, both new and experienced, showed up, and they had great questions and comments. I know I say this a lot, but it is soooo great to be in a room full of people who are interested in growing food!
One gardener (thank you Cathy!) shared her method of keeping track of varieties that do well in her yard: In the garden, she marks the varieties with the little plastic labels that come with them at the store, and if the variety does well, she stores the label in a plastic bin that she can refer to the next spring. It turns out that she hasn't ever been able to manage the pencil and paper kind of record keeping for her garden, and this has worked for her. She also stores photos of the garden, labeled with the date on the back, in the same bin as a way of keeping track of what was planted where, to help in planning the crop rotation for following years. For other gardeners with the same pencil-and-paper problem, and whose gardens are small, this could be a useful idea.
At the PAR meeting, we talked some about design and management of our new space. Our old space at Smith Gilbert Garden had been shaped like a short, squat ice-cream cone, with a big circular dome on two straight sides that met at right angles. We let that dome/circle design guide the layout of the crops - dividing the space into wedges like a pie. Sounds weird, possibly, but the garden was beautiful. However, we occasionally ended up with some very short rows that seemed a little inefficient. Looking at the garden, the trade-off was totally worthwhile, but the new garden at the Fountain Gate Counseling Center is a different shape.
Our new space is a giant rectangle, so we are going to return to the wide rows (link downloads a 2.8 mb pdf) that were used when the PAR garden was at its first space, on county property in Marietta. The wide rows have their own limitations and benefits, but they are a good choice for the size and shape of the available space. We also are going to use companion planting (eg: marigolds with the tomatoes) and cover crops more consistently. I'm looking forward to getting started!
I'm also working on some short talks/demonstrations to give at the new community gardens that are sprouting up in Cobb County. I have one for working with transplants (handling the plant babies, depth of planting, spacing, use of a "starter" fertilizer solution) and one about succession planting for the year-round raised-bed garden, but I want to develop a whole series. If anyone has suggestions for useful topics, let me know?
Today, it is supposed to be 70 degrees and mostly sunny here in Kennesaw. I expect to do some work in the yard. Hope everyone else has beautiful weather to enjoy!
Saturday's talk seemed to go well. A wonderfully large group of gardeners, both new and experienced, showed up, and they had great questions and comments. I know I say this a lot, but it is soooo great to be in a room full of people who are interested in growing food!
One gardener (thank you Cathy!) shared her method of keeping track of varieties that do well in her yard: In the garden, she marks the varieties with the little plastic labels that come with them at the store, and if the variety does well, she stores the label in a plastic bin that she can refer to the next spring. It turns out that she hasn't ever been able to manage the pencil and paper kind of record keeping for her garden, and this has worked for her. She also stores photos of the garden, labeled with the date on the back, in the same bin as a way of keeping track of what was planted where, to help in planning the crop rotation for following years. For other gardeners with the same pencil-and-paper problem, and whose gardens are small, this could be a useful idea.
At the PAR meeting, we talked some about design and management of our new space. Our old space at Smith Gilbert Garden had been shaped like a short, squat ice-cream cone, with a big circular dome on two straight sides that met at right angles. We let that dome/circle design guide the layout of the crops - dividing the space into wedges like a pie. Sounds weird, possibly, but the garden was beautiful. However, we occasionally ended up with some very short rows that seemed a little inefficient. Looking at the garden, the trade-off was totally worthwhile, but the new garden at the Fountain Gate Counseling Center is a different shape.
Our new space is a giant rectangle, so we are going to return to the wide rows (link downloads a 2.8 mb pdf) that were used when the PAR garden was at its first space, on county property in Marietta. The wide rows have their own limitations and benefits, but they are a good choice for the size and shape of the available space. We also are going to use companion planting (eg: marigolds with the tomatoes) and cover crops more consistently. I'm looking forward to getting started!
I'm also working on some short talks/demonstrations to give at the new community gardens that are sprouting up in Cobb County. I have one for working with transplants (handling the plant babies, depth of planting, spacing, use of a "starter" fertilizer solution) and one about succession planting for the year-round raised-bed garden, but I want to develop a whole series. If anyone has suggestions for useful topics, let me know?
Today, it is supposed to be 70 degrees and mostly sunny here in Kennesaw. I expect to do some work in the yard. Hope everyone else has beautiful weather to enjoy!
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
Sweet Potatoes at PAR
We cleared out the last of the crops from the Plant-a-Row-for-the-Hungry garden today. There were still winter squash and sweet potatoes. Pulling up the squash vines was a big job, but we found more than 40 pounds of good squash in the vines, and we have been getting 20 or so pounds of squash each week for a while now. That was a successful crop!
The big job of the day, though, was digging up the sweet potatoes. (Alert: lots of photos ahead.)
Even though we already had done a lot of work cleaning up the squash vines, we were pretty excited about the sweet potatoes. Here we are, just getting started:
How clean we all still were! We found potatoes of all shapes and sizes, and every single one was a joy to find.
There were quite a few "lunkers" under those vines.
And this plant came up like a string of sausages, which made us all chuckle.
Part of the fun is that digging sweet potatoes requires partners. The person digging benefits from having a "spotter" to help make sure that no sweet goes unharvested.
We did all slow down a bit, after a while. The digging was hard work! It was great that so many gardeners showed up to help.
After watching several of us make trips to the compost pile with armloads of vines, Gloria very wisely went to get a wheelbarrow from the shed. At first, moving the vines to the (Very Large) compost pile hadn't seemed like all that big of a job, but the vines were heavy. The wheelbarrow helped.
We completed the first pass through the area where the sweet potatoes had been planted, pulling vines and digging, and then we re-dug the entire bed to locate strays. We found some, but not too many. It was a good idea to have done the extra work though. Look how many sweets we found after we were finally done!:
After the digging, we sat down to sort. The good sweets were destined for the Center for Family Resources in Marietta, but we always have a pretty big pile of damaged sweets. The garden has a wireworm problem that we have been treating with beneficial (predatory!) nematodes for a couple of years now, and that has been making a difference. We saw the least wireworm damage this year of any year so far.
In addition to the wireworm damage, there are always some sweets that are accidentally skewered by spading forks, and there is always some damage from small mammals. In the end, though, we had more than 260 pounds of good sweets to take to Marietta. They filled the back of our fearless leader's car.
The squash had to go in the back seat, along with her garden tools. It is amazing that any gardener's car is ever clean, but this car was spotless before the spading forks went in.
Besides the squash and sweet potatoes, the garden still had flowers in it, and those had to be cleared out, too. Cathy took a minute to make bouquets from the zinnias and the sprays of purple seeds from the Jewels of Opar, so most of us had flowers to bring home.
The next-to-last job for the morning was to spread kelp meal and some more sulfur (the pH is still a little high...) over the entire garden. The very last job was to finish marking the sprinkler heads for the new irrigation system. A couple of gardeners had been busy locating those and driving stakes next to them so they would be easy to spot, but there there were a few left to mark.
Tomorrow, the garden will be tilled, and next week, we will broadcast seeds for our cover crop. Then, sometime in the next few weeks, we will celebrate!
The big job of the day, though, was digging up the sweet potatoes. (Alert: lots of photos ahead.)
Even though we already had done a lot of work cleaning up the squash vines, we were pretty excited about the sweet potatoes. Here we are, just getting started:
How clean we all still were! We found potatoes of all shapes and sizes, and every single one was a joy to find.
There were quite a few "lunkers" under those vines.
And this plant came up like a string of sausages, which made us all chuckle.
Part of the fun is that digging sweet potatoes requires partners. The person digging benefits from having a "spotter" to help make sure that no sweet goes unharvested.
We did all slow down a bit, after a while. The digging was hard work! It was great that so many gardeners showed up to help.
After watching several of us make trips to the compost pile with armloads of vines, Gloria very wisely went to get a wheelbarrow from the shed. At first, moving the vines to the (Very Large) compost pile hadn't seemed like all that big of a job, but the vines were heavy. The wheelbarrow helped.
We completed the first pass through the area where the sweet potatoes had been planted, pulling vines and digging, and then we re-dug the entire bed to locate strays. We found some, but not too many. It was a good idea to have done the extra work though. Look how many sweets we found after we were finally done!:
After the digging, we sat down to sort. The good sweets were destined for the Center for Family Resources in Marietta, but we always have a pretty big pile of damaged sweets. The garden has a wireworm problem that we have been treating with beneficial (predatory!) nematodes for a couple of years now, and that has been making a difference. We saw the least wireworm damage this year of any year so far.
In addition to the wireworm damage, there are always some sweets that are accidentally skewered by spading forks, and there is always some damage from small mammals. In the end, though, we had more than 260 pounds of good sweets to take to Marietta. They filled the back of our fearless leader's car.
The squash had to go in the back seat, along with her garden tools. It is amazing that any gardener's car is ever clean, but this car was spotless before the spading forks went in.
Besides the squash and sweet potatoes, the garden still had flowers in it, and those had to be cleared out, too. Cathy took a minute to make bouquets from the zinnias and the sprays of purple seeds from the Jewels of Opar, so most of us had flowers to bring home.
The next-to-last job for the morning was to spread kelp meal and some more sulfur (the pH is still a little high...) over the entire garden. The very last job was to finish marking the sprinkler heads for the new irrigation system. A couple of gardeners had been busy locating those and driving stakes next to them so they would be easy to spot, but there there were a few left to mark.
Tomorrow, the garden will be tilled, and next week, we will broadcast seeds for our cover crop. Then, sometime in the next few weeks, we will celebrate!
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
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.
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.
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