Planning for the Community Gardening Year

Garden planning, for all kinds of gardens, needs to take into account a long list of factors for best success. The sun/shade conditions available, common disease and pest issues in the area, and the local climate zone are examples of what we gardeners might want to consider.

Community Garden in Mableton, GA PHOTO/Amygwh

The garden's multiple purposes are also important. Is it going to provide cut flowers to bring inside? Is it providing herbs or vegetables? Is it all about supporting pollinators? Is it a "beauty spot" in a green swath of lawn?

Another consideration is whether we are going to save seeds produced in this year's garden to use in growing plants for next year's garden. Planning for seed saving will help a gardener choose good varieties for that purpose, and also help the gardener know how many plants to grow.

Seed Savers Exchange keeps information about seed saving online, to help gardeners get started. I also, though, will be giving a presentation about Planning for Seed Saving next week, on Wednesday, January 28 25, at the first 2017 meeting of Cobb County's Community Gardens group.

The group is a kind of "advisory committee," that meets four times each year. Its members are community garden leaders, members, and supporters who work together to keep Cobb County's community gardens vibrant, productive, and fun.

At the meetings, we (I am a member; can you tell?) share notes about what is going well in our gardens and gardening communities, and we help each other with problems that may have arisen. It is a great group!

The meeting will begin at 6:30 p.m., at the Cobb Water System Training Lab classroom, at 662 South Cobb Drive, Marietta. You don't have to be a member to come to the presentation, and it is always educational to hear what is going on in other people's gardens.

Planning for More Good Food

Twenty pound "Luscious Golden" melon from our front yard.

My not updating the blog for 3 weeks doesn't mean the garden isn't still a productive and wonderful place. It is, actually, providing surprising quantities of good food, considering that it also has been a little neglected.

We are running short-staffed at work, during our busiest time of year, and work-stuff has spilled over into my non-work time. However, the bosses have interviews lined up to fill at least one vacant space, so we are hopeful that the whole "short-staffed" thing will be short-lived!

In the meantime, I am thinking more and more about the fall garden. Last weekend, I amended some areas with compost, planted seeds for chicory, beets, parsley, green onions, and one last patch of bush beans, and I started seeds (late!) in a flat for broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, more beets (in case the outside seeds don't make it -- they can be finicky), and bok choy.

Mid-Summer Garden

July 6 tomatoes, Rutgers  PHOTO/Amy W.

Since the beginning of the month, we have enjoyed meals that included zucchini, beans, potatoes, tomatillos, shallots, onions, garlic, tomatoes, salad peppers, and cucumbers from the summer garden.

We have pickled peppers - both Jalapeno and Poblano - and made several batches of fermented cucumber-pickles. Beans have been blanched for the freezer, and we have been giving away our extra zucchini.

We also have begun thinking about where to plant the cool season vegetables that will provide fresh food in the coming fall and winter. It seems so soon. The tomato harvest has barely begun! If there isn't a plan, though, it usually turns out that no room is available when it is time to plant the seeds for carrots, beets, lettuces, collard greens, and other cool-season crops.

Looking Back, Looking Ahead

Really, this ought to be a thoughtful, beautifully written note to the world; it's the winter solstice, which means we have increasing light ahead, and this is (according to blogspot) my 500th post. You'd think I'd have planned better and be ready with something glorious.

Instead, I can only say that I still really love to work in my garden, to harvest what it offers, to learn from it, and to share what I've learned. I've lived here now for almost 25 years, and I started planting almost right away. There were some pretty huge errors that I probably should be embarrassed about, but at the time(s) I didn't know any better.

I wish I could say that each year my garden gets better and more productive, but it still has ups and downs. Every year, though, it engages me just as much.

In these days of least light, my plans for the new year are a bit murky. Seed catalogs are piling up by my chair, but I haven't had a chance to spend much time with them. To be honest, new varieties don't call to me the way they used to. I have developed a list of favorite varieties that I look forward to each year. I will probably add a couple of new things again, but I don't change the garden up as much as in the early days of my gardening here.  It could be that my age is showing, but if finding joy in favorite vegetables is a sign of old age, well, count me in!

One definite plan for this coming year is to release one bed back to the lawn. As it is now, getting around to all the beds in the evenings after work can be a challenge. I'll still have seven veggie beds to tend, plus berries, herbs, and flowers, so I certainly won't be bored and twiddling my thumbs in an endless expanse of free time. I am hoping, though, that cutting back by one bed will allow me to enjoy the others even more. Of course, I might just get annoyed that I don't have space for everything I want to grow.

I hope that the increasing light in the days to come brings abundance, peace, and joy to all my gardening friends!

Gardening Books for Georgia - Part 1

Back in 1990, when my little family first moved to Georgia, I already knew a bit about gardening. However, in spite of having gardened successfully elsewhere (and having a degree in Botany), I had trouble growing food here. Part of the problem -- very tall trees surrounding and shading the backyard -- was resolved through moving the veggies to the sunny front yard. I needed, though, to learn more about the rhythms of planting and harvesting for this area.

To help with that, we bought a copy of the go-to guide of the time, Don Hastings' book "Gardening in the South: Vegetables and Fruits." Hastings' book contains sections for each kind of vegetable grown in the area, with timing and fertilizing information, which is what I needed. It also contains what I now consider to be "the usual advice" about choosing the garden site, planting, amending the soil, and generally tending to the garden.

Most of that basic information can be found in other gardening books, but some parts of the book still stand out as being particularly memorable. One great narrative thread is about the author's working with farmers in Egypt and the Philippines. Details relating to these adventures pop up throughout much of the book. Another is about his family's variety of corn.

The Hastings family had developed a variety of sweet corn that performed well in the Southeast. In the part of the book about growing corn, Hastings tells that his neighbors were still growing Hastings sweet corn long after his family had switched to Silver Queen, which they decided was a better variety for their purposes. There's probably a little lesson in the tale, but I still haven't figured out what that might be.

Another part of the book that I especially remember is about the author's return to Georgia after a couple of years away. His prize flower bed, which had always had the very best soil of all his planting beds, had typically been amended with organic matter a couple of times each year. As a result, the soil there was usually wonderfully dark and rich with humus. In just that short time of being left on its own, the bed had reverted to solid red clay. That story provides great incentive for continuing to add organic matter to my gardens each season!

Of course, I am sitting here writing without having the Hastings book in front of me to double check my memory; it's possible that I've gotten some details wrong. This is pretty close, though.

A newer book (2007/2008) for Georgia gardeners is Walter Reeves and Felder Rushing's "Guide to Georgia Vegetable Gardening." This book contains the same basic information as the Hastings book and adds some newer weather and pest details. All the information is solid, researched, and reasonably up-to-date, and it includes names of recommended vegetable varieties that weren't available at the time Hastings wrote his book.

What the Reeves and Rushing book is missing is the thread of personal stories and asides (such as the note in Hastings' parsnip section in which he quite honestly says that he neither likes nor grows them!) that keep a reader interested. In other words, the Reeves and Rushing book is good for reference, whereas Hastings' book is good for both reference and recreation. Also, I've just checked the listings on Amazon, and it turns out that the Reeves & Rushing book is out of print, with used copies listed as selling for $99. The Hastings book is still both readily available and affordable.

Books aren't commonly addressed on this blog, but I decided to write about books for several reasons. One is that it lets me think about gardening while it is still too soon to do much planting (it's a useful distraction!). Another is that other gardeners new to the area might be looking for a resource, like I was those many years ago, that addresses the rhythms of gardening in this area. Another is that a friend has loaned me a new book for the South - Ira Wallace's "Guide to Vegetable Gardening in the Southeast" - and I'd like to have the other basic books in my mind as I read it. A review of that book will be coming soon.

What Gardeners Think About in Winter

Just to start, two more seed catalogs arrived at my house this week: Vermont Bean and Totally Tomatoes. This means that the planning part of the gardening year is here. I will hazard a guess that I am not the only gardener who already has begun thinking forward to the next round of planting.

This means thinking about which varieties to grow for each vegetable, about how much space to give to each crop, about the best-yet-cheapest ways to add organic matter to the soil, about the crop rotation sequence, about planning for seed saving, about seed starting and whether the fluorescent fixture needs a new bulb. Really, there is just no end to the garden thinking that goes on in winter.

There also, here in the South, are vegetables still in the yard to harvest and eat. In my yard, I have carrots, winter radishes, broccoli, and cabbage that are at a good stage for eating, and there are vegetables that didn't make it to maturity before the cold set in for me to watch and keep weeded, so they can return to growing as the soil begins to warm again in March. This all takes some thinking, too.

And if, like me, you have a parallel life as a spouse, a parent and a person who has a full-time job, all that thinking has to fit in the spaces between the rest of it. In my own life, the "spaces between" have shrunk down to just cracks for the moment -- next week, my youngest son graduates from college, and in three weeks my oldest son is getting married (THREE WEEKS!!!)--- but that doesn't seem to stop my brain from turning toward the garden.

Managing the Harvest

There's a post up at one of my frequently-visited news sites, Resilience.Org, about the frustrations of a gardener who can find plenty of information about sustainable (and small/urban) farming, but not all that much to help him in sustainable gardening.

The article by Erik Curran, "Sustainable Farming Mania is Frustrating Me," was originally published at Transition Voice.

He points out that there is a lot of information available right now (for example) about  the usefulness on small farms of including animals in the loop, which, as a suburban gardener, he just can't manage. As for many of the rest of us, keeping chickens and other livestock is not legal where he lives. This isn't the only sustainable-farming method/tool that doesn't apply to his little garden, but it's one he mentions.

A second, huge issue seems to be about handling the super-abundance of tomatoes (and other vegetables) that won't wait until he actually has the time to process them into a storage-able form. As someone who has spent time canning innumerable tomatoes in years past, I can sympathize. When we lived on the Eastern Shore of Virginia, we brought in tomatoes by the 5-gallon-bucketful (Every day! Day after day...). Over time, I've learned to plant fewer tomato plants.

Besides learning to "just say no" to too many tomato plants, part of the answer to managing the harvest at our house has been the use of a dehydrator. Canning take a lot of time and our full attention, but we can slice tomatoes, dice peppers, and cut up other fruits and veggies while watching something on Netflix ("Star Trek" episodes, Ken Burns' "The Dust Bowl," BBC's "Rosemary & Thyme"), let it dry in the dehydrator overnight, then store the dried produce in canning jars until we need it. This time of year, the dehydrator is "on" several nights each week.

Another part of the answer has been to plant some crops that don't need a lot of special processing for storage. This strategy saves a lot of time. Winter squash, onions, potatoes, garlic, shallots, sweet potatoes, and the kinds of corn that are stored dry -- the ones that are for popping, parching, or grinding into flour -- are stored pretty much "as is." No chopping or blanching is required. Cowpeas and other beans need minimal processing; they can be shelled when dry, left for a few days in a thin layer on something like cookie sheets to make sure they are Really Dry, then stored in canning jars like the other dried veggies.

Another part of the answer at our house has been to stagger the planting of big producers like tomatoes so that we are not overwhelmed. The former mountains of ripe tomatoes have become more manageable hills that appear sporadically all the way to the first frost. Right now in my yard, we are in a bit of a lull with regard to tomatoes, but there are two plants of paste-type tomatoes (Wuhib), planted in June, that currently are loaded with green fruits that will begin ripening soon. I've pulled up most of the earliest-planted tomatoes that had slowed in production due to disease issues (the Amish tomatoes are still in the ground and producing, and a late-planted cherry tomato is just now kicking in).

Managing the planting with the end in mind is hardest for new gardeners who haven't yet experienced how much food a tomato plant or a short row of pole beans can produce. Hopefully, the demanding piles of fresh food won't deter new gardeners from trying again in following years, with slight alterations in the mix and timing of the planting.

The Sustainable Garden

In a recent survey, the state’s Master Gardeners indicated that they’d like to know more about sustainable gardening.  One big hurdle will be figuring out exactly what “sustainable gardening” means!

Some gardeners are going to want to see a focus on ecological sustainability – such that the garden’s soil develops a healthy mix of microbial and other life, and as many pests as possible are “handled” by resident populations of beneficial organisms. Such a garden might rely a lot on things like cover crops, local composts, and crop rotation and use very little in the way of purchased inputs, while staying as far away from any non-renewable resources as possible.

However, there will also be a group that prefers to emphasize that a sustainable garden is one that the gardener can most easily create and maintain. The selected inputs are reasonably priced, the planning and physical workload are easily manageable, but the garden still produces plenty of the desired foods. Non-renewable inputs are used prudently, but they definitely have a place in this version.

And then there's probably a group that will not consider a garden to be sustainable if it can't be maintained productively through a serious hard time (think "zombie apocolypse"). This group might (I don't know for sure) use a mix of several strategies, ranging from keeping a stash of stored inorganic nutrients and other inputs for just-in-case, to the setting up of composting toilets as a source of nutrients and organic matter.

All will agree, I think, that a sustainable garden should be sized so that the gardener isn’t overwhelmed by the work of maintaining it. After all, if the garden is over-run with weeds, or if it becomes like a deep dark pit into which money and time disappear, the gardener may opt to “throw in the trowel” and return the space to something like turf. The overly-consumptive garden isn’t at all sustainable.

A garden also can't continue if its soils become depleted of nutrients.The most easily obtained (for urban and suburban gardeners, anyway) and inexpensive inputs tend to be inorganic fertilizers, like a bag of 10-10-10. Over time, though, if not enough is done to improve - or even just maintain - soil health, yields will drop. Our experience at the Plant-A-Row-For-the-Hungry garden shows that fairly well.

In the first several years we mulched with newspaper and fallen leaves (saved over the winter for use in spring and summer), and we followed fertilizer recommendations that came with our soil test results. Over those several years, yields dropped a little very year. Then, we switched to organic sources of nutrients and grew a winter cover crop of Austrian Winter peas. After just one winter, yields went back up to almost as high as those in the very first year of the garden. Talk about a turnaround!

The original plan/method turned out to be not sustainable in terms of the garden's continuing productivity - but the 50 pound bag of kelp meal wasn't cheap, and we had to travel a ways to find the giant bag of cover-crop peas for our 4,000 sq. ft. garden. If we had had a tighter budget, the garden might have suffered for another year.

It's a pretty safe bet that there will be huge areas of disagreement in what a sustainable garden would look like - or whether it's even possible to create one - and in the end, creating a garden that is acceptably sustainable is probably going to require a bit of a balancing act. It probably also will look different for different gardeners.

In the near term, my mostly-organic, home vegetable garden is an OK size. I can manage its ~350 sq. ft. of various beds mostly on my own, and it provides a decent amount of food for my family.

Some years, I am less good about managing it in a way that requires fewer inputs, because the environmentally sustainable way, the way that builds soil organic matter and encourages a diverse and abundant liveliness within the soil, usually requires some planning. It requires cover crops, as much compost as my yard can deliver, and good crop rotations;  it requires planning for pollinators and habitat for beneficial insects; it requires enough forethought to get the nutrients into the soil soon enough that the microbial life can make it available to transplants, and more.

Even in my best, most "on" years, when all the planning happens and when I actually manage to follow through, I'm not sure the whole enterprise is completely sustainable - but the food is good, being out-of-doors is great, and for me, anyway, it's close enough.

Square-footing-it in the South

I have been tinkering with plant spacing in my garden for years. Mostly, over time, I have been widening the spaces between plants.

For bush-type green beans, I usually end up with four to six plants per square foot. Back when I planted beans closer together, so that there were more plants per square foot, the tops were such a tangle that I had a hard time finding the beans! The real problem, though, of tighter spacing is in the increased risk of disease here in the heat and humidity that is typical of the Southeast. When plants are spaced very close together, air-flow is reduced, and any stray fungal spores will find a welcome home. The closer spacing also seems to invite more pests.

A guy was talking to me once about the failure of his tomato plants to yield much fruit. As the conversation continued, it came out that he had used a one-foot spacing, planting four plants in four feet of row, with a row of peppers one foot in front of them. At the time, I had no idea that this was the standard intensive-gardening plant-spacing, and I told him that one square foot was WAY too little space, even though my biggest problem in plant spacing has been with the tomatoes.

In my more rash youth I squished the spacing down to just a couple of feet. In those earlier gardening years, when I put them in the ground any further apart, the plants looked so small and lonely! I've gotten tougher with time and experience, and a three-foot distance between new transplants looks better to me now, but I have been pushing myself to space them out to four feet and beyond. As a result, in general, my yields have gone up.

There are many problems with closer spacing that can lead to reduced harvests. One is, as for the beans, the increased risk of acquiring diseases that are "in the wind" and the risk of spreading the disease to adjoining plants, since at the three foot spacing they are all touching each other, and the air-flow around the plants is reduced. Not too surprisingly, sick plants tend to be less productive than healthy plants.

Another is that their roots will be in each others' spaces, competing for water and nutrients. When I pull up tomato plants at the end of the season, the roots are easily two-to-three feet long. Even when the plants are four feet apart, if the plants are healthy enough to put out a good root system, there is competition in the root zone. This means that the soil needs to be augmented with more nutrients than the usual recommendation (which is geared toward research-recommended spacings of about four feet) to support the "crowded" plants, and the plants are going to need a lot of watering as the temperatures rise to summer highs.

Here in the South, anyone who plants tomatoes on a "one foot center" is going to have to put in some extra work, beyond adding extra fertilizer, to get a good harvest. To start, some serious pruning of the plants needs to be done (all the way back to a single stem), to reduce the amount of leaf-area that will be pulling water up through the plants through transpiration. Otherwise, the gardener may need to water those plants two or more times each day in the hottest part of the summer. Enough leaf-cover will need to be left to protect the fruits from sun-scald, but the pruning will help reduce the risk of disease, too.  A severely pruned canopy will have better air-flow, making it less inviting to fungal and bacterial invaders, since the leaves will dry faster after rains and too-exhuberant watering.

For gardeners using an intensive planting system in a Southern summer, choosing smaller varieties might help make the spacing work better. I have planted several varieties of peppers this year, and one that seems especially suitable for planting on a one foot center is Feherezon. It has stayed in-bounds, while producing some big, tasty peppers. The bell peppers, both Napoleon Sweet and Sweet Chocolate, the Golden Greek, the jalepeno, and the Ancho peppers already have canopies that completely span the 18-24 inches I allowed for them when they were planted. 

In the cooler fall and spring growing seasons, intensive spacings seem to work better. There is less heat stress, and the plants need less water as a result. The cooler weather brings reduced disease-pressure, and there seem to be fewer pests. Any gardener having trouble with intensive spacing as the summer progresses can look forward to fewer problems soon. In just about six weeks, it will be time to start planting the fall garden!

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!

Plant Everywhere

A person must plant everywhere and then concentrate on what grows. --Rav Yosef Yoizel Horowitz, The Alter of Novardok Zt'l

This is the "quote of the day" that came to my email a few days ago. I am pretty sure that it is not meant to be taken literally, but that is exactly where my brain went. It seems like pretty good advice.

There are people who do exactly that, sow food plants everywhere and tend what grows; the practice is generally referred to as guerilla gardening. I haven't taken to planting food in disused public spaces (yet), but here in my own yard, sometimes it seems as if I have planted everywhere. Then Joe points out that he still has little patches of lawn to mow, so I know I haven't quite done it.

The "concentrate on what grows" part is especially useful. So often, I try certain varieties over and over again because someone (usually in another part of the country) has raved about it, and the plants fail again and again. And usually, there are perfectly wonderful varieties that DO grow here just fine, but not always. Some whole categories of plants are never going to do well in the hot, humid Southeastern US (currants). Some will only do well with excessive pampering (celery).

There is a yearning, probably basic to the human psyche, for more/bigger/better or just plain different. Gardeners are not immune, and the people who write plant descriptions for seed catalogs know it. They know we will try almost anything, even though a lot of what we have is really great. The good news is that we can learn from what happens. This relates to the use of the word "concentrate" rather than a word like "tend." It implies thinking. After planting all kinds of plants all over the yard, we can come closer to choosing the best plants for our own yards the next year.

So, here at the close of the summer growing season, I am busy concentrating on what grew.

Plant a Row for the Hungry

One of my volunteer activities is working at a Plant a Row for the Hungry garden (PAR). We take our produce to a local food pantry, where it can be distributed to people who need food. This morning, the PAR gardeners had a planning meeting.

This was the meeting at which we catch up on everybody's news, drink coffee, and try to figure out what we should probably try to do differently in the garden.

One topic of discussion was the condition of our tomato cages. They are old enough that they have lost some of the legs that are supposed to poke into the ground; as a result, when the plants get big, the cages fall over. A couple of people are going to look into alternatives.

Another topic was that a couple of our trellises need repair. We think this won't be hard to take care of, but we are sometimes mistaken about how long/hard such work is going to be. We will see how that goes.

Our Fearless Leader also told us the soil test results for this year. Apparently, the soil is very depleted and needs more 10-10-10 than it has in the past. After two seasons of Big Rains, this should not be a surprise, but it kind of was. We do try to maintain soil fertility, but we didn't manage it as well as usual last year.

Another topic was weeds. Last year, someone tilled the garden for us in early spring, which was very kind (it is not a fun or easy job) but then it rained and rained and rained, so we didn't get the garden planted and mulched in time to stay ahead of the weeds. It felt as though we spent half our time trying to slice/chop/pull out the weeds. This year, we are thinking about not tilling.

We already have spread a thick layer of leaves over about half of the garden and will spread leaves on the other half soon. We are thinking that we might just pull back leaves from the spaces we intend to plant, on the actual planting day, and loosen, fertilize, and plant at that time, working on one section of garden at a time.

The garden is fairly large, maybe 4,500 square feet, and is a traditional row-type garden rather than raised beds, so we are not sure how this will work, but we really do not want to spend another whole summer weeding. We think this strategy of keeping the garden thickly mulched might help.

What we expect to grow:
Marketmore 76 cucumbers
White Mountain half runner beans
Sugar Nut hybrid melon
Clemson Spineless okra
Assorted tomatoes, as disease resistant as possible (these are started from seed by the same gardener who starts our peppers)
Assorted peppers (the gardener who starts these for us chooses, and she does a great job of providing a wide selection of delicious peppers.)
Beauregard sweet potatoes
Kennebec potatoes
Bush beans (I don't remember the variety name)
Seminole pumpkin squash
Trombocino squash
Yellow straight-neck squash
Carrots, variety unknown right now because we haven't grown them before in this garden

Our goal is to produce as much usable food as we can from our space. We don't plant a fall, winter, or spring (other than the potatoes) garden, so everything we grow needs to work in a traditional summer garden. The food we grow has to be familiar enough that the people who receive it can easily use it in meals, and the food pantry can't accept greens, because it doesn't have enough cool storage space to keep leafy veggies in good condition. These factors limit our choices of what to grow, but also help us choose wisely.

Calendar of Events

Having a plan in place in advance of the actual beginning of the growing season helps keep me on track. Just so I’ll have it in a place where I can’t possibly lose it under a pile of papers, I’m posting the plan for the next month or so here.


Just about now (early to mid-Feb.): start seedlings indoors for the brassicas and the earliest spring greens (the spring kale, the coolest-weather lettuces, spinach, any biennial and perennial herbs - parsley is one - that haven’t been started yet); plant the scallions outside (I know, that sounds so wrong, but “as soon as the ground can be worked” is already here!).

20-27 Feb.: on the nicest day in that week, plant the English peas.

As near to March 1st as I can manage: plant potatoes and onions outside; start peppers, eggplants, tomatoes inside; if any seedlings from mid-Feb. are ready to bump up into bigger pots and more nutritious soil, take care of that.

8-15 March: plant seeds outside for carrots, beets; if the greens and/or brassicas are far enough along, transplant some outside after hardening them off; start some of the more heat-tolerant lettuces inside.

20-30 March: transplant outside any little plants that look ready; plant some spinach and radish seeds outside; inside, plant some of the smaller sweet potatoes to get slips started; inside, start from seed assorted flowers, squashes, cukes, any/all remaining greens, ground cherries, tender herbs (e.g., cilantro, basil), the Slobolt lettuce (the most heat tolerant).

If tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants are ready, bump up to bigger pots and more nutritious soil.

Seed Orders for 2010

I've made the major decisions about what to grow this year and am posting the list here. I also have seeds from last year (and the year before that) to plant this year, including Pigott Family Heirloom crowder peas, Dakota Black popcorn, Wuhib paste tomato, SloBolt lettuce, and MANY more.

This is a lot of seeds, and the garden space isn't exactly huge. However, the seeds - and transplants grown from the seeds - won't all go into the garden at the same time; some of these are for spring, some for fall, and some for summer.


From Fedco Seeds, in Maine:

Little Leaf H-19 cucumber
Rocky Ford green flesh melon
Raven zucchini
Cherokee Purple tomato
Scarlet Nantes carrot
French Breakfast radish
Evergreen Hardy White scallions
Jimmy Nardello pepper
Black Czech pepper
Rutgers tomato
Golden Detroit beet

Total $14.00 (no S/H charges since I ordered with a friend; together, we got above the no S/H minimum)

From The Cook’s Garden, in Pennsylvania, but owned by the CEO of Burpee:

Sugar Nut hybrid melon (2 packets)
Costoluto Genovese tomato
Cilantro

Total $13.35 (plus $5.95 S/H)

From Sandhill Preservation Center, in Iowa:

Blue Marbut pole beans
Ukranian Beauty eggplant
Red Russian kale
Vegetable mallow
Aunt Molly’s ground cherry
Pollock Rocky Ford melon (orange flesh variety)
Detroit Dark Red beet
Marvel of Four Seasons lettuce
Winter radishes mix
Straight Nine cucumber
Yellow Out Red In tomato
Sweet Genovese basil

Total 20.25 (no S/H)

From Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, in Virginia:

Oxheart carrots
Hanover Salad kale
Forest Green parsley
Capitan lettuce
Cajun Jewel okra
Napolean Sweet pepper
Ice Bred White turnip

Total $17.24 (plus 3.50 S/H)

The grand total cost for seeds (so far) is $64.84. With S/H charges included, it's $74.29. When onion sets become available, I will be buying a bundle of those. Last year, one bundle cost $1.50, and I am expecting this year's bundle to be a similar price.

If I were more strapped for cash, I would have ordered from just Fedco and/or Sandhill preservation. They have more varieties for lower prices than other sources I've seen, and they have no S/H charge on orders above a minimum ($30 for Fedco, $10 for Sandhill Preservation). If my seed-ordering friend and I could find a few more people to order with us, we could get a "volume discount" from Fedco (10% off orders above $100).

Some Garden Economics

Today I made rosemary focaccia using the recipe from the blog Stephen Cooks. I heard about the recipe first, though, through Farmgirl Fare.

The rosemary I used was from my yard, and it’s a good thing that my plant is large, because the recipe calls for 4 tablespoons of chopped rosemary. Until I saw the growing pile of stems on the counter, I didn’t realize how many little leaves it was going to take to get to 4 tablespoons of chopped herb. However, chopping the leaves was more fun than I expected.

Since rosemary from the grocery store costs $1.99/oz, for the kind that isn’t grown following organic farming practices, this is one of those times when growing my own saves money in addition to tasting great.

The Cheap Vegetable Gardener reported in his blog last winter about some research he did into the economic value of garden crops, and his study showed that herbs and salad greens in general give a good dollar return on the space they take up.

To calculate economic values, he used someone else’s list of production values per square foot for the different crops and then went to his grocery store (Safeway) to find prices for the organically grown versions of the crops to use in calculating monetary production per square foot of garden space.

Of course, rosemary isn’t on the list of garden crops that were evaluated, probably because it is a perennial shrub that isn’t usually included in food gardens, but plenty of other herbs are on his list.

While his method of determining values may not be the way Arizona Extension conducted their research into the economic value of garden crops, and the list likely isn’t perfect for every gardener since the data for production per square foot are from Seattle (P-Patch garden) and prices per unit of veggie/herb vary somewhat across the country, The Cheap Vegetable Gardener’s list is fairly extensive and provides information that can be used by ordinary gardeners in making decisions about what to grow when dollar value of the food produced is an important factor in choosing what to grow.

The Cheap Vegetable Gardener’s list (note that prices in some cases are for ounces rather than pounds):

“Vegetable USD Value/SF
Cilantro $ 21.20
Arugula-Roquette $ 20.92
Green Salad Mix $ 17.55
Chives $ 16.40
Dill $ 16.40
Lettuce $ 16.20
Tomato, Cherry, small & medium $ 15.57
Turnip $ 9.90
Tomato, large $ 9.50
Squash, Winter $ 8.40
Tomatillo $ 8.00
Cucumber $ 7.74
Basil $ 6.63
Radish, Red $ 6.22
Pumpkin $ 6.20
Chard, Swiss $ 6.14
Celery $ 6.00
Squash, Summer $ 5.96
Choi $ 5.70
Peas, Snow $ 4.50
Pepper, Jalapeño $ 4.50
Squash, Summer, Zucchini $ 4.17
Onion, Bunching $ 4.14
Pepper, Bell $ 3.60
Brussels Sprouts $ 3.59
Carrots $ 3.56
Rhubarb $ 3.25
Squash, Winter, Butternut $ 3.20
Kale $ 3.07
Grass, Lemon $ 3.00
Peas, English $ 3.00
Onion, Bulb $ 2.63
Radish, White $ 2.60
Bean, Bush $ 2.51
Peas, Edible Pod $ 2.50
Artichoke, Globe $ 2.40
Cabbage, Chinese Napa $ 2.24
Squash, Winter, Delicata $ 2.10
Spinach, Spring/Fall $ 1.80
Leeks $ 1.75
Potatoes $ 1.50
Parsnips $ 1.50
Garlic $ 1.37
Squash, Summer, Yellow $ 1.34
Parsley $ 1.31
Corn $ 1.25
Squash, Winter, Acorn $ 1.20
Squash, Winter, Hubbard $ 1.20
Eggplant $ 1.10
Greens, Mustard $ 1.10
Rutabaga $ 1.00
Beet $ 0.89
Cabbage, Savoy $ 0.80
Broccoli $ 0.80
Kohlrabi $ 0.75
Cauliflower $ 0.60
Broccoli, Chinese $ 0.60
Cabbage $ 0.50

Now, most of us are not going to live on, say, cilantro alone, so some common sense will have to be used along with the list in making decisions, but I am glad to have confirmation that the bits of space in my garden given over to herbs like parsley and cilantro are space well-used in economic terms.