Vegetable Tourism

On May 7, the day before Mother's Day, I will be out at a big garden/small farm on Dallas Highway, playing docent. The Garden (of Mr. Kastner and Mr. Hankerson) is on the Master Gardeners' tour of gardens this year, and I signed on to help. I've been going, and hauling my family with me, for the last few Saturdays to help get things planted and to learn more about The Garden so I can do a good job.

I've learned quite a bit about what is being planted, why those crops were chosen, and how the soil is prepared. Since I usually work with much smaller plots of veggies, this has been a real learning experience. The good news is that I'm ready for questions!

Every year, the Master Gardeners send around a request for volunteers to help out at all the gardens on the tour. Different gardens are on the tour each year, but it's been awhile since a food garden was featured. One of the great things about this garden is that a lot of food it produces is given away to people who really need it (going to pantries and shelters, for example).

Making sure everyone has access to good food is important!

When I was visiting the Energy Bulletin website this afternoon, I saw a link to a video about a much larger project that's dedicated to providing good food to as many people as possible. The project is called Incredible Edible, and it started in a town called Todmorden in the UK. It takes watching five YouTube videos to hear the whole talk, but it's worthwhile. The whole town of 17,000 people has much better access to fresh produce than before, partly because it's growing all over the place. The group also has put effort into making sure people know how to prepare the food that's being grown. It turns out that this is a very important piece of the local, fresh food puzzle. Video five brings up the topic of Vegetable Tourism, which made me laugh, but then I remembered what I'm doing a week from Saturday . . .



I hope that The Garden gets some good vegetable tourism next weekend!

Plenty to See

There's a lot of action right now, plantwise, both in the wooded backyard and in the garden. It's a great time of year to walk around and see what's going on in the plant world!

Taking up the whole right side of this photo is some cilantro that seems to be in competition with Jack's beanstalk. I don't think I've ever seen cilantro get to four feet high before! On the left are the potatoes, and in the back, starting up the trellis, are sugar snap peas.



Elsewhere, last fall's chard is bolting, and the spring lettuces and spinach are making enough progress that they will soon land in the salad bowl, along with some of the radishes that are getting close to the right size for eating.



The herbs are greening up and looking lush, especially the comfrey, which is in glorious bloom. The bees are very happy!



The backyard has smelled like apples for a couple of weeks now, because the sweetshrub (aka: Carolina allspice) is in bloom.



The woodland flowers are coming along, too. In addition to the goldenseal, which is already setting fruit, and the Solomon's seal, the trillium are putting on the best show they can.



And the Jack-in-the-pulpit have burst forth with their weird little blooms, too.



The crossvine blooms way up in the trees. I wouldn't know they were in bloom if they didn't drop their flowers all over the place. The flowers resemble somewhat the flowers of trumpet creeper, but the crossvine flowers smell like Mexican food.



I hope Spring is progressing as wonderfully for other gardeners!

Keeping Pace

Tonight, after work and after supper, there was still enough daylight to putz in the garden. Actually, there was enough to get the zucchini seeds in the ground. Since I am hoping for only five plants, this wasn't a monumental endeavor.

Seeds for the dwarf runner bean with big red flowers that I've enjoyed for the past couple of years also got planted. These are technically edible, but I have planted them mostly just to admire. I put in ten big seeds.

About six days ago, I was able to plant seeds for the slicing cucumbers (the variety Straight Nine), and these have poked their seed leaves (cotyledons) out of the soil. I am very happy to see them! So far, there are five seedlings. That might be all I planted.

Later this week, I'll probably plant bush beans and pickling cucumbers. Then the pole beans and popcorn will go in. After another week or so, I'll think about getting the tomatoes into the ground. Then it will be time for melons and okra (as seeds), and eggplants and peppers (as plants).

As long as I get a few things into the ground each week, I know that it will all get done. That doesn't mean I don't sometimes wonder how I'm ever going to get the whole thing planted; I do! But every year, it gets done. My planting gets done the same way eating an elephant does: one bite at a time, and I'm guessing that my garden isn't the only one that gets planted this way.

Choices

We've had a beautiful warm day today, and a warmer one is forecast for tomorrow, but there was a frost here just a few days ago, on Wednesday morning. I'm glad that my plant babies are still in their flats and pots, rather than in the ground.

I've worked some in the yard today but still have a little more to do before the beds are all ready for summer crops. Since the "last frost date" is still a few days away, this is just as well.

The map of what will be planted in each section of the gardens has been drawn, but it isn't really set until the plants are all in the ground, and I've been thinking more about what I've chosen to plant and the reasons for my choices.

I tend to plant many different kinds of crops, but just a little bit of each--except for tomatoes and peppers, which I plant enough of for a little canning/freezing/dehydrating. We eat a lot of tomatoes and peppers.

For the other crops, though, there are different reasons for the choices. Some plants, like lettuces, don't keep especially well, so I try to grow enough for us to use fresh, with a little to share, but with not too much that might "go bad" before we can use it.

Some crops I grow just a little of because we won't eat much of it (chicory and kale, for example) but we do like to have a bit.

Other crops we grow just a little of because I'm not sure yet whether I like them. This is how I started with beets, but I plant more of those now as we like them and their greens more and more.

Other gardeners make other choices. I've known some to grow just tomatoes. I would hesitate to put all my effort into that one crop, though, because some years are not so great for tomatoes. It would be sad to put a lot of effort into a garden that keeled over from, say, late blight! Diversification means that, even if one crop doesn't make it, there will still be food from the yard.

Mr. Hankerson and Mr. Kastner, who have a big garden out on Dallas Highway, are growing more peppers this year than in the past, and I was told that choice was partly because they have a great new recipe for green tomato and pepper relish. They plan to make lots!

At the Plant-a-Row-for-the-Hungry garden, we plant crops that don't have an immediate and pressing need for refrigeration, because the food pantry that gets our harvest doesn't have a huge fridge.

My friend who grows all her veggies in containers on her driveway looks for varieties that are just a little different than standard grocery-store produce, so people who walk by won't harvest all her food before she can. It turns out that white eggplants are less likely to "walk away" than the standard purpley-black ones.

What a miracle it is that there are so many kinds of good food from which to choose, so that we all can grow gardens that work for us!

Helping the Plant Babies Grow

My seedlings out in the front yard are still pretty small, and I'm thinking that they are slow partly as a direct result of cool weather but also as an indirect effect. The indirect part would be that the nitrogen from the organic fertilizers is not yet available. It needs to be "set free" through a decomposition process, and the cool soil may be slowing that down. That's my current theory, anyway.

The nitrogen in that soil right now is in the form of some cottonseed meal and a couple of bags of "humus & manure" from a store. Given some more warm weather and a bit more time, that nitrogen will become available for use by my plant babies, but I am impatient. I will probably water that bed with some fish-emulsion in a dilute solution tomorrow. That form is more readily available to plants, but when mixed according to package directions won't harm my little lettuce, chard, spinach, mustard, carrot, beet, and scallion babies.

My garden doesn't usually have this problem, but it has happened before, and the fix was liquid fertilizer, so the fishy plan is likely to work. Gardeners who rely more on bags of conventional fertilizers will not be so constrained by the weather, which is certainly something to consider when planning a garden, but I'm sticking with my stinky organic amendments.

Stormy Weather

This isn't the metaphorical stormy weather of the old song; I'm not pining for a man to return, but my little seedlings here in the house are surely pining for a return to sunshine.

We had a nice long stretch of it before thunder started shaking the house and the rain started falling down like the sky is one big waterfall. The crazy weather seems to mean, though, that spring is really here. The good news is that the cold and cloudy will be over soon, and my seedlings will pine no more, but we need for the cool spring to continue if we are going to have good lettuces, spinach, and other spring veggies. If it gets warm too soon, the spring crops don't do well.

When I got home from work today, the clouds were still here, along with the cool temperatures, but the rain had let up, and I had a chance to see how things are holding up out in the yard.

The peas have made a good start:



And so have the potatoes:



On the edge of the garden, the patch of horehound (perennial) is greening up as well as any fuzzy, grayish green plant can, and the grape hyacinth are blooming right alongside.



Elsewhere in the yard, the goldenseal is beginning to bloom. This loves our yard; it has spread to make a nice big patch.



And the toad trillium are beginning to bloom.



Spring is definitely here.

Bumping up the Babies

It is about time to bump my seedlings out of the tray where they were started (in seed-starting medium) and into pots with something that's more like soil. I usually fill the new pots with Miracle Grow potting soil, but a friend of mine who uses the same stuff had a problem this year.

My friend starts about a thousand plants each year. Some are for her own garden, but most are for Master Gardener projects like the Plant-a-Row-for-the-Hungry garden, where we both volunteer, and the veggie garden at the elementary school for which she is the project chair.

This year, she transplanted all her seedlings into the potting soil as usual, but this year all her seedlings died. She called the company, because she is pretty sure there was too much nitrogen and that it burned the plant babies. The company refunded the money for her three bags, but she will have to start all those seedlings again. That is a lot of work and time lost.

The big problem for me is that I bought my bag of potting soil at the same store, and at about the same time. It is probably from the same lot, but my friend doesn't have her empty bags anymore to compare.

Yesterday, because I would hate to lose my (much smaller number of) plant babies, I bought a big bag of Farmer D's Planting Mix. If I had been thinking, I would have switched last year when I first saw it, because it is locally produced and not already laced with fertilizers (I will get to manage the nutrients myself).

This afternoon, I washed the empty six-pack-style plant containers that I plan to use for the first bumping up and filled them with planting mix. The tomatoes are all settled into their new spaces, but the rest of the babies will get moved tomorrow.

Progress of Spring

My seedlings, both indoors and out, are mostly up but also still quite small.

Outdoors, where I set out a lot of seeds on homemade seed tapes right before a big rain, the last seeds to germinate have been the carrots and scallions, but when I got home from work tonight, I could see them coming up. I must have hung over that bed just grinning for about ten minutes.

The most amazing part about that planting is that the seed tapes did such a great job holding the seeds in place. There are a few that have strayed out of their lines, but the plant babies are, essentially, in their assigned spaces in spite of a couple of downpours.

The seeds I've started in a tray are almost far enough along to transplant into individual pots. The first sets of true leaves are becoming well-developed in all the tomatoes and lettuces, and they are becoming big enough to see without a hand-lens on the eggplants, peppers, beets, spinach, chard, and parsley.

The overwintered plants out in the yard are looking good (except, of course, that I pulled up the last 4.5 pounds of carrots last week when they began to grow new leaves).

The amazing patch of cilantro has been great to have all winter long, but it is beginning to bolt. Luckily, I have new cilantro coming up already in a couple of other places in the garden.



Last fall's chard has put on enough growth that we can harvest some for meals.



And elsewhere in the yard, spring is really coming along. All of the flowers pictured here today have been blooming for about a week, so they are almost done. They are all, essentially, ephemeral. Soon the blooms will drop off, any seeds that are going to be set will be set, and the leaves will begin to die back. When the hot weather of summer sets in, there won't be much left above ground to show where these live.

This is the toothwort.



This little rue anemone is among my favorites, but it is pretty obvious that I need to pull some weeds in the patch of ground it inhabits.



The bloodroot is so white it almost glows at the back of the yard. There are two patches across a little path from each other.



Unlike the others above, these bleeding hearts aren't native. They are amazing, though. There have been times when I have just sat near them on the ground and admired the pink.

Planting with PAR

At the Plant-a-Row-for-the-Hungry (PAR) garden for which I am a volunteer, we continued this week with the early spring planting. Only one other person in the whole group had ever made seed tapes before, so we started our Wednesday session in the Carriage House, making seed tapes out of toilet paper, Elmer's glue, and carrot seeds. We haven't planted carrots before at PAR, so this is a double experiment for us.

Some of these gardeners work with children at other projects, and they were particularly happy to discover how easy making seed tapes is. The hardest part (especially for the people who didn't bring their reading glasses to the garden) was getting the seeds onto the glue without dropping huge numbers of them in a pile all at once.

Fred, our other gardener who has made seed tapes, gets around the "tiny seed" problem by using pelletized seeds. He drops one at a time, with tweezers, at the correct spacing onto his homemade seed tape. I am less precise in placing seeds onto my seed tapes, but I usually have to do a little thinning as a result.



There were enough of us present that it didn't take long before we had a lot of seed tape ready to go.



After we had plenty, we tidied up (put the newspaper back into the recycling bin where we found it) and moved to the garden to work. Planting the seed tapes didn't take long, either, but we had plenty of other tasks to keep us occupied. Broccoli was planted along the edges of the bed in which the carrots are now planted.



We also planted more potatoes and onions. We didn't finish getting these in the ground, because parts of their bed were still too wet from the previous day's rain. We made a lot of progress, though.



We are really fortunate that the city had someone weed-whack our cover crop (the garden is on city property), the Austrian winter peas. The greenery was becoming startlingly thick, and it was going to be heck to turn under, even with a heavy duty rototiller. The potato/onion/carrot/broccoli areas had already been tilled by Doug (thank you!). If we are lucky, he will be able to till the rest of the garden in a couple of weeks, shifting the good organic residue of the peas down into the soil, where we need it.

Making the Most of Small Gardens

Over at the blog called Our Engineered Garden, EG has a post up about setting up his trellises. Growing big, climbing plants up trellises is one way to get more food from a small garden space.

His post made me think a bit about why I don't use more trellises in my own small garden, and what it mostly comes down to is height. I am not at all tall. Growing things up trellises, where I can't reach them to take care of the plants and harvest the produce, just isn't practical for me. For taller people, trellises make a lot more sense. It turns out that EG is well over six feet tall.

My strategies for maximizing production have relied more on using the gaps between plants on the ground. As I plan where in the garden to plant each crop, I consider each plant's eventual height and sprawl. Plants that will spread across the ground, like sweet potato vines, can be planted next to a crop that uses less ground space and more air space, like okra, corn, or peppers. The vines can then be aimed toward the bare ground under the other taller crop, where they act like a mulch over that ground, shading out weeds. This kind of planning lets me have sweet potatoes in a small garden.

When the sprawling crop is one that uses tendrils to climb, like in cucumbers, squashes, and melons, some extra effort is needed to keep these from climbing up the taller plants (and possibly pulling them over), but that doesn't take much time.

Another strategy is using the close, grid-like spacing described in books like Mel Bartholemew's "Square Foot Gardening" and John Jeavon's "How to Grow More Vegetables and Fruits, Nuts, Berries, Grains, and Other Crops Than You Ever Thought Possible On Less Land Than You Can Imagine." I do a lot of this. When bush beans are well-grown and spaced as in this strategy, they are a beautiful sight.

Yet another strategy I use is intercropping, which means pretty much what it looks like it means: crops "in between." One way to intercrop is to plant root crops in spaces between leafy crops. An example would be carrots interplanted with lettuces. When intercropping, the standard planting distances can be reduced in ways that allow the garden to produce a little more food from one patch of soil. The lettuces could be planted at the usual distances (6-8 inches apart) but in the open spaces, carrots could be sown.

When one crop produces mostly above ground and the other mostly below ground, competition for space is greatly reduced.

The two crops should be genetically different enough that disease and pest problems are also reduced. For example, even though chard and beets don't compete for exactly the same space (one produces a big bit of its harvest-able food below-ground, one produces all the food above-ground) they are too similar genetically for intercropping to be a good idea.

Before the recent big rains started, I planted some seeds outside, and I set them out as intercropped rows in the bed nearest the road. The rows alternate leafy veggies (lettuces, mustard, chard) with root veggies (carrots, beets, radishes).

If I am lucky, the seeds are all still there, rather than having been washed away. In another week or so, I will know. I did set them out as homemade seed tapes, which should have helped keep the seeds in place. Amazingly, I have a contingency plan in place! (Some years I am more organized than in other years.) If not all the seeds come up, I can replace some with plants I've started in a seed-tray in the house. Those, mostly, have begun to emerge.

Hanging Out with the Old Guys

Insanely early on Wednesday morning, I was at the dermatology office to have a thingy removed (a hazard of a life lived largely out-of-doors). The other people waiting outside for the office to open were older guys, who all turned out to be in their early eighties. We spent time visiting while we waited.

One of my new dermatology friends had grown up in north Georgia but had lived on Lacy Street in Marietta for a little more than fifty years. All that time, he'd had a garden in the backyard. He and his wife now live in a smaller townhouse, but he still gardens. He just asks people he knows, who have sunny spaces in their yards, if he can grow a few (fill in the blank) at their homes. So far, he hasn't been turned down.

He told about a friend who had moved here from Louisiana (this was one of those "way back when" stories), who had always gardened in the black dirt there but who was skeptical about the ability of the red dirt here to support crops. My new dermatology friend went over to his yard one spring, dug out three spaces, mixed in rotted leaves, a little lime and fertilizer, and planted three tomato plants. By the end of the summer, his friend was totally surprised at how well this worked out in terms of total harvest -- "he'd never got so many tomatoes before in his life!"

This year, my dermatology friend and a grand-son-in-law, a young man who has never gardened before, are going to start a veggie garden in the young man's backyard. It sounded as though they are both really looking forward to working together on the project. The older man plans to set up raised beds using old railroad ties to contain the amended soil, because that's what he's always done. He likes for his beds to be three feet wide.

As the conversation continued, he offered some advice. He said that he waits until the end of April to plant his summer garden, claiming that plants set out earlier are slowed down by the cold soil. He thinks his late-planted garden does better than if he had planted on the last frost date, when many people plant. As another gardener who waits an extra week or so, this was very satisfying confirmation of what I've thought/experienced about planting on that last-frost date!

Later in the morning, I was at the Plant-a-Row-for-the-Hungry garden, where we planted onions and potatoes. We are going to plant more next week, when we also plan to make seed-tapes for carrots and plant those, and probably also put in some broccoli transplants. One of our gardeners, Lee, has been growing a lot of her food for a very Long Time, and she said something that I tend to forget, but that's important.

The conversation was about which pole beans to grow. We had looked for mountain half-runner beans at Ladd's Farm Supply, but they weren't in yet when we went. Lee also grows mountain half-runners, but only from the company she called Morse (now it's Ferry Morse). She's grown the same variety from other companies, but she has found that they just aren't as good.

After years and years of seed production by one grower, a variety can develop slight genetic differences that affect its growing and food qualities. Lee thinks the beans from Morse both taste and perform better. Another gardener in another place might prefer beans from a different source, but when ordering/buying seeds, keeping track of where a favorite comes from can really help the success of a garden.

Update on my own planting: onions, potatoes, and peas are in the ground. The potatoes are Red Pontiac; the peas are both Wando (a dwarf English-type pea) and Sugar Snap (an edible-pod pea).

I've also finally started seeds indoors: Tomatoes (Rutgers, Wuhib, Cherokee Purple, Olivette Jaune), peppers (Jimmy Nardello, Czeck black, Ancho, Feherezon, Spanish Spice, Golden Greek, Sweet Chocolate), eggplants (Casper White, Black King), curly parsley, spinach (Bloomsdale), chard (Perpetual Spinach), Collards (Georgia), lettuces (Marvel of Four Seasons, Capitan, Bronze Arrow), chicory (Pan di Zucchero), and some Golden Beets. Some of these are "old reliables" and some are new this year.

Based on the number of varieties, it seems like there wouldn't be enough room in my little garden for everything, but I tend to plant just a few of each kind. This is a way to hedge my bets in the gambling world of gardening. If one crop doesn't pay off, another one surely will.

UGA and Sources of Gardening Information

When looking for reliable sources of information about gardening, one place to start is at the land grant college in your state. Here in Georgia, that's UGA. It offers a search function on its publications website that can be used to find all sorts of great information.

Publications span a wide range of topics and include a booklet-length text on Growing Vegetables Organically. We handed these out at yesterday's talk on raised bed gardening, but we didn't have enough for everyone. (To get an electronic copy from the linked page, choose which version you want, either html or pdf, and it will appear!) UGA offers publications on individual veggies and fruits, on composting and many other relevant topics.

The good news is that most County Extension offices will send, through the mail, paper copies of their publications if a citizen in the county requests the information. Later in the week, when I get to the Cobb County Extension office, I will be putting together a couple of envelopes full of information for people who came to the talk but missed out on the handouts.

Other sources of information include experienced gardeners, some of whom will have published information in magazines and newspapers. Yesterday, someone asked about growing vegetables in the shade. Amazingly enough, when I opened my email this morning, the most recent note from Mother Earth News included an article on growing veggies in shade.

The article, Best Vegetables to Grow in the Shade, includes a link to a handy table of veggies and their minimum sunlight requirements along with the general discussion on maximizing availability of sunlight to a shaded garden.