January 17, 2010 - Lessons Learned From 2009

Happy New Year and all that stuff...

While the snow in this picture has melted it still very much looks like Winter out there.  The Spring seriously cannot come soon enough!  Until then I thought I'd take a look back and put some of my thoughts about last year up for everyone to see.  Although it was a very successful garden, there were a number of things that  I can improve upon....

1.  Give The Plants More Space
I was pretty adamant about using the Square Foot Gardening book as a guide on spacing of the plants last year.  I think the biggest lesson I learned last year is that there needs to be more room for everything to grow.  The tomatoes grew haphazardly and after a month or so they had already begun growing over top of each other.  Two square feet just wasn't enough!  The zucchini and peppers also suffered from this.  I have seen huge pepper plants a few feet tall that yield dozens of peppers per plant.  While some of the plants (Cayenne and Banana for example) did real well, I think that the Bell Peppers and Jalapenos suffered from being over crowded. Like the Tomatoes, they grew fast at first until they shaded out each other.  As a result, the Peppers were a bit smaller than I was hoping. 

2. Less Is More (sometimes)
I'm sure I won't listen to this advice when the weather is warm and I'm at the Growers Market starring at the sea of flats begging to be planted.  But just because I buy zucchini in a four pack doesn't mean I have to plant all of them.  Someone remind me of that in May!

3.  Focus On What We'll Eat
Cantaloupe and Watermelon are definitely out this year - the 'loupes didn't grow well and the watermelons were not necessary as my landlord grew tons! No radishes as I'm the only one that eat them, less Beans (see below).  The sunflowers are out of the garden, although I may plant some down by the stone wall for decoration. They were fun to grow but I never really eat any of the seeds. I'm going to need the room they took up to space out the Peppers some. Which brings me to the Hot Peppers.  I had 5 or 6 varieties of Hot Peppers last year, this year I think two will be enough.  I  love them, Stacey doesn't.

4.  It's Real Hard To Work Between Two Sets Of Trellises
Last year I had a long trellis of Bean and Cucumbers, and a smaller trellis with Peas.  The weeds got real bad in between and when it was time to harvest the Beans it was a huge pain in the ass to get in there. Especially because the Beans needed to picked every other day!  So I think I'm going to pull up the smaller trellis and move the peas along with the Beans.  A little less Beans shouldn't be a problem as they were so productive last year it was impossible to keep up.

5. More Prep Work And Maintenance
Before I get everything planted I've need to prep the soil a bit more carefully this year.  I need to get compost, eggshells, and other goodies worked into the soil along early. I hope this will be a bit easier this year since I don't have to pull up the sod.  I also need to try and keep up with the weeds better and prune the tomatoes more often.  Easier said than done!

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Over the next week or two I want to finish up a draft layout of the 2010 garden. Any suggestions?

Spetember 25, 2009 End of the Year

I'm officially calling an end to the garden for the year.

I've learned a lot and had a great time this summer with everything! The end of the year totals were not too bad, but should of been much greater. A lot of produce went to waste from both pests and my own neglect. It seems that at the end of the summer when I was the busiest was when I needed to be out there every day harvesting and tending the garden. I had visions in the Spring of eating vegetables from the garden every day during the Summer, but that just wasn't the possible. Lesson learned...

At some point over the coming months I'm going to sit down and evaluate what worked and what didn't to hopefully improve my plan for next year. One thing that is for sure is I'll be scaling back a bit and not use the recommended square foot garden spacing as much. Plants like the peppers, for example, quickly became shaded out from the tomatoes. When I was forced to prune and remove some of them a few weeks back, they almost doubled in size. If the frost comes late and it remains warm I still may get some additional peppers from the new growth. Next year they'll get much more space between each plant and whatever gets planted near them....

This weekend I plan on ripping out everything and cleaning up the space for the fall/winter. By the looks of it it seems like a lot of work!

I'm really looking forward to putting this year's experience into practice next year!

August 30, 2009 Back From Vacation

After a week away at the beach, this is the mess we came back to. All the sunflowers were drooped from their own weight, many tomatoes rotting on the vine and on the ground, all the cantaloupes rotting, a watermelon split and rotting, and even a few of the peppers were rotting. I guess I picked the wrong week to leave everything!

I removed two tomato plants and pruned back the others. All the rotting tomatoes are now in a pile along with some other garden refuse. so things look a little more put together now. I harvested all that could be salvaged and there are still plenty of green tomatoes yet to ripen. So the season isn't over yet, but I definitely lost quite a bit!

August 16, 2009 Melons and Sunflowers

I've been pretty busy the last two weeks, hence the lack of updates. In that time all sorts of things have gone to hell in the garden. I haven't weeded the watermelon patch in about a month or so and it was so over grown that you couldn't even see the watermelon plants let alone the melons themselves. Stacey put a huge dent in pulling the big stuff the other day and I finished off the little she left for me yesterday. I hope that will buy me some time!

The real issue I've been having is with my tomatoes. It seems that they're a little top heavy and with only a single stake holding up the center the branches laden with tomatoes have become a problem. Some have broken off with some of the heavy storms, others are resting on the dirt where the bugs, critters, and fungus has taken some (but not all) of the 'maters. Next year I need to do three things different --

1) Cage them along with the stakes to support the branches.
2) Prune them back MUCH more.
3) Space them out even more. They're currently about 2 feet apart, but I'm going to try to add another foot between them.

Despite the problems I'm having, I still have more tomatoes than I know what to do with! Nice.

I also wanted to share some pics on how the melons are doing:

Also the sunflowers are all in full bloom! A couple of the flower heads have seeds set and I'll need to harvest fairly soon before the birds take too many. I've read a few methods of cooking the seeds but I'm going to try this one:

Sunflower seeds can be roasted by heating in a 300 degree F oven for 15-25 minutes. If salting is desired, soak seeds overnight in a brine of 2 tablespoons of salt to 1 cup of water. Boil the seed brine mix for a few minutes and drain. Spread seeds thinly on a cookie sheet and roast in a 200 degree F oven for 3 hours or until crisp. If roasted long enough, they are easy to shell.
http://www.ext.colostate.edu/ptlk/1828.html


And finally I was taking pictures of all the bugs on the butterfly bush and thought this was a good one of a large carpenter bee hanging out.

August 4, 2009 Zucchini Pruning Update

here's an update on the pruned zucchini plants:

Take a look at the pictures of the day I cut the plants and a little over a week later. They seem to be coming back a bit. Some new flowers (all males) are popping up around the stem. Although there are several new leaves that have grown, most of the original leaves I left on it have a fair amount of powdery mildew. Not a good sign! But they've already exceeded my expectations - I kind of figured they would have been shocked to death after two days. If I get any more zucchini off of any of the remaining three plants I'll call it a success.

This was from July 24th:

...And this one from August 4th:

Check out the update to the Harvest count. It's starting to get impressive. I guess I have some more tomato sauce to make this week:



Several of the sunflowers are in full bloom. They ended up being between eight and nine feet tall. I'm pretty happy with that with so many in a small place. I think I'll space them out a little more than a foot next year!

July 27, 2009 Goodbye to the Zucchini

The powdery mildew has gotten the best of the zucchini. I decided to pull one completely and prune back the other three to the newest leaves that are not (currently) infected. The plant has powdery mildew on the stalk as well so I don't think this will work, but I couldn't bring myself to destroying the plants without trying. We'll see how long they last after loosing 90% of their leaves in a day. I'm worried that their proximity to the cucumbers may be a problem, but so far they are showing no signs of being infected.

I took a large garbage bad and covered as many leaves as I could and then started snipping the leaves off at the base. I tried not to shake the leaves too much in an attempt to keep the spores from spreading. I have cucumbers and melons fairly close by. I'll try and post a couple of pictures in the next couple of days to see how they do with so many leaves gone. Even though I ended up harvesting over thirty of them and couldn't eat them fast enough (my coworkers and friends helped out a bit) I'm going to miss pulling one or two every couple of days. I have my the zucchini bread recipe memorized now!

The tomatoes have been ripening up lately too. It's been a nice treat to snack on the grapes. I've also made two batches of sauce out of the larger ones. It's kinda cool when the sauce has three or four different varieties in them, especially the yellow Lemon Boys which turn the sauce almost orange. The place smells good from all the cooking on Sundays!

Here's a summary of the video:

• The pumpkins and watermelon are both getting big. I counted 6 watermelon and 7 pumpkins on their way!
• Three decent sized cantaloupes are on the vine. I hope I can time the melons right to get a couple of days worth of fruit salad.
  
• The beans are coming in faster than I can eat them.
• Cucumbers are plentiful now.
  
• A couple of the bell peppers are turning red and the hot peppers are all maturing nicely!
• The sunflower heads are growing, but not as large as I had hoped...one of them is about to open.
  

July 18, 2009 Powdery Mildew Fight

So I lost the fight against the flea beetles for my eggplant. And I have a feeling based on how far gone the problem is I'll likely lose the fight against powdery mildew for my zucchini. It was a few days since I was out there and it has gotten pretty bad. Nearly every leaf is covered. Only a few of the leaves have actually turned yellow/brown but I'm sure that it's not too long before the whole plant just can't take it any more and dies.

The good news is that I've already pulled nearly 20 delicious zucchini from them, but I'd still like to get 20 more! I've talked to some people in the area who say that Powdery Mildew kind of just happens in this area at a certain time of the year, and to get zucchini all summer you should do a few plantings of one plant through out the late spring/early summer. There are certain preventative measures you can take, like watering in the morning and only at base. But it sounds like even that will just delay the point at which you'll eventually get it.

So what to do? I read that using plain 'ole milk does a better job than any commercial fungicide on the market. So that's what I'm trying... read more here:

http://planetgreen.discovery.com/home-garden/powdery-milk-mildew.html

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/3125/title/A_Dairy_Solution_to_Mildew_Woes

Check out this haul today!

July 18, 2009 Late Blight Warning

I was listening to You bet Your Garden this morning and heard a bit of bad gardening news: a really bad case of Late Blight has infested the east coast. As of today it's primarily in New York and New England but has been identified as far west as Ohio and down into the Carolinas. "So what?" you might ask, well this apparently it has the potential to devastate tomato and potato plants (amongst other related plants) for both home gardeners and commercial growers. This is the same disease that cause the Irish Potato Famine in the mid-1800's.

It's recommended that you inspect your tomatoes and potatoes daily and if you find any of your tomatoes are infected with late blight to destroy the plant and bring samples into local government agricultural labs to ensure that it's tracked. I just checked my plants and so far nothing that looks like the pictures. (Pictures of late blight symptoms) Good luck to all!

Here's a piece of the YBYG article:

And late blight spreads like wildfire on a windy day in bone-dry weather. If people don’t promptly remove and destroy infected plants the spores will travel with the wind to the next garden—or farm. A single spore can travel many miles. And the cool, damp weather that plagued the affected parts of the country throughout much of June provided the ‘perfect’ conditions for this nasty actor to spread rapidly. Oh and just to make SURE you don’t sleep well tonight, this is the earliest and most widespread it’s ever appeared.

The Associated Press has done an excellent job of reporting on this potential crisis. According to their story of July 3rd, the disease appears to have originated in tomato plants shipped to ‘Big Box’ stores on the east Coast—specifically Lowe’s, Home Depot, Wal-Mart, and Kmart. Infected plants were found at almost every store that was checked, so be especially vigilant if you or a neighbor got plants from such a store.

If you grew your own plants from seed or got them from a purely local grower—who didn’t mix their stock with bulk-purchased plants—your only risk is the spores blowing into your garden. If you’re in a community garden or other ‘shared’ situation, make sure your fellow growers are informed, and agree up front that any infected plants will be immediately destroyed.

Full YBYG Article:
http://www.gardensalive.com/article_mcgrath.asp?ai=1&bhcd2=1247942148

More info from Cornell University:
http://www.nysipm.cornell.edu/publications/blight/

July 14, 2009 Stuffed Zucchini

'Nuf said.

July 13, 2009 -The End of the Peas, Begining of the Beans!

Here's a new video of the garden!




1. Zucchini have powdery mildew, but I've got the egg shells in the dirt so at least they won't have blossom end rot!
2. Cucumbers are in season
3. Pole bean bonanza!
4. Sunflowers are about 6 feet tall and starting to form the flower heads
5. Peppers a plenty
6. The tomatoes are starting to ripen, and not just the grapes
7. A watermelon is growing pretty quick, it's not the size of a small baseball


And here's a shot of the harvest today. It made a great green bean casserole. Stuffed zucchini tomorrow...