Robbins Farm Garden

A Cooperative Learning Project

Elisabeth

Nitrogen: Not All Forms of Nitrogen are Created Equal

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Most plant fertilizers usually include the three main plant nutrients:  N (Nitrogen), P (Phosphorus), and K (Potassium). This journal entry is about the first nutrient, Nitrogen. Nitrogen is available in different forms, and these different forms may lead to different results, where your plants are concerned. Since the different forms of Nitrogen may have different effects upon your soil’s chemistry, your plants’ abilities to take-up various nutrients (not just Nitrogen!) may be adversely effected.

For more info on the different forms of Nitrogen, and how these different forms may react in your soil, see: www.greenhouse.cornell.edu/crops/factsheets/nitrogen_form.pdf

A Brackett Elementary School Green Initiatives Group “Pizza Garden Starter Kit” finds a home at the Robbins Farm Garden

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One example of the Pizza Garden Starter Kits

A Pizza Garden Starter Kit

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To help support activities of its Green Initiatives Group, students and parent volunteers from the Brackett Elementary School sold "Pizza Garden Starter Kits" in early June. The Group began this project, assisting third grade teacher Jenny Brown, by reclaiming a greenhouse at the school that had been used for storage. With help from the children and staff of the Brackett After School Program, BASP, USDA certified organic seeds were planted in pots (using organic potting soil) in late April and cared for over the next 6 weeks.  Each kit consisted of 4 seedlings including a cherry tomato, basil, oregano and sweet pepper plant, marked with individual artful hand-made signs. Also part of the package was a note with care instructions and sauce recipes. (The seeds were from Botanical Interests). 

The Robbins Farm Gardeners were delighted to purchase a Pizza Kit and to give it a home in the Garden. We hope that the students and parents who gave these plants their start will visit the Garden to watch their progress!

The Green Initiatives Group at Brackett Elementary School fosters projects including composting and recycling to raise awareness within the school community about our impact on the environment and to promote more ecologically sustainable practices.  The Green Initiatives Group anticipates, through its current school year efforts, diverting 10,000 pounds of cafeteria waste from the waste stream, and saving 500-1,000 large sized trash bags. The Group is interested in more growing projects for the school and wider community next school year, including another pizza garden project. 

The Brackett volunteers report that 45 Pizza Kits were sold, raising approximately $540 dollars to support these programs.  If you’d like to help support the Green Initiatives Group at Brackett, or to help form one for your school, contact the group through gig.brackett@gmail.com.  (Thanks to Kim Kapner, Erika Riddington, and Robin Varghese for their contributions to this post.)

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"Green and Red" pepper plants, growing in the Brackett Elementary greenhouse.  (This variety produces green peppers that will eventually turn red and sweeter.)

Several Pizza Garden Starter Kits, ready for sale

Our Pizza Garden Starter Kit, planted in the Robbins Farm Garden and covered with a shade cloth to protect the young seedlings from the hot sun.

Bolting bok choy

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For the second season in a row, our bok choy is bolting, putting out flowers and seed heads instead of developing into the semi-celery-like stalks I’m used to seeing in the market.

After clipping the flower shoots, I tasted one of them and it was pleasing, both tender and tasty — as opposed, say, to the mustard greens stalks, which were way too reedy to eat. Still, it wasn’t bok choy like I’m used to seeing in the market.

I don’t know what, if anything, we can do for these guys, but I would like to put it on our futures list that we investigate: more shade, different variety, lots of gentle encouragment?

As I discussed my concern with a couple of garden mates Saturday, Lisa confided her antipathy for bok choy, and I was glad to have a balance for her beet mania. I love bok choy.

Heat Wave Watering

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The weather forecast says hot and sunny for the next week, with no rain.  According to conventional wisdom, a vegetable garden needs an inch of rain a week.  A good, soaking rain will provide 1/4" or more, so a few days a week sufficiently waters a garden.

Without rain, a vegetable garden needs supplemental watering.  In sunny weather particularly, the soil will rapidly dry out.  First, do the finger test:  poke a finger down to the second knuckle.  If it comes out dry, the soil needs watering.

Second, consider the maturity of the plants.  Young seedlings do not yet have deep roots, and so depend on moisture at the top.  They need watering more frequenty — at least every other day.  Mature plants ought to have deeper roots, so as to need watering less frequently.  However, unless they get some un-watered days, they don’t have incentive to root deeply.  Plants adapt to the watering they are given, so watering every day means you’ll have to continue watering every day.

For our garden mid-season, we have a mix of maturing plants and seedlings.  This comes from rotating crops — for example, when the peas came out Saturday, the pole beans went in — and from staggering plantings, so that we get multiple generations of things like carrots and lettuce.  So this forces us, in the absence of rain, to water at least every other day.

We prefer to water in the morning, to reduce loss to evaporation in the hotter and sunnier part of the day, and so that the leaves don’t stay wet overnight and acquire mildew.  We also prefer to water by hand, with watering cans, to put the water where we want it, and not just throw it up in the air with a sprinkler.

How many watering cans-full do we need to apply?  Just how much water does 1-inch a week mean?

A standard bed in our garden is 6′ x 9′.  54 sqft x 1-inch = 4.5 cubic feet of water per bed.  1 cubic foot = 7.5 gallons.  Thus, our beds each need 4.5 x 7.5 = 33.75 gallons of water per week.  With 1.5 gallon watering cans, that’s around 22-23 full watering cans.  That means, when watering, we should water each bed with at least 3 full watering cans — and probably more, since we don’t want to water every day.

Our entire garden is 2000 sqft, with about 60% for growing plants (much of the remainder is used for paths for visitors as well as ourselves).  1200 sqft x 1-inch x 7.5 gallons/cuft = 750 gallons = 500 full watering cans.  Watering five times a week means 100 full watering cans each.

This sounds like a lot of water!  But compare to how much water you use to shower yourself.  A typical modern showerhead has a flow of 2.5 gallons per minute.  So the water we need in our garden per week is about the same as showering for 300 minutes.  How many showers do you take per week?

 

 

Peas: Good Tall Varieties

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Tall Peas

 

Growing multiple varieties of vegetables is the tradition at Robbins Farm Garden. So it is with our Peas. This year, we grew three types: Snap (Sugar Snap), Snow (Mammoth Melting Sugar) and Shell (Alderman).

The Sugar Snap Peas performed well enough last year to justify a repeat performance, covering our 7-foot high bamboo trellis which also serves as the platform for the late season Pole Beans. Yet, the bush-type Snow and Shell Peas we grew last year were not the best use of vertical space.

The search for a tall Snow Pea was easy. Mammoth Melting Sugar is an heirloom variety, considered one of the largest and finest flat pod peas on the market. They grew, not unexpectedly, terrifically well in our garden. A tall variety of Shell Pea was more difficult to find. We decided upon Alderman, a variety marketed by Thompson & Morgan.

Alderman is a later pea (85 days to maturity vs. 70 for Sugar Snap & 68 for Mammoth Melting Sugar), but it did not disappoint. The plants grew as quickly — and as tall — as the other Peas, and the production was every bit as good. Fresh from the pod, they rival snap peas for flavor and sweetness. One warning: they require very little cooking, and they lose their flavor if over-cooked.

The Pea plants were pulled today and Pole Beans planted in their place. Overall, I would have to rate this year’s Pea crop as outstanding, with a solid month of harvest.

New Compost Arrangement

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We’re implementing a new compost arrangement:  three bins instead of two.  In the past, we used two — a square wire frame, and a cylindrical black plastic.  However, with being able to keep the compost pile over-winter, as well as the huge amount of winter rye at the beginning of the year going into the compost this spring, we exceeded our capacity.

So I decided to have us use three cylindrical plastic ones, because they are deformable, and so can be squeezed into the space allocated for composting.  Three bins will facilitate turning.  With just two bins, we were forced to turn one into the other even while adding new matter, or else not turning to keep new matter separate from more decomposed matter.

With three bins, one bin will be emtpy, and we can alternate turning one of the other compost piles into the empty bin, or even turn both.  New matter will go into one of the piles, so that the older pile can more completely mature into good compost.  When the older pile is ready for compost extraction, the newer pile will then become the older pile, and we will start a newer pile.