Robbins Farm Garden

A Cooperative Learning Project

Elisabeth

Cabbage Runts Pulled

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cabbge runts 
We harvested one red cabbage Saturday.  But some cabbage plants looked like they were not going to do much.  So the decision was made to cull the runts.  Most of these had cutworm collars, leading one gardener to speculate that maybe cutworm collars somehow stunt the growth.  However, it was pointed out that the cutworm collars, placed about a week and a half after the seedlings were planted, were placed especially around those seedlings having trouble.  One wonders at why some cabbages did better than others.  Was it the transplanting?  (i.e. some rootlets might have been more disturbed than others)  Was it some early attack on the seedling by a pest?  Or was it just that some do better than others?

Meanwhile, the tomato committee appropriated the liberated area.

Cauliflower Taste-Off!

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We had three cauliflower, one of which was sneakily harvested by the Wednesday gardeners.  That still left us two cauliflower for harvest on Saturday:  one of which had its leaves tied up for blanching, the other left exposed.  While there was a clear visual aesthetic difference, the real question was of taste.  Two of us did (nonblind) comparisons.  We agreed that the blanched cauliflower was slightly sweeter, but that the unblanched cauliflower was still tasty enough.  Alan also pointed out that when cooked, the coloring of the unblanched drains away anyways.
Also, we planted some cauliflower seeds Saturday to have more later in the season.

Coke vs Pepsi
Coke or Pepsi?

Persnickety Pests Prefer Soybeans

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We are growing two different kinds of beans:  bush beans and soy beans.  The soy beans have been repeatedly attacked by plant-eating pests, while the bush beans have escaped unscathed.  Some weeks ago, with the beans just poking their heads out of the ground, one gardener was concerned that the leaves were being eaten already.  But these were not true leaves, but cotyledons, which come from part of the seed.  In the two weeks which followed, though, as the true leaves emerged, pests continued to eat at the soy bean plants.  I wonder what they know?  Nevertheless, the soy bean plants themselves have been producing more leaf than is being eaten.

This situation makes a point about pesticide use as well.  Yes, perhaps a heavy dose of pesticide might have eliminated any leaf-eating.  But the soybean plants are clearly thriving despite the pests.  Maybe pesticides aren’t as useful or needful as advertised.

Sunday visits

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Yesterday, I opened the garden from about 2-5. Perhaps a dozen families, maybe 15 or 16 even, visited, expressing a lot of admiration. We are really looking pretty sharp, not a weed to be seen! Thanks Michael (and others)! My routine is to walk up to the playground and invite people down. A few families come on their own, or are walking by. Some were interested enough that I invited them to come by Saturday when everyone is there. A number took cards, and I gave out some peas here and there.

Determinant and indeterminant

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I’ve heard the words of my headline tossed around the garden this spring, figuring they meant something but not getting the concepts entirely. But I think I have it now, and it’s worth sharing. (Or so I think; you decide.)

The times I’ve heard the terms tossed, the subject was tomatoes. According to this tomato-growing site, determinant varieties, including the well-known Roma variety, grow to a roughly defined height, stop growing when the fruit sets at the end of each branch, ripen about the same time, and then die.

Indeterminants keep growing until frost — flowering, setting fruit, and ripening all at the same time, on different stalks.

Pinch meRecently, my gardening mate Michael Smith, who horticultures for a living, shared a brief film on pinching out young tomato-plant branches that I later realized are what others call "suckers," another term I’d heard but didn’t quite grasp. (There’s a lot of that for me in the presence of actual gardeners.)

After watching, I went out into my own garden and pinched — or clipped — all the suckers, which are identified as growths emanating from the juncture of the main stem and a side shoot. The reasoning, as I understand it, is that these suckers will make the plants bushier, bringing no advantage, at the expense of energy that would better be applied to the fruit. 

Then I noticed that my eggplant plants also have suckers, and wondered if I should cut them out, too. Luckily, I didn’t. I asked around among the gardeners and got no definitive answer, though one guy said he thought it made sense, and another observed that both tomatoes and eggplants are from the nightshade family.

Turns out, according to a consensus of websites I found, though none authoritative enough that I’d link to, that eggplants are determinant, so every branch I cut off would just be limiting yield, instead of concentrating energy in the "right" places.

There still remains the question of whether all eight of my tomato plants are indeterminants. That’s something I ought to know, but don’t.