Managing a cooperative garden is tricky. It’s easy to overlook important, time-sensitive tasks while putzing around wondering what to do next. So we’ve developed a system that lets the Chief Gardening Officers discuss in advance what will be the best use of our limited time at the garden, record it on a whiteboard which we hang from the garden gate at the beginning of the session, and then we can all just work through the list until eveything important has been completed. It saves time, reduces confusion, and makes sure we don’t forget to pick the zucchinis.
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Okra and Air Conditioning
I don’t have air-conditioning at home. Some summers, there are a handful of days where, to sleep at night, I have to run a fan drafting air directly over me from toe to head. Last summer I did, but this summer not yet.
Last summer, our "dwarf" okra grew over six feet tall. This summer it seems resigned to at most two feet. I think it’s the lack of truly hot nights that has held back the okra: it just hasn’t triggered it’s growth spurt. It’s already beginning to flower, so I think now it’s too late.
Plants can "observe" their environment, and integrate (sum up and average) such things as daylight and temperature, by accumulating certain chemicals. When they build up enough, that triggers a change. Quite possibly, okra is observing the average temperature, and nightly lows, in order to decide whether to switch to giant growth mode.
So next year, let’s hope I have a few insufferably hot nights in July, so our smart okra decides it’s okay to be a giant!
Scheduling with a Garden Gantt Chart
We’re growing 44 crops in our 2,000 square foot garden this year, each with its own ideal growing schedule in our area. Fortunately, we’ve also been recording our experiences with these crops. (Our 2010, 2011 and 2012 Crops Lists record our planting and first harvest dates.) Now it’s time to put all that information to work.
Our first ever Garden Gantt Chart is an attempt to give us a visual, week-by-week schedule for our crops. In the spring, the chart will help us determine which garden beds need to be prepared and planted each week. In summer, it will be helpful to make sure we start our late-season seedlings on time.
Multiple plantings of short-season crops (such as Lettuce and Radishes) and space-saving scheduling of different crops in a single bed (such as Peas and Pole Beans) are reflected in the chart. We’ve also included times for starting our own seedlings indoors (something we hope to do more of next year).
The chart is still officially in the draft stage. We’ll be adjusting the information as we move through this year’s gardening season. The removal (or last harvest) for the crops wasn’t recorded, so information for later in the season is a bit speculative. Look for a finished version in late fall.
Please note: Though this is our third year of gardening this space, it’s our first year of early spring gardening. Planting was delayed our first two years by the need to build the garden from the ground up in April. Permission to leave the fence and garden beds in place last winter allowed our first on-time start this year.
Hornworm returns
A sphinx moth has dropped by the garden once again. That’s the parent of the hornworm caterpillar Lisa found munching last week on one of our green tomatoes.
The hornworm looks like something out of a medieval fairytale. It’s bright green with slanted white stripes and dark eye-spots on its sides and a curved black horn extending out from its rear end.
Because their coloring is so close to that of the plants they visit, hornworms can be hard to spot at first, clinging as they do to the underside of the branches they defoliate. But once you see one, you think you’re looking at a miniature monster.
A hornworm brigade attacked our tomatoes two summers ago. Fortunately, however, right behind them came a flight of parasitic wasps launching a counterattack of their own. They stopped most of the hornworms in their tracks, but not before the little monsters had stripped bare the tops of several tomato plants.
So far this summer, we’ve spotted just one horn worm, and no parasitic wasps.
Curiously enough, this time the hornworm did not go for the tomato plant’s leaves. This time Lisa found him munching on a tomato.
Top 5 Things to Know About Corn Pollination
Most of the corn plants in our Three Sisters bed have reached the tassel stage, and some of them have also reached the silk stage. This is important, because corn has both male and female parts — that is, the silk and the tassel.
Alan was nice enough to snap this photo of the golden and red tassels formed on our popcorn plants:
Proper soil moisture, as well as air temperature, are both critical to having both the tassel and silk appear at the same time, and therefore create the proper circumstances for successful pollination. Many of our crop plants are pollinated by insects, (e.g., bees, wasps, moths and ground beetles), but corn is different. The corn plant depends on wind to carry the pollen from a tassel to the silk strands that form at the top of each potential ear of corn.
For more info, click here for the Top 5 Things to Know about Corn Pollination.
Our raised bed
When we expanded the garden between years one and two, we added a parcel with a drop in elevation that was evident the day we paced out what our request to the Rec department would be.
It turns out that the drop is about 16 inches, as measured early this season by Alan Jones and I (mostly Alan). We weren’t seeking data for its own purpose, but to assess how high to stack stones to make a level bed in our southeast corner.
We found the rocks, it should come as no surprise, while double-digging other beds (which may well be my next blog-post topic). Just for this one bed, whose walls fade away to nothing about two-thirds up the slope, we used not only most of the big rocks we excavated this year, but reclaimed some we’d relocated along the park perimeter.
The stacking is as rudimentary (skill-less) as you can imagine. Steven Lee and I put the biggest rocks in the corners, the next largest along the bottom row, and for the rest, tried to match shapes that “interlocked” as best we could. We can say that, so far, the rocks are still standing.
One reason we wanted to try the raised bed is that last year, downhill flow during a rainstorm actually washed away some garlic we’d planted. By making a level planting field, we thought could mitigate, or redirect, any such future torrents. And, it looks nice, in a rustic, New England sort of way.
