Robbins Farm Garden

A Cooperative Learning Project

eggplant

Visitors enjoy the progress

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I opened the garden for an hour and a half yesterday afternoon. Though there were dramatic rains in both Lexington and Boston, none here! Even so, the garden looked well watered.

A nice group of Asian-American mothers and children came to visit. They remarked on the eggplants (great purple blossoms), the amaranth, and the tomatoes. Earlier a mother with two daughters enjoyed finding the hidden zucchini. Several people took the cards.

I tried to draw the amaranth and the basil, impossible as usual.

Mid-season pH check

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When we first opened the garden, we had the soil tested, and the pH (acid/alkaline balance) was very low, about 5.8. We added 170 lbs of lime when we dug it up – about 17 lbs/100 sf. We checked the soil again on June 26 in a few spots around the garden, and the pH was around 6.6, which is just about perfect for most vegetables. It takes a while for the lime we added in April to change the soil chemistry, so we wanted to verify that we’d added enough. Every time it rains, the soil becomes a little more acid, so we need to keep checking and adjusting throughout the season.

We lightly dusted lime around the plants that have a sweet tooth (cauliflower, broccoli, tomatoes, beets and greens). Some plants (potatoes, eggplant) like it a bit more acidic, so we did not add any lime to those beds.

We used calcitic lime (plain ordinary powdered limestone, or calcium carbonate) because it adds a quick shot of calcium to the soil, to help prevent blossom end rot on the tomatoes.

Soil pH is important because plants won’t absorb nutrients from the soil as well if the pH is too high or too low. A good introduction to soil pH is here, on the UMass Extension web site.

Did you know that farmers used to check their pH by tasting the soil?

pH adjustment

Are the Nadias coming back strong ?

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Nadia bloom 
Just a week ago, the garden’s Nadia eggplants were beginning to look like a lost cause. They were flat to the ground, at best just 1/3 the height of the Mangans. Plus they had no blooms, where the Mangans had bloomed early.

Happily, however, the Nadias are now catching up. Several display gorgeous blooms of their own. And they’ve shot up, doubling their height. They’re not the height of the Mangans, to be sure, but they are now at least half way.

Let’s not count the Nadias out yet.

Nadias & Mangans

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.

Eggplant faceoff: No contest?

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Mangan got her first flowers this weekend, a full week earlier than expected.

She’s also now a stately 3 times taller than the very squat Nadia.

Plus her stems and veins are a beautiful deep purple, where Nadia looks quite plain.

At this point, Mangan is leaving Nadia in the dust.

Blossoms and even a fruit

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TomatoesOur fourteen tomato plants went into the ground at Memorial Day, after a robust discussion the week before of which types and quantities we should raise.

Twelve of them ended up in the bed we designated for them, and singles are in the adjacent brassica bed in openings created when we had to remove diseased cauliflower and cabbage plants.

This is our roster, thanks to Lisa, who reported their planting when they went in: 2 sugar plum grape, 2 sungold cherry, 1 red zebra, 1 blondkopfchen cherry, 2 Moskovitch, 1 yellow perfection, 1 red brandywine, 1 brandywine, 1 Charlie Black and 2 eva purples.

The method for planting was completely different than what I would have done with my own tomato plants at home had I not been there to observe: The holes were dug one-third deeper than the pots the seedlings were in; this was because tomatoes, I was told (by Mike, or Alan?) are vines, and all about their roots. To accommodate the added depth, we pinched off the shoots from the stem that would have been underground.

The holes were prepared, meanwhile, just as I had, on instruction, earlier in the day for peppers and eggplants: A small handful of chicken poop for fertilizer and a sprinkling of pulverized eggshells for calcium, to ward off blossom end rot. 

Mike, who headed the tomato committee, advised mounding small rings of earth at each plant’s drip line, to form sort of a watering dish. This, he told me, ensures that water showered on the plant is more likely to arrive at its roots, instead of dampening all the surrounding area.

Last Saturday, the first tomato appeared on one of the plants — sorry, dunno which one (it was a sugar plum)— mottled green and marble-sized. I took a picture to share with you, but my auto-focus got a really sharp image of the hairs of an adjoining stem instead. It was mottled green and marble-sized, trust me.