Dabney Garden Blog

So today I saw this lady in a tank tops and cutoffs carrying a two-year-old wearing only shorts.  Does this adequately illustrate how warm it has been?  We haven’t had days below 70ish, except that one when it rained. 

As a result, the garden’s looking great.  The tree-trimming seems to have made the carrots happy, if nothing else.  I was able to harvest about ten little tomatoes and a few peas today.  These are the first ready peas I’d seen, even though I wrote about seeing a blossom December 22nd. Probably haven’t been looking closely enough.  And as a result, missing tastiness.

Today I saw a cluster of seven honeybees drinking water off a still-wet soaker hose.  

The bean plant(s) near the wall were not looking so happy, and I’d been meaning to pull them out for a while.  I bought a potted rosemary plant with the intent of putting it in the corner when the bean was done-it’s probably the best placement for a perennial bush.  I finally replaced the bean today.  When I pulled it out, I got another double-handful of dried bean pods out of its unreachable depths (and converted them into 1/3 cup of beans).  I also found some sprouting beans, which I replanted near the snow peas.  

I also put some more of Alex’s sprouting onions into the ground, including nine cloves of garlic.  While the garlic may bulb again, the onions should be let to go to seed. They already had 3-6 inch bulbs, and likely won’t improve upon that.

My indoor starter flats are really happy.  I planted them sixteen days ago, and all four types (basil, kohlrabi, oregano, and parsley) are up, in that order.  They certainly follow the light of the desklamp- when I turn them, three hours later they are leaning toward the light again.  We’ll have more herbs for the wall bed when it gets warm for good.  (Who knows, maybe that’s now?)

Tree Trimming

So, over MLK weekend, I sent an email to Grounds Manager Delmy Emerson asking whether we could have the two olive trees trimmed to allow more sunlight in the big patch.  Remarkably, the following Wednesday afternoon I happened upon a guy finishing up the job.  Thanks Grounds!  (Unfortunately it hasn’t been sunny any day since, so it’s hard to tell how much better it will be yet.)

Fungicide

I bought a tree oil based fungicide to help out with the powdery mildew problems (neem oil, for those of you keeping score at home).  I refuse to let the squash die of it without a fight.  I have no illusions that a chemical that comes from a tree is necessarily better than one that comes from a lab.  I’m sure it doesn’t qualify as organic, and I can attest that the concentrate is an irritant. (Yeah yeah, the bottle warned me.)  I chose this particular chemical primarily based on the fact that it breaks down quickly in the environment (one to several days) and has low phytotoxicity at use concentrations.  It kills the mildew on contact and ceases to be active after it dries, so I’ve been using it about once a week on the squash, tomatoes, beans, occasionally the lower leaves of the kale.  I have gone to some lengths to avoid spraying anything someone would want to eat.  It seems to be helping.  The tomatoes especially respond well to it– we won’t be pulling up any more of them.

Worm Composting

So, I finished building a worm bin and ordered a pound of worms from the internet at the tremendous cost of $33.  It’s not clear you could do it for any cheaper. I called about 6 local nurseries, but the best offer I got was I could reserve some worms from the next order, three week lag. Sad.  (Note: composting worms are Eisenia foetida, not the same as normal earthworms.  They’re good at living at high population density and eating approximately their own body weight per day of most anything you can throw at them. Earthworms, I’m told, would just die.)  So we should get our worms next Tuesday or Wednesday, and start having them eat things for us.  Between the worms and the regular bins, we should have some nice compost to use for spring plantings.

Fooood!

Since that last week or nine days had consistent temperatures of 80-85 degrees, the tomatoes set a tremendous amount of fruit.  I’ve picked and eaten or distributed at least 10 cute little tomatoes, and there are many more, including a conical heirloom variety, beginning to ripen on the plants. Kristen notes that the tomatoes taste like they were grown in the cold.  I’m interested to see whether we can tell the difference after it gets warm.  Also, it’s really cool that the tomatoes are still doing so well-  we’ll have tomatoes continuously as soon as it gets warm.

There’s also arugula and lettuce growing wild in the yard, presumably seeded from last year’s wall patch. Along with the thriving mustard greens, you can make a pretty solid salad. 

The radishes aren’t large, but we ate a tiny one the other day– very punchy, good flavor.

I think the beans are done; their last gasp yielded about a quarter cup of dry-able beans.  I’m going to pull them out soon, and I’m strongly considering just leaving in the trellising and planting new beans seeds come warm times. Who said gardening had to be hard?

Also, in a few days, we’re going to start having peas.

On a better note, the day I left (12/22/08) the first sweet pea plant had a pretty purple bloom, and one of the squash was starting to get a bud.  Note that these yield dates, even if they bear fruit, will be beyond the expected range for the plant.  Clearly these ranges are calculated for summer growing, and the Theoretical Eating Chart is not so useful for winter plantings.  I’m not sure how to update it for winter usefulness, as even the latter range dates are far too early.

But yeah, we’re going to have veggies, and that’s cool.

Beef & veggie stew using onions and beans from the garden.  Not that you can really tell that from the photo, but isn’t it cool?

I arrived at the garden this afternoon to find all the weeds removed and the size of the garden increased by a factor of 2 or more. What’s even more amazing is that almost all the existing plants are perfectly OK. We don’t actually know what agents are responsible for this, but whoever it was worked magic, because I understand it all got done in one day — work that would take us a week with a pickax and shovel. Thank you so much to whoever’s responsible!

So we planned the winter crops, in order to make sure we’ve got something planted to keep down the weeds. Roper’s door (in Tunnel) contains the full list, which he will perhaps post here at some point when he’s got a bit of a break from work. Suffice it to say that there are a huge number of different greens coming, plus some root veggies, peas, squash, cucumbers, and various oniony things. Planting schedule will be forthcoming, but hasn’t been discussed yet; many of the seeds were ordered today, so we’ll have to wait for them to come in.

Incidentally, the new crop of beans seem to be doing great. If you want to pick some, go ahead; the ones growing in shadier parts of the plants are tastier.

I’ve been on hiatus this month until now, but I’m totally going to get some work done this weekend. Anyone who wants to help should do so. This is what we need to get done:

1. Pull out those poor dead squash plants. Kill the fungus-infected leaves with fire.
2. Cardboard and mulch a larger part of the garden. (Operation is cardboard-limited.)
3. Then compost and plant all of that new area. I’ll bring the seed beans when I come, maybe grab some extras from the Kentucky Wonders if we’ve got extra.
4. Remove the impenetrable arugula forest that has taken over the wall bed, saving seed if possible. That will also enable us to take a look at the beans and see if anything needs to be done there.
5. Shear the garlic (this helps the bulbs develop). I’ll take the scapes home, but if anyone else wants some they’re welcome to ‘em. I’m sure there will be plenty.
6. Take a picture of that weird little nightshade with the tiny purple berries. Maybe someone can figure out what the hell it is.

Again, anybody’s welcome to come out and help. I’ll be there either Saturday or Sunday, but you don’t need me there to get work done.

New developments:

• Trash can for the coffee grounds is here. Eric is taking it to Pedro Luna right now.
• We cardboarded and mulched probably 9 to 12 m^2 on the west side of the main garden patch yesterday. Would’ve done more but we ran out of convenient cardboard. Once this is layered with coffee, more mulch, and compost, it’ll be ready for planting. It might be a good idea to put in raised-bed borders, but maybe not until we’ve prepared the whole area.
• Also, we put in a nice straight deep ditch for drainage, running south along the west border of the main patch and draining into a holding pit south of the grassy area. When we got there the sprinklers had turned the whole area into a swamp. A guy from Operations came and turned it off for us though; apparently it was just stuck on.
• Scott Hersey said he could help on weekends.
• One of the bean strings fell down off the porch. Someone should fix this.
• People should eat tomatoes; they’re tasty.

Hi all,

Val and I ordered a trash can to lend to the Red Door Cafe. They will be donating their used coffee grounds to the garden instead of trashing them as they currently do. Coffee grounds make an excellent mulch, fertilizer, and addition to compost. Eric will be setting it up in a few days.

We have also ordered three more composting bins, since our current donation from Carol is nearly full. These will be a nice rolly model.

Additionally, we will, over the next few weeks, be placing compost buckets (they have an airtight seal and odor-absorbing lid) in the Hovse kitchens. If you really don’t want one in your kitchen email Eric and it will not be put there. We don’t have the resources to regularly empty them, however, so it is up to students who use them to take them out when full. There will be signs on them explaining this.

I’ve loaned a few pieces of equipment to Chris Watson for the purpose of starting a garden at 255 S. Hill, and used a bit of our helping other campus groups funding for soil for his project. Housing may be reimbursing us, but I did build in some getting other groups started funds into the proposal.

Rather than sending out emails to this list for status updates, I plan to set up a blog on our UGCS space. When active, it will be at http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~garden/. There will be RSS and all that Web 2.0 stuff that makes yuppies drool.

Finally, there are some edibles back there now, tons of pole beans (Val says you can eat them raw now or wait a few weeks and shell them.), tons of kale by the wall, and lots of garlic shoots and green onion greens. More coming soon.

Peace out to the free world,
Alex

Short:
* If you have 5 mins please review the MHF proposal due tomorrow: https://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~alexr/garden.pdf
* If you want garlic shoots or lettuce, feel free to pick some. We have far too much lettuce and a decent amount of garlic
* If you have 30-45 minutes please help by thinning the kale patch/moving plants around to good spacing.

Elaboration:
* The proposal is almost complete. Only changes will be adding a statement from Tom and changing the bursar’s account number to a real account. Anything else needs changing, please let me know ASAP. Constructive criticism/suggestions appreciated
* If you have experience gardening, even if you haven’t/don’t plan to help much with the garden, please send me a few sentences/paragraph to
put in. The MHF wants to see we have knowledgeable people on board the project.

* Trim garlic shoots that you take leaving hte plant about 4 inches to work with. Trimming like this encourages bulb development.
* Try to take the lettuce flowers along with leaves. Even if you don’t eat them it will encourage leave growth.

* The kale in the white rectangle should be in two rows about 1 ft apart. Plants in a row should be 2-3 in apart

Cheers,
Alex