Garden Maintenance

Well, the garden is chugging along with very little help from us, but it's not producing very much. Hmmm...Poor soil? Overcrowding? Too much moisture? Not enough moisture? We will have to investigate before the next planting season and revise our gardening strategies accordingly.

Our only other problem has been an invasion of mealybugs and some powdery mildew, which we have treated with natural products specifically made for vegetables. So far, the damage seems minimal.

We have had to reinforce the corners of the e-fence because the plastic posts had started to lean toward the garden beds and the wires were drooping. Our remedy was to place short lengths of rebar next to the plastic posts and to secure them to the original posts with plastic zip ties. This tightened up the wires considerably.

Also, the sweet potato vines had been growing out of the bed and shorting out the e-fence, so we corralled the vines with a length of short garden fencing kindly donated by Jane.

We continue to wait patiently...

Last Spring Harvest

The last of the spring lettuce, various herbs, and our first batch of pole beans and snowpeas...yum...

Garden Review

The gardeners got together on Memorial Day and we discussed our successes and failures so far. (Wine and spicy chocolate cupcakes were on hand to facilitate our conversation...)

First, it appears that we need to increase the drainage in our garden beds and to be very careful with moisture levels. We have lost several seedlings and all of our spinach as a result of problems related to overwatering. (Planting the spinach earlier in the season might also have prevented it from bolting, as we had an unusually warm spring.)

Second, in the large garden bed, the position of the pole beans and tomatoes on the far trellis should be reversed if we plant them again. The tomatoes do not seem to be getting quite enough sun, whereas the bean plants look a bit crispy.

Third, we need to be more deliberate in thinning our root vegetables and bok choy as they grow. Although the bok choy was certainly edible, the plants were spindly and didn't develop the deep green leaves, plump stalks, and classic bok choy taste that we were hoping for -- we think that overcrowding might have been the problem.

We will take these notes into account as we prepare for our next planting season!

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Free Wildflower Seedlings: Cardinal Flower

Virginia has been growing wildflowers from the seeds that she gets as a member of the North Carolina Botanical Garden. And because she believes in spreading the love, she'd like to give some of those seedlings to friends of Savasana Community Garden.

Right now, she has about six cardinal flower (lobelia cardinalis) seedlings that are ready to find new homes. According to the Botanical Garden, cardinal flower is a hummingbird favorite with its "striking red flowers," and it requires average soil and sun to part-shade. Read more about this plant here.

If you would like a seedling or two (or more), please leave a comment on the blog or contact Virginia by phone or email. The seedlings will be a distributed on the usual first-come-first-served basis. Enjoy!

There will be more wildflowers to come!

Remember Kids: Safety First!

The garden has received several days of steady rain, which has been great for the veggies but not so good for the gardeners, who were left with slippery and treacherous paths between the garden beds. To remedy this, Peggy and Virginia spread several bags of rubber mulch between the beds this afternoon.

We also snipped a few herbs (the basil smells amazing), harvested the rest of the radishes and some lettuce (and replanted both), and thinned out the bok choy to give the remaining plants more room to grow. Salad, anyone?

This is how the garden is looking today - fabulous, no?

Our First Harvest: Radishes!

We harvested our first crop of bright red, crunchy, and delightfully spicy "Cherry Belle" radishes after yoga class on Thursday - Raphanus sativus never tasted so good! We will plant another row in the next week or two because we just can't get enough!

Our zucchini and tomato plants are starting to flower, and everything else looks happy and healthy.

The best defense is a good e-fence!

As promised, here are some photos of our new electric fence, which appears to be successfully protecting our garden from the local rabbits and squirrels. It's a very simple system, with aluminum wire (about 75 feet) strung through metal cotter pins attached to 2-foot plastic rods. We strung two wires, one about six inches above the ground, and the second about two inches above that. The wire is connected to an energizer on Peggy's deck, which is grounded by a 2-foot rebar sunk into the ground below.

Now we just have to be careful about not tripping on the wires as we garden! Peggy's going to devise a flagging system to help us remember that the wire is actually there.

As for the garden itself, we have some new friends in the form of toads (who were instantly given a toad house, thanks to Peggy) and some new seedlings (because even if you're urgently shopping at Lowe's for electric fencing, it's hard not to cruise through the veggie and herb aisle!). We lost the Hillbilly tomato (which did start out in poor shape) and all of the cucumber seedlings (due mostly to overwatering, as mentioned previously). But from Lowe's we gained parsley, replacement cucumbers, sweet potato "Beauregard" (it seemed like a good idea at the time!) and...um...asparagus (you see, asparagus looks a lot like dill when you're in a hurry...). Jane's husband Greg has also donated a Roma tomato plant.

The new cucumber seedlings have gone into the large garden bed, the parsley is now in one of the herb tubs, and the sweet potatoes are in the new tomato bed, along with the Roma tomato and the accidental asparagus. (We took a "let's throw it in the tomato bed and see what happens" attitude toward the asparagus because we really don't know what we're doing there.) Peggy has also rustled up some actual dill, which will find its way to a herb tub very soon.

And now, with any luck, we just sit back and watch it all thrive.