More lessons from 2007

1. Learn how to mulch. First I was waiting to mulch until the seedlings came up. Then I was afraid of smothering the seedlings, so I was waiting until they got high enough that I could put mulch under them. Then I was overwhelmed by the difficulties of tucking mulch in around the base of all those plants. I didn't learn until the end of the year that I don't have to "tuck it in" around the stem. :D I also didn't have the money for a good commercial mulch, the transportation to get much of it, or the patience to shred enough newspaper to mulch 70 square feet of ground. And don't use peat moss as mulch. It dries into an almost impermeable layer. I learned that after just one watering. My most effecti ve mulch was coffee grounds. I was cautious with them this year -- next year I'll be less cautious.
   


2. Don't plant cucumbers beside the lavender. Interplanting works great, but cucumbers need LOTS more water than herbs are comfy with. Flowers and herbs, okay; strawberries and herbs, okay; cucubits and herbs, no.
   


3. Mark where you planted! I sometimes forgot where seeds were, and which. The markers of individual nursery plants got lost, too. Not as big deal, but I was surprised when our (one) green pepper turned red; and what I thought was a zucchini turned out to be a sunburst squash while the sunburst squash turned out to be a zucchini.
   


4. Keep up the garden journal better. I started out faithfully recording every sowing, every watering, every feeding, every time it rained, the date I started a new worm bin or compost bin. By the end of September, though, I slacked off on keeping records. Now I wish I had them.
   


5. When you buy nursery seedlings, you can get more than one in a pot. The reason the peppers never thrived turned out to be that they were each two plants, put in together. When I tried to separate multiple seedlings in other pots, they sometimes did not thrive. Again it seems best to steel yourself to cut off extra seedlings early, in order to get one productive plant.
   


6. If you start your own plants, you have more control over what you get. Of three pots I bought all simply labeled "zucchini," one was light green and pear-shaped, one was dark green and round, and one was dark green and, well, zucchini-shaped. This was interesting, but... well, I want to know what I'm raising!
   


7. You have to start the winter garden before winter. I could have more growing now, if I'd realized I had to plant it earlier.
   


8. Foliar feed is pretty much wasted on lightly-feeding plants. Not that it hurts them - but it's a waste of money.
   


9. Don't try starting seeds in potting soil. It works much better in peat moss. And even in warm weather, some plants start better in peat moss than in garden soil.
   


10. Worm castings don't solve everything. They worked so well on the black spot that I tried them on the downy mildew, too. Doesn't work on downy mildew.
    


11. The charts say beets like acid soil, but mine grew a lot better after I added some dolomite lime.
    


12. Sunburst squash tastes better when you let it grow larger. The bite-sized squash on crudité trays is pretty bland, and isn't worth the space in a community garden when you have to make salad for 20 once a week. When it gets to three or four inch diameter, it develops a very pleasant flavor - and goes a lot farther!
    


13. Lemon cucumbers taste better when they are very deep yellow. They are edible when they've just begun to turn orange around the stem, but at that point they taste like almost any other cucumber. If you wait until the whole cucumber is dark yellow with streaks of orange, they begin to taste lemony. In a salad, though, nobody noticed any difference. Plant less lemon cucumbers next year, and use them whole.
    


14. When they say to use compost tea right away, they mean it. I let it sit too long, twice. BIG stink.
    

Top Ten Things I Learned in 2007

1. Don't crowd the plants. I put way too many big-vine plants (cucumbers, zucchini, "sunburst" squash, and pumpkins) in too small a space, with not enough trellising, and I never pruned anything. I ended up with a jungle, got only a few fruits from each plant, and in August downy mildew swept through the whole lot; by the end of September I had to pull up every plant and most of it, I couldn't even mulch. I lost a couple of heads of lettuce and a pansy to damp rot. I couldn't bear to thin the basil, and I ended up with a lot of tiny basil plants that bolted to flower almost right away. In general, thinning results in bigger, healthier, and more productive plants.
   


2. WATCH more closely for disease! I didn't notice the black spot until it was far along; I lost two peppers entirely. I also didn't notice the downy mildew early enough. When I did, I should have sacrificed the affected plants early, and I might have saved more.
   


3. Prune your tomatoes, they like it. Tips I found out too late: As soon as a tomato plant puts out its first flowers, pick off all the leaves up to that point. (And add soil; tomatoes can put out roots from their stems!) Pick off a few leaves every now and then through the season, to let sun reach all the tomatoes (makes it easier to see them for harvest, too). At the very end of the season, while waiting for the last of the fruit to ripen, pick off almost all the leaves. Tip I had but didn't use: You don't have to keep every tomato that sets. I had a LOT of tomatoes per plant, but most were very small. Next year, I'll go for less numbers, bigger individual fruit.
   


4. Don't plant under the tomatoes unless some sun is going to get in there! I tried it with pot marigolds, then with carrots. Both times, I got sprouts; then they disappeared as the leaf layer above them got thicker.
   


5. I need better trellising! I put four-foot metal tomato cages around the tomatoes, and they outgrew them. By the end of the season two of the tomato plants were lying horizontal. The flimsy plastic trellises I used for the cucumbers started leaning over even before anything had begun to lean on them. Other trellising mistakes: Often I didn't notice new growth that needed to be tied to the trellis before it had gone its own way too long, and bending it back ran the risk of breaking it. That was partly due to plants too close together, partly just not checking often enough. The zucchini did not seem amenable to trellising at all; I think it could have been if I'd started when it was younger. And I thought it was real cute at first when one of the cucumbers started climbing a tomato; then the cucumber leaves shaded by the tomato started dying. Not an experiment to repeat.
   


6. Switch to different greens in hot weather. The salad greens we started with produced wonderfully all spring. When the weather got hot, they shot up long stocks and flowered, and the leaves turned bitter. Next year, pull the spring greens as soon as the weather heats up, before they bolt. Plant some hot-weather greens (just before hot weather). Switch back to cool-weather greens in the fall.
   


7. Cherry Belle radishes don't grow well in winter. They were great all spring and summer; three weeks from planting to eating, and you can eat the thinnings too. I tried planting some the end of September and they hadn't gotten over two inches high, three months later.
   


8. Don't plant mesclun mixes unless you know what each variety looks like. I was letting weeds grow all over the garden because I didn't know what was a weed and what was unknown-green-number-eight in the mesclun seed mix. And ALL of what I thought were "Sacred Basil" seedlings turned out to be weeds. I'll try starting Sacred Basil indoors next year, and find out what the seedlings are supposed to look like. Someday I will now what every seedling of every crop and every weed looks like. Maybe by the time I'm 93.


9. Don't spend money on garden worms until you build up the organic content of the soil. It was December before it dawned on me that the reason the worms I'd added to the garden had not multiplied was, there wasn't enough for them to eat. I did build the soil up a lot, and the worms I did add survived. But they won't multiply until the soil gets rich enough to support a larger population. Instead of adding more worms, add more worm feed.
   


10. Avoid overhead watering. Really. By next spring I'm going to have a water-the-roots-only system of seep hoses put in. With the sandy soil and the raised beds, it's really impossible to over-water this garden. But damp-rot and downy mildew have made me very cautious about over-watering the leaves.
    

Planting onions

We straightened out which key is which today. I went out at 9:30 AM and put in 24 Walla Walla onion seedlings and 24 yellow onion seedlings, interplanted with the pansies, peppers, and mesclun-mix salad greens. I figure if the pansies serve to shade the onions, the mesclun and peppers should too.

The Walla Wallas go from the left side in.

The yellow onions go up the right side.

Closeup of the peppers with onions:


Then I poured more fertilizer on: used up the last of the compost tea, and then some for fish&kelp. Between yesterday and today, I've put 5 gallons (2-1/2 cups fish&kelp, 3 qts. compost tea) on the vegetable bed; 1-1/2 gal. each (3/4 c. fish&kelp, 1 pt. compost tea) on the strawberry bed and the herb bed.

As near as I can calculate, our garden needs 45 gallons of water a week. I probably gave it that much Saturday evening. The soil was moist and easy to dig for several inches down today, while being dry in patches just on the surface. With the extra water today, and whatever Jean and Claudia add when they plant their additions tomorrow, I'm not expecting to do another watering until Saturday. I'm going to try to use a much lighter touch Saturday; I think I brought the water down too hard on the pansies and petunias last time.

I'm going to get more compost tea every Saturday, but I need a mister to apply it properly. Pouring it onto the soil is helping the soil texture, but to get the most benefit I also want to soak the leaves, gently.

Here's a closeup of some soil. The soil from the veggie and herb beds is sandy, but at least holds together when pressed in a fist. A handful from the strawberry bed is more sandy; it forms a nice clump when pressed, but falls apart when released. (That's the sample in my hand, and it's too close to the camera to see clearly.)



No sign of slugs yet.

Shopping Day!

Tomorrow is planting day! We're going to be putting in a mix of seeds and nursery plants. Six of us, along with staff member Shelby, went to Home Depot today to pick out plants [and buy seeds for what hasn't arrived yet. :( ]

We also bought the bone meal and peat recommended in response to my question on Yahoo Answers.

I took my proposed garden plan along, but we didn't exactly stick to it. Once we saw live plants, everybody wanted something different!

We now have a bunch of salad greens already started; we can plant those next to the mixed-green seeds, and have a continuous harvest. I forgot that I already had radish seeds, and we got some more. We also got some spinach seed, which is another early crop. And I have plenty of beet seed; beet greens and baby beets can be harvested early. I think that's enough for greens this year; I'll stop fretting for turnips.

We have six tomato plants: two Early Girls; two Sweet 100s; a Sweet Red Cherry; and a beefsteak hybrid, name I forget. I'm sure all the seeds I bought will keep for next year, when we can start our own plans indoors. We got two zucchini plants and two cucumber plants (one burpless and one lemon) so I'm going to save the zucchini and cucumber seeds for next year, too. We got two pumpkin plants, which was unplanned for, but I love it. I still want to plant my seeds for Scallop Sunny Delight summer squash, though! I got nasturtium seeds, since the ones I ordered haven't arrived. Pea plants don't seem to come in starters, so I will be planting seeds for those. And that fills up ALL the space for trailing vines. Somehow we ended up with three pepper plants, plus a package of seeds. I don't know where we're going to put them!

We got some Walla Walla onion sets and half a dozen pansies, which we'll plant interspersed with the pansy seed I got. I'll see if what worked for Jackie French in Australia will work for us in the Pacific Northwest. :)

I was talked down from the 20 strawberry plants I wanted, to 10. According to Shelby, they have babies. :) I wanted six thyme plants among them; we got two. But they'll probably spread, too!

We got the lavender, rosemary, and sage that we had planned for the herb bed, plus oregano and peppermint. I know we've got at least two sage plants (two different kinds) but I'm not sure how many of the others we have. I think we need more; Shelby and Jean think those will spread to fill in the space we've got.

Shelby insisted on getting some creeping myrtle for "ground cover." I researched it after I got home; it will be pretty, but it's an invasive plant, and unlike the myrtle bush that it is not at all related to, it is toxic. I feel very strongly about not having any toxic plants around the garden, so I am going to urge Shelby to take the creepy myrtle home.

We got lots of marigolds. None of them seem to be the gem marigolds or the french marigolds that I wanted to plant. (Also among the seeds that never arrived!) We also got a nice big cosmos, which I hadn't planned for but fell in love with when I saw it. (It's purple.)

I wish I'd taken the camera along! I will definitely be taking pictures tomorow, though.

See you then!