Busy Busy Busy

It’s funny how drastically different this spring season is compared to last year’s. We enjoyed such a mild winter and early spring last year, we were able to get a lot done. The only reason we waited until May 2 to plant our tomatoes last year was because we hadn’t yet acquired the land for them. This year has been so cold and wet that a lot of things have been delayed.

We finished planting our tomatoes in Sunset Hills on April 28. However, this may still have been too early; we’ve also since planted some at Iowa Ave. and they seem to be faring better.

Along with tomatoes in the back section of our Iowa Ave. garden we also transplanted some pepper plants last week. Because of the invasive grass, we planted the peppers in holes we cut through burlap coffee bags and lined all the paths between plants with burlap and straw.

Here’s the whole back section, complete with burlap and straw. Between the peppers and tomatoes we planted parsley, nasturtium, thyme, and other herbs.

We also started a new tomato container garden in the section by the west fence where we were growing nothing but tall grass and weeds. To keep the grass out, we laid out a tarp and plastic sheeting before placing the pots and topping with wood chips. This method worked well for us in a different section last year.

Besides dealing with the terrible grass, we’ve also found evidence of pest damage to some of our newly-sprouted bean plants (above is an Italian pole bean seedling). It happens every year, the beans and peppers are the first to be eaten. We’ve used Dawn dish soap in the past but  this year I got some Dr. Bronner’s castile soap- more natural. Mixed with water, I’ve been spraying the tops and bottoms of the leaves and stems of all of our bean plants, and the damage has been limited.

Some of the popcorn we planted sprouted, but not all of it. We want to make sure it grows close together enough for sufficient pollination, so we reseeded some of the areas where germination was low.

We have two new raised beds at Iowa Ave.  (as seen in our garden outline) this year.  I planted horseradish, mustard, and kale in one, and Eric planted ginger (pictured above) in the other. We grew ginger last year in our side yard after sprouting it in shallow pots first. This year we direct seeded- the smaller pieces are our ginger from last year, the bigger pieces are organic ginger from Local Harvest.

The other thing keeping us busy this spring is setting up a new garden space at Eric’s sister’s new house. She found a house in the city with a 1/4 acre lot, and she’s letting us farm it (thanks Amy!). We tilled up this section of her yard literally the same day she closed on the house, May 1.

We called on our Sunset Hills gardening buddy, Tom, to till the area. It was just too much space for our little walk-behind tiller.

After several hours, Tom had mowed the overgrown grass and tilled up these two big sections for us. Unfortunately we were losing daylight, so he was only able to pass over each area once with the tiller.

To really remove all the grass, we needed it tilled again. Of course it rained for the next four days straight, so it took a week before Tom was able to come out to finish the job. As he tilled we worked to pull out grass clumps, and we returned yesterday to continue pulling them out.

Here’s a view from the other side of the yard. In this big section we’ll grow sweet potatoes, squash (summer and winter), pumpkins, melons, and whatever else we can fit.

Today I applied some fertilizer and crushed gypsum to the longer, thinner section where we’ll plant tomatoes, then covered with a layer of free compost. Eric is planning to return tomorrow with our little tiller to work the compost in and space out our mounded rows, then plant tomatoes and peppers! We’re also hoping to install a drip irrigation system to help with watering.

The weather has really forced us to be super productive in the short periods of time between rain. The forecast for this coming week looks pretty clear, thankfully. Lots of work ahead of us!

Wild Gourd Farm

You may have noticed some changes to the blog here. Well, it’s official, our operation finally has a name- Wild Gourd Farm.

No, we’re not changing our game plan and only growing gourds. We’ll still be tending our various garden patches with various plants throughout the St. Louis area (and have plans for two more gardens in the works). So where’s the name come from?

Eric recently found a wild gourd vine growing off the banks of the Meramec River, with several dried gourds still attached. Was it cultivated by Native Americans in the area? Did it germinate from seeds swept down the river? This find was mysterious, rare, and beautiful.

We’re determined to grow this wild gourd variety and keep its heritage alive. We’ve split one of the gourds open and are working on germinating some of the seeds, which is proving to be a challenge.

In the end, these artifacts symbolize our approach to life and gardening- a return to self-reliance in the wilderness (urban though ours may be), following the natural flow of the seasons, always ready for a challenge.

We’re looking forward to a new gardening season with our new name. St. Louis friends, look for our produce around town, especially at the Cherokee Street International Farmers’ Market, starting this Friday, May 3rd!

Babying the Tomato Plants

It’s cold and rainy again, calling for lows tonight in the mid 30s and gusts of wind as strong as 20 mph! So we’re doing our best to protect our tomato plants, both in ground and in pots.

This morning I went out to Sunset Hills to protect our newly-planted tomatoes. It gets colder out there in the county than it does in the city. Thankfully, Eric’s mom was willing to help me in the rain! We wrapped plastic sheeting around all of the tomato cages and secured it with staples, clothespins, and wire.

I don’t think we’ll get any frost but we wanted to be extra safe. Along with the straw, the plastic should be a good wind break and provide more insulation. We’ll just have to remove the plastic on Thursday before it gets too warm!

Here at home, Eric helped me build a windbreak for the potted tomato plants. Most of our plants are safe and sound inside our half hoop house but many are outside hardening off. This tarp attached to wooden stakes driven deep in the ground should protect these babies from strong gusts of wind. 

On a side note, we’re now selling our tomato plants! All organic, many heirloom varieties including Arkansas Traveler, Costuloto Genovese (our favorite), a bush Beefsteak variety, all colors of cherry tomatoes, and several others. In 3″ or 4″ pots, $3 each. Let us know if you’d like any!

Edit: We only sell locally in the St. Louis area. We are not able to ship plants at this time. Thanks for understanding!

How We Spent Earth Day Weekend

This weekend was dedicated to the gardens.

It all started Friday night, when the forecast called for a chance of frost overnight. A few days earlier a surprise frost nipped a few of our tomato and pepper plants, so we didn’t want to take any chances. Thus began the great plant shuffle of 2013- all of the pepper plants and the tomato plants that hadn’t hardened off yet (they were in the half-hoop house) were brought inside. As you can see above, we had hundreds of plants inside, covering literally every available surface in our apartment. The plants we’d had outside hardening off were put in the hoop house. Then, about 12 hours later on Saturday morning we put them all back where they started.

Most of the rest of Saturday was spent at our Sunset Hills garden working on our tomato patch.

We’re using a similar method as last year, utilizing burlap in between the rows and all plants to keep weeds down and moisture levels high. It’s been a cool, rainy spring here in St. Louis so we only planted about 1/3 of our tomatoes for the year, the rest to be planted later.  Most of Saturday was spent building trellises.

Last year we staked each tomato plant separately and tied them as they grew, which was a royal pain. The plants sprawled in all directions and we lost a lot of tomatoes that ended up growing on the ground. So this year we constructed individual 5′ tall wire mesh cages for each plant (about 50).

Though we didn’t plant all the tomatoes, we plotted out the rows and fertilized the spaces for each plant. We interplanted some borage, basil, marigold, and calendula seeds today and finished off with straw on top.

After a full day’s work at Sunset Hills we shot over to Iowa Avenue while we still had daylight.

Our bamboo teepee trellis stands 8′ tall and will support our favorite flat Italian pole beans. We’re going to tie string horizontally around the bamboo but leave an opening in front so we can walk into the middle to harvest the beans.

After several brainstorming sessions, we figured that purchasing nylon netting was the quickest, easiest, and cheapest way to trellis our new bean section this year. We planted a row of mystery beans (unidentified, collected last year), black beans, bolita beans, and burgundy bush beans, with carrots and salad greens along each row. The paths in between were lined with burlap and straw to keep the weeds down (the evil grass was already starting to regrow- UGH!).

On the other side of the beans we planted popcorn in rows. We haven’t grown corn before, we’re hoping we planted them closely enough to allow for good pollination. We plan to interplant seeds from a wild gourd that Eric found along the Meramec River.

We have a lot to do still, but the forecast predicts lows in the 30s again this week, so we don’t want to get too far ahead of ourselves. We’ll probably go and wrap plastic around the bottoms of the tomato cages in Sunset Hills to help protect the plants over the cold nights. As soon as the weather breaks, we’ll be planting another big wave of tomatoes, all our peppers, and the rest of our veggies. Can’t wait!

Up-Potting: It Never Ends!

We’ve been up-potting tomato, pepper, and other herbs and veggie plants for several weeks, after starting over 800 from seed. From grow lights in the basement, the plants are transplanted into larger pots (4″ diameter) and placed in our greenhouse as an intermediate step before hardening off. We had a pretty hefty stash of plastic pots saved from previous years and managed to scrounge lots of pots from several other sources, but we finally ran out. So we bought some Solo cups from the dollar store and drilled holes in the bottom for drainage.

It’s been pretty cold here in St. Louis (especially compared to last year), so we’re glad we have the hoop house to help store them- temperatures inside have soared over 100°F, so we keep it vented.

 

We built this make-shift shelving unit from wooden crates and boards (all free). 

 We’ve designated the left side of the hoop house for the potted plants, and the right side has salad greens, cilantro, and kale, which we seeded last fall.

Here are some tomato plants hardening off outside of the hoop house.

We’re planning to plant about 100 tomato plants and sell the rest at the Cherokee Street International Farmers’ Market, which starts May 3rd! Varieties include our favorite yellow cherry and other cherry varieties, Arkansas traveler, Costuloto Genovese, black giant, a bush variety we’ve saved seeds from for years, and several other heirloom varieties.

This Week on Iowa Ave.

March blasted through and left us with about 7 inches of snow on the ground. We got to work as soon as it melted. On the agenda: major expansion of the Iowa Ave. garden. Ideally we would’ve completed this last fall, but we ran out of time.

Here’s a shot of the back part of the garden before all the work:

Last year we planted tomatoes, cucumbers, and beans directly in the ground in the back section by the fence. No beds, no tilling, and the eventually the grass totally took over. So this year we’re determined to nip that problem in the bud by completely eliminating all the grass before we plant.

The grass is a formidable foe, and we’ve battled it before. This section was buried under a tarp, burlap sacks, wood chips, and containers of tomatoes for nearly an entire year. We never expected to see such a thick mat of grass roots under the tarp after we pulled it up! So instead of just tilling, we had to hand-dig as much of the root mass out as possible. To do this, we had to dig down a foot or more, physically pull out all visible roots and then sift through the resulting mounds of soil to ensure no roots were left. We’ve found that even the tiniest piece of root, no matter how dry and brittle, will regrow and eventually generate a field’s worth of grass.

The back section was ready to till after a couple hours of digging. After tilling, we added a rock border to retain the soil and started a chicken wire fence to keep out chickens and dogs. All said, tilling this back section added about 300 square feet of planting space; we’ll be planting tomatoes, peppers, basil, and as many flowers as we can fit.

Next, we tackled the middle section of the yard. Previously this had been home to our keyhole garden, which contained sunchokes and melons last year (along with a truly despicable amount of grass). We love the idea of a keyhole garden and hope to install another one someday in the future.

We dug up the sunchokes first and ended up filling a 5 gallon bucket! We had only planted a handful of little tubers, so this harvest was a welcome success. There were two other beds that we moved out of this area, too, out of which we transplanted garlic, mint, and strawberries.

I worked on digging up this middle section myself for a whole day and didn’t even finish!

Three-quarters of the way through, and I had filled this giant red bucket with roots and emptied it four times. With Eric and his mom’s help, we finished digging today and then quickly ran over the area with the tiller. We had basically already tilled it by hand.

Luckily St. Louis city provides yard waste dumpsters, so we can take the roots completely off site. At the end of my time digging yesterday, the yard waste dumpster had already been emptied once and was half-full of roots. By the end of our workday today, the dumpster was completely full. That’s right, an entire dumpster full of grass roots.

The newly tilled middle section added another 200 square feet of planting space to our garden. Like the back section, we also bordered it to retain the soil and will need to fence it in eventually. We added a stepping stone walkway to separate the left 2/3 of the space from the right 1/3 so we can plant different crops.

Here’s our overall garden plan (click to enlarge):

*plus many other things already growing (hops, sunflowers, etc.) and more to be inter-planted.

With all the work we put in this week, we have high hopes for this garden this year. Eric is planning to install a drip irrigation system (easier said than done, he says). That way we can devote our time in the garden to more productive activities, like truly keeping the grass at bay.

Seed Starting: New and Improved!

We’ve upgraded our seed-starting operation for this year. From our homemade grow light fixtures, we’ve graduated to four fluorescent shop lights hung on a 6′ x 3′ metal shelving unit. Right now we have about 1,000 seedlings under these lights in our basement; last year our set-up only allowed us to start about 300 at a time. 

It all started when we acquired this metal shelving unit and all the light fixtures from Eric’s grandfather, who passed away last year. He was a talented craftsman, and his resourcefulness inspired us to create this set up.

We hung each fluorescent light fixture to the underside of the shelves using chain and wire to suspend them. This will allow us to raise and lower the lights as needed. We also lined the back with foil to reflect light.

 

We started our seeds on February 9. We use the Jiffy seedling trays, which contain 72 cells for individual seedlings and come with greenhouse lids to help with germination. We’ve reused ours year after year. We speed up germination by putting some of the trays on heating pads made specifically for growing seedlings. We only have two of these pads, so we got creative. In the left photo, we put a milk crate upside down over a register and placed a seedling tray on top. The right photo shows a small side table with a wicker bottom shelf we placed over a register, which housed two full trays.

The majority of the tomatoes germinated within 1 week. We removed the lids and put the trays under lights once germinated. This photo was taken February 16.

For our onions this year, we planted our seeds in a tray without cells. Half of the tray is planted with red onion, the other half is green onion. We’ll buy slips for white or yellow onions, depending on what we can find locally.

These are some of our pepper seedlings. This year we’re growing jalapeno, banana peppers, an heirloom variety from Baker Creek called lipstick, Marconi, and chocolate bell. The peppers take a little longer to germinate than tomatoes.

We planted an entire tray with one of our favorite varieties of tomatoes from last year- Costoluto Genovese. If you look toward the right side of the photo, you can see a seedling that shot up faster and taller than its fellow seedlings; we’ll be documenting this plant’s progress throughout the year, and if it lives up to its explosive beginnings, we’ll make sure to save seeds for next year!

A sea of tomatoes… we planted a tray of Arkansas Travelers and a bush variety we’ve been saving seeds from for years. We also have two full trays of cherry tomato varieties, including our favorite yellow, as well as some sungold, purple, and red. In smaller quantities, we started heirloom varieties Millionaire and Pierce’s Pride from Baker Creek (given to us free last year), Black Giant, Black Pineapple, and White Wonder.

We plan to plant about 100 tomato and 50 pepper plants this season. We’ll be selling the rest in the St. Louis area. We’ll be up-potting these soon and will continue to document the progress!