Making Up For Lost Blogging Time

We’ve been away from the blog for a while because things have been so busy with our house and gardens. Since buying our home last year, we’ve been focusing our efforts on the house and yard, and our garden at Amy’s place. We are no longer utilizing our former satellite gardens at Sunset Hills, Iowa Ave., Sallie’s side yard, and Lafayette Square. So here’s finally an update on the garden at Amy’s!

We got a later start than we would’ve liked this year due to a cool, rainy spring. Once it dried a bit, we were able to get our two plots re-tilled and planted quickly. In the future we’d love to rely less on tilling (or combine it with the use of a cover crop) but it was absolutely necessary this time to remove the grass and weeds that had already taken root. The irrigation system is still in place, but it’s been mild enough that we haven’t turned it on yet.

We’ve rotated our crops a bit from last year to promote soil fertility and reduce pests and disease. In the east plot, pictured below, we seeded beets, carrots, bush beans, and Peaches and Cream sweet corn, and transplanted some volunteer black seeded simpson lettuce, and broccoli and cabbage from Bowood Farm. There are also quite a few volunteer tomato, borage, celosia, marigold, and cleome plants from last year.

May 4th- lettuce, broccoli, and cabbage transplanted

May 25th- beets and carrots germinating in middle rows

June 1st- left to right: lettuce, broccoli, beets, carrots & herbs, purple cabbage

July 1st

July 1st- sweet corn in the back, broccoli, beets, carrots, and cabbage in front.

We just ate the first of the sweet corn yesterday and it was delicious!

In the bigger, western plot at Amy’s we transplanted five rows of tomatoes, sweet and hot peppers, basil, a few of our wild gourd plants (second generation this year!), lacinato kale, sweet potato slips, and nasturtium. We seeded salad greens, bush beans, radishes, beets, spinach, and tronchuda kale. We got some really great harvests out of the spinach and radish row before they went to seed. We’ve since replanted the rows with more carrots and salad greens.

May- Tomatoes, basil, and peppers transplanted on Mothers’ Day

Newly transplanted tomato

June 1st

June 1st- trellising the tomatoes with Amy, sweet corn growing in foreground

We’re using the large tomato cages we made last year from cattle fencing for our tomatoes at the Sunset Hills garden. We didn’t have enough for all the tomato plants this year, so we’re also using the Florida weave method. We drove in stakes between every two or three tomato plants, then used tomato twine to wrap around the stakes along each row to support the plants from both sides. This method works best if you keep up with adding another line of twine as the plants grow.

July 1st. Left to right: radishes going to seed, bush beans and wild gourd, hot peppers, sweet peppers, tomatoes

July 4th.

July 10th. Lacinato kale and nasturtium, two rows seeded with carrots, beets and wild gourd, peppers, tomatoes.

 

Sunset Hills Update

We planted our Sunset Hills tomato plot in late April this year, earlier than any other tomatoes we planted. With the cold, wet spring we had, they’ve actually fared worse than their counterparts planted in May at Amy’s place and Iowa Ave. We’ve learned our lesson- planting too early, even if it’s after the traditional planting date (April 15th in our region), doesn’t necessarily get you a head start.

The good news is that our major harvests will be staggered- we’ll get a flush of ripening here when some of our other plants will be slowing down.

There are plenty of green tomatoes. I fertilized with a high-phosphorous organic fertilizer over the weekend, so we should see more production from that, too.

Iowa Ave. Garden Update

Sunflowers grow here every year- thanks, Dave!

This is our third season working on the Iowa Ave. garden, and it’s going well. Originally designed with raised beds, we’ve since tilled up larger sections to get more planting space and try to deal with the ever-invasive grass.

Newly tilled this year is the back section, which now boasts a dozen healthy tomato plants, lots of peppers, and a variety of herbs.

Ripening tomatoes

Basil

Parsley and nasturtium

Popcorn is thriving in the tilled middle section of the garden.

Also in the middle section, three varieties of beans, including bolita and black beans.

We saved seeds from an unknown variety last year. Long and skinny with small striped beans, they’re great as green beans when young. We’re hoping they’ll be good for dried beans, too.

The teepee trellis sits in the southwest corner of the lot, which we dug out by hand. It’s planted with more pole beans.

Pole beans growing up the bamboo

The view from inside. Yes, there are beans all the way at the top, very much out of reach without a ladder!

Hops growing in the corner

The raised beds have eggplant, edamame, cucumbers, carrots, garlic, beets, flowers, and lots of plants going to seed. Soon we’ll be replanting for fall!

We have two new beds this year. This one was planted with ginger.

Horseradish in the other new bed, along with some mustard going to seed.

I do most of the harvesting on Fridays in preparation for the Cherokee Street International Farmers’ Market but we harvested some goodies today, too.

Lemon, Japanese, and pickling cucumbers

Tomato and bean harvest

I also started to dig up some of Dave’s hardneck garlic we’d transplanted into one of the beds earlier in the spring. Temperatures are predicted to be much lower tomorrow and Thursday, so we’ll be back at it some more!

July at Amy’s

It’s July and all the gardens are in full swing! Here’s what’s going on at Amy’s place:

We got up on the garage roof to take some aerial photos today. This is the west side of the large plot, which includes our spicy salad mix, cabbage and cauliflower, cucumbers, butternut squash, zucchini, sweet potatoes, banana squash, pumpkins, and melons.

The tomato/pepper plot to the east.

We’re trellising our tomatoes using the Florida weave system this year- our first time using this method. Using stakes every 2-3 plants, you wrap tomato twine around the plants as they grow. I like it so far, but you have to keep up with it! This photo was taken 2 weeks ago; you wouldn’t believe the growth since then!

Speaking of tomatoes, our Genoveses are starting to ripen. They usually grow singly, but it sure is fun when they grow in big bunches like this one!

Our jalapeno pepper plants are producing prolifically this year! We picked over 100 peppers last week for the market.

Bell peppers are getting there, too.

This is our wild gourd plant, propagated from seed from one of the dried gourds we found over the winter. Super excited for our namesake gourds!

This is Eric’s favorite flower, cleome. We like to interplant lots of flowers in our garden plots- not only are they beautiful and make great cut flowers for bouquets, but they attract beneficial pollinators, too.

Meanwhile, in the plot to the west, we’ve got several varieties of pumpkins growing- good for cooking and carving!

Also lots of melons! Mostly watermelons but also some cantaloupe.

Melon vines in foreground, followed by pumpkin, and banana squash taking over the background.

We’ve got two rows of zucchini, black beauty and a gray variety from Baker Creek. So far we’ve harvested ~25, with more maturing every day.

Our row of sweet potatoes is filling out nicely. We have more planted elsewhere, too.

And here’s the butternut squash row. We planted these a little later than our other squash rows, and there are already a few baby squash starting.

More updates to come!

Iowa Ave. Garden Update

We’ve been focusing our efforts on our newest garden at Amy’s place, but we’re still going strong on our plot on Iowa Ave.  Here’s what’s growing over there:

The tomatoes, peppers, and herbs are thriving in the back section. Thanks to some burlap and straw, the grass isn’t too bad back there.

Our new tomato container garden, built over a thick layer of plastic sheeting and wood chips, is also grass free and doing well.

And, since we had so many tomato plants, here’s our newest little tomato patch by the front fence.

The middle section we tilled up this year is supporting four varieties of beans, with salad greens and carrots planted on either side of each row. Burlap and straw line the middle of the rows. So far the grass has been kept mostly at bay with this system!

Cucumbers are filling in (also some grass). We planted three varieties, lemon, pickling, and Japanese.

The hops along the front corner are doing well this year, their second year in this location.

Some of the Italian pole beans we planted did succumb to pest damage, so we’ve replanted to try to fill in the teepee trellis.

Lots of beets!

Sharing the beet bed are some sugar snap and snow peas. We’ve had several great harvests from these- the cool spring was good for something!

These curly garlic scapes will eventually flower and produce seed if left in place. We’ve been cutting ours off to promote bigger bulb growth. Plus they’re delicious!

Popcorn!

Got these French breakfast radishes planted right in time, they’re starting to get pretty spicy now that summer weather caught up with us.

The ginger we planted is starting to sprout.

These salad greens have been going strong for several weeks. The spinach toward the back of the bed bolted and is setting seed.

Some volunteer lettuce heads also bolted and are currently flowering in the onion bed. In the three days since I took this photo they’ve grown even more and shot out some beautiful blue flowers.

This is shaping up to be our most productive year for this garden. Tilling the back and middle sections definitely got rid of a lot of the grass we’ve been battling and gave us extra planting space. We had planned to install drip irrigation but time got away. Maybe next year!

Amy’s Farmhouse

We’ve been spending a lot of time at our newest garden at Eric’s sister’s new house.  It turns out the previous owner, Wendell, had farmed the yard and sold his produce from his driveway! We’re excited to continue the farming tradition.

We got Eric’s family together on Mothers’ Day to help us plant the narrow plot (pictured above are his parents hard at work). Eric used our walk-behind tiller to carve out the space between each row, then mounded up the rows using a hoe. This also incorporated the compost, gypsum, and organic fertilizer I had added on top of the soil earlier.

For planting tomatoes, we always bury the stem as deep as possible to promote deeper root growth and stability. The timing was perfect. Usually it would’ve been a little late, but this year the weather really delayed everything. The tomatoes we’d planted earlier in Sunset Hills and our Iowa Ave. gardens are stunted compared to these.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

With Eric’s family’s help, we planted 60 tomato plants and 40 pepper plants, mulched with grass clippings around each plant, and seeded basil, calendula, and other flowers throughout.

Last week Eric and his folks installed a drip irrigation system for the tomato and pepper plot. The system connects to the exterior hose with a battery-operated timer, which we’ve set to allow water flow for two hours every other day.

We also started planting the big plot last week. Like the narrow plot, Eric used our small tiller to carve out the spaces between rows, then I used a hoe to mound each row up. We mixed in some free leaf compost and seeded the first three rows with several types of salad greens and lettuces because they are shaded by the garage for most of the afternoon.

This is the back of the garden. The squash pictured above were started from seeds I saved from a huge pink banana squash last fall. We also seeded the next row to the right with several varieties of pumpkin and the last row with watermelon and cantaloupe.

As you can see, there’s still lots of space to fill. We’ve got some some sweet potatoes sprouting inside and zucchini plants we started from seed about ready to transplant. We’ve been researching other types of squash to grow, specifically some that are pest and disease resistant.

Also on the agenda: installing drip irrigation for the big plot. We bought the rest of the supplies we need, but we’ll have to set it up in two separate zones and reconfigure the part we already installed. It’ll be worth it though, not only would watering by hand take forever, it’d also be difficult to navigate the hose without running over plants.

This is our biggest contiguous garden space, at about 1/4 acre, but we haven’t neglected our other gardens! More updates to come!

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!

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.

180 Square Feet of Garlic

We planted a new garlic bed at Sunset Hills last week. In our zone, traditional garden wisdom says to plant garlic around Columbus day. That way the roots can start growing before the ground freezes, giving the bulbs a head start in spring. Our tomato garden is still going strong, and another gardener holds claim to the larger tilled patch, so we built our new garlic bed the only other place where it will still get full sun- behind this shed on the south end of the yard. It turns out, as a neighbor later told us, this shed was used to house a horse about 40 years ago. That means the soil is well fertilized!

It’s true, the soil is great. In a perfect world, we would’ve had our chickens scratch and peck the soil to prepare the bed for us, but we had neither the time nor the chicken tractor to do so. Instead, we bought a tiller from a neighbor to dig up the bed. Eric did most of the tilling… that little engine was strong and jerky. While he tilled, Eric’s mom and I pulled out as much of the grass and roots as we could, with rakes and by hand.

This is only one of the piles of grass we removed, there were several more. In the background, you can see Eric adding some soil amendments- we added leaf compost, granite dust, ash, and bat guano.

It’s best to plant garlic that was grown locally, so you know it’s suitable for your climate. On the right is garlic we’d harvested earlier in the summer, a hardneck variety and some elephant garlic, but it wasn’t enough for our new 12′ x 15′ garlic garden. Unfortunately we missed the boat on buying local garlic, but we’re betting the store-bought cloves on the left will grow just fine. We selected the biggest, healthiest-looking cloves to plant.

Each clove was planted about 2 inches deep and about 5 inches apart. We laid the bed out in four sections, separated by narrow walkways for us to get around, then fenced it in with wildlife netting to keep the deer out. We’ll add mulch before it gets too cold, to keep the ground a little warmer.

We had a couple storms last week, and the bamboo stakes holding the fence blew or fell over, allowing some deer in. We did see some cloves dug up, but mostly it just looks like the deer walked around a little and left. They’re not supposed to like garlic, but we’ll see- these suburban deer seem to eat pretty much everything. We re-staked the fence, so hopefully that’s the extent of the damage.

Our garden in Sunset Hills is part of a backyard in a small subdivision, which used to be one large family farm. In the background of the photo is the remaining farmland that hasn’t been developed. We’ve talked with old Farmer Hank, one of the neighbors, about leasing some of the beautiful, creek-bottom land for farming. He doesn’t seem too interested, but we’ll see!

The Year of the Tomato

This week we harvested enough tomatoes, cucumbers, jalapeños, and herbs to participate in our first farmers’ market! We’ll be selling our produce at the Cherokee Street International Farmers’ Market on Fridays from 4-7 PM all summer!

The tomato plants at our Iowa Street garden survived the massive heat wave we experienced- over a week of temperatures soaring well above 100ºF. Watering was a tricky balancing act but I think we were successful- the plants are positively exploding with tomatoes. Seriously, we’ve never seen such prolific tomato production!

The tomato plants at our Sunset Hills garden are thriving, too. No ripe tomatoes here yet (besides some yellow cherries), since we got a later start than we would’ve liked.