Weeding

With the intense amount of rain came an intense amount of weeds. This took me the better part of a day and it was gratifying to say the least. 

Dwarf Cherry

Today we added a dwarf cherry tree to our community garden plot. I can't remember the variety at this moment; but we chose it because it was good for eating (the other varieties said "pie cherries") and at full maturity it will be relatively small, 8'-10'. In regards to the size, we figured it would be good for a community garden plot. Ours is in the northern corner so we won't have to worry about shading out our neighboring gardeners. We will use the dirt around the base of the tree to plant shade loving greens. 

The catalogue said that we can expect fruit in 4-7 years. The dwarf plum in our backyard is finally going to fruit after three years. The change brought on by the plum tree to our little backyard ecosystem has made the wait seem like nothing. We anticipate the cherry tree bringing the same benefits to our community garden plot. 

Mostly Tomatoes

Our seedlings are doing great. I believe the number of tomato starts is somewhere between 100-125. A majority of these are determinate paste tomatoes for the community garden's market garden area. In a third tray we have a slew of greens and some flowers. 2014 is off to a solid start.

Winterizing

I'm not sure if this shot is pretty or perverse. Either way, our community garden water storage is ready for the freeze.  

The garlic is in

The garlic got in a little late this year. I'm counting on a late start to winter; which has been the norm around here. There are 250-300 cloves planted. We're going with three varieties (all hard neck): Georgia Fire; Music; and German Hardy.

I only planted the left half (southern) of this bed. Our plan is to plant determinate paste tomatoes on the right half. The bed is roughly 4'x30'.  

The Garlic Harvest

This was our garlic harvest over at the community garden this year*. There are two varieties here and both are hard neck. The small bunch on the right is Georgia Fire. Maybe 10% of what we planted actually came up. We won't eat any of this and just plant it later this month. The big bunch** on the left is German Hardy. This is the third season we have planted this garlic from bulbs we bought three years ago. This stuff is awesome. We would be tempted to just plant this variety only since it does so well, but we like to have variety; so we will continue to invest maybe half to two-thirds of our garlic patch to this stuff and the rest to others.

What we'll be planting this season will be ~60 sqft of of the German Hardy, just a few square-feet of the Georgia Fire, and ~30 sqft of Music. The Music garlic will be a new addition. It's all we had when we lived in Downingtown and if we would have known how difficult it would be to get planting bulbs, we would have taken some with us when we moved. I predict that it will be as successful as the German Hardy. Fingers crossed.

*Yes, yes. I know garlic was harvested a while ago; but I have a lot of catching up to do. Who says that this stuff has to be in order?  :)

**Don't let the photo fool ya. That wheelbarrow is a Jackson (it's deep).

Best Paste Tomato Year Yet

We planted ten paste tomatoes in our community garden plot and we will probably harvest 100 pounds of fruit. The two bags in the photo are from the first harvest, which yielded 30+ pounds. The second gave us 42 more. We planted two determinate varieties, one called Margherita (I think that's right) and the other is just plain ol' Romas.

In terms of end product, the first 70+ pounds gave us 30 quarts of juice that was then cooked down to 15 quarts of thick sauce. Next year we may plant more, but first we will want to invest in a pressure cooker.

Full-metal trellis

If I needed to attach an adjective to this trellis, it would be industrial. Other than a few short pieces of rope, the entire structure is made entirely of metal. As I said in a previous post, our community plot is designed to be low maintenance; which for us means build everything heavy-duty once and leave it be.

These trellises are for our shelling beans. The idea is to just let them climb, die, dry, and get harvested. Pretty simple.

First look at our community garden plot

The video is a little shaky (take Dramamine before viewing).
 

Glorious Complications

We need to re-rethink our city garden philosophy. This year the intensive companion planting got way out of control. Our approach, knowing that we would have oodles of farmers' markets and a CSA to rely on, was to focus our efforts on the diversity of our flowers and veggies, as opposed to looking for food storage sized production. In one of our smaller beds (4'x16') we managed to squeeze in 20+ varieties just in the first planting alone. Needless to say, things got a bit crowded and then spilled over into out of control.

We're still learning how to eat locally and sustainably in a city/town. This year our food has primarily come from four sources: half of a CSA share, with a fruit and egg share; our garden; our community garden plot; and the occasional farmers' market visit. The key to this kind of food consumption (is that the word I'm looking for) is knowing your inventory at every stage of the season. Now when I say "at every stage of the season" that makes it sound more complicated than it really is. Well no, scratch that, it is complicated; however the complications aren't because we're having to check our inventory often, it's because we need to plan really far in advance and calculate into our quantities food that we're not growing. Here's an example:

Our CSA starts in June. One of the first items we received were greens and lot of them. However, on our garden production end we can produce greens much sooner (and dammit, if we can have it, we want it). The tricky part, we discovered, is that once the CSA greens start coming in, and our garden is still churning them out, we end up having far more than we could possibly consume. I think at one point I was eating three to four salads a day. Now I love salads just as much as the next gardener, but holy hell that gets to be a bit much.

Now that we know this, our solution for next year may be to start a cooperative community plot, grow and share our greens there, and once the CSA kicks in, we can surrender the excess plot greens to our partners.

We're also going to redesign the way we use our backyard and community garden plots. The approach will be based on time spent in the garden. We can obviously get to our backyard space every day; so our plans are to grow items that we would want to access frequently or would need daily care (peas, beans, cherry tomatoes, etc.). The community garden plot we want to use for low maintenance, space hogging plants (paste tomatoes, winter squash, soup beans, and so on)

I'm guessing that we may have this system down in another season or two. In the meantime we'll keep taking notes, cussing (and laughing) at our mistakes, and hoping for solid weather.

More to follow

I'm not sure what my title is on this project, I think I'm an advisor or something; regardless, I think it's a project worth sharing. What you're looking at is the top of a storm water storage unit that will serve as a collection space for an underground water filter/rain garden. The student running this show will have a detailed post about the rain garden when it's completed. Until then, just think of this: during any single rain storm heavier than a drizzle, we will be able to fill a 1550 gallon cistern with water that is close to potable.

When the post is ready on my other blog I'll be sure to link it here as well.

Why heavy winds make me worry

This is a bean trellis I set up at my community garden plot. I made it with branches from the woods and twine I found laying around. There is a little sway to it, but nothing too much; the big concern is when the beans fill the strings and turn the trellis into a sail.

To be continued...