Community Garden Update

So I haven't posted about my new plantings this spring yet, so I figured now's as good a time as any!

My plan for this spring/summer was to plant the "three sisters" model - remember learning about that in elementary school, where the Native Americans used to plant corn, beans, and squash together? I thought it would be a fun experiment. . .until my experiment was hijacked by whoever runs and makes decisions for the community garden (more on that later).

Here's a picture of the plot shortly after transplanting 6 corn seedlings on March 14th (there's a little bunch of spinach there in the middle that has since been pulled up):

And what it looks like today (with the transplanted corn in the foreground - with the beginnings of tassels! - and the ground started ones behind them. You can also see the beans coming up around the base of the corn, but the cucumber plants in the back by the trellis are so small you can't really see them):

I decided to try an experiment on top of an experiment by attempting to transplant corn. I grew them from seed in little pots in my house and transplanted them into the garden after about a week and a half. Many sources say you can not successfully transplant corn because of the sensitive taproot, however, I have a book (the Mini-Farming one I reviewed here) that suggested you could as long as you didn't wait longer than a couple of weeks. They seem to be doing just as good as the ones I planted later directly in the ground. They are short, but I don't know if that is just the variety or not - we'll see as the other ones mature.

Once the corn was about a foot high, I planted 3 'Kentucky Wonder' beans 6 inches from the base of each corn stalk, so that as the corn grows, the beans will have a support to grow on and they will supply the nitrogen-heavy consumer that corn is with a little extra.

The next step was to plant the vining squash on the ground to serve as a "living mulch" to shade the soil and keep it free from weeds (and of course produce squash!), but there will be no more squash. And I hope that I will actually get my harvest of corn and beans. It was announced that the community garden will be doing a "solarization project", where starting June 28th, we have to remove every plant from our garden and every plot will be covered with black plastic until September. This is to supposedly correct a severe pest problem that could have been avoided in the first place by rotating crops and disinfecting tools. Let's just say I have rotated my crops properly, and hmmm, I don't (knock on wood) have a pest problem. I am so mad about this. And when I asked one of the head people of the community garden what happened if I was just about to get my harvest but it would be ready a little after the termination date of June 28th, and it was pretty much a "that would suck, because you'll have to take it out anyways". So after all my hard work all season, nothing.

I already know the cucumber plants I planted by the trellis I built will not be ready in time. AAARRRGGGHHH!!!

Ahem.

Anyways, that's the story.

So we'll see if at least my good ol' corn will give me some ears before the garden gets nuked!

Backyard Garden Month 3

Kind of crazy to believe that I have only had all this stuff planted for two months!! With the warmer weather, things are really growing now! And I am learning some valuable gardening lessons as well. . .

Let's take a look back a month ago:

Ok.

And now. . .

Crazy what a month can do!!

Celebrity tomatoes getting bigger and bigger (this pic was taken a week ago)

Pie pumpkin blossom (don't have any growing pumpkins yet - until recently, the male and female flowers have not been open at the same time and my efforts at hand pollinating have been unsuccessful, but finally the plants are sending up lots of blossoms all at once so I hope soon we'll get a pumpkin growing!)

The scarlet runner beans - I love how these have been blossoming so I have a few pictures of them :)

Sunny boy yellow tomatoes

Bell peppers and jalepenos are fruiting now

My massive tomatillo plant - it is literally taller than I am at this point, reaching about 6 ft tall!

Tomatillos starting to grow

Here's the beans growing up the trellis (and you can see a preview of the new beds that are going to be added soon!)

The first sunflower is getting ready to open!

A bumblebee on the scarlet runner beans

So, there's all the pics! Since everything really took off growing this past month, it has been within the month that I have learned a lot of things:

1. Tomatoes get BIG.  I actually had no idea they could get this large - I saw pictures of 6 ft high, 4 ft wide tomato plants in various books, but come on - they were gardening books that the author wouldn't be writing a book if they weren't some sort of super gardener, so I just kind of disregarded. The tomatoes I have grown in the past maybe got 2 1/2 ft tall in their containers. As it turns out, planting them in the ground is a whole different situation. . .

       What I will do differently next time: I will not waste money on those small wire cages you get from Lowes or Home Depot (well, I guess I already wasted that money. . .) but I will get hog or cattle panels (whichever ones will allow me to stick my hand through it and pull awesome fruit out) and make them like this: 

That way my tomatoes won't be on top of each other, climbing out of the beds and into the lawn and smothering every other plant I have planted nearby (and being so close they are more prone to massive caterpillar attacks and the spreading of diseases. . .)

2. No pumpkins.  I admit, this was more of an experiment than anything (I took some seeds that started to grow on the side of the driveway after Husband went all Office Space on an old pumpkin last fall before throwing it (kind of) in the compost pile):

I knew pumpkin plants get big but it is totally dominating and it is not really being very productive either (every female flower to this point has not been fertilized I guess, and the baby pumpkin has turned yellow and fallen off every time). I guess we will see if this changes. Maybe I will get 10 pumpkins. I doubt it, though (but if I do, it will be at the expense of every other plant in its vicinity). You can see the effects of the drain on nutrients by comparing the two sides of the garden that have scarlet runner beans:

The left side plants are no higher than two feet up the trellis (and this pic was taken 2 weeks ago!) and the right side is thick with leaves and blossoms all the way up to the top and extending past the top! And the leaves on the left are more yellow than the ones on the right. So, no more pumpkins. . .

That's all for now! Maybe I will try to update more frequently :)