Community Garden Update and Harvest Totals Update!

I am actually starting to harvest stuff from my community garden plot! Before the solarization project I discussed here happens and nukes the garden.

I harvested one cucumber, and there will be a few more next week too! They were all hiding under the foliage and were a pleasant surprise as I watered yesterday!

I didn't realize that real homegrown cucumbers are wrinkly and spiny. Someone at the community gardens told me they are ready if you rub the spines and they fall off. I don't know if this is true, but they did, so I picked it and we'll try it tonight!

The corn is (I think) ready to be harvested - it seems that corn is one of those things that you have to learn when it's ready from experience. I am also curious to see if they are fully fleshed out or are missing kernels from improper pollination, being such a small plot. We shall see on Tuesday when I go to harvest them!

I was really proud of my homegrown corn until I saw it for 8 for a dollar at the grocery store! Oh well - I bought a few ears and I will compare mine with grocery store, and see if it's worth it :)

Home Garden Harvest Totals:

I decided to keep a running tally of the harvest totals from my home garden before I can't keep track of them anymore! I guess that is a good problem to have! We are up to our ears in tomatoes, and it will just continue - I have 1 plant that has 20 tomatoes on it right now waiting to ripen. I already gave some to the neighbors. And some of the tomatoes are the BEST I have ever eaten. Here's a picture of the latest group I picked (one of which is a Celebrity tomato weighing in at 0.76 lbs all by itself!!!)

Starting at far left and proceeding clockwise: Sunny Boy Tomato, Celebrity Tomato, two smaller Old German Heirloom Tomatoes, one tiny Yellow Pear Tomato, and the very first Better Boy Tomato.

Here are the totals so far:

Tomatoes:  total = 6.23 lbs in 6 days!!!!

- Beefmaster: 0

- Better Boy: 0.55 lbs 

- Celebrity: 1.25 lbs

- Cherokee Purple: 0

- Homestead 24: 0.64 lbs

- Old German Heirloom: 0.95 lbs

- Patio (in pot): 0.61 lbs

- Sunny Boy: 2.20 lbs

- Sweet 100 (in pot): 0

- Yellow Pear: 0.03 lbs

Peppers:

- Better Bell: 0.31 lbs

- Chocolate Bell: 0

- Golden California Wonder Bell: 0.25 lbs

- Jalapeno: 0.18 lbs

- Red Bell: 0.43 lbs

- Tabasco Hot: 0

Pumpkins:

- Pie: 0

Tomatillos:

- Salsa Verde: 0

Eggplants:

- Long Purple: 0

Cucumbers:

- Salad Slicer: 0

Summer Squash:

- Pic-n-Pic (in pots): 0

I plan to update this weekly (at least while there is a lot of produce coming in). Stay tuned!!

Home Garden Update and Harvest Totals!

So it has been about a month, so I figured it is about time to post an update! :)  Here's the garden right now (tomato forest is more like it. . .):

The sunflowers are in full bloom, the tomato plants are completely unruly, and I am finally getting to taste the first fruits of my labor!

Remember when it looked like this?

It wasn't all unicorns and rainbows, however. . .

I lost two very large Beefsteak tomatoes to stupid fruitworms I had been battling all spring:

And just about every tomato bush (except the Celebrity tomato) has a disease of some sort. But rather than treat it, I am taking a passive approach and it seems to be working for now - the plant is setting and producing fruit faster than the disease kills the plant. .  ah, the lazy woman's kind of disease management :)

Here's some of the good:

-Sunflowers in bloom: the plants are well over 7 feet tall!

Dragonflies in the garden: 

- Pumpkins!! I have two growing. The bigger one growing (of course) outside the raised bed on the grass looks like some animal with claws attempted to haul it away last night. Hopefully the scratches aren't too deep to damage the pumpkin - I have heard when squash are small you can carve your name in the skin so that it remains there as it grows but these scratches are pretty deep so we'll see - I don't care if Mr. Raccoon carved his initials in it, the pumpkin is MINE!!

Pictures of the largest of the two pumpkins two weeks ago:

And today:

- Pepper harvest (and a few beans too)!!: I harvested the bell peppers green, but only one of them is a true green pepper (the one in the middle). The largest on the left is a red bell pepper and the one on the far right is a yellow bell. I wanted to harvest these in hopes that the plants would set more peppers (which they still haven't done yet). Jalapenos are growing well and there are plenty more still on the plant!

 About a pound of fresh bell peppers from the garden!!

-And the tomato harvest!!

The Sunny Boy tomatoes right before picking. . .

How many tomatoes can you spot on this one section of a Better Boy tomato plant?  :) 

The first ripe tomato on the Celebrity plant. . .

These two tomatoes were my first tomatoes to be harvested this season! They are Old German Heirloom tomatoes and were quite tasty! Together they weighed about 0.59 lb, which in current grocery store prices of $4.99/lb for heirloom tomatoes, I would say these beauties are worth $2.50! (Their true cost is probably WAY more than that considering all the startup costs, compost costs, labor, etc that went into producing them. . .ever read the book The $64 Dollar Tomato  by William Alexander? I probably should.)

 Harvest today of Sunny Boy and Celebrity tomatoes! Total weight: 2.11 lbs!!

 And I'll leave you with my attempt at an artistic picture often seen on blogs that people actually read. . .

Happy gardening!  :)

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!