Volunteers Needed

Volunteers to help with the garden will meet at 6 pm on Saturday the 19th and 26th of May, weather permitting. Please bring sun and eye protection, gloves, and sturdy shoes.
 
Tasks include:

Weeding (lots and lots of weeding)
Preparing compost
Rubbish removal
Sowing seeds

A Garden Green

Last weekend we dined on carnival carrots, bell peppers, and eggplant from the garden. I am looking forward to a large crop of carrots and parsnips. So, now is the time for us to consider sharing our bounty with those in need. Carrots keep for a while, are easy to prepare, and can be snacked on fresh or cooked into stew.

Also growing quite well are beets, peas, lettuce, and maybe even a few tiny tomatoes. Finally, tomatoes are fruiting! I never thought I would see the day.

I find myself thinking about building more beds with paving stones. It would be nice to build a little 2x4 foot bed for each of the little kids to grow a salad! The eggplant is still growing, flowering, and producing fruit. It has become a bit skinny and lost leaves with this recent chill and lack of rain. It did not occur to me when I planted it (novice!) that it was a perennial plant in this climate, but it sure is! The bed we have is really not designed for a large, long-lived plant. I've decided to try moving it at the end of the month. That means I will need a large, deep bed to plant it in.

Water is a continuing issue that is being discussed in the official meetings and such. Yes, there is a pond, pump, and whole setup back there. I tried priming and running the pump this week, and got no suction. I pulled the end of the pipe out of the pond and found the filter was fairly clear. I am clearly no expert, but I think the pump isn't working. Meanwhile, one of the watering cans gave out this week, so we are down to one. I enjoy the brute, earthy carrying of water buckets to the garden, but I am obviously the only one :)

I took the big little step, and signed the UUCB membership book today. I know! I've been here a nearly year and felt welcome from day one, but it just didn't seem necessary to make it official until recently.

What did we plant today?

Actually, that is a really good question. As you know, we are using the Square Foot Gardening technique (loosely). The fire ants colonized the bamboo we were using to partition off the squares, so we tossed those aside for everyone's safety. The beds are still planted in a square foot pattern, and as of now there are no empty squares. I didn't write down what we planted as we went, so from my poor memory... it might go like this:

(CLICK TO ENLARGE)

Green Bean	Bell Pepper
Celery (10/23)	???
Eggplant	Onion
Bell Pepper	Parsley
Leeks	Peas
Basil	Beets (10/23)
Carrots (10/23)	Green Bean
Raised Stone Bed (10/23)
Carrots (10/23)	Beets (10/23)
???	Kale (10/23)
???	Green Bean (10/23)
Lettuce (10/23)	Beets (10/23)
Bell Pepper (10/23)	Kale (10/23)
Parsnips (10/23)	???
Carrots (10/23)	Peas (10/23)

I admit, in the ??? spaces I can't even guess what we planed there. But there is, really, some seed there! There are only two spots labelled Empty/Available in the image above. If you have a hankering to plant something, tell me which of those two you want.

The Thank You Post

Today was the day I've been waiting months for... the compost is finally ready!

BIG THANKS to...

Richard, who rolled the heavy compost barrel all the way out to the garden and helped empty it into the second stone bed.

John, who mixed the compost into planting soil, leveled it all out, and put seeds in the ground.

Helen, who provided some tomato plants that will "grow like a tree." We planted them today as well.

Lisa, Stacy, and Max, Dan... everyone who has assisted with various odds and ends and advice.

Everyone else who brought matter for the compost bin. Without your rotting vegetables, our garden would not be possible!

Sunday Construction

Big thanks to Richard, John, and Lisa for deciding to move stones today. We managed to move 30 or so more paving stones to expand the garden bed. More of the same next week, and then we can fill it up with soil and plant some more stuff.

I set some more peas into the ground, hopefully these will do alright. We didn't harvest any eggplant today, even though 3 or 4 are growing now. Next week we should have a nice big eggplant dish. I'll go water tonight if it doesn't look like it will rain.

There were bees on the cantaloupe (muskmelon!) flowers today, so maybe things will be okay there after all. Flowers on the bell peppers are pretty little white/cream ones.

The Cantaloupe That Wasn't

I'm reading up on Cantaloupe, to see if I can make ours fruit. The first thing I find is this from University of Florida:

"The melon referred to as cantaloupe is actually named muskmelon (Cucumis melo, var. reticulatus). The term cantaloupe is a misnomer that has been used widely in the vegetable industry as a synonym for muskmelon. True cantaloupe (C. melo, var.cantalupensis) is grown in Europe and is a small fruit with a hard, scaly, or warty skin."

This explains why we called it muskmelon when I was a kid. I thought that was just some local Missouri term for the fruit, because everyone I talked to later had no idea what fruit I was talking about. I guess the name muskmelon does not sound very appetizing for folks in the produce isle?

Reading further down, I see that our problem might be not enough pollinators:

"Cucurbits have separate female and male flowers, with the male flowers appearing prior to female flowering. For the female flowers to produce fruit, pollen from the male flower must be transferred to the female flower by insects. Generally, satisfactory pollination occurs when one strong beehive is present for every two acres of muskmelon. Flowers of muskmelon and other cucurbits open just after sunrise and close in the late afternoon or early evening."

So it appears we will have to pollinate both the cantaloupe and tomatoes by hand, unless someone has a beehive handy.

Growing

Eggplant, Japanese - The teacher's pet of the garden, producing lots of fruit! Next time, I'll plant it in a corner spot, so it doesn't crowd out the other plants.

Tomato, Heirloom Tiger Stripe - Growing, flowering, but producing no fruit. Why? We may need to help the flowers pollinate.

Red and Orange Peppers - The eggplant is shading them out, and I may pull one of the pepper plants so the other one can grow bigger in that spot. Maybe I can transplant it?

Okra - See this post from last week.

Citronella - The wind from Irene actually damaged both of these, so I pulled it and planted beans there.

Leeks - I'm not really sure if these are doing well, since I've never grown or purchased leeks.

Marigold, Orange and Yellow - The yellow died a few weeks ago, and there are now beans planted there. The orange is scraggly, but I let it grow enough to produces some seeds, so we can grow them next year.

Flower (I keep forgetting to check the tag!) Pink - It died back quite a bit, but when I went to pull it up, I saw it was producing new growth. I decided to transplant it to a pot, and then planted peas in that spot.

Mulberry - Still fruiting slightly, although something is damaging the leaves. The fruits get eaten by birds and such before I manage to pick them. They more commonly fruit in the Spring anyway, so I'm not worried about it.

Banana - 3 leaves now!

Cantaloupe - This has grown very large, and produced many many flowers, but no fruit that I can see yet. It might need more fertilization, which means I may use the worm compost that David H. donated.

Pumpkin, Early Sugar - These are still very small, and I worry that I started them too early or too late. I was hoping for pumpkin pie from our garden in October, and that is clearly not going to happen this year.

Peas - The peas that were started from seedling on my back patio did not take transplant well last Sunday. I'll have to plant them from seed directly in the garden, probably tomorrow.

Green Beans - I transplanted two of these, and one was snapped by Irene's winds, and the other is doing well. Two or three more seeds have been planted from seed into the garden, and are already sprouting.

Ruby Beets and Red Cored Carrots - This is the second attempt at each of these. They didn't like being transplanted, and they take a good couple weeks to sprout. Wait and see.