Weekly Update of the Community Patch 6-8-14

This weekend was architecture days!  After the success of the raised bed, I was emboldened to finally put in the trellis materials the vegetable plants needed. So on Saturday I installed (with help from hubby) three different structures for the vegetables to grow on.

Here is the garden this week:

Here is week one (for comparison):

This week the big additions were the raised bed for the thyme, the trellis for the cucumber, the string frame for the peas and the rope pyramid for the pole beans. I detail these items in another post on Wednesday..

Additionally the plants are beginning to bush out, flower and bear fruit.  We have green peppers, hot peppers forming, flowers on the acorn squash and tomatoes, and we were able to harvest greens for a salad this week.  To taste the first fruits is a wonderful experience.  Look to the bottom for a recipe for dressing I made to go on the greens.

The greens are doing very well and we were able to cut some of all of them to eat.

We finally have neighbors.  I guess the person who originally took the space next to mine had to decline and someone new has moved in, but she has a lot of weed work to do.  You can see she is slowly working her way from the back to the front and has a patch already cleared.

The melon and the zucchini were both attacked by the cucumber beetles, so I was glad that I waited to thin them until  later as a few plants were so eaten they had to be removed.

Melon plants thinned to 2 inches apart.

three sunflower crowding each other

I also thinned the sunflower.  Originally I planted three seeds in a hill to see how they germinated.  In one hill nothing came up, but in each of the other three hills, at least two plants came up.  This week I thinned each hill down to the strongest heartiest plant.

Thinning is a fact of growing from seed and if you do not do it, you get weak thin plants that cannot support fruit or die in the middle of the season, so bite the bullet and thin the seedling.  I usually wait until after the plants have formed to real leave.  the first leaves out of the seed are usually round and indistinct, but the second set or real leaves, are the shape of the proper leaves for the plant.

You can see the plants I plucked out were not as healthy as the one I chose to leave.

But the one left I in each hill I expect to get 2 to 3 feet tall and give me lots of sunflower seeds!

thinned sunflowers

Weekly update of the Community Patch

I visit the garden almost daily.  Mostly to water it if it does not rain, but also to see if it needs anything.  Do I have bug or rodent issues?  Do the weeds need taming?  Things like that.

Here is the garden just after planting:

Here is the garden as of May 26th:

Here is is on May 31st.  Just in 4 days you can see it got more growth.

You can tell some things have gotten bigger and that I planted a few more seeds since the first weekend.  But progress is slow at first (the real reason I do not take a progress picture everyday!)

I think from now on I will take a picture on Sunday and update the blog shortly after that. The best news on this particular day is that the greens seeds (lettuces) that I planted on the first weekend have germinated.  Here is a close up.  In the next few days I will need to thin the plants to the correct spacing, but for now I will just enjoy the fact that germination has occurred!

Micro Greens Mild Mix (from Botanical Interest Seeds)

Black Beauty Zucchini (Botanical Interest) only 4 days to be this big

Sunflower Teddy Bear  (Baker Creek Heirloom seeds)
These took two weeks to germinate but at a two foot high sunflower!

Problems in the Garden

The bummer item on the list this week is that there are cucumber beetles in the garden.  This particular insect can winter over in the soil so its emergence just days after I planted the garden is unfortunate but not surprising.  I used the Organic method of squashing them whenever I saw them as the first line of defense, but they still did some major damage to the the leaves of the cucumber plants.  They have also attacked the acorn squash. I more radical method will be to steep tobacco leaves and mix the tincture with water and dish soap and spray the leaves.  I am preparing that solution now.

Here you can see the damage close up.

I think the stress of the warm weather and the long time in the too small pots reduced the plants ability to resist and repel the insects, so I will have to help them fight back.

What is a Cucumber Beetle?
Cucumber beetle is a common name given to members of two genera of beetles, Diabrotica and Acalymma, both in the family Chrysomelidae. The adults can be found on cucumbers and a variety of other plants. Many are notorious pests of agricultural crops. The larvae of several cucumber beetles are known as corn rootworms.

Cucumber Beetle

At one point last year, I thought they were artistic!  (This image is on a greeting card I made from a photo I took of Black-eyed Susan.)

Some well-known pests include the western corn rootworm (D. virgifera virgifera), the spotted cucumber beetle and its larva, the striped cucumber beetle (A. vittatum), and the western striped cucumber beetle(A. trivittatum). These should not be confused with the Colorado Potato Beetle which also has stripes. 

Potato bug (not what I have!)

The insects live about eight weeks, during which time both larva and adult feed on plants. Adults will attack the tender young growth of stems and leaves, and the buds and petals on mature specimens. They also carry and spread the bacterial wilt organism Erwinia tracheiphila and the cucumber mosaic virus. Eggs are laid in clusters on the undersides of host leaves and hatch into larvae ¹⁄₂ inch (13 mm) long. The larvae often tunnel into the soil to attack roots.

Cucumber beetles can overwinter in crop fields or in compost or trash piles. Eradication efforts may include manual removal, clearing cultivated areas of litter, debris, and infested plants, and application of pyrethrin-containing insecticides such as Cyfluthrin or non-systemic organphosphate insectsides such as Malathion.

How to Identify Cucumber Beetles

Adults are about ¼ inch long and have a yellow and black striped abdomen and a dark colored head and antennae. Look for holes and yellowing and wilting leaves. Crop yield will be low; and plants will produce yellow and stunted fruits. The larvae are worm-like, white, dark-headed, a have three pairs of legs on the thorax.

Often, the Cucumber Beetles alone will not kill the plants or cause major damage, but the spread of disease will. Adult cucumber beetles overwinter in weeds, garden debris and woody areas. The diseases they carry can also overwinter internally, and can be passed onto plants the next spring through fecal matter.

How to Control Cucumber Beetles

• Inspect newly planted cucurbit plants for the presence of this beetle; be watchful when plants are seedlings.
• Cover seedlings with row covers, though you must remove during blossoming time several hours each day to allow pollination.
• If you till your garden in the late fall, you will expose cucumber beetles hiding there to harsh winter conditions and reduce their populations next year. Tilling has the added benefit of making the soil easier to work in the spring.
• Where cucumber beetles are a problem, let the beetles come out of hiding and plant late. They have a knack for finding vulnerable seedlings. When yours are up and growing, the cucumber beetles will be gone, fooled into thinking you don't have any cucumbers in your garden.
• Few insecticides can be used on cucurbit plants because they are very sensitive. They would need to be used when plants are beginning to emerge through the soil. Please contact your local cooperative extension for a list of approved insecticides for your area.
• Natural predators include soldier beetles, braconid wasps, some nematodes, and soldier beetles.

Garden Planted!

I had a plan to plant on May 9.  Instead we had downpours that resulted in soil too wet to plant in.  Then I had to wait a week due to a turn in the weather.  I was finally able to plant on Sunday, May 18.  It was in the 80s that day, but had been cold and snowing just two days previous.  It was still a risk to put plants in the ground with our changeable weather, but I went ahead and planted plants and seeds in an all day marathon.

Time wise (so you can compare)  I was able to get the plants and seeds in the garden in about 3.5 hours.  I started around 10 am and worked until about 1:30 with a break for lunch around noon.  That included planting and watering.  I spent another hour on that day placing some peat moss around some of the plants and rewatering so that would not blow away.

I had to rake out the weeds that were sprouting int he space, but did not need to till the soil,m as the park district did that.

Here are some images of the work:

Plot #72 with a few planting areas marked with flour.

The final garden plan (as designed)  This is subject to change during planting, but I had a rough idea of what I wanted to do using this plan I created in advance.

Tools: shovel and rake; watering cans; hand tools including trowels, hand rake, and ruler; plant markers, clip board with plan; brown paper bag with seed packets; cooler with water and snacks.

The plants mixed in two flats and an extra two cardboard boxes

The first thing I did was mark the handle of my rake with markings ever two inches for 1 foot, then 6 and 12 inch increments after that.  Now I just lay it down on the ground and  can easily space plants.

You can see how close the RR tracks are!  This is before work began, nothing raked or placed.

After raking a good portion of the plot (20 feet by 20 feet) I then placed out the plants based on the plan to see if everything would fit as desired.

We have way more tomato plants that originally planned, so that changed the diagram.  We also put in a few more paths that I planned too to make it easier to get in and take photos for future blogs.

That portion int he middle which is not raked is for seeds I did not intend to plant on that day, so I chose not to rake it until I was finished planting the other areas.

Here is a sneak peak of the completed planting, I will provide details of the how we got to this point in another post.

Ready to plant the Community Plot

I could get into my 20 x 20 foot Community Patch as of May 1, however my teaching schedule made that date not work for me.  The weather did not cooperate either as May 1 was cold and blustery.

I knew others would be able to get into the gardens before I could so I stopped over the day before to string off my space and mark a few places where I was going to plant seeds and plants.  Over the weekend I when plant shopping. Here is what I purchased:

•  Peppers: Jalapeno and Pablano
•  Tomatoes: Grape Tomatoes, Sweet 100, Mortgage Lifter and heirloom Tomato plants: Pineapple and Cherokee Purple
•  Cucumbers: Burpless and Salad Bush
•  Salad Greens: bib lettuce, arugula, red leaf lettuce, red stem sorrel, giant red mustard
•  Broccoli                                                
•  Acorn squash
•  “Brilliant” Root Celery
•  Yellow Sweet Spanish Onions
•  Herbs: lemon balm, spearmint, lemon grass, bronze and green fennel, spicy globe basil, lemon basil, sweet basil, sunset hyssop, many varieties of thyme, tricolor sage, oregano,

The weather is going to be warm this week, so I have decided since the last frost free day is between May 10 and May 15 depending on who you listen to, that I will plant the bulk of the perennial herbs and some cold hearty herbs and vegetables as well as a number of seeds on May 9^th.  I may save the tomatoes, cucumbers, and basil until the following week.

This was the originally garden plan I created while working with my books.  I got so caught up in placing things I forgot to pay attention to scale:

 

one square = 1 foot (it was seeing 6 feet of lettuce that I realized my mistake!)

This is what I finally decided on, the spacing is much more accurate and I left myself enough spaces for late additions and whimsey!

scale 1 square=1 foot (now the greens includes more than lettuce!)

I will detail the plot and the plants placed with close up shots after they go in.  This garden is going to have lots of items to can, dry, preserve and share!

What can you do in a Community Plot?

We have just signed up for a community plot in Elmhurst.  They are located in Golden Meadows Park, not far from East End Park and near the Union Pacific Rail Road tracks.

This will be the season to prove just what can be grown in a 20 x 20 plot and what you can do with it.  We are going to plant a combination of herbs and vegetables and perhaps a few flowers.

We have a Kickstarter you can donate to that will provide you with some of the bounty from this garden even if you do not live nearby.  For details check this out.

We will post hear at least weekly with progress, recipes, ideas to try and facts about the work in the garden.

We will also share what we learn, not only here but in public programs and through community events.  We may even have a naming contest for out little patch.

So check back often to see what the Community Patch is up to.

Next week I will provide more details about myself, my hubby and the plot once we get to choose its location!

community garden plots courtesy of the Elmhurst Park District